And I don't think I was anything special or unusual. Or maybe all the women I know are similarly situated. My best friend, Sangs, who went to school in our rigidly conservative hometown and ended up with an equal number of guy friends with whom she was most emphatically not romantically involved, once told me about a family friend whose marriage plans were cancelled at the nth minute. Apparently she was marrying some guy who'd never looked a girl in the eye before his horoscope was matched to hers while she was a normal kid who'd grown up in the Middle East and who'd managed to scrounge up some friends of both sexes and different nationalities in spite of the fact that she attended a same-sex school and nationalities tended to segregate in her locality. So the hick that she was going to marry (pardon me my condescension, but really!) came to visit or for the engagement or whatever and ended up reading her emails.

I have no idea what he was doing in her email account but he came across her inbox which was filled with "hey wassup" notes from various friends. He was outraged to discover all those male names in there - none of which went beyond the hey-how-are-you stage - and broke it all off. The girl was only too relieved coz she was basically in it to please her mom and dad, but Sangs was mad.

"What an asshole," she said.

Her father agreed. Her father, who has the strictest Malayalee father notions on girls and how they ought to behave, was taken aback by this young man's behavior. "In this day and age," he said to me, "One has to expect that girls and boys will be friends and that it doesn't necessarily mean anything."

And therein lies the problem - sex and sexism.

Sex, because for a people who live in complete denial of it, the act determines so many aspects of desi lives. What we wear, how we walk, what we say, the people we interact with, the way we regard someone, where we go, what we read, what we hide, so many things, all based upon sex. The fear of it or the suspicion of it.

And sexism because we still haven't understood that when you talk about leveling the playing field, then you can't do it in some ways and not in others. When girls and boys are given, even nominally, the same opportunities as each other then you can't expect it not to leave some sort of mark. You can't tell a girl that she is just as good or even better and give her every chance to prove it and in the end turn around and tell her the past was all prologue and now that she's topped her class, become a neuroscientist, and beaten every other obstacle in her path, what's really important is the quality of her curry. Because, you know, that's the bottom line - Ms. India Perfect, Neuroscientist and Curry Maker. Well dowried for a good home.