It feels good to be a statistic. At least you feel like you’re part of the country—of the millions who were intimidated by some action that they never called for. While protesting or writing complex, jargon-y statements about women’s right to claim the streets, to walk unafraid of mental and physical attack and through the very act symbolise the legal freedom of being out ‘there’, I never once really understood the utter sham words can be.
And yet
all I can do is write when a gentleman on a bike reaches out of his way to
plant a sharp slap on my ass. No I didn’t ask for it. No it wasn’t the middle
of the night (Even the prude eleven o’ clock Bangalorean curfew wouldn’t frown
upon a 10 PM walk). No it wasn’t a dodgy, run-down part of town. It happened
where I’m given to believe Bangalore’s elite live. No I wasn’t taking my
chances with the night in a mini-skirt or hot pants. Just merely walking home
from dinner in a “morally conducive” pair of jeans.
The
appalling thing is that he actually stopped to check my reaction. Turned his
head around to see what I would do. Too stunned to move, I couldn’t even swear
at him. The slap had seemed disconcertingly familiar.
I’ve
had my breasts peeked at, poked at, an unassuming hand graze across my ass.
I’ve had boys in school wait under staircases and been stared at so hard it
made it impossible to stay in one place for too long. I had never
underestimated the violence of a gaze, but the sheer anger of being touched
without consent is something much bigger than just anger. It’s an unlearning, a
complete undermining of your person.
He had
a yellow shirt on but that’s all I could tell. He was on a bike, his face half
hidden by darkness and the other half by an ugly smirk. He was
indistinguishable from the thousands of others who do this to thousands of
other vulnerable women across the country. They often do much, much worse.
The
ironic thing is that on the way back from work earlier, on a bus segregated by
gender, I thought about the geography of misogyny and violence. And I realised
there isn’t any. Once the son of a prominent cabinet minister had joked about
how women only got raped in Delhi, in contrast to Gurgaon where they get
murdered in addition to being raped. I thought the joke in very bad taste, but
since we were being young and urban and self-consciously gender neutral in our
friendships, I let it go.
I sat
through a slew of insults against Delhi when I first moved to Bangalore. About
how Delhi didn’t know how to treat its women, about how raping was a sadistic
past-time there, about how ridiculous the Khap Panchayats were. As if Delhi was
a monolithic kingdom that sacrificed women as part of a daily ritual. The truth
is that people rape, abuse, harass, touch and pinch women in Delhi for the same
reason that men in other parts of the country do: because they can get away
with it. The helplessness of not being able to run after the bike, or it being
too dark to check it’s make, were things not in my control. They’ll never be in
my control when a hand reaches out from the back. From now on, in my mind, my
geographies of violence will change. Familiar streets will grow vulnerable to
the sheer audacity of men on bikes.
Statistics
have history. So I learned when I called the most un-hysterical person I know:
my mother. Tough as nails, my mother’s response to the rising incidents of
assault and abuse in Delhi has never been to curtail my freedom. Typically, she
heard me out calmly and offered a few ripe insults towards the biker to assuage
my hurt. She then told me about how thirty years ago, as student in Miranda
House, she had faced much of the same thing while walking to class. In her
mind, the map of assault and insult consisted of a few streets in Delhi
University where she and her friends were regularly leered at by groups of men
dominating street corners. “Sometimes the days would be just as bad. There
would be no one around in the scorching summer heat. No one to help,” she said.
For my mother, I know that these geographies of violence shifted constantly as
she moved between states and even to other countries. Bad men were bad men
everywhere. Their belief in misogyny intact, it didn’t matter how or who fell
to the system.
When
someone calls me a feminist, they usually mean it as an insult. They say it to
undermine my political and personal belief that every individual has the right
to live equal to his/her peers. At work, in the middle of UN millennium goals
poll, a colleague, quite coolly, passed over the need for gender equality.
“What do you need more? Water, food, sanitation or women’s equality?” he said.
In his vision for the future, if this happens to me again, I should come back
home to my water and scrub off the feeling of guilt and utter helplessness.
Because that’s women do—they wipe themselves off an existence.
