Chez Moi

After years of dodging the issue, I am accepting it. What has prompted this revelation, you ask. Yet another blowout with S, after yet another crowded desi gathering and I’m throwing in the towel. Why am I so? Well, for starters, I do not get along with everybody. Who does, you ask. Good q. Nobody but they mask it better. I don’t. I always thought I will not be a hypocrite and be false to someone when I think they are crap. By that, I do not mean I am generally rude to people or anything silly like that. I just remain a bit aloof - well I do that till I become comfortable around a person, before I let my guard down. And if it turns out that the person cannot be trusted, then I don’t ever let my guard around them. Is that wrong? Well, I thought not but S thinks I intimidate people. How, when I try my best to mask that I am intimidated by most people out there?

To explain my case, let me tell you the story of this Telugu family we know. The child’s dad works with S and we’ve been to their house a couple of times for lunch and they have been to ours once and though I wouldn’t say we became bosom pals, I thought I was still quite nice and pleasant to her. S says I intimidate the female half of the sketch by speaking in English all the time. Give me a break here: I am a Tamilian while they are Telugu. They have lived in Madras for couple of years and though the girl’s picked up some Tamil, it is way different from mine and I speak Tamil very fast anyways. As I don’t speak any Telugu at all, I thought ‘let’s stick to English’. Well, hey, we live in England and all that. But no - apparently not. By speaking in English to desi folks, I intimidate them.

S also claims that I am socially inept. Why? Coz we do not have a major social life and a big group of mates. This sort of links to the point I made above and he says it is all a part of the social fabric. Being a hypocrite, I ask. Being friendly without trying to be a soul mate, he says. But I do not act nice and friendly to someone to their face and then bitch about them behind their backs now, do I? That’s besides the point, apparently.

Some people also go off me mysteriously. Don’t know why. Let me give an example - there’s this fellow mum at P’s school who was also in my dressmaking lesson with me. We used to get along fine then and used to stop now and then at the school gates to exchange pleasantries. Couple of months back, she told me she was thinking of looking for a job and I suggested my place of work. She said she will ring my mobile so I’ll have her number to give her more details. She never did. When I asked her the next time I bumped into her, she made some excuse, said she can’t go back to work just then and hurried off. We have been a strictly ‘hi’ and ‘bye’ duo since then.

I thought I at least belonged in my safe, cyberworld. But no. My social ineptitude followed me there too - when I met up with two of my fellow writers at DC, I thought things went swimmingly. But further emails have been unanswered and plans to meet up at a later date politely ignored. See, I told you it was me.

I always thought I was sort of like Howard Roarke, the rebel who refused to conform to norms and let society dictate terms. I will be a person by my own rights - not a fake smiling and back biting one; just a genuine one, in a WYSIWYG format. But nah, apparently not. I am wierd.

I read this old post in one of my favourite blogs and it brought back to my mind some incidents from my own past. Events that had completely unnerved me and left an indelible mark on me. Nothing really drastic that nonetheless have scarred me for life.

Some of the earliest instances date back to the time when I used to travel by bus and the ’studs’ used to pass leery comments. Crude, obnoxious remarks that were not at all for the ears of a twelve-year old. And then there were the gropers who would pinch your bums and anything else they could get their grubby mitts on. Shouting for help never really worked as no one generally took a blind bit of notice. Plus there was the very real fear that they get caught because of you, they might come with the rest of their goondas and exact revenge on you on the morrow. Then there were those dhoti-clad ones who let their bits hang free and got their kicks by rubbing them against your behind. A hardening organ rubbing against you in a public transport is a very scary thing indeed.

I still can feel the panic rising in me as I remember this dark stranger who once followed me home from my computer class. He wouldn’t stop staring at me in the bus and got off at my stop. Never once flinched, kept steady pace with me and short of taking off like the wind, there was nothing I could do to shake him off. Even when I was afraid of leading him to my home, I couldn’t gather the courage to take a fake route and mislead him somehow. Ultimately, I dived into my friend’s block and hid on the stairs for a long, long time till it grew dark and I had to go home.

Then there were the countless times I was taunted and jeered at the LIC bus stop by the roadside romeos from Nandanam Arts College who haunt our college bus stops. The ‘men’ who used to get such pleasure from scaring young girls brainless that one even ran into oncoming traffic to escape their clutches.

When I look back, I cannot help but think my parents were rather naive - or blind. In a world full of perverts, they innocently trusted their daughter to travel everywhere by herself and come back home unscathed. Though it was I who insisted on travelling solo by train to Mumbai, I shudder now when I think of what harm I could have befallen me. Or the time when I went to Trivandrum for a friend’s wedding, without even letting her know I was coming as I wanted to surprise her.

My experiences, though thankfully not too serious, still made me rather jittery among men. They made me act out in rather funny ways one of the most memorable ones being this sudden hankering I developed for a big brother. Maybe it was the protectiveness I craved but I tried to fill the void by the only method I knew how by tying rakhi for couple of older guy friends.

At one point, I was rather suspicious of every male I came across even ones linked to me by family. I used to go out of my way to make sure I was never left by myself with any of them. I could also never make eye contact when talking with them and if one of them became genuinely friendly, it only made me suspicious. I even cut off all relations with S’s close friend because me playfully pinched my cheek once. I guess those events have disturbed me a lot more than I gave them credit for.

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The year 2007 in Brentwood dawned with news reports of two girls raped at midnight in different parts of the town. Since then, I have read numerous reports of girls being molested, both here and back in India. I am sure the men who did it are under the mistaken impression that it was a sign of their manhood, that they have brought a woman to her knees. How will we make them understand that it isn’t so - taking a woman by force and leaving a dirty footprint on her life is not macho, it is not something to be proud of. It is rather a shameful act; one so vile that no punishment is sufficient and no act possible to eradicate that event from the affected woman’s life. What will it take for a man to understand that it is the ultimate act of cowardice to scare and scar a woman so?

One of the biggest misconception among most men is that having a dick maketh a man. Well, it ain’t and the sooner the pervs of this world realise this, the better. A biological part does not make somebody a man. Scaring young girls and violating a person is most definitely not the mark of manhood and anyone who thinks otherwise is seriously deluded.

Now that I am a mum, I am even more worried about the sort of world I have brought my son into and how safe I can keep him. I so empathise with the blogger’s and her husband’s fears when strangers express a desire to take pictures of her little boy the world is not innocent anymore and it is a sad day for us when we have to view every single thing with suspicious eyes. But when the alternate is just way too horrible to contemplate, parents can be excused for wanting to wrap their children in cotton wool.

These fears are so real and prevalent in UK that we are banned from taking pictures of children in places like schools, in parties and other assorted gatherings. Most places have big notices saying ‘No cameras’ and you need special permission to take pictures even if you are having a party for your child in a public place. I couldn’t understand this before I became a mum; now I am happy whatever measures are there in place to prevent perverts from getting a picture of my son.

I have filled little P’s head with dire tales of strangers and what they can do that he has equated a stranger to the most vile kind of monster a five year old can imagine. Then again, those that harm us and our precious children do not disguise themselves as strangers anymore, do they? Read the case of two-year old Casey Mullen, who was raped and strangled, in her own bed, by her own uncle. I am absolutely bereft of words.

I am sure my blogger pal and I aren’t alone in this fear of ours scores of parents must feel the same way and some of the blogs I have read on this subject just prove my belief. A whole generation of children are going to be molly coddled and cosseted by their parents who are fearful of the harms that could come to their child that the children are in very real fear of being too afraid to do anything carefree and fun. Never mind the fearful strangers robbing them of their childhood, we overprotective parents might just end up doing it by stifling them.

The question on my mind now is, where do we go from here? With morality on a steady decline, what is the path humanity is meant to take in order to save itself? How are we to keep our children and ourselves, safe?

We have a mini-library of sorts in my team, at work. Well, mini-library seems a rather grand way of describing what it is, a collection of books, but we take it very seriously - we even have a librarian to monitor the traffic! Most of the books in this collection are light, even frivolous read - none of the blood chilling or brain workout-y type of books I’d like to get my teeth into, so I generally
stay away from it.

But one day, a random thought struck me and I actually went through these books. Most of them were written by women and covered subjects such as shopping, clothes, dating, partying, drinking, sex… ‘chick lit’, as I describe it. Not that I have anything against such things, I even borrowed one such book when the library was shut. As I was reading all about three enterprising women and their ideas to nab themselves a dishy guy, I couldn’t help wondering how come we have no such books in the desi market.

How come us desis girls don’t muck about such light material? Lord knows we could tell the world a thing or two. How tough it is to walk past a crowd of roadside romeos without batting an eyelid; how to cross the road opposite Ethiraj College (in Chennai) without getting run over by blokes driving outsized bikes; how to go on a date without grandparents and assorted relatives spotting you around the countryside. There’s also the intriguing life of upstairs-wali Mallika and her shenanigans, the old boy next-door and what he gets upto when maami goes to the market, Flat Association President mama who makes sheep eyes at Lily aunty’s cleavage at the committee meetings… well, you get my drift?

Why is it that the desi literature scene so heavy? Is it because us desis cannot read chick lit or anything half so flimsy? Do we need meaty subjects all the time? Why? Why can’t we kick back with the tale of Meena and Seema as they try to plot their way around their workplace, trying to get past the letch Mohan or Ammu, as she tries to solve the mystery of who-put-the-salt-in-the-soup-and-ruined-her-dinner-party?

I say the desi lit world needs some input from the likes of us Desi Chicks. The Jhumpa Lahiris, Arundhathi Roys and Kiran Desais can have their hard core, heavy works but we need some fresh, new blood from some regular Janes too.

What say my gal pals?