Unsavoury encounters on Indian streets

When I read of anti-molestation protests and the media coverage of them, I always hope that young girls and women — and parents, siblings, spouses/partners — stay alert and aware of even the minor ways in which women can be molested.

Some four decades ago when my sister and I, not yet in our teens, were transplanted to a north Indian city, our parents had no idea what could happen on the streets, having come from the relatively safe southern part of the country.

Father’s only sister joined a convent at an early age. She had probably not faced any molestation problems in that time for she had not just one or two, but nine strapping brothers to escort her around and watch over her!

Mother had lived away from home and travelled on her own, but that was in the cosmopolitan Bombay of the 1940s, a far cry from what the north is even a quarter century later. She had no idea how inventive molesters could be when they encountered young girls.

We, however, went through an initiation by fire, so to speak.

Apart from commuting alone to and from school in the metropolis, we ran errands for mother and spent a lot of time out on our own. We probably looked what we were — two innocents abroad — and we would often be bumped into needlessly or talked to suggestively.

Luckily for us, our knowledge of the local language at the time was only rudimentary and we didn’t understand what was being said. Even the gestures went over our heads: we were still too young to ‘get it’.

But we knew that it wasn’t a good idea to linger and we would hurry home; and with rare unspoken agreement between us sisters, not say a word to mother. Maybe we knew that if we did, our new found freedom would be curtailed — and we were too wilful and too eager for ‘adventure’ to allow that to happen.

So we kept these unsavoury encounters to ourselves. We went to the male hairdresser mother had heard had a way with the scissors and we never mentioned that he had a way with his hands too. Instead, after that first unnecessary squeeze while he arranged the apron over us, we mulishly sat with our arms crossed and no amount of cajoling would get us to change our posture.

When we walked down the road — even in broad daylight — it was a commonplace event to be grabbed by an agile cyclist as he came up from behind. By then we had learnt to fight back with words, acquiring the choicest of epithets in a number of languages from our friends, but what was the use of words after the fact?

We realised it was wiser to always face oncoming traffic and we walked forevermore on the wrong side of the road. No one could sneak up from behind for a quick grope, and in case they tried, we also made sure we held a thick file or folder against ourselves like a Kevlar frontpiece.

In crowded public buses, there was less scope for self-protection and after being pushed and prodded we experimented briefly but not very successfully with weapons of minor destruction like bobby-pins and nails — and then we stopped boarding buses altogether and became great walkers.

In time, these unsavoury incidents became less frequent. It was not our clothing or our movements that changed. (In fact, as we grew older, we became more daring with our wardrobes.)

Rather, we learnt when we could risk being alone and when it was wiser to stay in a group and many other little things in a process of self-preservation and self-education we could not have got if we had been anywhere else in the country!

Cheryl Rao is a journalist based in India.