City Life

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live”/Joan Didion

I grew up in a 100-plus acre campus placed in the middle of a city that had been a city for four hundred years when I first knew it. Not that I ever knew the city — not really. I literally lived in a house on a hill, surrounded by trees and rocks; visitations of all manners of birds and beasts were daily occurrences. I watched trees wither and bloom again; I burnt the soles of my feet clambering over rocks mid-summer- the city of my childhood was a ten minute walk, and an entire lifestyle away. Every week, I’d encounter it — briefly. The visit to the vegetable mandi and local kirana store, the one to church. “Shopping in Secunderabad” was, in the early years, a life event, coinciding as it did with birthdays and Christmas. But most of what I knew about the city was hearsay: classmates who took trips on buses, who played cricket in narrow lanes, who did things like eat pani poori from street vendors, and who had, after 1991, access to the magical world of cable TV. I only walked five minutes from “home” to “school”, so I didn’t learn the trick other girls did of carrying safety-pins to ward off lecherous men in buses. Other girls had a route — school and home, and a curfew; I stayed out reading under my favorite tree until the light grew too dim and wandered home with my armful of books that I’d managed to beg or borrow; somehow my mother’s disapproval never seemed serious. I’d hear of neighborhood intrigues and gossip, of the dictum of never talking to strangers, of waiting at bus stops for buses that were perennially late, and it all felt like another world; like the store glass window I had my nose pressed up against — someday, I thought — I’ll walk in and buy it, be a part of it, belong.

If people asked me where I lived, I would say “Hyderabad”  — and yet: my city existed, as it were, only in my imagination. As I grew older, this idea of my city was hopelessly entangled with other imaginations of other cities — cities that I read about in books, or saw on TV and in movies. Cities that were, quite literally, continents away.

By the time I was twenty and ready — well, pushed, really — to step out of this idyll, I was as much in love with New York and Bombay as with Hyderabad. These cities, as transmitted to me by a half dozen films, were the places where things happened:  I was a romantic young woman, and Bombay or New York were clearly made for romantic young women to Live Their Wonderful Romantic Lives: their own quirkily furnished, spacious apartments in lovely neighbourhoods, meeting interesting people, overcoming impossible odds, being rewarded for being superstars at their work and (most importantly) meeting The One.

I couldn’t have described to you how this city was built; what it streets looked like, what the weather was like there, or how many people lived in it. I could, without hesitation, tell you what it felt like: freedom.

*

I spent the first half year of my working life sharing an apartment with five other women. The next half year was spent sharing an apartment — a hole in the wall — with three other women. The ceiling had mirrors. But our curtains matched our cheap cutlery, and the only furniture we had was a TV and two mattresses. And so it started: my single life in a City. For the first time I understood, deeply, viscerally, what it means to be a city dweller.

The vagueness of the city of my imagination was up against the reality of it: the jostling, the noise, the dirt, the smell. It was the freedom to wake up late on weekends, to wander streets picking up second-hand books, to discover fancy restaurants and cheap ones; it was cheap Chinese takeout everyday because we couldn’t be bothered to have a functional kitchen; it was texting my crush all night and early into the morning without anyone reminding me that I needed to be at work by nine am, it was being in control of my everyday existence to a level I’d never had before and it was exhilarating and terrifying. Just knowing that I could buy a book and not have to account for that expense to anyone was the equivalent to flying out of a window fifty feet off the ground.

But it was also this:  do not walk alone after 6pm, always take public transport after 8pm, never just go for a walk in a park, never loiter, is your bra strap showing, are your legs waxed, do not go alone to watch a film, avoid certain areas, even in the colony where you stay; in short, an eternal, unceasing vigilance of my body- where it was, what it was doing, did it have to be there, were other people ok with it being there, did I, in fact, have the right to the space I occupied?

*

What shapes the contours of the cities of our imagination? The stories we tell, not just through fiction, but also through memory — a different kind of fiction, perhaps.

My mother moved, in the 1960s, from a small village in Kerala to the same city that I now live in, to pursue a college education. She tells me that for most of the first year of college, she barely understood a word spoken in class, and had to copy her cousin’s notes to make sense of “all that English”.  The college education was a stepping stone to a job. I don’t believe she ever thought of the acquiring of a job as self-actualization: it was necessary; like marriage, children — all inevitable in the scheme of her life as she had learnt to imagine it. 

My father tells me a dozen stories of the time he first moved to Bangalore, to Hyderabad.  My mother, only a few. Every time we pass the exit toward Brunton Road, my mother tells me: my hostel used to be there. The sisters were very strict, she says, if you weren’t inside by 6pm, there was no dinner for you.  Or she tells me: I watched Aradhana in Opera Theatre three times.  Or she says, I took your father for his first Chinese meal ever there. That last one always make me laugh: in our family, my mother is the least keen to explore new places; so the idea of her proudly “showing off” her knowledge of the city to my father is both endearing and strange.

I try to imagine the city as it was through her eyes, but it’s difficult. Some things seem the same: in particular the struggle with patriarchal authority, manifest in all the small and big ways. Other things are patently different.  I try to imagine what I would tell my children, if I ever have any: what would I point out, what would be left to say: I was here. Just like the way my mother’s city has vanished, my city, the city of my individual experience will vanish too, dying with me, before me.

*

What kind of stories do we tell about our cities? About women in our cities?

Our collective schizophrenia about women shows up ever so clearly in our stories: Madonna or whore, sometimes both, always other.  Where I saw transgression, I was also quickly running into the limits of it- singleness as a transient state because of the inevitability of coupledom; growing up, I don't recall ever reading a story that featured a non-heterosexual or transgender character. Women may have had authority over their own lives- to an extent- but rarely were they shown in positions of authority over other people- unless those other people were children or women. 

So looking for models- consciously or unconsciously- in fiction also became a choice. Whom to believe, to what degree? I can't, of course, claim to have known that these choices existed at the time- but over time, the fact that I had made that choice became clearer. 

I suppose it was inevitable, in the larger scheme of things, that my earliest encounters with the stories of single-in-the-city-women are also tied up with the shame of an illicit pleasure- vestiges of which I feel these decades later, as I write this. I was sneak reading Mills & Boons and Harlequin romances at the impressionable age of nine. These were the much maligned “chick lit” books within which a whole different kind of woman lived alone, worked, fell in love, and had the most magnificently purple-prosed orgasms ever. It would take me decades after I had abandoned them entirely for me to articulate what these stories gave me: a template for women who got what they wanted. Wish fulfillment as an entitlement, not a favour.

*

The intangible qualities of the cities of our imagination: the freedom, primarily, to be ourselves and in control of our lives tend to be opposite to our lived reality. The reality of streets without street lights; the lack of public restrooms designed keeping in mind women’s needs; the harassment verbal or physical; the gendered division of the city that is not just spatial, but temporal — our freedom sets with the sun. 

The City gives me this as its peculiar gift: invisibility. The gift that is also the double-edged sword- liberation and burial, depending on the moment. I’m often happy to be invisible in the city: it keeps me safe, it allows me to slip through the hostile, to pursue my happiness and pleasure without interference. At other times, this invisibility is the thing I fight: where I have to loudly, repeatedly, relentlessly say with words and body: I am here, I am a person, I am entitled to this space.

*

I look around city spaces and see, for most part, women erased from memory: parks named after men, streets named after men, hospitals named after men, statues erected of men, traffic circles and stations.  Everything durable remains largely male-identified. Women, if they exist in our memory of cities, exist on the periphery, quite literally. One study found that even in cities which had a higher proportion of streets named after women, those streets tend to be away from the centre, the pulsing hearts of the cities.

And so, the imagined community of Women of The City in my head is largely that: imagined. When I think of women-only spaces in the city: women’s schools and colleges, hostels, “PGs”, restrooms, “ladies only” compartments on trains or seats on buses, beauty salons — the sense is not one of community — though that does build in these spaces, of course; but overwhelmingly the sense is of segregation. Space being gendered under the guise of protection or privilege, which is also - not so coincidentally- control.

*

One of the first stories I remember hearing was the one about the woman who was turned into a pillar of salt. This was, of course, a punishment, an eternal testament, a warning, a body made metaphor — many things. Lot’s Wife has been many things over the centuries in which this story has been passed down across time and cultures- she has been many things to many people.

I think about her these days: a woman looking back at a burning city — a city destroyed because it gave itself over to Pleasure above every other thing — even goodness — and I think of her body, compelled to turn back, once more, one last time, and paying the price of disobedience.

I think about how we don’t know her name.

*

I used to see her every Sunday as a child, on that weekly trip to church. She’d be standing at the same junction, begging bowl in one hand, cradling a child on her hip with the other. Tattered sari, burnt face — evoking in me pity and terror and guilt. As payment, every week I’d slip her a coin or two from the safety of the auto rickshaw. 

Twenty years after I’d left that city behind, I see her by happenstance. I’m in an auto rickshaw very near the same place. I crane my head to watch her pass me by: older, hair streaked with grey, no child tags along — instead, a purse slung on one shoulder, sari neatly pinned, she strides toward a junction named Paradise.