Metrowali

(Published in First City magazine, May 2012)

Someone once asked me, ‘What is it like, being a woman in Delhi?’

Rhetorical questions like these send me into tick-tocking tizzy, and produce an anxiety attack VO that goes something like this: ‘Quick! Work brain, work! Where a witty retort when a writer needs one?’ My response was the usual: ejection of a garbled sentence that I hoped would sound cryptic-cool and not plain grammatically incorrect.

“It’s like… being… a lot of woman.”

Sounds like a lot of phoo-phoo shit, I know. But slip this line into a mildly swaying, densely sonorous, openly-stared-in-and-stared-at Ladies Compartment of the Delhi Metro, and it sounds downright goddamn epiphanic.

They say Dilli is the city of seven cities. I’d say ever since they put those ugly pink and white sanitary-napkin-advertisement-reminiscent ‘Women Only’ stickers on one end of the platforms, the Delhi Metro has become a virtual city hidden away in our great city of seven cities. Think Metro Sarai for the woman traveller, nay highway rider. Think phone rescue from the Matrix when Agent Anderson is breathing near your ear. Think fabulous Kahaani moment when the assassin slips into the vast procession of identical women, while the men hop on the spot, craning their necks, looking to swoop on her, all in vain.

They say if there’s a city where escaping gender is a big tease, it’s Delhi. I throw my hands up and agree. Perhaps it’s to do with the fact that Dilli speaks largely in Hindi, a language that cannot roll itself out without ascribing gender to everything - even a chair. Everything is quickly classified, and the method of doing this is staring. Surely, staring is the capital passtime, an unwritten rule; Delhi is all about people checking people out. Everybody stares at everybody: frontally, peripherally, sneakily (The latter created especially for the ladies who do public transport). The young ladies of Dilli are taught (by a kind of osmosis) the fine art of cultivating peripheral vision; all public spaces in Delhi have silently taught me to avoid eye contact and magically begin to ‘sense-see’ other bodies with my arms, breasts and ass. You don’t break the barriers of class and gender. You don’t watch everybody openly; you don’t give them the right to watch you back.

But here, in the artificially-created limbo space of the Delhi Metro ‘Ladiej Compartment’, there are unending ways of tasting Dilli paradoxia. This coach, you see, isn’t just about a great sea of aunties shielding Red Riding Hood me from the wolves in the next compartment. Here, a strange sense of security shoulder-grazes intense scrutiny. Here, easy, casual staring (that I now have shamelessly mastered too) is totally cool - a kind of initiation, really, into instant sisterhood. The moment you come to terms with it, there is an unconscious change in body language: girls adjust their shirt necks less often, aunties splay way beyond normal ladylike knees-together etiquette, shoulders graze without squirming. A curious space expands, where women breed familiarity silently, starefully, instantaneously.    

And in this quick sisterhood of frank, shameless gawking, perhaps for the first time, Dilli’s elaborate class system allows itself to stare itself down, compelled by more curiosity than prejudice. The security woman with exaggerated womanly touches (golden sandals, nosepins, earrings plopped onto androgynous uniform) watches the newly married chick with sparkly red accents, who finding herself alone, lets a furtive gaze rest on the ‘labour-type’ women playing with their snotty-nosed kids on the floor in a corner. Benignly watching over this open ogling, and scrutinising all of them by turns (as if flipping channels on teevo) is always an army of aunties; you’ve spotted one if upon entering she proceeds to order thin seated girls to ‘adjist’, and then wedges them against each other cruelly by inserting XXL derriere into the delicate bench-balance. Of course, sneaky columnists like me watch all women watching women from a nonchalant corner, and on being caught, pretend to stare at enticing cross-section of female feet, clad in vile pink toe-socks more often than not.

So hypnotic is this silent conversation of the ladies’ coach, that for a short while, something unusual happens: Dilliwali me forgets. I forget, quite literally, ‘where I come from’ - that hot, biting, city that’s ninja-fied me all these years, named me so. Not for too long, though. The doors of the ladies coach slide open, I exit into a sea of women, gradually feel the air grow thick, the temperature change (and no I don’t mean faulty airconditioning, and no I’m not PMS-ing). Walk in the direction of the men’s coach; five degrees up. Step into escalator crowd; ten degrees up. Negotiate groin-proximity at exit stalls; full-on Dilli ki loo. Walk out into a thousand stares and blinding light: Cruel hot slap of summer, hello Dilli.

One fine day though, I sprint across a flight of stairs to get to the sisterhood coach at the end of the train – and realise I’m never going to make it to my cocoon before the doors slam shut. I dash instead, into a 'general' compartment (which I mis-typed as ‘men’s coach’ by Freudian slip just above). I assume I might encounter wolves, but there are only two kinds of men in here: they wield injured pride or unabashed hostility. My weird, altered, don’t-touch-me walking-style (like I’m RDX-strapped suicide bomber who doesn’t wanna go off too soon) doesn’t help. It makes men either cringe, or singe; they either draw their groins in to make space, or stare at me as if I’m Shylock asking for my pound of flesh. I look away, I don’t stare, I am beset by acute, anxious, sudden realisation of just how alarmingly male the Delhi outdoors are. Away from my cosy Sisterhood Compartment, but injected into as synthetic an environment, I begin to observe men again, experiencing very strange dejavu. Just how slyly they watch each other, how quickly they turn their gaze away when caught, just how uninterested they are in acknowledging instant brotherhood in a coach-full of men. I realise that if there was a Metrowalla, he would write this column more for the ‘Metro’ than the ‘Walla’. Before I know it, by self-perpetrating logic I am now waist-deep in enticing polemic; tasting the revelry of gender stereotypes that I otherwise love to debunk; practically enjoying the anti-body feeling and the concentrated hatred pooling around me, planning even to plot it all in a column like this. The men seem to stare at me clairvoyantly and smirk with loathing.

"Chor Bagh?! Noooo! She didn’t say Jor Bagh!”

When men and women become ‘a lot of man/woman’, god sends a few loony kids to save the world from premature apocalypse. This one had cottoned on to the announcement lady's peculiarly surly anglicised accent that crawls under the skin of XY and XX chromosome alike.

Suddenly there were giggles and grunts, some inadvertently coming out like nervous laughter, some like relieved gasps. The kid lapped up the applause, playing to the gallery, grinning away.

“Chorbaghchorbaghchorbagh.”    

The doors slid open, I walked out into a sea of men; I put Madonna on my iPod and walked the streets like I own them, knowing fully well that even she can’t quite drown the muffled stab I felt just then, on hearing that flying, unending, kiss-on-the-cheap sound behind my back. My Rational Self said to me, ‘Shh, don’t create a scene.’ I said to my Rational Self, ‘Quit the drama, hain? Oye don’t you know? I’m ‘a lot of woman’.”

WHAT KEEPS THE DILLIWALI SANE

How to keep brain sane in a ladies’ coach with highest per capita chatter-on-the-phone stamina? I’d suggest with a book a lot more absorbing and entertaining than eavesdropping can be: The Household Tips of the Great Writers by Mark Crick. It’s the author being ‘literary ventriloquist’ --- channelling Virginia Woolf and Sartre and Hemingway’s authorial styles to write about DIY odd jobs around the house, like bake dessert, unplug a drain, wallpaper a room. (‘Gently she melted the butter, transparent and smooth, oleaginous and clear, clarified and golden, and mixed it with the sugar in a large bowl.’ I showed this line to an author-friend who asked me, ‘so when did Woolf write this?’)
Engrossing enough to hold in one hand and sway with the rod-handle. Will make you giggle and smile and make all the ladies wonder enviously what it is that you’re reading.

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).