Soon after she first came to Sharda, Amina discovered that Indian campuses liked to infantilise female students under the guise of “protection”—an experience familiar to most young women in Indian hostels. If she wasn’t in the hostel by 8pm, she was expected to “find her own accommodation for the night.” If she was, she would be locked in, until the hostel guards released the women from their temporary cages every morning—all of this heightened by the fact that unlike most Indian girls, Amina couldn’t just crash at a friend’s place. Her classmates from African countries were at the mercy of similar whims from landlords and hostel wardens, her Indian friends who still lived with parents didn’t know how to explain bringing a black woman home.

Her experience was similar to those of most international students enrolled in any one of India’s many new multi-disciplinary, international higher education institutes, like the Acharya Institutes at Soldevanahalli outside Bengaluru, or the campus of Lovely Public University on the Jalandhar-Phagwara highway. Everywhere, students would find themselves presented with two options—campus housing (which usually meant restrictive timings, terrible food, and behavioural policing) or renting homes in the palatial but semi-deserted housing colonies near the college. On campus, life was limited. Outside it, in the jungle of the vast peri-urban (chosen to accommodate equally vast campuses), it was dangerous.

Life on the edges

Near Sharda University, adjacent to Greater Noida’s four Knowledge Parks, are mid-range high rises with names like Vista, Panorama, Springfield, Crescent or Boulevard Heights. A marble-tiled, but otherwise ordinary, five-bedroom flat is rented out for anything between Rs19,000 and Rs24,000 (the rates are hiked for students from African countries). The apartment complex offers additional services like security guards who speak a smattering of English, CCTV cameras, gymnasiums, a provisions store, a plant to purify Greater Noida’s notoriously hard water and a swimming pool (which Amina does not use—the one time she tried, the pool emptied out in seconds, leaving her alone in the water). The residential complexes are so designed that you rarely have to leave them—to disguise the fact that if you were to actually leave, you’d be stranded for some distance, without public transport, amenities, food or help.

”I’ll die if I have to live here any longer,” Helen, a B.Com student from Lovely Public University in Jalandhar said over the phone. A year after she first arrived at Lovely, Helen, who was living in the men’s hostel, decided she had to come out—both to her parents in Zambia and to the university. When her parents stopped speaking to her and Lovely refused to give her a room in the women’s hostel, she left the campus to find a safer home. Outside, she learnt that being a black trans-woman was like walking around with a target painted on your back.

“One night, a man I had gone for dinner with came to my apartment asking for a glass of water,” she said. “When I turned around to bring it to him, he locked the door and tried to rape me. I convinced him that I would co-operate if he stopped hitting me. As soon as he let me go, I ran out to find the police. They took one look at me—barefoot, torn clothes, black, trans…she’s a prostitute, they said, trying to ruin some Indian’s reputation.”

Helen rarely ventures too far from the campus anymore. She spent a month in Delhi, where she said she lived frozen in fear, watching the door at all times. At the centre of Jalandhar, she said men follow her, try to touch her, and “mimic Hindi film stalkers.” She recalled: “I’ve had men show up at the door of my house well past midnight, saying they saw me somewhere. That’s all. Seeing me outside was enough provocation to invade my space.”

Amina, who rarely travels outside the Greater Noida-Noida-East Delhi triangle, decided to venture out when her cousin sisters were visiting last month, and booked a hotel room for the family in East of Kailash. When they arrived at the hotel, they were informed there were no vacant rooms.

“I showed him my booking, but he just kept saying no, no, go away,” she said. “We heard him tell another guy—‘I don’t like these kind of people, I don’t let them take rooms’ in Hindi. I told him ‘Your language is not so difficult to understand, you know, this is not right man’ and walked out.”

Amina insists her experiences in India are not “all bad,” but often, recounting an incident like the one at East of Kailash, or when her neighbours in Greater Noida accused Nigerians of cannibalism, she blinks back tears, shaking her head gently as though she cannot quite believe what she is narrating. Her experience of Delhi excludes all that is best about it—occasional green oases, old monuments, spectacular arrays of food, bookstores and retail.

“I saw Khan Market and Chandni Chowk once,” she said, “I was in a car, I passed by.”

Like Helen, Amina agreed that policemen were the last people one could approach for help, especially if you were black. “I realised soon after I came here, Indians are more nationalistic than anything else. If you say anything, like hey, why is this guy following me, they still take it like an insult to their country.”

However, in some ways, places like Greater Noida or the Jalandhar-Phagwara highway offer a small sanctuary, because of their insistence on becoming hubs for international students. In Greater Noida’s Janta Market, Amina has found a beauty parlour that knows how to braid her hair, a shop that stocks basic ingredients for Nigerian food, and a tailor who has learnt to make her traditional wrap-dress, cutting out matching patterns for headscarves.

“For whatever reason, even if it’s just that we pay fees and rent, people around here try to hide their racism,” she said.

This year, Helen and Amina will both graduate, and move on to the next uncertain chapters of their lives. The only thing they are certain of, they said, was that they would warn other black students to stay far away from India. Many students in Greater Noida, Amina said, were already buying one-way tickets to go home midway through the term.

“Who knows if I make it to graduation,” Amina smiled. “If I don’t…or if I have to stay here longer, I will just leave the course and run. The only thing is, what will happen to my brothers?”

The question hung in the air as her brothers shuffled out of their rooms, nodding in greeting and looking around the bare kitchen. It was evening, soon it would be time for dinner. It wasn’t safe to go out yet. “We have bread and sugar,” Amina said, opening the fridge. “We’ll manage.”

This post first appeared on Scroll.in. We welcome your comments at ideas.india@qz.com.

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