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.

For Asifa. 

I wish I had never heard her name. 

Maybe, in a better world

I would have, anyway. 

Maybe, then, it would have been breathed

in awe, in wonder, in pride-

maybe. 

The odds are against it, though. 

I rather think-

she would've grown up ordinary-

an indifferent education,if any,

jobs that paid for the gas

and energy saving electric bulbs,

and because this better world

is still the same world

maybe a husband to cook meals for

and children's noses to wipe snot from

and the occasional quiet moment

of looking up at the stars

and thinking

what if

an ordinary life

the best odds offered

to any of us-

- I wish I hadn't seen her eyes

brighter than anything in that photograph,

even her purple kurta with the yellow flowers-

I wish I had never heard her name.

Rare Entertainment

Image:  White Male Character One is learning to control his superpowers- the ability to turn everything around him into cinders in seconds-so, White Male Character Two has set up target practice. The targets are unclothed female bodied mannequins- big breasted, narrow waisted- with big X signs on their torsos. Barbies without the annoying hair. Or clothes. Boom, boom, boom. High fives all around. Congratulations, you’re officially a man. Er, mutant. But manly mutant.

Image: Jon Hamm playing a umpteenth variant of Don Draper, a role he’ll probably play over and over in the next few years- a White Male Character helping a (younger) White Male Character score. “See anything you like?” he asks over a Fancy Hidden Communication Device because we are in a Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show. Younger White Male Character directs his attention to a Very Lovely Brunette eliciting surprise from Jon Draper Hamm because clearly the Very Lovely White Blonde standing right there in her cleavage-showing dress is The Most Obvious Choice. Interesting, he murmurs, and then the next ten minutes are devoted to Young White Male attempting a seduction- while a half dozen men listen and watch via Fancy Hidden Communication Device because we are in a Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show. Did I mention Award Winning? We are also Award Winning. Unfortunately-ahem- for our voyeuristic leading men, the night ends badly- no sex, just murder.  And because we’re the Award Winning Very Cool Progressive SciFi Show, the woman turns out to be a mentally unhinged murderess.  I feel blessed. There’s still forty minutes before the episode ends. It can only get More Progressive. (It does: more dead women, one still a girl).

Image: A half-naked woman being beaten bloody by a man straddling her. In the imaginatively named town of Vice, you can have every forbidden pleasure you choose to pay for- your partners? Synthetics or Not Real People. Coincidentally, these Not Real People are shaped like Extremely Hot Women programmed with Real Memories and capable of feeling Real Pain (we are never shown them feeling Real Pleasure: presumably the White Male Characters who seem to form the general clientele in this Pleasure Town are only interested in Real Pain). Anyways, this is almost two hours of an AI-becomes-sentient-and-is-hunted-down-but-survives story aka The Not Real But Real Woman is stalked, hunted, beaten up, violated and Emerges Triumphant….to be a sidekick to the Real Male Cop. Ah! The twist in the tale: our heroine turns out to be Not The Real Heroine much like she is not a Real Woman.

X Men: First Class grossed over USD $353 million worldwide when released in 2011, Black Mirror has been nominated or has won major awards every year since its first episode in 2011, and Vice- well, Vice had a limited theatre release in 2015, and then was released to DVD- and made around #1 million USD.

In the span of two weeks, I’ve managed a random sampling of available entertainment in terms of critically acclaimed and/or popular (or neither!) in a genre and am served up the same thing every time: images of women being brutalized emotionally and physically. Sometimes this brutality is An Important Plot Device- what would Our Leading Male Characters Do Without Motivation- but other times, it’s just there. The stuff you only notice subconsciously most of the time, the peripheral, the scene, part of the stuff that’s there because it helps you suspend your disbelief, because yes, a woman is being violated and you don’t have to pay attention to that if you don’t want to, so the story feels just like real life.

Image: In the thirty seconds it takes me to get a token for the subway ride, the young couple nearby move from a silent-tears-and-recrimination kind of fight to the hands-around-your-throat kind of fight; he has his hands around her throat, shoves her into the wall and walks away. She follows, still crying.

Image: Two young girls strung up on a tree in a UP village.

Image: A smiling, smartly dressed young woman stands next to a car at an automobile expo. You can’t sell the dream without the woman, can you?

Image: A news story about a woman who committed suicide after her rape was filmed and circulated on Whatsapp.

Image: Two people in a public argument on the road- you whore, I hear him say, see what I will do to you.

You see the problem I have: separating fact from fiction and wondering where the line exists.

Sometimes I think: this isn’t real, this is a stupid movie that you’ll turn off in a minute or forty, when you are really, really sick of it, and then you never have to think about it again.

But it is, and it is and it is and it feels like somebody should be sick to death of this story already, should say, this is overdone, let’s start anew, but no, it’s so foundational that even when we tell stories about the future- the marvelous, miraculous future with star ships and mutant genes and time travel and artificial intelligence- it’s the same as the stories of our past, the ones with dragons and historical accuracy- the same old story: the visceral hatred of women, invisible in its ubiquity.

And I think about it every day.

Tamar

In the last week, my attention was drawn, quite by chance, to different narratives involving one incident narrated in the Old Testament- the story of Tamar. I've been familiar with this story from childhood- and the way the focus, both in the text, and in subsequent discourse rarely stays on Tamar- she is literally written out of her own story, having provided the impetus for the more "consequential" events in the form of the actions of her male family members. Of course, where the focus does stay on Tamar, it's sometimes in the form of gross victim blaming interpretations- one of which I had the privilege of reading last week.

The Old Testament doesn't tell us much of what became of Tamar- but it does tell us that she had a niece who shared her name, and about whom the only other piece of information we have is that she was considered to be "a beautiful woman".

I'd like to remember them both this way. (I've messed around with the timelines, compared to the Biblical text- sorry, not sorry. :D)

Your father

placed you on my lap,

said-

We're naming her Tamar.

My brother-

he was always like that-

trying to fix what

had broken

by brute force

or by kindness

which was also

brutal

in those days

because I couldn't bear it-

couldn't bear that the world

was unshaken,

that it moved to its usual rhythm

sun, moon, stars

following their appointed paths.

Spring had come and gone

and now summer was on its way out

and your eyes were hazel,

the colour of dead leaves,

but soft, soft, soft.

I wished you dead,

in that instant-

you had your life ahead of you

and I loved you in that instant

because you had your life ahead of you.

But soon, I loved you for yourself.

You made that easy.

You've heard all this before-

we have had no secrets, you and I-

it was to me you'd come

for comfort when some childish game

went wrong, and your playmate

was revealed to be

a perfidious wretch

who deserves to go to bed hungry

doesn't she mother?

(for that's how you called me, only me,

your mother, she had to smile and bear it

and I am not ashamed to say, I rejoiced in it,

for I had tasted her pity and knew it to be

as bitter as strangers' mockery)

and it's you now, who bathes this

crumbling body, soothes these

swollen joints with the most

fragrant of oils

touches my limbs as though

they are loved.

Miriam, that one from the kitchen

who won't shut up-

she tells me of how

tales of your beauty

are being carried

through the land-

your body is to be

a treaty, the trade

for men, and weapons

and allegiance-

If I could,

I would kill Absalom myself

for this, no, don't look

so distressed-

You want to say

Father would never--

but then, Absalom is, after all,

his father's son,

a man,

and with them, it is always thus-

blood and war and taking

what isn't theirs.

Here, take these:

the ornaments that your father

insisted that I wear-

a defiance he insisted on

and I acquiesced to

because I loved him too.

And these- that the King gifted me

every passing year,

see how he weighed my sorrow

in gold and precious stones-

It was all I could do to pretend-

acceptance-

because I knew-

this day would come, and that

you, my darling one,

would not share my fate,

though you have my name.

I have arranged it-

Benjamin is to be trusted,

and Rachel, but the hearts

of men are oft easy turned,

so keep this dagger with you,

and do not hesitate to use it,

but only as a last resort.

Keep your hands clean of blood,

For as long as you can-

Once stained, there’s no washing away.

What more can I say to you?

Don't weep, my heart.

This parting is but temporary,

though it last the remainder of our lives.

Live your life, my daughter,

May your cup ever be filled

and run over-

You were meant for joy.

Lot's wife

Sometimes I think of you
turned into salt
(but not of the earth)
because you couldn't resist-
compulsion stronger than command-

What shall I call you:
Patron saint of all of us
who can't, after all,
Let it go-
Obsessed with memory-
the city built
(so small, our spaces)
and its burning
(our stories returned to dust
with our bodies) -
Saint?
Sister
They took your name from me
(as they took so many others)
but the taste of you remains
I carry it on my skin. 

Feel like a woman

If I had bigger breasts, I’d feel more like a woman.

Perhaps, if every time I stood naked in front of a mirror, they hung like melons, or stood, perky, ripe for plucking,  my eyes would be drawn downward, to an actual cleavage, the valley of my breasts; perhaps, if every time I stepped out in public, men refused to meet my eye, but had no problems reaching out to touch, feel, squeeze, poke; perhaps, if instead of a barely there 32A, I was a 34C or a 36B- I swear, the only time I really remember I’m a woman is when the underwire of my push-up bra begins to hurt my chest:  the red lines on my skin when I take it off every evening feel like a reassurance- I’ve played my part- understood that beauty is pain, endured, and emerged triumphant, if bruised.

A real woman. 

Barely two weeks ago, a woman asked my mother: “In which class is your son?”

Don’t blame her for the misgendering: in a small nook in rural Kerala, a flat-chested, loose t-shirt &  jeans clad, short haired, skinny person, clambering ungracefully over rocks to get to the river bed would hardly be thought a girl, much less a woman.

It’s only the second time in my life that this has happened: the first was a quarter century ago.  Coincidentally- or perhaps not- I was similarly clad and shorn.

I shoved my “Dream Princess Barbie”- all golden curls and lace nightgown- in the face of my befuddled questioner and demanded: “Can’t you see my Barbie? Of course I’m a girl!”

I don't have a Barbie, metaphorical or real, to show the smiling ammachi, and I doubt that if I suddenly take off my shirt to present my non-silicon enhanced, very real, very small breasts, it would be considered proof of my womanliness. Quite the opposite, I imagine.

Amma is affronted by her question, I am merely bemused.

Not being transgender or gender fluid, I can afford the bemusement afforded by the occasional misgendering- it’s not systemic oppression or daily fear for my life, it’s not leaving me out on the street.

Yes, I can afford the bemusement.

In my own small way, this bemusement is hard won.  Between the eleven year old confronted by a question that feels offensive, feels wrong, makes me feel bad and the thirty six year old giggling about the same question in the back of a beat up car, is this:

At thirteen, having to reappraise everything I thought I knew- being “cool” no longer meant being as un-girly as you could- the one that wasn’t allowed to be scared of spiders or cry when she fell from a tree she’d climbed as a dare- no, being "cool" was now a sudden inability to negotiate fences without help,  drink a pepsi without a straw or open a door. Softness was in, “tomboy” was just pathetic.

At sixteen, being betrayed- by my own body - that grew up to be the anti-thesis of Barbie-  flat-chested, angular, hirsute. Being marooned, between the well intentioned indifference of family that drilled into me the values of “inner beauty” – “gentleness”, “self –control”- while having to negotiate the capricious sea  that is social acceptance without the raft that I found was increasingly necessary- you may be the smartest girl in the class, but they all still want the number of the prettiest.

But hey, I coped:  picked a side- smart was easier; “pretty” would clearly not be happening and besides, picked up two things that have stood me in fantastic stead- self-deprecatory humour and a unshakeable sense of my own moral superiority.  

That doesn’t sound great, does it?

Believe me, it absolutely is. Breasts sag, self righteousness remains.

Then I moved cities, met a few girly-girls who were appropriately horrified that I’d never waxed or gotten my eyebrows shaped, and that, in fact, to quote one, “had never learnt to be a girl”.

Reader, I capitulated.

Crumbled like a cookie left out too long.

I couldn’t take my eyes off my lips, the first time I wore lipstick. 

It was like magic.

I was a real girl.

Fifteen years after this momentous event, I know what this was- this complex, messy, becoming.  I can now say things like “gender is performance” and know it to be as true as the fact that the size of my breasts  do make me a woman, as much as they don’t.   I know that smart is sexy, and sexy isn't all that important even though they constantly tell you it is, because universal fuckability is not essential to being human.  I feel like saying, hey, I've got your number, I've figured out your bag of tricks:  you with your glossy magazines and airbrushed photos, your fifteen ways to make sure your man never looks at another woman, all of which involve me making myself into something I'm not,  because what I am, apparently, is never enough; your fairness creams, and hey, look, two guys are getting a couple of million dollars to make vaginas smell like peaches.  Yeah, I've got your number, world, and I'm not in line outside that door you guard so vigilantly: the one that's marked with those neat little line drawings of skirts and pants and the little book of rules that you hand out to those deemed worthy- boys don't cry, girls are sugar and spice and all that's nice.
I don't need your permission to be let into the room of my own humanity.

Edited: 22nd Jan.

“No she’s not asking what you’re gonna tell your daughter /She’s asking what you’re gonna teach your son”/ Andrea Gibson "Blue Blanket"

Cross posting something I wrote on FB.

Dear parents

When you teach your daughter that "good girls" stay at home after 7 pm, you are teaching your son that women/girls who are out of their homes after that time are "bad", and that there are times of day and night that are exclusively male.

When you teach your daughter that "good girls dress appropriately", you are teaching your son that "bad girls" dress "inappropriately".

When you teach your daughter that she shouldn't be seen in (clubs, bars, on the road after dark, at a movie hall, in a restaurant with an unrelated male), you are teaching your son that there are places he shouldn't expect to see women; that there are places that are exclusively male.

When you teach your daughter that she should fear strange men, you are teaching your son that that its "normal" and "correct" if strange women look at him with fear.

When you teach your daughter to avoid confrontation as much as possible as a method of staying safe, you are teaching your son that the "normal" behaviour for women is to avoid confrontation no matter how severe the harassment or injustice they are facing.

When you teach your daughter that whether or not she is a victim of violence, is dependent on her behaviour, you are teaching your son that violence is a "normal" response to women who do not conform to these arbitrary standards.

When you teach your son how to fix your car, but teach your daughter how to make tea, you are teaching your son that there are certain kinds of jobs he can and SHOULD do, and teaching your daughter which jobs she can and MUST do. Frankly, both skills are necessary for both your children.

When you teach your daughter that the only men who will respect her are "brother/father/husband", you are teaching your son that the only women he needs to respect are "mother/sister/wife" and all other women will fall into the good/bad category (see above) and can be treated as such.


When you teach your daughter that despite the degree(s) that she has worked so hard to earn, she should be prepared to give it all up to marry and raise children, you are teaching your son that his hard work will always have more value than his sister's. Do you think it's a coincidence that across the board women are paid lesser than men for the same kind of work?

When you teach your daughter that "men will be men" with all that it implies, you are teaching your son that "men will be men" is a valid excuse for sexist, misogynist and ultimately inhuman behaviour.

So think carefully, and think hard, what are the "values" that you are imparting to your daughter, because those are the "values" that you will be imparting to your son.