"I'll be watching you"

One of my biggest fears is being followed by strangers; this could translate into a fear of being stalked, but stalking has much more of a recurring tone it. Of course, that does sound frightening, but that’s never happened to me (knock on wood!) so I won’t worry about that now.

There are undoubtedly a lot of creepy people everywhere in the world, and I happened to meet two of them in Tajikistan.

The first man was obviously homeless and a beggar. My friends and I were in an underground market area near the center of town when he approached us. As we were buying poetry, he was lingering and asking around for some money. But then he came up to the booth we were at and that’s when things started to get creepy. As foreigners, Tajiks assumed we knew Russian, so he was speaking to us in Russian and we just ignored him. He went up behind all of us and continued speaking Russian, but then he switched to English behind me and asked “Can I draw you?” Needless to say, I was thoroughly freaked out. He continued to just stand behind me and repeat that phrase over and over and over. When we finally decided to leave he continued to follow us up from under the underground and that’s when we started walking quickly. And guess what? He hobbled after us still repeating “Can I draw you?” Once we had crossed a couple roads and he was still following us, we ducked into a bookstore and hung out there until we felt like he would be gone.

The second time was right outside of my house. I lived in front of the Philharmonic, and every evening my host sister and I would go out to take a walk around there and talk. It wasn’t uncommon for even young children to go out there and play at dusk, so it was considerably safe. One day, this guy came down and sat next to us while we were talking and started talking to my host sister. She ignored him, but as he began scooting closer, we got up and moved to a different spot. He, of course, decided to follow us and my host sister turned to him and told him to leave us alone. We got up to leave but he wouldn’t stop following us and even became aggressive and got in front of us to try to stop us from going anywhere. We tried the ducking into a store approach, but he sat just a ways a way and as we were leaving to go home, he began to follow us again. Luckily, one of the boys in my building came into the store and my host sister explained to him the situation and he went “dealt with it”(in her words) while we ran up thirteen flights of stairs to get back to the safety of our apartment.