'Have the men in India been staring at you?' Audrey asks as we queue up for a flight from Varanasi to Delhi. We're newly acquainted and each of us is at the tail-end of our first visit to this captivating, perplexing country. Neither of us is ready to leave it. Audrey poses a pertinent question, but before I can respond to it she delivers her own, unequivocal answer: 'They've been staring at me, and I'm 84!'
A week from now, when I've returned to Sydney and Audrey to Guadalajara, Mexico, those penetrating stares — sometimes menacing, sometimes judgmental, occasionally jocular and friendly — will turn away from foreign women travellers and look inwards, to the five men who are on trial for the gang rape and murder of a young Delhi woman in December last year, and to the culture that allowed it to happen.
The trial will prompt India to examine its collective conscience, and to analyse the links between entrenched anti-female practices of the past and the way in which women are valued today.
'Here, girls have always been brought up to believe what their fathers and brothers say is God's word,' says my guide, Varsha, as she leads me around the Amer Fort in Jaipur. 'Now, in the cities at least, they are becoming more educated. Things are changing, but until they do, many young women will have to pay the price.'
It's a chilling thought, but one that's borne out by articles tucked deep inside the major newspapers,stories that somehow don't evoke the same public outrage as that afforded the Delhi victim: a four-year-old is raped and murdered; a 22-year-old is gang-raped so brutally her uterus must be removed; a woman is set alight by her husband; a UN report finds that 570,000 girls are 'not born' in India each year due to female foeticide.
Varsha takes me to the main entrance of the Amer Palace; above it are the delicately-wrought gates behind which the maharanis would sit in purdah, waiting for the king to return from battle. From here they would scatter upon him bright garlands of roses and marigolds, their joy manifested not necessarily by his survival but by the relief that came from knowing they would not have to sacrifice themselves on a funeral pyre beside him.
Such exquisitely-crafted palaces and forts seem to embody in their architecture the strangely dichotomous treatment of women in centuries past: the tightly-latticed