AFTER DARK

Bum to crotch, crotch to crotch, bum to bum, crotch to shoulder, hip to crotch, crotch to ear, and all those other unimaginably incredulous permutations and combinations are a routine flavour for everyone on the go in a DTC on a typical day in delhi. For their insidious pleasures, the voyeuristic fluency of their minds, or the cheap thrills of ego boosts and adrenaline rushes of the perverse kind, the average man from delhi will be the man from delhi and for the very same reason, the delhi woman will be the quintessential woman from delhi.

For if equations were to change, wouldn’t the possibilities post the same be a life difficult to imagine! As a girl child growing up in a Bengali family, i was always protected from the delhi that was out there. I lived, in the delhi of my imagination. And oh my, it really was amazing to wallow in its wonders till one fine morning, on my way to college in South campus; i saw road rage at its best.

The DND flyway had just opened up and it was obvious that the delhiite’s demand for decent infrastructure had just begun to be answered. As a testimonial to that fact, it was packed choc a bloc that morning. However, our dear delhi man had found a way to display his angst even in the middle of this involuntary gathering. And with the bumper sticker backups of jat is king, the site seemed no less than an impromptu akhada. A spectacle to behold even as they undressed each other in furious attempts at ripping apart each other’s underwear which were of course completely successful for the fear of being proven the lesser mortal on those grounds.

That morning, on the flyway where no one was exactly flying, let alone moving, everyone got ten concentrated minutes of gawking at the scene, and some even cheered, of course not without taking sides. Our men had also found a great excuse to let their egos consume their itineraries for the day. Of course there were appropriate bruises to show the authorities they were accountable to, that is, if they did consider them authority at all.

However, in all those years of overhearing the regular behenchod maachod, there, and everywhere - my senses evolved in all crookedness. The remembered Delhi of Sunday mornings spent in a middle class neighbourhood in East Delhi remained intact while the lived ‘Dilli’ grew on me. As a woman, i was made uncomfortably aware of the seven o’ clock curfew, like i was living in a strife torn area. But my journalistic beginnings kept me out till late. Ultimately, my parents gave up on trying to maintain a curfew and just kept calling me an alarming number of times in a day. In those times when i reached places like Vaishali at 12 or 1 on a few days, i just had a strange spiritual conviction that nothing would happen and nothing did. I was not followed, teased, and rape was a far cry. But the strong realisation that i was roaming the streets of this city with these ‘terms’ in my backpack was enough to send me back home at a ‘decent’ time. I accepted my paralysed existence. The issue was, that given a choice between exploring the city and staying home, i was afraid that i would, in time, fall in love with the latter.

While this was the case, among a majority of us, on this side of the gender divide. The grass was undoubtedly greener, stronger, and abounding with strength and vigour on the other side. While we packed up for the day at 7, the men were just beginning their plans. And while those who had boyfriends and brothers were very fortunate, a lot of us cursed our sibling-less existence or just resigned to our fate, hiding in chocolates, family time, or books. Though a few of us, did manage to slip out for late night parties in the company of reasonably responsible men and the other lot of us thought we knew better than that; all of us who lived in delhi in those years can vouch for the fact that things seemed better back then. For we were to see, what we would probably term ‘worse’ in the years that followed.

In the times that ensued, I and a few other friends moved to cities like Mumbai, and Ahmedabad. We breathed in a fearless existence, staying out nights to quench our thirst from deprived years, even if it meant waiting alone for a local on a platform. We could embrace our sexuality freely, feel less masculine, and the unnecessary ruggedness disappeared from our personae in time.

But most of us left our parents, or what was the paternal or maternal ‘home’, back in Delhi. And somewhere down the line, the pull was inevitable. And so we gravitated back, more ‘woman’ than we were before. It felt ‘normal’, like we were finally breathing. We got back to Delhi, and were happy to note that the patrolling rounds were more frequent and we could see a larger deployment of police personnel on the roads. However, the fact that we had worn out a bit of our hardiness made our re-synthesis with the city a bit turbulent. Our body language on delhi roads was unconsciously different from what it used to be. We embraced a less alert, happier gait in no time. The metro made me feel safer, but those of us who could drive cars, did so.

On one of these happy evenings, as i sat in India Habitat centre with a friend at sundown, chomping away on momos, we gladly lost track of time. Catching up on almost three years worth of experiences, the clock struck eight and she piped up cutting a great evening short. “My god! ...Its eight! we have to head home now”. Sadly, the evening lost most of its charm as we called it a day and cooed to each other on our way to the auto about how we should meet very soon. As she stepped into the good old hari peelee, happily settling for somewhere close to the obnoxious fare demands of the autowallah, i said goodbye and decided to settle for one of my favourite walks in Delhi.

The two or so kilometre stretch from Habitat to the Khan Market metro station is one of my favourite stretches in the city, apart from the ridge area around North Campus. The evenings always seem nostalgic there. That was my claim to holding it so dear. However, on that day, five minutes after i crossed the India International Centre bus stop, i realised that i was being followed. Looking back to confirm, i overheard these two men commenting loudly about my gait and other details. As Khan Market drew nearer, i increased my pace and crossed the road more than thrice. But it was not before i entered the market premises, and lost them in the crowd, that i sighed with relief. However, for the first time in twenty odd years of being in Delhi, had i felt that surge of panic in myself. A few hours before, i had heard a friend recounting a horrific story about a common friend who was dragged out of her car in front of Akshardham temple in the early morning hours of a usual weekday, and beaten black and blue by a man with the city traffic rushing past them. All that the police personnel nearby could do was to plead the man to spare her. The justification that was given to her was of the order that this man happened to be holding a reputable position in a national bank. The incident was followed up by several calls made to our friends in the media, resulting in coverage by the print media. The perpetrator was jailed, post which he managed to get a bail. However, he was imprisoned a second time following a strict scrutiny of legal proceedings by the victim.

Between then and now, a considerable amount of time has morphed into indifference. A state of silent mourning, as i see it. My friend is driving her car to work again, and i am more cautious. I have even begun to think twice about wearing what i usually would, in a city like Mumbai. The Delhi police and their alter egos are on the prowl. One can’t be sure of which one to be more afraid of or of which is which. Amidst the delirium, Delhi women seem to know, that ‘Two is better than One’ and Gurgaon has posters and protests alike. In hope of a ‘someday’, they rest their cases in the comfort of their homes, conventions, and the arms of delhi men they know will protect them.

The larger question, however, remains ‘how do we define belonging?’ and when it comes to that. Do we belong to a city or a space at all? And what gives us the right to belong? The Oxford dictionary puts down the definition of belonging in three ways

·                     1 (belong to) be the property of

·                     2 (belong to) be a member of (a particular group or organization)

·                     3 [with adverbial of place] (of a thing) be rightly placed in a specified position

¹Though, what we know belonging to be, as individuals, or as men and women, completely depends upon how we build a ‘place’ into a ‘space’ in our imagination full of an accumulated sense of attachments and sentiments by means of everyday practices. We develop our belonging or attachment for a place on the basis of our spatial knowledge of the environment as well.

Growing up as women in delhi, we were mostly witness to supervised visits with our parents to sights and sounds in the city, that were relevant to the family. While conditioning was meant to be internalised by both the sexes, it worked that way only for the other half of us. The agency which would enable us to belong to the city faded away because we grew afraid to explore it beyond our fears. While the boys from our teenage days, and the men from our youth gallivanted or rode across on their bikes, and often made gifts of their visions of the city to their pillion rider of a girlfriend. We scurried away into our cocoons of ideas of Delhi by a safe time under the sun. We saw the city of the day and remained happy with our memories. And on a day or two, when we were stuck outside at an ‘indecent’ time, caught in palpable throes of distress (mostly in our imagination) and our thoughts ran amok in the middle of nowhere, we called up everybody we knew to find the nearest shelter we could escape to for the night. A crisis, a love affair, and paranoia. But mostly, a man. That is Delhi.

And the rest is determined by the fact that whether belonging, is at all, a choice anymore?

1.        Reference to ‘Gender and the City: The different formations of belonging- Tovi Fenster’

Addiction

On this afternoon that i sat down at a delhi cafe in the middle of the nowhere lane as i liked to call it out to myself, they played these two songs, Breakaway and ironic. I was born in and brought up by delhi. I felt the umbilical cord tug at my veins, a tingle in my belly, and a silent vibration clamber up my heart into my mind. There was nothing ubiquitous about this feeling. I was nostalgic about Delhi sitting in Delhi.

I was putting up at this friend's place. He was a stephen's graduate. The place was like a stopover on a bike trip on high altitudes, and convergence produced fissionary reactions, and brilliantly colourful deconstrution .

The quintessential 'chaupal' of the university tribe. There was one in every micro commmunity that made up the vishwavidyalaya in delhi. I too, belonged there, or did I? The dynamicity with which this stream of consciousness evolved, prevented me from acknowledging a prolonged loyalty. Three years ago, when i was graduating, i would be fighting for recognition, love, popularity, and adulation in the middle of such a gathering. Thrre years later, i sat as a qualified journalist, an filmmaker, and i absorbed the atmosphere of such conversations, rejoiced at the nostalgia of having been a student in DU, sulked at not being there anymore, and plainly let this monster of an emotionally driven uprising that was taking place in the pit of my stomach, dissect me into a thousand different mes from within.
No, existentialism, was not a far cry, but it wasn't the overpowering ideal anymore. I was mouldless now. Circumstances, had led me, to consequences, which needed me to motivate my mind to engage in creation which did not arise from within me. I was robbed of choices. Ironically, my angst kept me alive, and made my ideology stronger. The cherry on the cake was the fact that they said you had to pay for independence, like a toll post where they would charge you your life savings to be on the highway to freedom.

But this highway to freedom, you see, was a mystery. The horizon was blind from where the road took a downhill slant and dipped downwards. The personnel from the toll post was never allowed there. The penalty for trying to escape the toll post was prosecution, and i already told you, they charged you your life savings. And, no one was ever known to come back from there. It was the promise of eternal oblivion in the middle of a defined world.

The price i had to pay for independence, i did not have the resources or the will to provide. It either went against my grain or my plans of saving up for a bad day, week, month, or year. My strategies were difficult to execute but it really wasn't like i had a choice, was it?

My strategy became the middle path. A path where the trademarks were subversion, inspiration, motivation, irritation, tenacious determination. Not out of choice, it was a compulsion. Now, why a compulsion, you'd ask? Why was i trying to create a frankenstein? All frankensteins, by natural rule, broke out on that one fateful day, didn't they?
Defeatist thoughts aside, i was packing in ammo to face a life of believing in determinism, in my middle class existence, and so i would execute it to guard my homeground. I had to play the game without gaining opponents, or components. Vitality had to be that ineffable, overwhelming life source of my existence, lifestyle, and behavioral architecture.

I wanted to be the god of my world. I wanted to be a magician.

Back in the cafe, My life trailed in my mind's eye like a gradually engulfing haze, sometimes it seemed like a train that on the road to nowhere. Like the edge of a cliff, jumping off which was the toughest call i ever had to take. 'Would there be enough water at the bottom to cushion my dive?', i wondered. The lurking fear of the question remained. It lingered in my mind like a rolling stone. The problem is, it was rolling in this closed room with no windows, no door, and four walls. I'm very mortal, i thought, and jumped off. Later, after an escape into what seemed liked an obliviated escape into timelessness, i was alive.

Yes, i was experiencing nostalgia of a delhi gone by. I couldn't find the delhi of my childhood. And so, one of those evolutionary insights took over. I realised the potency of my imagination, and learnt a lesson in faith. In the middle of a suddenly alien city, i began to see familiar faces again...

Tourists I Travellers

I had just set out for home. My phone was pelting calls like bullets out of my bag. Thank god, i could have Dylan lullabying tambourine man on it. But i was kinda sure, that by the time i was through with the evening, i would be tired of dylan too. Yes, this curiously irritating dilemma of whether to pick up my phone or whether to pick up my phone had been induced by my mother, of course, and sometimes, my father, too.

In retrospective, an irritating seed had planted itself in me, the day i had let go of that air cushion called home raising. At times, it was worthwhile to think of this plan i had, to travel a lot and have a child, for a companion. A diet of questions, a road which went through innumerous terrains, a disregard for legacies, and a sparse population of expectations from myself and friends. And on a day, that i had realised that we were all just chips off the old blocks, i had been so disillusioned, i had almost gone through an identity crisis. That was the kind of love hate relationship i shared with my parents. My parents, weren't exactly liberal and neither did they belong to the romanticised cult of the children of the flower power generation but the most enchanting fact that i had come to know about my father was that when he met my mother for the first time, he'd asked her father about why the backlanes of Chandni Chowk in delhi were so narrow. He'd spent his life, mostly in the semi rural areas around as well as the main city of Kolkata.

Similarly, my mother wrote poetry that was surreal and had eyes that glowed like a child's every time i looked into them. She was one woman with whom i'd learnt how to value love. A remarkable quality about my mother also was that she had a brilliant memory, and when it came to things like literature, she was a storehouse of information.

That was all that was there to them. They hadn't been published or read for their ideas. In the throes of their middle class existence in Mumbai, they were hardly left with time to socialise as such, or even engage in occassional literary affairs.

Their professions had grown them as much as their communities, neighbours, cities, localities or academic profiles. However, the predominant influence of their occupational responsibilities and family management had unconsciously, and rather intrusively populated their itineraries with events that they could have done without. Fatigue had taken the form of dark circles under their eyes, and reduced outings to dinners at the closest mall, which was quite well endowed and glamorous by metropolitan standards.

They had five year plans too. They were part of the larger universe of cycles, winding downwards from the architecture of governmental infrastructure. They were at the receiving end of policy systems built for the welfare, progression, economic emancipation of the middle class but they were also part of the common mass called a 'Public', and the deemed civic duty of this public was to contribute to the large accumulation of national wealth and reserves which were responsible for the processing/recycling of these moneys and their investment in various sectors created for the operation of governmental machinery for civic purposes. However, while this was the part that worked fine and my parents were obedient civilians following all these processes carefully and wisely, paying their taxes etcetera, when the time came around, there would obviously be an occurence where there would be a breaking story glaring at them from national news channels, and they'd come to know, at the end of  a tired day, from a medium that was suffieciently passive, that there had been a scam with a loss to the national exchequer. The cream of the industrial world who were responsible for the multiplication of national moneys, or philanthropic ventures had conveniently escaped the bar. Power games were the rule of commerce anyway, they thought, and went off to bed, without letting the bitterness of the situation get to them. Tomorrow was a new day. This one statement was programmed into our minds like a permanent ink stain.

They were too engrossed in and confident of their plan execution skills. Their plans were the life force of their existence and the reason they functioned effectively. They had short term plans and long term plans. A plan for today, tomorrow, weeks, months and years. If their plans even fell a little out of line, all their irrational fears took over. Unfortunately, or fortunately, in some rare cases, the insecurity about their child's future was one of the most haunting consequences of this seeming failure.

This is a very good point to mention that i'd always been a rebellious soul. I rebelled against these plans and the influence of these plans on me. Their middle class expectations were like an invitation into a prison, and a very comfortable prison. A prison built of shortsightedness. My world view was constructed during my education as a journalist. Subsequently, i went to film school. I grew into an independent conscience based on first hand information about the world around me, and its happenings, and pursued my independence like a dog. I had ideas and goals, and planning was not in my DNA. So i took routes that i had a hunch about, climbed a few branches, balancing myself, so that i would reach the top as healthily as i followed daily routines.

When we sat and dined together which was an occassional occurence, i would often find this silence at the table where we'd be staring at each other's faces. The space in between was full of contradictions. Though, we always knew how to laugh together and make a good day out of it.

On many such occassions when we were out on a rare 'family' holiday, we would often be witness to travellers with backpacks, gruffy from their exercise, yet beaming with a radiant satisfaction. Their interruption in our line of view would usually be followed by a comment on their hygiene from my mother. However, my father loved to venture out, question, and gain knowledge about all such individuals. He always went about whatever he did, quietly. Though he was as moody as a child when it came to talking about these experiences.
The larger point, however, which was seemingly irritating to a large number of tourists who ventured out with their families on planned vacations was the adaptability of these travellers to any situation whatsoever. On occasions, their spartan attitudes became a hot topic of discussion at dinner tables too. Though these discussions were sufficiently short lived. They lasted only till these families got back to their hotel rooms and were comfortably snug in their airconditioned dreams.

On one such occassion, and consequently, though my literary experiences of reading innumerous travelogues and international writers, my subconscious processes had ultimately led me to make a choice. The choice of being a traveller, forever. It was a way of life.

I thought, that when the final destination of all processes that the world led themselves to, was disillusionment, wisdom was the only wealth that one could wish to accumulate. Compassion became a fundamental. I learnt not to overrate anything under the sun. All i could ever own was only 'A Life'. The worth of which only i could measure, in the last few moments of my life.