So I went to the bar. And then I went again. And again. I drank. A few games later, I watched. I cheered. I asked questions. I absorbed. And now, almost a month later, my head is filled with fabulous trivia about the world’s most popular sport. (It turns out soccer – I mean football – is fascinating.)

But now what? The World Cup ends on Sunday. What do we do with all this new information?

I know that the Spanish exert constant pressure, putting most of their players on the offense as they repeatedly try to score. But that strategy can backfire because their goal can be left with only a few players to defend it. I know England is normally strong, but this year they didn’t even look excited to be there. I know it can be better to get a foul than let the other team score. And fouls are common – players kick and trip and pull their opponents onto the ground. (Maybe we should tell Americans how violent this sport is.)

I know corner kicks are dangerous. I know Ghana was Africa’s last hope, and we all mourned when Uruguay prevented a goal. I know the goalie can’t use his hands outside the box. Speaking of goalies, there have been so many goalie errors this year!

I know a player can’t return once he’s taken out, and the clock doesn’t stop but referees add a few – seemingly indiscriminate – minutes at the end, and there are no commercials except during halftime.

I know Angela Merkel loved that game against Argentina. Where was she during the semifinals?

Most interesting to me have been the outfits. You probably think so too but because I am a woman I’m allowed to say it. Uruguay in light blue and Netherlands in orange was a lovely combination. Germany’s black tops were hot. And while a goalie dressed like a florescent banana disturbed me at first, I know there’s logic behind it: people think the players will be distracted by the color. I still don’t understand why teams must match their jerseys, shorts and shin guards, but players are allowed to choose their own – often hideous – cleats.

I also think I get why people like to talk sports so much. You gather all this information, you don’t want it to go to waste. You want to share it with friends. You want credit for how hard you paid attention.

No, I didn’t watch any games by myself. I only saw one from the beginning. And I didn’t realize the teams switch sides at halftime until Spain beat Germany. But I still count myself as a fan. It took one World Cup, and I’m converted.

As much fun as it’s been, perhaps it’s not so bad to have four years off. I need time to recover. And my friends owe me a serious number of Grey’s Anatomy episodes.

Follow Hanna on Twitter: @Hanna_India

Bhojpuri stars Ravi Kishan and Pakkhi Hegde film a song for an upcoming movie on a set in Malad a suburb of Mumbai. Photo by Hanna Ingber Win

MUMBAI, India — An old man sits at a wooden stand slicing lemons for fresh juice as a group of movie fans gathers at a nearby gate. The collection of rickshaw drivers, taxi drivers and other migrants all eagerly wait to buy tickets for the latest Bhojpuri film. Bhojpuri is a Hindi dialect spoken in India’s northern states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and among much of the city’s migrant workers.

One of the men at the gate, Rajaram Chauhan, moved to Mumbai from his village in Uttar Pradesh 10 years ago to earn money to support him and his family back home. Wearing an old orange button-down and loose polyester pants with a hole in the knee, he says he earns 9,000 rupees (US$195) a month working a machine. Every Friday he spends his free time by going to the movies, usually a Bhojpuri film in his language. Asked if the movies remind him of home, Chauhan says: “Why would you ask a question like that? Of course it happens!”

As Bollywood films have increasingly catered to a wealthy, cosmopolitan class of Indians here and abroad, regional cinemas have seen a growth in demand from Indians who can no longer relate to the Hindi movies, according to Kathryn Hardy, a University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate in South Asia studies who is working on a dissertation on Bhojpuri cinema.

Regional cinemas have filled the hole left by Bollywood by producing movies that cater to a local audience through language, themes, music and settings that resonate with them. Bhojpuri films have been around since the 1960s, but the number of movies made each year has jumped in the past decade. About 100 films are now made a year, Hardy said.

Read more about Bhojpuri cinema or scroll down for photos.

Fans wait in line to see a Bhojpuri film at a single-screen theater in Andheri, a suburb of Mumbai. Photo by Hanna Ingber Win

Bhojpuri stars Ravi Kishan and Pakkhi Hegde film a song for an upcoming movie on a set in Malad a suburb of Mumbai. Photo by Hanna Ingber Win

Hasina Khatun lives on an island on the Brahmaputra River in Assam in northeastern India. Hasina was married at 13. She's now 15 and five-months pregnant. Photo by Hanna Ingber Win.

I had written about child marriage before. When I went to Ethiopia, I visited a program for girls who had fled early marriage in their villages and ended up in the capital Addis Ababa. I met a classroom full of such young girls. With their schoolbooks in hand, they looked like kids, not brides. I talked to some of the girls in depth about how their desire to continue their schooling had pushed them to leave their families and traditions behind and flee to what they hoped would be a better life. These girls had dreams, and the courage to pursue them.

This time, in a small village on a remote island on the Brahmaputra River in northeastern India, the story was still on child marriage, but everything was different.

This time, the girl, Hasina Khatun, did not want to continue her education. She had not been to school a day in her life. Hasina was 13 when her aunt had told her she would get married. Like the girls I met in Ethiopia, Hasina did not want to leave her family behind and start a new life with a husband. But unlike the others, she accepted her life. When I asked if she had goals or dreams, she couldn’t think of any.

Unlike the girls in Addis, Hasina hadn’t fled.

Whether in Ethiopia or India, girls who have a baby under the age of 15 are five times more likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth as women in their 20s, according to the UN Population Fund. Girls 15 to 19 are twice as likely to die.

Wherever the girl lives, child marriage increases the likelihood of domestic violence. It generally lowers the age of a first birth and ends a girl’s opportunity to get an education, thereby decreasing her chances of employment and earning potential. Sent away from her family and village, the girl is likely to loose her support network and face social isolation.

In Ethiopia, this information served as a backdrop for what the girls I met had escaped. In India, as I chatted with Hasina inside a bamboo shack on the island, her life felt like a checklist.

Domestic violence? Three days after getting married, her 19-year-old husband told her they would have sex. She said no. He forced himself on her. Check.

Low age of first birth? She’s now 15 and five months pregnant. Check.

Education? She works in her in-laws home, helping cook and clean. She lives on an island with no secondary schools and couldn’t get an education if she wanted one. Check.

Isolation? Her family and friends live 25 kilometers away on the mainland. It takes a boat two to three hours to get there. Check.

Physical health? Hasina’s hemoglobin level, which should be at least 11 grams per deciliter, is 6.4. She’s severely anemic. Check.

As I interviewed Hasina, I had a million things on my mind: getting this timid young girl to open up, jotting down details on the chickens wandering around us, convincing the male translators to ask my questions on sex, shooing away the neighbors and husband who kept crowding around the door.

It wasn’t until I left Hasina and her village of 886 people, got back on the boat and checked into my humble hotel on the mainland that I began to process the girl’s story. I connected my camera to my laptop and began downloading photographs of Hasina.  I sat alone in my room and stared into an image of her face. Hasina does not look like a woman or a wife or a mother. She looks like a sweet young thing.

The girls in Ethiopia will undoubtedly have difficult lives trying to survive as teen migrants in the capital. Many of them must work as domestic helpers while trying to continue their education. But those girls see potential in their lives, and they will strive to achieve it.

Hasina sees nothing.

She has decided that despite what the boat clinic nurses and doctors tell her, she will give birth at home. Her body might be too small and undeveloped to handle the burden of a pregnancy, her home might be hours away from medical help if there is a complication, but she says she does not care.

As a reporter, I kept trying to get Hasina to tell me something positive or uplifting about her life. I thought my story would be better if I could add a happy twist and show what gives Hasina – just like other teenage girls around the world – a sense of joy.

And yet, I couldn’t find anything. Perhaps I didn’t ask the right questions, perhaps I didn’t stay with her long enough. I am sure there must be something that makes this young girl roll over with laughter. But I didn’t find it.

At the time, I wanted that extra information for my story. It would be my ending. Now, as I look at the photographs of Hasina over and over, as I envision her holding her sari up to her face as she whispered one-word answers, I realize I was looking for a piece of joy for myself, too. Without it, I am left with the image of a young girl with a swollen belly and not a shimmer of hope.

Read more about Hasina here.

Follow Hanna on Twitter @Hanna_India.

This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Thanks to Google, I got some photos before my trip to help me visualize the dreaming while busing experience. And thanks to Twitter, I got some input before the journey. @dhempe confirmed these sleeper buses exist and wrote, “yup thr r sleeper buses which r very comfortable.”

But then @aparnaandhare chimed in: “except when the driver decides to speed around a corner and you are terrified of falling!”

Eek, maybe this was a bad idea.

@SudhaKanago added: “I had also heard about shady things that go on in the dark ”

@AndrewBuncombe, the Independent’s Asia correspondent who was recently shot while reporting from Bangkok, wrote “That counts as brave. Will you be able to Tweet from the bunk?”

My transportation choice to the beach was not supposed to be “brave.”

But I needed a break for a couple days, and the pina coladas on the beach were calling.

The bus arrived at the Bandra long-distance bus station — which consists of a couple benches by the side of the road — and my brave mode of transport did not look particularly impressive. The windows were tinted black so I couldn’t actually see inside. I ran over to the man checking tickets, eager to be first on line, and then hopped onto the bus, peaking my head around the driver’s seat and into the vehicle of mystery.

Neither the Google pictures nor the friendly tweets had prepared me for the real thing. I don’t mean to be cheesy, but there’s no other way to describe it accurately — a sleeper bus is super cool.

Mine consisted of two layers of beds, like bunk beds, on each side of the aisle. Everything was maroon and velvet. Maroon velvet cushions, maroon velvet curtains on the windows, maroon velvet curtains blocking out the aisle, maroon velvet ceiling.

I climbed up a metal ladder on the side, awkwardly plunking myself, laptop, camera and beach towel into my compartment. I wrapped a metal chain around my camera and laptop (and, with no where to hook it, around me), spread my beach towel over my legs like a blanket and lied down.

To my surprise and delight, a sleeper bus is incredibly comfortable. Arguably more comfortable than my own bed. Resting my head on the built-in pillow, I glanced at the ceiling and curtains, ran my fingers along the bedding and felt like I was in a super soft maroon cave. As a lay in the bus horizontal, I pulled back the curtain and watched the Mumbai traffic as we headed out of town.

From this view, even the traffic seemed lovely.

Ten hours later, when the bus driver would only pause at the roadside for the men to pee and refuse to stop at a public restroom, and the little boys would repeatedly bounce up and down in the aisle, popping their heads into my compartment every six minutes, I saw the sleeper bus a little differently.

But those first 10 minutes were delightful.

Photo by Hanna Ingber Win

DIBRUGARH, India — After receiving her bachelor’s degree in medicine and surgery and completing a one-year internship, Dr. Sumi Baruah spent two years studying for an entrance exam to secure one of the few prized seats in a medical college in Assam in northeastern India. About 1,200 students compete for 170 seats each year.

Sumi, now 27, says she did virtually nothing but study – 12 hours a day – for almost two years. Her plan was to attend medical college and then work as a doctor in Dibrugarh, a town in upper Assam, serving a mostly middle class population.

The Assamese government foiled her plan.

In an effort to get more medical professionals to serve the state’s largely rural population, the government implemented a rule in October that all graduates with a Bachelor’s of Medicine, Bachelor’s of Surgery (MBBS) degree, like Sumi, must spend one year practicing in a rural area before enrolling in a post-graduate degree course. MBBS graduates, who are given the title doctor, are considered general physicians. Lack of trained medical staff in rural areas has been a major obstacle to improving health care in India.

Sumi was not happy. She says she had heard disturbing stories about rural postings. For example, she heard that if a patient dies, even if it was not the doctor’s fault, all the villagers would come and harass the medical staff.

But Sumi, who is the first woman in her family to work, had no option. She took a position in Dibrugarh district in upper Assam at the Panitola Primary Health Center. The center, which during a recent visit shared its compound with a handful of roosters and a grazing cow, serves about 100,000 people, mostly villagers from the mainland or remote islands on the Brahmaputra River.

The Assamese government has placed 768 MBBS graduates like Sumi in rural postings throughout the state, according to Dr. Bishnu Ram Das, an associate professor in the department of community medicine at Assam Medical College. Some must live far from family and friends in remote locations with few public services and almost no amenities.

During a recent morning shift, Sumi shared a desk with another young female doctor as they treated patient after patient as a crowd gathered inside their modest office. A line of women in brightly colored saris, many holding infants with black circles smudged on their foreheads to ward off evil spirits, waited on benches outside.

The doctors are paid 25,000 rupees ($543) a month during their one-year rural posting and perform basic health care like immunizations and checkups. The center does not have the facilities for blood transfusions or handling complications, which they refer to a nearby hospital.

Sumi says she has had to deal with various problems related to serving a mostly uneducated, rural population, but over the past seven months she has learned how to manage the situation. When a drunkard hangs around the clinic, for example, she now just ignores him.

Despite her initial misgivings, Sumi says she has grown to appreciate the experience.

Sumi also passed her entrance exam and will be attending medical college after she completes the rural posting.

This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Follow Hanna on Twitter: @Hanna_India

Photo by Hanna Ingber Win

TENGATOLI, India — The air crackles as a team of medical staff and crew walk across a peanut field, lugging a big generator from their boat into a village of 850 people. Near a collection of thatchroof homes, the crew sets up a projector on the dirt floor of a small bamboo structure that also serves as the community’s schoolhouse. Well, it occasionally serves as a schoolhouse. The teacher lives on the mainland, a three to four-hour boat ride away, and only makes the journey along the Brahmaputra River to Tengatoli village in lower Assam to teach once a month. Sometimes once every two months.

Barefoot children and mothers holding infants trickle into the school-turned-cinema hall. The boat staff, part of a boat clinic run by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research with funding from the Indian government and UNICEF (see previous blog on C-NES and the boat clinics), show a video on maternal and child health, including the importance of family planning.

Some of the video clips are in Assamese, and even though many in the crowd only speak Bengali, the language barrier does not seem to dissuade them from watching. Many who live on this island without electricity or televisions have never before seen a video.

One of the women watching is Anuwara Begum. Dressed in a vibrant yellow, orange and red sari, she wears her head covered, an assortment of bangles and a nose ring. Begum, who does not know her age but thinks she is about 30, grew up in a village on the mainland. Like many of the girls in her community, she got married at 12 or 13. She left her family and friends and moved to her husband’s village on the island. Begum had her first child at around age 15, she says as she slowly rocks her fourth and youngest in her arms. This baby will be her last, she says through a translator.

She also says her husband agrees, which is crucial in a world where the wife – or, in this case, one of the wives – makes few decisions on her own.

“I belong to a poor family so we don’t want more children,” Begum says while sitting in a neighbor’s home. Kids from the village gather outside the door, peering into the home of bamboo walls and a tin roof. Begum says three sons and a daughter are enough to help around the home and in the fields. Her husband does relatively well as a farmer, earning around 8,000 – 9,000 rupees a month ($174 – $196), depending on the harvest, but that income must cover him and Begum plus his other two wives and all 10 of his children.

“If there is another child, there’s a problem of food, buying clothes and then educating him,” Begum says.

Begum says she was a little jealous when her husband married his second wife, but she understood the need for her. She says that early in their marriage she fell sick and was not able to fulfill her responsibilities as a wife.

“My husband is a rich man; he has a lot of agricultural land. But I was sick so I couldn’t do the household work,” she says. “If I had been well, he wouldn’t have had to marry again.”

She says she now gets along well with the second wife, who has always shown her respect and has become like a sister to her. The third wife, who is about 16 or 17, lives in Guwahati on the mainland, where her husband has other business. Begum says that while her father had only one wife, most of the husbands in this island village have two. Asked if she wants a second husband, Begum turns her head to the side and laughs.

“No need for two husbands,” she says.

The family’s decision to have fewer children marks a dramatic change from previous generations of communities in lower Assam like Begum’s. She comes from a family of eight children, and her husband is one of 10.

Less than a quarter of married women between the ages of 15 and 49 living in rural Assam use a modern form of contraception, according to government’s 2005-2006 National Family Health Survey. Factors such as early marriage correlate with higher rates of fertility.

While a change in family planning practices is coming slowly and is far from universal, public health experts in Assam say they are seeing an increase in the use of contraceptives in villages like Tengatoli.

Once Begum’s menstruation cycle restarts after the birth of her latest child, she says as a chick walks over a sack of produce next to her, she will begin taking an oral contraceptive provided to her from the boat clinic. She tried using it in the past, but she forgot to take the pills regularly and eventually stopped. This time, she says, she is committed to it.

Family planning is considered an important aspect of maternal health and would help reduce Assam’s maternal mortality rate, which at 480 deaths per 100,000 live births is the highest in India.

Fewer births means fewer maternal deaths. Furthermore, giving adequate spacing between the births of children enables a mother’s body to fully recover after a pregnancy. Having fewer children also increases the chance each individual child will receive enough nutrition and medical care and have an opportunity for an education.

After the interview, Begum takes us on a walk down a dirt path running through the village, past clucking hens and a man chopping bamboo, to see her one-room home. We meet her 10-year-old daughter who has long brown hair, a sweet smile and a flower-shaped nose ring that matches her mother’s. But not everything matches.

Begum says she and her husband will send their daughter to high school on the mainland. She wants her daughter to wait to get married until she is 18 and then have only two to three children. She agrees that it would be a big difference from the life she has known.

“I expect my daughter’s life,” she says, “to be better than my own.”

This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Follow Hanna on Twitter: @Hanna_India

The doctors, nurses and I follow behind, zigzagging through the rain-soaked grass. We take off our shoes to wade through the flooded areas. The air feels fresh and crisp. With no roads or vehicles on the island, the only sounds we hear are roosters, cows and our feet sloshing through the water.

About 1,200 Bengali-speaking Muslims live in Azimor village. They have no electricity, toilets or clean drinking water. There is a primary school, which consists of a one-room structure made out of bamboo walls and a tin roof. The week before our arrival a storm had picked up the school and dropped it off in another part of the village.

When the children pass grade four at about nine or 10 years of age, they must go to secondary school on another island about four kilometers away. For most, the long and relatively expensive journey by foot and boat prohibits them from continuing school.

We reach the village, and the pharmacist from the boat sets up a table of medications as barefoot children gather around. Women in colorful saris and headscarves clutch their babies as they line up for immunizations from the boat nurses.

Ten boat clinics, run by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research and supported by the Indian government and UNICEF, bring basic health care to isolated island villages like this one. About 3 million people live on the Brahmaputra River, and the clinics have served about 300,000 of them in the past five years. For many, the boats provide their first experience with a medical professional. Read more about C-NES and listen to an interview with managing trustee Sanjoy Hazarika at my previous posting.

It begins to pour, and the mothers huddle under an open-air structure with a tin – leaking – roof. “This is the main problem,” says Ashok Rao of C-NES, as he takes shelter from the rain. The storms and human activity cause the islands to erode, and the families must move over and over. On some islands, families have been displaced six or seven times, Rao says. With each move, they must build new makeshift homes and start anew.

The displacement also affects their healthcare. The doctors return to an island to give children their next immunization dosage or perform antenatal checkups for pregnant women, but when they get there, they learn the family has been forced to move.

“The water makes them so vulnerable,” says C-NES doctor Ruhul Amin, 27. “They can’t stay in the same place.”

The boat clinics work with community health workers, called Accredited Social Health Activists or ASHAs. Part of the Indian government’s National Rural Health Mission, ASHA workers serve as a liaison between the village members and health professionals. The ASHA workers receive compensation for bringing a woman to a health facility to give birth and for getting children immunized. India has trained and began working with 250,000 ASHA workers in 10 states across the country, according to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare.

Ful Mala Begum, 30, is one such worker. She takes responsibility for ensuring that the pregnant women in the village get their antenatal checkups when the boat clinic arrives, and she gives them counseling on how to eat well.

Asked what she tells them to eat, she says through a translator: “We are poor people; we don’t have good things to eat. We must use whatever is available, mostly fruits and vegetables.”

One of Begum’s biggest tasks has been to convince the women to give birth at a primary health center about one and a half kilometers away rather than have the delivery at home like their families have done for generations. In the beginning, she says, the women were reluctant to go to a doctor at all because they did not want to reveal their bodies to a male physician.

“Previously, due to lack of awareness and their religious beliefs, they did not feel like going to a doctor and showing themselves,” she says while sitting in the makeshift school. As she talks, the doctor from the boat tends to patients a few feet away.

Begum says she would return to the women’s homes again and again, telling them they needed to give birth at the health center in case of a medical complication. She would also tell the women about the government’s recent policy to give 1,400 rupees ($30) to every mother who gives birth in a medical facility.

Eventually, Begum’s message began to sink in.

“Now they are beginning to go,” she says, as the splattering of rain can be heard in the puddles outside the schoolhouse. In the past four years, Begum says she has brought about 60 women by bicycle or handcart, across a small stream, to the health center for delivery.

While more mothers are giving birth in the health center, they are not receiving the benefits that was promised to them, Begum says. The government gives the 1,400 rupees by check in the mother’s name, but none of the women who live on this island have bank accounts. They do not even have a bank to open an account in.

To get the money, a woman must take a market boat from the island to the mainland and then walk to Mukalmua, the nearest town. If a woman leaves the island at 7 am, she would not return home until 4 pm in the afternoon, Begum says. Most women, who have just given birth and have other responsibilities like older children to care for, do not have the time or resources to spend a day opening a bank account.

Despite the bank account issues, Begum says more and more women agree to give birth at the health center.

“I’m happy that I’m able to serve the community. And I’m happy I can get some income,” Begum says as the crowd of women standing around to listen break into laughter. “After I die, the Lord will bless me.”

This reporting was sponsored by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Learn more about this reporting project.

Follow Hanna’s reporting from Assam on Twitter: @Hanna_India

Photo: Hanna Ingber Win

GUWAHATI, India — We load up in an SUV and make our way through the streets of Guwahati. It is raining, and much of this major city in northeastern India is flooded. Cars, men pedaling rickshaws and our SUV slowly edge their way through the water-filled streets. The water looks orange, stained from the clay that has eroded from the surrounding hills and clogged Guwahati’s drains. We are headed to meet a boat that will take a group of medical staff and us to visit a remote island on the Brahmaputra River.

A dark cloud forms overhead, and we hope it doesn’t storm. If it rains too hard, the villagers are less likely to come meet the temporary clinic the medical staff will set up on the island. If it storms, our boat won’t be able to go at all. We – like the villagers – are in the hands of the rain.

About 3 million people live along the Brahmaputra, a massive river that stretches from Tibet to Bangladesh. The boat clinics, run by the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (C-NES) with funding from the Indian government and UNICEF, work in 10 of the 15 districts on the river. They have reached over 300,000 people since they began in 2005.

I call, expecting a timid woman. I know that contrary to the stereotype, many women who wear burqas are highly educated. And yet, I subconsciously assumed Fatima only spoke Urdu or Hindi. I am taken aback when she answers the phone speaking perfect English.

She also sounds friendly and inviting. She calls me “dear.”

I arrive at her home in a Muslim neighborhood in central Mumbai, and she greets me with a warm smile and a hug. “So nice to meet you!” she says at the door.

Fatima is wearing a strikingly fashionable salwar kameez with bright pinks and blues and a delicate blue veil covering her head, shoulders and chest. Had I gotten it wrong, I think to myself. I wanted to meet a woman in a burqa – who’s this lady?

Again, I had consciously known that women only wore the burqa when they left the home or in front of men. But in my imagination, these women were covered in black at all hours of the day and night.

We sit in Fatima’s living room, and she serves me fruit juice and dates. I leave my notebook in my bag, wanting to make her feel comfortable. In hindsight, I think she was more comfortable than I was.

We chat, and she tells me about her ancestors. One had moved to India from Ethiopia, another from Afghanistan and another from Western Europe. They had come as traders.

Her history reminds me of my own. Jews throughout time migrated from country to country often as merchants, acclimating themselves to their new lands while maintaining their own distinct culture. Normally, in an attempt to make an interview subject feel at ease, I might have compared her story to my own. I might have said, “Oh, just like my family!”

This time, I do not.

My Indian friends tell me that I need not be afraid of being Jewish here. This is not the Middle East, they say. It’s not even Austria or Poland. India is one of the few countries in the world where Jews have almost always lived in peace with their neighbors.

After their reassurance, I have decided to be open about my religion. I tweet about celebrating Shabbat, I talk to my friends about my culture, I am writing this article. Being Jewish is a huge part of my identity, and if possible, I’d rather be open about who I am.

And yet, I am still careful.

As Fatima and I chat, she explains Allah’s teachings with a sense of deep love for Islam. She speaks calmly, her body at ease. She shares with me different rules that govern her. “Islam is a way of life,” she says. It teaches one how to live in a peaceful way, at harmony with others.

Prophet Mohammed says don’t kill a bird if you don’t want to eat it, she tells me. Yes, I think to myself, Rabbinic law also forbids hunting for pleasure.

Fatima tells me that Muslims must give a percentage of their annual earnings to charity, called zakat. That is similar to in Judaism, I think to myself. She says she has a small box in her house where her family puts change for the needy. I think of my Sunday school classes at Temple Beth Shalom in New York and remember bringing change each week to add to the tzedukah box sitting on the teacher’s desk.

In the background, we hear a man begin to chant in a low, melodious voice over a loudspeaker. Fatima silently recites the muezzin’s words, and then translates for me the azaan or call to prayer.

Fatima talks like a rabbi, telling a parable with every point she makes. As we sit on her floor and enjoy a lunch of roti, dal and vegetable dishes, she tells me a story about two men walking with a camel. When the young man sits on the camel and the old man walks nearby, people criticize the younger one for making his elder work hard. When they both sit on the camel, the community criticizes them for putting so much weight on the animal. The men jump off, tie the camel’s legs to a stick and carry the animal down the road. People then laugh at them for working while the camel gets a free ride. No matter what you do, Fatima says, people will judge you.

Thinking I will get points for celebrating a Muslim holiday, I bring up the street festival in honor of Prophet Mohammed’s birthday that I had attended the previous week.

Fatima shrivels up her face in a look of disgust. “This is all crap,” she says, pointing out the window. The festival had taken over her streets as shopkeepers blared loud music and men rode by dancing and singing on big trucks.

“Money should go where? To these things? These are pagan habits,” she says. “This is not the way of our Prophet.”

Throughout our conversation, Fatima frequently addresses the issue of men and women being separate. She tells an anecdote about diamonds and says, “Allah made women precious.”

“We are exactly as a yummy cake with a lot of ice cream,” she says. “What happens to it? You see humans pouncing on it, you see flies pouncing on it.”

To protect women from being pounced on like a dessert, they must separate themselves from men.

As Fatima describes the comfort and joy she gets out of following Allah’s direction and covering herself from men, I think of my visit to a Jewish Chabad House in Venice years ago. I had popped in to see the synagogue there, and the rabbi’s wife spotted me — young, eager and open — sat me down for a Kosher lunch and spent two hours explaining to me why Jewish women should follow God’s rules.

Coming from a Reform background, I had been raised believing that women’s equality meant that women should be treated the same as men. This rabbi’s wife turned that argument on its head. She said God viewed women as even more special than men and therefore gave them certain obligations.

The rabbi’s wife described to me the mikvah, a body of water that a woman must cleanse herself in after menstruation. Rather than condemning the practice because it assumes that a woman needs to be purified after menstruation, this woman described the mikvah as a spiritual experience even nicer than going to a spa. Once a month, you go to this separate facility, take off all your clothes, clean your nails and comb your hair and then submerge yourself in a body of water.

Both Fatima and the rabbi’s wife said that women must keep themselves separate because men cannot control themselves. Muslim and Jewish women cover their hair, which is considered super sexy, and must stay out of sight while the men pray, lest they distract them.

As I leave, Fatima and I make a date to meet again. I have been debating if next time I should be open about my own heritage. I want to give Fatima the benefit of the doubt, and I know that my assumption that she might dislike Jews is one more stereotype I have of Muslims in this part of the world.

On the other hand, I am a Jewish reporter working abroad in a time of great hatred against the state of Israel. It is not a myth that many Islamist extremists associate all Jews with a state they consider evil. While Fatima is not an extremist, I know nothing about her neighbors and friends.

At the end of the day, I am still scared.

I begin to realize that I am not going to be telling Fatima I am Jewish. One meeting with a woman who has thus far shattered all my prejudices is not going to crush this last one. Assuming that there may be some in Fatima’s wider community who may wish me harm or could cause problems for me is one prejudice that will not be broken down so easily. At least not yet.

Follow Hanna on Twitter: @Hanna_India

“I tried, Mom,” I said. “They won’t fix it. We have to move on.”

Hours earlier, while my mother was sleeping, content in thinking her daughter had hundreds of followers, I hit one seemingly innocuous but very bad button. In a second, I went from having a community of friends, readers, supporters, sources and confidants – to having no one.

I had accidentally deleted my Twitter account.

I had been trying to change my settings so that my tweets no longer automatically appeared on my Facebook page. It was a Saturday morning; I was a bit hungover; the coffee had not yet sunk in (any other excuses I can come up with?). The page asked if I wanted to deactivate, I hit yes.

Wrong move.

At first, I did not comprehend the damage I had done. I refreshed my Twitter page over and over, but I could not find my home base. I kept getting the same message. In big bold letters, it said: “You deactivated your account.”

Where were the big bold letters 30 seconds ago? Where were the flashing lights and sirens, screaming: “Stop, you idiot! You are about to kill your online identity!”

I did not freak out. OK, I thought, I deactivated my account. That was stupid, but it shouldn’t be too hard to fix. We all know that whatever we put online will stay there forever.

I read closer.  “Account restoration is currently unavailable.”

Huh, that does not sound good.

And then, as if I was not already feeling like an idiot, Twitter says: “Here is the message you agreed to before deactivating your account: This action is permanent…”

Still in a state of denial, I refused to believe “permanent” meant “permanent.” I needed help, and like I often do when I need assistance, I reached out to my online world.

I had spent the past four months growing a community of people to help me understand India and its way of life. I work from home, and my followers had become like colleagues who I could quickly tap for advice or guidance. When I wanted information on how to celebrate an upcoming Hindu holiday or clues as to why my housekeeper left empty eggshells in my windowsills, I posted a message on my page. My followers quickly offered me assistance. (Eggshells, it turns out, are intended to keep lizards away.)

When I needed to find a place to celebrate Passover, I tweeted, “Have 3 days left to find a seder .. does anyone have Jewish Indian friends in Mumbai?” A half dozen of my followers chimed in with information on synagogues in the city. One offered to put me in touch with her friend living in Pune, a couple hours away. Others retweeted my request, spreading the word that a guest in their country needed assistance.

Again, I was sure my Twitter followers would come to the rescue. I signed on using a different handle that I had recently created but never used, @HannaIngber. I typed: “I somehow killed my Hanna_India account. This is very sad. Any one know how to fix?”

But then I realized that I did not have a single follower. Deflated, I typed one last line. “I am talking to no one.”

As I futilely searched Google for answers, the seriousness of the situation began to hit me. I felt all alone.

I continued to type on my Twitter page, though it was now less like a noisy cafeteria and more like a diary.

“I really don’t want to start over with no friends,” I typed to myself. “It’s like moving to a new city and knowing no one. I have already done that.”

To keep the depression at bay, I got to work finding friends. Using my new handle, I began looking for my old community. I felt like a high school student who had lots of friends during the school year, but then went away for summer camp while everyone else stayed home and partied together. Here I was, returning in September, knocking on the door and asking if they might take me in again.

To my delight, they did. One by one, my @Hanna_India followers opened up and accepted @HannaIngber.

Though not without some teasing. “Accidents do happen, Glad no one is hurt ,” wrote @cbinoy.

“Before deactivation Twitter should ask: ‘Are you sure you aren’t sleepy, drunk or otherwise incapacitated?’ ” a fellow reporter wrote.

As messages from Twitter that people were following @HannaIngber began to trickle into my inbox, I grappled with all I had lost. In addition to an audience for my every tweet, I had lost an online record of 140-word thoughts on moving to a new land. I had been mostly using Twitter to record my impressions of Mumbai as I came to call this place home. Now, those first impressions were gone.

Luckily, though, I did not have to grieve alone. My new followers sympathized with my loss and offered condolences and help.

“You seem remarkably perky in face of such great tragedy. Many ppl wd hv got a stroke on thought of deleting SocMed accts,” wrote @c_aashish.

@polgrim tweeted: “Hey folks @HannaIngber is feeling at a loss for not being @Hanna_India anymore. Please follow her and show her some love.”

A few days later, just as I had come to terms with my loss, I got a new message in my inbox. It was the Twitter helpdesk, responding to my pleas. “Charles” informed me that they had magically brought @Hanna_India back to life. No details, no explanation, sometimes less is more. I was back.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this near-death experience. First, mom is (almost) always right. Second, nothing is permanent. And finally, don’t mess with your social network settings before the second cup of coffee.

If this column did not make it clear, please follow Hanna here: @Hanna_India