Eyes Cast Downward

I can hear them before I see them; there are loud whoops followed by uproarious laughter, and one of them is yelling. Soon their voices are raised in song. I know they’re ahead of me, and approaching closer, but I can’t see them yet.

It’s hard to describe to anyone who hasn’t grown up here in India, but there’s an inherent nervousness to being a woman in India. When you’re alone and out there, you constantly feel alone. When you’re a single woman trying to rent a house or a flat here in the south, you either have to make up a husband who doesn’t exist yet, or you have to pretend that you’ll be renting the place along with someone male: a father, a brother, an uncle. Anyone, in fact, who can be ‘the man’.

I remember asking as a teenager why everything I had to sign or fill up, including my passport application form, my various school forms, and even a form at a dental clinic outlining a procedure I was going to undergo, required my father’s name. My father, who was a non-entity in my life, and whose name wasn’t at the end of mine (I’d switched to my mother’s maiden name after her divorce and refused to go back to my dad’s), somehow was important enough that his name was required on every single one of my forms. ‘But why do you want his name?’ I asked, plaintively. ‘I don’t belong to my dad. I belong to myself.’

Questions like that are discouraged, and I was frowned upon. I am stubborn, however, and I always crossed out ‘father’s name’ and pencilled in ‘mother’s name’. Then I wrote down her name. Nobody objected to this, but as I got older, and remained, horror of horrors, unmarried in my twenties, I was asked for my husband’s name on forms. ‘I don’t have one’, I’d say, and be met with gazes filled with both horror and pity. My gaze was equally pitiful, and slightly defiant. But it occurred to me that I still didn’t own myself.

Indian women, never, apparently, own themselves.

And so we come back to today, to walking my dogs down a side street in the dusk, and hearing men’s voices before I can see them. My gaze, usually so confident, shifts; I look downwards, away, and not at them. I want them to go past without whistling at me, without commenting at me about my clothes or my body, and without making noises at me like they’re calling my dogs, only I know they’re directing it towards me. And today I am lucky; they are in high spirits and don’t really care to interact with me. They’re too busy discussing the movie they’ve just watched; they’re too busy singing the songs they’ve just heard. But I catch myself as my eyes lift to follow them around the corner, and I cannot believe myself. I have apologised for being a woman out in public to these men I have never seen before; I have apologised for being out alone.

I return home and I talk to my sister, who tells me she does it too. ‘You just want them to go past you without bothering you’, she says, and I nod. I call friends, who all tell me the same thing. ‘I try not to care’, explains a friend as she wrestles her two-year old into a romper. ‘But I do it anyway. I think we all do. We learn how to.’

And there it is. We learn how to because we are sorry. We are sorry for being women, out alone. We are sorry for being afraid of your voices; we are sorry for being afraid of your bodies. We are sorry for wanting to belong to ourselves. We’re casting our eyes downwards, hoping you’ll go on your way, because, more than anything else, we want to be invisible because we’re afraid, and we’re sorry.