I was so young when I arrived in Mumbai. Not just young in years, I was naive and oblivious about the hard facts of the world. I learned a lot from the women who lived at my guesthouse.
The girls at the guesthouse taught me how to walk down the street. A defensive posture was required. One hand you keep on your handbag in case of bag snatchers, the other you keep clenched to a fist and held across your chest ready to push off any creepy man who tries to grope you in a busy crowded street.
It seems ridiculous that this was serious advice, but it was not ridiculous. As a pasty foreign person who stood out in a crowd, several times while walking down the street, I saw men spot me in the crowd and switch from a normal walking gait to a weird kind of hunched pose so they could try and brush up against me.
When I asked questions about the stories of Hinduism, one of them gave me little cartoon books to read that explained some of the key stories from Hindu religion. There were several books covering the Ramayana, so I got a good understanding of the kidnapping of Sita, the wife of Rama, by the king of Lanka, and the battle that followed.
There are two women from the guesthouse who stand out in my memory, and Dharma* is one of them. Dharma came from the eastern part of India. She was in Mumbai studying for a Masters degree. She explained her mother was worried she would marry a foreigner and go live overseas. She told me, “I think she’s right. I can’t see myself finding an Indian man I’d be prepared to marry.”
She asked me about the differences in rights of women between India and Australia and asked my estimate of how long she would have to wait before India is at a similar stage for women’s rights as Australia. I had only been in India a few weeks at this point didn’t feel fully equipped to answer her question. Trying to put into context my sheltered experience of life in Australia and compare it to what I’d experienced so far in Mumbai, I made a guess at twenty to thirty years. I don’t think she was prepared to wait that long.
Dharma also explained to me the phrase “May you be the mother of 100 sons”, something that was meant to be a blessing from one woman to another, but was the title of a book by a Danish author, Elisabeth Bumiller, on the situation of women in India. Dharma explained, “My friends and I use it as a curse. If someone does something to piss us off, we say to them may you be the mother of 100 sons.”
(The book made for grim reading. Just the difference in the population between men and women. Assuming there should be a 50-50 split in births and women make up slightly more of the population as they live longer, the difference statistically at that time I worked out was something like 20 million women missing from the population.)
Dharma told me that once she was told off by some older women when she was in the train. One woman leant across and tapped on her nose. Dharma thought she must have a booger on her face, so wiped at her nose but woman was making a point. “No ring!” (Married women traditionally have a nose piercing.) Another reason why she wanted to leave the country.
Jintimani* taught me about Indian clothes. She took me shopping for salwar kameez (the long tunic worn over trousers) and saris. Thanks to her I bought two saris “one for everyday and one for dressing up” (because there was going to be a point in my life when I would need an “everyday” sari?). Under her advisement I also bought three salwar kameez, one for everyday and two for “dressing up”.
Hearing that I had bought a sari, the girls at the guesthouse had fun dressing me up like I was some kind of pale western doll. Saris are beautiful and look wonderful on, but if you’re a white woman who hasn’t been born into a culture where you were wearing saris from a young age, you are always going to look anxious and awkward.
Wearing a sari is both simple and complicated. Saris are perfect outfits because they’ll still fit, it doesn’t matter how much weight you put on or lose. It’s all the pleating. Saris require two undergarments: the choli (short-sleeved, midriff exposing blouse) and the petticoat. The sari is tucked into the petticoat and wrapped around you, with pleats folded in to give you room to walk. The tail end of the sari is draped over your shoulder and this end usually has a complementary/different design to the rest of the fabric. Lovely as saris were, knowing how crowded my bus was in the morning, I could picture myself getting on wearing a sari, and getting off wearing only my choli and petticoat with my sari unwrapped down the length of the bus.
Out walking with Jintimani one evening, me in my everyday salwar and her in jeans and a t-shirt, we got hassled by two boys on the street. I say “we” but it was her whose bum got grabbed. I think the boys were surprised when we turned around and they saw the person they had groped was local – and she was angry. She let loose a torrent of abuse at them. I didn’t understand it, but I assume it was along the lines of “What the hell are you doing? How dare you? I can call the police and have you locked up in a cell**. Is that what you want? What kind of mother raised such ignorant boys?***” I think part of the noise was to draw attention, either to encourage someone to step in, or to alert other women that bum grabbers were about. Also she was fucking furious.
**at the time, a woman could call the police for this kind of street hassle, “eve teasing” as it was called, and get the offenders locked up for the night.
***God forbid you say anything bad about an Indian boy’s mother.
One of Dharma’s friends knew about classical Indian music, and got tickets for performance at the Banganga Tank by santoor master Pandit Shiv Kumar Sharma. Harmanpreet* explained the music to me before the concert. The santoor a string instrument, the strings are hit by sticks to produce the sound. The santoor is usually accompanied by a drum. Because it has so many strings, at certain points in the music the player has to stop and tune it. Even though the seats were uncomfortable and the concert seemed to go on for a very long time, it was one of the highlights of my time in Mumbai. I remember the warm evening, the candles floating on the water, listening to this beautiful music.
Amandeep* asked if she could buy some US dollars from me as she needed to buy a train ticket home. (She also came from the Eastern Provinces.) There were no tickets left for locals but she knew there were still foreigner tickets available. These had to be paid for in hard currency, so she was asking around the people she knew who might have some US dollars. (My memory is fuzzy on this but I have a feeling there were rules restricting local people from getting access to hard currency.) One of the other foreign women in the guest house went to the station with her to buy the ticket. (I’m pretty sure there was a separate ticket window for foreigners paying with hard currency.)
Although Dharma and Amandeep were both from the Eastern States of India, Amandeep looked more Asian than Indian, and experienced internal racism from other Indians as a result. Dharma said that people would sometimes make racist comments about the Eastern provinces people in front of her, not knowing she was from there. “Oh but you don’t look like…” You don’t have to look like you’re from somewhere to take offence when your people are being insulted.
The women at my guesthouse helped me make sense of where I was and what I was, but within Indian society at that time they were statistical anomalies – middle class, from families wealthy enough to support them living away from home while they studied, or forward thinking enough to allow them to live away from home while working at a job and still unmarried. This may have changed now.
I told Dharma India would “catch up” to Australia in 20 or 30 years. India has changed a lot in the 30 years since I lived there, but as for the position of women in society, I still don’t feel entitled to answer that.
I wish I knew where Dharma was now so I could ask her.
*In line with my usual policy of not using people’s real names, the names used here are names of players from the Mumbai Indians Women’s Cricket Team.
Tales from Tobhamhor 