Yesterday was a pious day. But since early this month a face has been disturbing me. I have been remembering it every day since the first Navratri that culminated in Ram Navami yesterday. At the end of the nine-day Navratri puja, people in north India worship girls who have not attained puberty as Devi, the Goddess. But the city of Delhi was again outraged as a girl, all of five years, had suffered rape and brutality.
The face that had been troubling me came back again. It was of a man whom I do not know. This young man was a co-traveller in the Shatabdi train from Dehradun and got down at the New Delhi railway station. His face was expressionless and was part of a coach-full of people who had witnessed a heated exchange of words between a set of old men on one side and Puja, a trainer in the hospitality industry by profession and a remarkable woman full of energy otherwise, and I.
I do not know what that man was thinking when before alighting I said bye to Puja in a rather sad voice. He wasn’t even looking at us but was probably thinking we were some overreacting flag wavers. It’s only at that moment that I felt that maybe what I did was wrong. In any case, men laugh at women if they lose their cool. They dismiss them as some nutty tyrant.
It was like any train journey and my uncle had come to drop me at Dehradun railway station and while placing my suitcase in the luggage bin, he asked me whether he should buy me something to read. By the time, he bought me India Today and I was taking my seat, I heard an old man passing a snide remark on how the less you read the better it was for you.
A bunch of old men was his captive audience though they had no relation with him. He was regaling them in the aisle with a viewpoint on everything on earth. They were just two rows behind me in the AC chair car. He praised Arvind Kejriwal for his honesty and passed rather cheap comments on Sharad Pawar, the NCP leader, who he thought was a very corrupt man.
By then, Puja and I had twice requested the man and his audience to soften down. It had been a tiring weekend for me after some official work and I had travelled early morning the previous day to Dehradun. Puja was returning the same day from Dehradun after visiting her injured brother in a hospital. But the old man was not considerate enough. Just when Puja came back to her seat, he spoke insultingly about women in general. And his point of reference was Indira Gandhi who imposed emergency. He had a lot to say about freedom of expression, little realising that the same could have been said about old men who not only trouble their wives their whole lives but also were a source of nuisance on the train.
I got up from my seat, turned around and gave a piece of mind to not only that guy but his captive audience who were actually inciting him. “You all are bad citizens and actually encouraging the guy to talk ill of women. I am sure you treat women badly.” Puja got up too. By then, the Railway Police Force constables came in. She wanted to register a complaint but then some people intervened. A young man said, “He is an old man so just forget it. After all, why do people retire? It is because their minds stop working.”
Surprisingly, the other half of the coach was of people who did not bother at all. Scared of the constables, the old man kept quiet, said sorry and peace returned. But soon enough, the man, a contractor by profession, started commenting on Puja. She was wearing a red T-shirt and he said, “Who will marry a red bull” without realising that she was a successful careerist with three children and a pilot husband, managing a big household.
The otherwise pious man, who wanted to have a glimpse of the Ganges when Haridwar station came, was actually a case of a cynic who had gone cuckoo. After he got down at Shahadra station in Delhi, the bunch of old men laughed over the experience and continued to make fun of us.
Dehradun Shatabdi taught me a big lesson. A vast majority of Indians, lacking basic etiquettes despite all the education and money, are increasingly becoming insensitive. They not only turn deaf when there is nuisance around them and want to keep away from any problem they actually believe that women are just nutty beings. Indians worship women but treat them badly and probably will continue to do that despite all the education.
