Tonight I saw a woman on the train whom I was convinced was a man dressed as a woman. In "The Dancing Girls of Lahore," Louise Brown says that even Pakistani prostitutes - especially the prostitutes - cover their heads when walking down the street. The only woman who doesn't do this is a transvestite friend of hers. After several months in Pakistan's repressed society, Louise starts to beg her friend to cover her head, too. I felt uncomfortable with the constant stares, but she didn't seem to notice, Brown writes, or something like that.
Here's a big difference between Delhi's men and women: their attitude in public. I told someone yesterday that the very idea that trains should have reserved women's compartments suggests that all public space, by default, belongs to men. But it's not really a revolutionary observation. In India, public space belongs to men. They spit and piss in the streets, sing rowdy songs, walk home at all hours of the night and scream and shout at each other across crowded intersections. They wear threadbare dhotis that defy decency, and in summer they go shirtless to stave off the heat.
By contrast, even the most confident Delhi woman moves through the streets with the attitude of a fugitive attempting not to get caught. Delhi girls learn early on that the city is full of seething, frustrated men. These men own the streets, and the implication is that if she's outside, they own her too. By keeping her head down and not making any sudden movements, she might pass unnoticed through them and escape on the other side. For men, the streets are a place of celebration. For women, they are a place of danger.
A friend of mine was on her way home the other night in an auto when a strange man leaned past the bars and grabbed her bare knee. She was terrified, but admitted later that she "wasn't properly dressed." There's not a girl in this town who gets dressed in the morning without wondering, if briefly, how men will react to her outfit. I don't think there's a single man in Delhi who ever thinks about that.
Of course, this is the case all over the world. But nowhere is the attitude more apparent than in Delhi. When Lara Logan was sexually assaulted by a mob of men in Egypt, news channels pointed out that Logan's case was especially tragic because the crowd was celebrating. But most women in Delhi know that's a false distinction. This year, during the Holi religious festival, mobs of drunk men began verbally abusing the women at Holi Cow, a massive and expensive party at the outskirts of town. The organizers shut the event down early, saying they "could no longer guarantee the safety of women."
We cannot guarantee the safety of women.
It's a common refrain, from religious festivals to the daily frustrations of autos or the Delhi Metro. Entering public space is, by default, dangerous to women. Anything else is an exception to the norm.
When India won the cricket World Cup, I drove home from the match with a friend. The streets were full of laborers who had shut down the intersections. They were exploding fire crackers and cheering in the streets. But there were no women anywhere. My friend and I - both women - sat in the car with the windows up, hoping that none of the drunk men celebrating in the streets noticed that one of the cars contained two defenseless women who had foolishly ventured out into the streets alone on this happy occasion.
Which is why I was especially amazed at the girl I met on the train. She was very tall, very thin and extremely beautiful. Most pretty girls in Delhi keep their heads down and their eyes on the ground. She was some village girl - she had a silver nose ring in and she was wearing rubber sandals with a green and black nylon sari. Despite that, we all looked at her with secret admiration. When she turned around to laugh, her eyes took in the entire compartment and the entire train. She laughed loudly. She had a loose, confident stride, the kind that's commonplace among Delhi men but nonexistent among Delhi women. Her husband was standing between the compartments. Every so often he'd call out to her and she'd answer back. She began to joke with the woman next to her.
All of these things made me wonder whether she was a transvestite. Her husband, however, suggested otherwise. A minute later he produced a tiny boy - maybe a year old - who was clearly their son. The baby ran barefoot back and forth between his parents. Within two minutes, the entire compartment was glued to this drama. The man - who didn't impress me one way or the other - the little boy and the young, vital, energetic mother.
The only other woman I've met who had this kind of confidence was a servant who worked in a friend's house. For several years she was married to a man who beat her black and blue. Eventually, she left him. She's the only other woman I've met in Delhi who wandered through public spaces with that kind of daring.
In Maximum City, Suketu Mehta describes the appeal of a woman he dubs Monalisa, a village girl who becomes a bar dancer in Mumbai. Reading about the passionate, uneducated but brave Monalisa, I couldn't help but feel that Mehta was engaging in a bit of Orientalist fantasizing. In the book, Monalisa wanders fearlessly through Mumbai. She goes to discos alone, she dances until four in the morning. She has ill-considered but intense flings with men she feels passionately about. Mehta revels in describing Monalisa, the implication is that she's careless with her beauty. At one point, a friend of Mehta's cautions him not to fall in love with Monalisa. "What makes you think I'd fall in love with her?" he asks. "Listening to you describe her, I'm already a little bit in love with her," says the friend, a woman. Mehta concedes the point.
Until I lived in Delhi, I didn't understand the appeal of a character like Monalisa, either as a fantasy or as a person. But I see it better now. Delhi - and to a certain extent Mumbai - are urban cities in a developing country, a country that has only 914 girls to every 1000 boys. They are cities full of poor laborers and migrants who sleep illegally in the construction sites they work on during the day. It's rare to see women on the streets, and as night arrives the streets are taken over by men. They drink tea, they shoot the breeze, and they exclude women from existence.
But it's still true that confidence is the most attractive human trait. I wonder who suffers when cities like Delhi demand that women deny and shutter their most attractive trait - their vitality - as a concession to the male need to feel invulnerable. To avoid violence. It's the oldest and most obvious trick in the book. There is nothing "cultural" about violence against women in the developing world - whether it's a terrifying street assault like Logan's or a khap panchayat's decision to murder a woman who marries outside of her community. It is part of a systematic pattern of denying women.
Which is why all of us on the train were peeping with fascination at the brave village girl who didn't seem to give a damn. Even though she probably did. Even though I don't even know her. For an outsider living in Delhi, this city makes you desperate to see Monalisa, to invent her if she doesn't exist. You want to believe that she is possible, that she can survive unharmed.
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