i.
i was born in the capital of the country
and grew used to gazes
ii.
madras found me shoving my hands in the pockets of my too-short shorts
or so the aunties and teachers and friends’ mothers thought
got pulled aside one sunny afternoon (but then most afternoons were sunny)
when i was sitting by the library (the safest spot on the campus)
my physics teacher asked my why i wasn’t wearing shorts
under my uniformed regulation skirt and wasn’t i sending the boys
the wrong idea, somehow?
madras found me laughing in the face of my modern-day medusa
asking her whether she thought boys staring up my skirt might
already have completely the wrong idea
through no encouragement of my own through no intention of mine
medusa and i called an uneasy truce after that but i could feel her stone eyes
whenever i walked through the mud through the grass over the basketball court
a friend with whom i’ve long lost touch asked me, aged nine, whether my top
was slightly too revealing and showed too much of my midriff
i felt her eyes on my stomach on my yet-flat chest still-growing body
‘that’s what my mother thinks anyway’ she said and took a sip of her juice
madras found me combatting many modern age medusas
worried about my honour and my prepubescent body
littered with skinned knees and adorned with shorts
i learnt then to avert the eyes of those that wanted me turned to stone
iii.
i moved back to the capital and watched it grow around me
and it silently watched me right back
it lurked uneasily at the side of barely-developed roads
men looked at me through car windows and whistled
they watched me wait for my uncle at the airport
they watched me walk down the path to school
they watched me fling myself across a court to catch a ball
delhi waited for me to step a single toe out of line
so that it could claim me for its own
growth spurts meant being hauled up in front of class
and being loudly asked by my chemistry teacher
(is it any wonder that i never took a shining to science?)
about whether my pink bra was appropriate within hearing range of
every boy in class who asked me every day for a week
whether my breasts were appropriate
(i was eleven when i was called a slut for the first time
she’d probably learned it from her mother
back then, it meant girl who wasn’t scared of her own body
now, it means girl i don’t like because she has an opinion)
growth spurts meant being let into adult-rated movies at fourteen
once i leaned in to look at the show timings
and the man at the box office looked down my shirt through a plastic counter
iv.
growing up meant being terrified of newspapers
because every day was a new atrocity
growing up was feeling the country beat around me
pulse, silently, with ever-growing anger at people who looked
like me, shared so much of mine except my luck
(we learned to laugh it off, of course
my friends and i enjoyed the film just fine and i didn’t think of the man again
when asked, i just said i had no time for the news)
when i was fifteen i was at a school fair in line for some food
a man my father’s age came up behind me in line
i didn’t think anything of it until he
pressed his body to mine and i could feel more than i ever had before
through my jeans through his terrycot trousers
of course i didn’t say anything
this was delhi and i had fear constantly lurking under the bravado
i waited and i waited and i took my burgers and ran back to my friends
they thought i was imagining everything, of course
they thought it wasn’t on purpose, of course
they thought i was thinking ill of a poor old man
and i turned around and saw him staring at me and licking his lips
v.
fear waits
around dark corners
when the sun’s long gone down
fear persists
no matter how many people you surround yourself with
despite how loudly feminist you are
(because of how loudly feminist you are)
fear manifests
fear remains
fear waits for a single misstep
to come up behind you and hold you close
and suffocate you and strangle you and leave you in the dark
gasping for breath grateful you’re safe now
but you’ll never really be safe again
and nothing ever happens until it does
fear lurks behind every closed door
fear lurks in me
it comes to me as natural as breathing
fear rises in me and meets the moon every night
fear would have me believe that inside every person is a werewolf
and the lunar cycles dictate when he loses his humanity and ravages the town
the world would have me believe in man’s cursed lycanthropy
the world would have me sympathise with men who do not have men in them any more
the world would have me blame my skirt my behaviour my volume my inebriation me
for a poor man’s loss of control
but there is nothing poor about a man and the moon
there is nothing pure about the cold sinister rage that lurks behind the surface
there is nothing pure about the way an entire country watched me grow up
just beyond my field of vision
they wait for me to fuck up
they wait for a single slip in my vigilance
all it takes is a single careless moment