You must have been 12 when, as you trailed behind your friends down a Colaba bylane, a man on a bicycle stretched his hand and grabbed your chest. You still remember his hair curled behind his ears and the flares of his brown terrycotton trousers were kept from getting entangled in the bicycle chain by the broad orange rubber bands around his ankles. For a few seconds you stood there holding the tears back — his nails had raked disappointedly over your flat prepubescent front and already you could feel a rising welt — and watched his receding figure. Then you hurried to catch up with the gang.
Growing up as an only child of overanxious parents you knew that the incident must never be mentioned at home. Who knew, your father might take it into his head to accompany you every time you stepped out. Already being exhorted to ‘behave like a lady,’ the phrase ‘when you get married’ was being bandied about too often for your liking. Of course, your father, with his bookshelves stuffed with Solzhenytzin, Kafka and heavens, even a Greer here and an Eva Figes (Patriarchal Attitudes, no less!) there, wouldn’t do anything drastic. Would he? Like what happened to the girl who shared your desk in the fifth standard. She was pulled out of school when she started menstruating. “She’s learning to run a home,” her brother said when you met him on the street.
It was clear. The only way to protect yourself from grabbing hands and the looming terror of growing into a full-fledged female person, who bled every month, had breasts, had to always sit with her knees tightly together and eventually disappeared into a marriage — was to transform yourself into a boy. Boys had all the freedom in the world. They talked and laughed loudly, had no sunset curfew, and hung around parking lots playing boisterous games. None of your friends’ brothers ever helped out in the kitchen, and, as far as you knew, none of them ever had to fight off lecherous ‘uncles’.
You never told anyone about the man on the bicycle and for years thought about the incident with shame. Did you send off signals that made creepy men want to touch you? Was it the way you dressed? Was it your hair? Was it the way you walked? You know it was that incident that led you to chop your hip-length hair to within an inch of your skull, take to wearing boy’s t-shirts and jeans of an indeterminate cut, and affect what you thought was a male walk and manner.
But you can’t battle biology, and by your late teens you learnt the best way to remain unmolested was to ensure that you were always in a group, and if you weren’t, to wield a safety pin to terrific effect on a crowded bus full of roving hands.
In retrospect, the early 1990s seem a less complicated time. Twenty-four hour television and its compulsions were in the future, malls and multiplexes were unheard of, Tim Berners Lee had just put the finishing touches to the Internet and India was a closed economy. There weren’t many pubs to crawl into, Hindi film heroines never kissed on screen and proclaimed they were virgins, girls didn’t wear spaghetti tops, lovers didn’t hold hands in public, and those who sneaked kisses on the rocks at Bandra Bandstand in Bombay ran the risk of doing sit-ups on the street as punishment by police officers. There were so few women in the workforce that male bosses hadn’t yet learned to hide behind political correctness. “Why should we take you on? You’re going to get married and leave anyway!” one prospective employer commented. He was right. You didn’t stick around too long. But it wasn’t holy matrimony that caused you to bolt, but the sudden efflorescence of the job market in newly liberalised India. Ah, the future was so bright you had to wear shades.
You hid behind those shades when fanatics brought the Babri Masjid down, and cowered as Bombay burned. But the horror of those events was soon forgotten in the excitement of earning more in a month than an earlier generation made in a year. You were young, Aishwarya and Sushmita had been crowned the world’s most beautiful women and hey, you were no beauty queen, but some of that magic had rubbed off on you. Never mind the feminists who carped about the idiocy of beauty contests and the left wingers who insisted sotto voce that it was all an attempt by neo-colonial forces intent on creating a new market for their goods. You wanted so badly to be a part of that market, you went on wild shopping sprees at the new palaces of consumption springing up everywhere.
Eventually, you married, had babies and tried not to lose sight of yourself despite years of sleep deprivation. Like every other female magician you know, you juggled babies, career and domestic power struggles. You desperately tried to keep all the balls in the air while ignoring your 19th nervous breakdown. Perhaps all that hard labour left you with hallucinations because suddenly, one day, you begin to feel you are living the American dream, as you wander endless wellstocked supermarket aisles, right here in India shining.
But of course, every silver lining has a grey cloud. As stories of horrific violence against women filtered out of Gujrat in 2002, you began to grow even more uneasy about the place of women in the emerging India, so patchy in its modernity that you’re never sure when the anachronistic forces will break through. You fear that force because you know it well. It’s a part of your race memory, and you’re scared you’ll wake up a raving madwoman who thinks minorities should be shown their place. Unsurprisingly, this swing to the right is accompanied by a social conservatism that renders seemingly empowered women optionless. You’ve heard of tank-top babes who hand their earnings to their husbands and beg for ‘pocket money’, of those who cling to unequal marriages because the idea of divorce is anathema, and besides, they have nowhere to go. It’s a definite regression from the days of your greatgrandaunt who chose to leave a despised husband though it meant definite ostracism. Your great-grandaunt, a woman who never spoke a word of English or stepped outside her native land was far more liberated than many women today.
You never knew her but you’re sure she’d have laughed at the effrontery of the Hindutva affiliated parties that seek to lay down the rules of appropriate behaviour for women, but neglect entirely to work on any similar code of conduct for the men. But then, for all their bluster, these are men who are running scared. To them the sight of a woman doing as she pleases, is a sign of the breakdown of traditions, of a society morphing into something that’s sinfully attractive while being ugly as sin. And since, all ideas of purity are vested in the body and role of Woman, any indication that she’s ‘impure’ is apt to send these guardians of virtue into an absolute funk.
You don’t think of all this as you put on your make-up, slip into that little black dress and (after arm twisting kids and spouse into agreement in true feminist fashion) prepare for a girls night out at a new club.
Alas, you don’t know that the man with the orange rubber bands around his ankles is lurking, waiting to pounce on you again. This time, it’s your fault. You aren’t dressed appropriately, like a good Hindu woman whose place is at home producing at least four male children, as the Bajrang Dal recently insisted. The cigarette in one hand, drink in the other mark you as wanton and unlike any of the approved goddesses, never mind if Hinduism’s great strength is its openness to plurality. Damn, you deserve to be thrashed and have your skirt pulled down. Oh yes, this time you really were asking for it.
As the invited cameras zoom in to capture the juicy moment, you think you should wield that safety pin again. Only, now it isn’t just the man with the orange rubber bands you are battling. It’s the whole of this sensation seeking society where every half-wit’s rantings are amplified and every trauma is transmogrified into crass entertainment.
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