India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (22 page)

Mrs Mukherjee is an intelligent woman. She sees where the
trend is heading and realises she can do little to stop it. The more women are empowered, the more her caseload will increase. She wishes things weren’t that way. Family and freedom need not be incompatible. Young couples are more attuned to the shift in roles these new demands require. They are working ‘hand to hand’. As long as India remains male-dominated, however, women will suffer. And marriage will bear the brunt.

She points to a poster on the wall. It depicts a chain necklace with seven circular amulets. Each is amateurishly yet colourfully illustrated with a scene of domestic harmony. In one, the husband is building a wall for the family home, while his wife hands him the bricks. In another, the man is doing the ironing. A third shows them seated in conversation. The sequence ends with a family photo: the happy couple, in-laws and offspring, all smiling. The necklace encircles a caption in Hindi. ‘A happy family is the responsibility of all the family.’

The slogan travels with me on the train to Rashbehari Avenue. I walk the gauntlet of the pavement, assailed by shopkeepers on one side and market vendors on the other. Eventually I find escape down a narrow passageway that leads to the ground-floor offices of Kanash Lifestyle Management Centre. Located beside a ‘multi-sex’ clothing outlet called X&Y Chromosome, the private counselling service shares the building with a drug and alcohol abuse charity. There’s no signage outside. Kanash is not the sort of place you would stumble on by accident.

I’m met at the door by Shilpi Mondal, a warm-hearted lady in her late thirties with a rounded face and eyes as dark and liquescent as a West Country mire. The hallway opens into a sizeable room with orange curtains, yellow walls and purple wooden chairs. A vase of plastic flowers adds to the well-intentioned efforts at cheeriness. The head of a nameless Indian woman, dark as soot, surveys the room from a pedestal. She is dressed with a lopping bridal nose ring and wears the Indian national flag as a headscarf.

‘Doctor? Mrs?’ I enquire, as I take a seat beside her desk.

‘Miss,’ she says emphatically.

Miss Mondal teaches at a prestigious primary school during the day and offers one-to-one counselling sessions during the evening at the Kanash Lifestyle Management Centre. Counselling is her passion. It’s also the source of a steady second income. She is separated and has two children to maintain. Her husband is a Bengali from Kolkata. He is also an only son and therefore doted on by his mother, a traditionally domineering character in Bengali culture.

‘Oh god,’ her friends used to say to her when her and her husband first met. ‘You’ve got something not so pleasant to look forward to.’

As it turned out, they were right. Early on in their marriage, her husband took a job as the manager of a tea plantation up in the hills of West Bengal. With the loneliness of the place and boredom of the job, he gradually turned to drink. Coming from a conservative family, Miss Mondal had no experience of alcohol. They returned to Kolkata, but his drinking continued. She tried to get him to go to rehab. He refused. Eventually, after seven years, she left. She’s not officially divorced as yet. He won’t turn up to the hearings. He’s sought no contact with his children for the last three years.

Miss Mondal says sorry. It’s usually her asking the questions. She hadn’t intended to reveal so much of herself. What is it I wanted to know again?

That’s quite all right, I assure her, privately glad to have stumbled upon my second talkative divorcee. For a while, the conversation steers back on to less personal ground.

She talks quickly, like an excited teenage girl gabbing to her friends about a boy she likes. Much of what she says tallies with the accounts I’ve already heard from Mrs Gutgutia and Mrs Mukherjee. She too identifies how fast attitudes are changing among young, educated women. They want their own independence, she says. They want to earn well. They want to lead a life of their own. So why marry? They see their mothers running from pillar to post trying to hold down a job, manage the home, keep the in-laws happy. ‘Young women think “I don’t need that.”’

The new generation is not naive either, Miss Mondal asserts. They know what marriage will entail. It’ll require adjusting their lifestyles. It’ll mean ‘bowing down’ to someone else. They have a lot of pride in themselves. So many are therefore putting off marriage until they are older. Some get wed because they want kids. Others don’t want to grow lonely when they are old. Either way, for once it’s about what women want. Not what their families want for them.

Whom they marry is a case in point. Most would prefer to find someone themselves. Not that they’ll rule out an arranged marriage. ‘It’s a helpful back-up option.’ Interestingly, many parents are going along with it, the teacher-counsellor maintains. ‘Their daughters have good salaries and they realise there is not much they can do about it.’

The same could be said increasingly for divorce. It’s a question of attitude, according to Miss Mondal. Today, once one party has decided that the marriage is over, ‘like it or lump it, it’s over’. Parents are slowly coming round to the idea too. Before, daughters were perceived as someone else’s property almost from birth. That’s changing. ‘Daughters are seen as an equal part of the family.’ If a marriage breaks down, the parents are now more likely to help her out. Especially in cases of ‘love marriages’, where the contractual bond with the boy’s family is not so strong.

Miss Mondal suddenly hesitates. Just so I’m clear, I should know it’s the upper classes she is talking about. For the middle classes and everyone below that, there’s very little flexibility. Social change in India can be a piecemeal, protracted affair.

As she talks, I struggle to ascertain exactly where she personally stands on the issue. With Mrs Gutgutia, I sensed there was an element of zealotry in her divorce proceedings. Her stance was unabashed and unrepentant. It wouldn’t surprise me if she secretly hoped Mr Gutgutia vs Mrs Gutgutia might one day make it into the series of Supreme Court adjudications lining her bookshelf. Mrs Mukherjee, in contrast, was torn. Her belief in family stood challenged by her recognition of women’s rights. For her, divorce
was a last resort, to be avoided if at all possible. But what of Miss Mondal? How did she feel?

I ask her outright and am surprised by the calm measure of her response. She married for love, she explains. That love died. She feels no particular animosity towards her estranged husband. Unlike her sisters, who want to beat him black and blue, she has emotionally detached herself from the situation. She told him when they separated that he had to choose between the bottle and his family. It took her two years to realise he had made up his mind.

So with admirable pragmatism, she set about rebuilding her life without him. She realises it will be difficult for her to remarry. Few men would take on a divorcee with children. Yet she is in no rush to do so. Not that she’s anti-marriage. Her parents and siblings are all happily married. For her, for now, she is happy where she’s at.

Time has run on. It’s close to seven o’clock. Just as our conversation is winding up, her phone rings. It’s her nine-year-old daughter. She is with the ayah. She’s calling to say goodnight.

For the first time, a look akin to sorrow passes over Miss Mondal’s face. She would like to be at home putting her daughter to bed. But such is life, she says, biting her lip and looking around for a distraction.

Her eye settles on a semicircle of chairs at the opposite end of the room. She points to them. They remind her of something that brings a smile to her face, expelling her momentary sadness. She runs a group counselling session every Saturday morning, she explains. ‘Personal growth classes’, the lifestyle-management folk at Kanash brand it.

‘It’s designed to help people get in touch with themselves. You know: Who are you? What makes you tick? What do you want out of life?’

Sunny’s father strides into his room with a hammer. The teenager braces himself, an arm flung over his head. His father, lips blue
with fury, sweeps past towards the room’s only window. Wrenching four nails angrily from his pocket, he hammers the shutters closed. The window is never to be re-opened. Natural sunlight is banned. From now on, Sunny will have to study by the light of a desk lamp.

Five years on and now a third-year journalism student, Sunny recalls the incident over a bottle of fizzy orange in his university canteen. A good-humoured smile flashes across his cheeky face. His grin is semi-permanent, as though it came with his name.

Sunny is dressed in rolled-up, retro jeans and a branded red T-shirt. He is the campus funny guy.

The violent incident stemmed from a girl, he tells me. ‘Opposite my window, on the other side of the road, was a flat with a balcony where a girl used always to come. I used to keep looking at that girl. And she’d look at me. It went on for almost a week. On the day I was talking about, my father was cooking in the kitchen next door and he saw the girl standing there. That’s when he came rushing in and locked the window. Afterwards he asked me if I was looking at her. Of course, I said “no, no, no”. Can you believe it? It’s a crazy thing. I know it is. But in my village, everyone has that kind of mentality.’

The window episode occurred in Patna, Bihar, Sunny’s home state. His father was working in the city as a teacher. Although he himself was only a high-school graduate, he was adamant that his son would go to the Indian Institute of Technology. And so Sunny spent his late teens cramming at his artificially illuminated desk. His father banned anything that might distract him. Especially girls.

‘He used to consider even looking at girls a sin,’ Sunny says with a rueful smile. ‘If I looked at a girl, he used to ask me, “Why are you looking at her?”’

Sunny, as it turned out, had no aptitude for science or engineering. Girls, not numeric equations, were what filled his post-pubescent brain. The more his attentions drifted from theorems to hemlines, the more repressive his father became.

Prevented from so much as speaking to a girl, Sunny became
‘desperate’, as he puts it. He began masturbating. Only his dad caught him at that too. He looks at me straight in the eye, appalled, for a moment forgetting his mask as the resident course comic.

‘Do you know how much fear he sent into my heart about masturbating? He said I’d become weak, that I’d not become tall, that I’d lose my memory power. And I was so frightened that though I had all the urges I used to be so scared of all that. You know, it was only when I came here to university and researched thoroughly on this matter, that I realised that masturbation was not injurious to health.’

The Indian Institute of Technology never worked out. He struck on journalism instead. The wide-eyed boy from Bihar entered the campus gates as fixated as he was naive about sex and relationships. Until then, the opportunity to actually ‘go out’ with a girl had been inconceivable. Not that dating in the Western sense is really an option. Most Indian teenagers are left to lust from afar. Or from the couch.

Sunny somehow succeeded in keeping his pornography habit silent. At sixteen, he came late to the porn scene. For many Indian youngsters, blue movies provide an alternative to the blanket classroom silence on the subject of sex. Earlier it was all on pirated DVDs, watched secretly round at friends’ houses. The arrival of the Internet has made accessing pornography easier, according to Sunny. At first, he didn’t care what he watched. Over time, he’s become something of a connoisseur. He’ll always opt for an imported film over local content. ‘In Indian porn, the woman is not very participative. Just the sex and it’s over. That’s the difference.’ All his friends agree.

‘Would you like a drink?’ he asks.

‘Sure, thanks. Whatever you’re having.’

He returns from the canteen checkout with two more orangeades. I ask how he’s adapted to university life, ‘with the girls and everything’. Sunny makes a show of looking abashed. He’s not. Not any more, at least. In the beginning, it was different. As
with all the boys from rural or conservative backgrounds, he was struck dumb by shyness.

‘When you come from the villages or any other part of India to a place like Manipal, the society over here is very open,’ he says, referring to the suburb of the small coastal town of Udupi in Western Karnataka where the journalism college is based.

‘Open in what sense?’

‘Here people talk about anything, anything, I tell you. Take this girl in my class. One day, she sits beside me and she starts drawing body parts, male and female. She asked me to name them. I named her ears, mouth, nose and everything. Then she drew a penis, huh. I didn’t know what to say. Then she said “penis”. I thought, oh my goodness, what is this?’

In such an environment, Sunny’s tongue-tie problem soon passed. After that, his reticence swung to the other extreme. He used to go round ‘proposing everyone’, university slang for asking a girl out. When that failed, he tried the ‘rakhi sister’ ploy.

The scheme derives from ancient Indian custom. Tradition has it that, on nearing adulthood, a girl ties a holy thread (or rakhi) to her brother’s wrist and her sibling then commits to protect her for life. It is all rather gallant. ‘Brother’ and ‘sister’ need not always be linked by blood. Close family ties sometimes suffice. The students have adapted this loophole to their own ends. To gain a rakhi sister is not to gain a girlfriend, as such, but it does offer access into her friendship circle, which, by Sunny’s previous standards, marks a promising first base.

A pretty girl from his broadcasting class approaches. She is wearing a pair of tight-fitting denim jeans. The cut of the trousers accentuates the thinness of her legs. Her one-size-too-small T-shirt has a similarly pronouncing effect on her modest bust.

Her arrival marks a break in our conversation. The two begin discussing a pending assignment. They are clearly on familiar terms. Sunny starts ribbing her – or, as he puts it, ‘taking the liberty’ – about a fellow classmate whom he alleges she fancies. He calls her ‘Mal’, which in Hindi literally means ‘item’. Colloquially, it translates closer to ‘hooker’.

Not all Sunny’s classmates conform to the ‘open culture’ that he has so readily embraced. A number remain ‘conservative’, a term he uses frequently and only ever as a pejorative. Girls dominate the category. Most come from rural backgrounds such as his. They prefer studying to socialising, he says. And they blush at his graphic jokes. These ‘behan jis’ (‘sisters’) stand out as prudes in Manipal only because of the university town’s reputation as a cosmopolitan hub. Much more representative of middle India is Mangalore, an hour down the coast and a world apart. There the prudes reign.

A provincial port town, important in the export of coffee and cashew nuts, Mangalore has a homespun and mildly forlorn feel to it. The main road is being resurfaced when I arrive. It is part of a drive to spruce up the place. A flattened road surface to go with the town’s first all-shining, half-empty shopping mall.

One of hundreds of third- or fourth-tier towns, Mangalore has no more than a walk-on part on the national stage. In that sense, recent years represent something of an aberration. Not once, but twice, the port town has hit the headlines. The second incident occurred a week before my arrival, when an Air India plane overshot the runway and killed almost everyone on board. Before that, there was the ‘Pink Chaddi affair’.

The hullabaloo began in Amnesia, one of a handful of bars popular with Mangalore’s young crowd. During the day, students from nearby colleges – St Aloysius, Madhyama Kendra, SDM, Besant – would come to hang out, play pool and drink beer. At weekends, a DJ would play and a bigger crowd might gather. The scene was never as raucous as in Manipal. Most students originate from Mangalore itself and are subject to parental curfews. Closing time at Amnesia used to be eleven o’clock.

One February afternoon, a group of around forty or so slogan-chanting young men gathered outside the pub. Their saffron-coloured headbands and scarves identified them as militant Hindus, part of a radicalised group called Sri Ram Sena (literally, ‘Lord Ram’s Army’). Reports of what happened next are sketchy. What seems certain is that the mob broke in,
grabbed a number of young women from inside and partially stripped them. Then, in broad daylight, they dragged them outside and beat them up. The police were called but arrived long after the thugs had disappeared. No arrests were made.

The case was then taken up by a group of women’s rights activists in Bengaluru, the state capital. In very contemporary India fashion, they coordinated their protest through the social-networking site Facebook. The group opted for a suitably provocative name: ‘The Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women’. Their Facebook page attracted fifty thousand members in the first week. In addition to much emailing and wall-posting, supporters were encouraged to take direct action. The call went out to send the chief minister a pair of pink chaddis (or underwear) for St Valentine’s Day.

Voices within the Hindu right have long inveighed against Valentine’s Day as ‘un-Indian’. Its religious-minded opponents deride it as a celebration of all that’s rotten and impure about the promiscuous West. In the run-up to the Amnesia attack, Sri Ram Sena, the self-appointed custodians of India’s cultural traditions, issued a warning. Any unmarried couples found together on 14 February would be marched to the nearest temple and forced to tie the knot. Sending their underwear was the Consortium’s literal way of saying ‘Eat my Shorts!’. Women responded in droves.

What good the campaign did is difficult to tell. The media concerned itself as much with the underwear’s cleanliness (were they used or not?) as with the cause they were designed to symbolise. Certainly, the chief minister did not appear overly put out. Despite official promises, he declined to enact the strong-arm Goonda Act against the attack’s perpetrators. Nor have the police advanced any further with their inquiries. As for the women attacked, they have gone into hiding.

I spend a couple of days traipsing around Mangalore trying to find out more. Through a local journalist, I track down the number of Pawan Shetty. The twenty-six-year-old shot to fame after intervening in the brawl outside Amnesia. He was the only bystander to do so. The television footage shows the rickshaw
driver’s son throwing himself into the throng and disappearing under a hail of punches. His intervention distracted the thugs for long enough to allow a few of the girls to escape.

I put in a call to him and fifteen minutes later he pulls up at my hotel on a noisy Yamaha motorbike with a flatulent exhaust. He indicates for me to jump on the back and we roar off into the traffic.

We head to Liquid Lounge, a busy bar just in front of Amnesia. The latter stands empty. After the attack, government inspectors slapped it with a temporary closure order. Copious red tape and legal wrangling have resulted in the measure becoming permanent. Rumour has it that the owner of Liquid Lounge was in cahoots with the Sri Ram Sena mob, Pawan says. True or not, the removal of the nearest competition is certainly working in its favour. The bar is packed with early-evening drinkers. Meatloaf is playing at full volume. We sit outside.

Pawan orders a jug of beer and we kill time waiting for it to arrive. A one-time bodybuilder, he evidently enjoys his new-found fame. Anywhere I want to go, anyone I want to speak with, he can sort me out, he assures me. Good-looking and a sharp dresser, Pawan is a born hustler. He works the university scene mostly. He’s short on specifics. On other subjects, however, he’s positively verbose: the girlfriend who wants to be an air hostess, the brother who works as a valet at the mall, the father who has fallen on hard times. He’s a talker. He reminds me of Sunny.

The beer arrives and I pour us both a glass. ‘So, the incident outside Amnesia, can you tell me a bit more about it?’

He falls strangely quiet. There’s not much to tell really, he mumbles in an offhand way. He picks up a pack of cigarettes from the table and starts turning it between his fingers. ‘I was just drinking tea in the Woodside hotel next door when I heard some shouts from the road.’ He saw the mob arrive and watched them break into the pub through the back door. Next thing, he caught sight of about ten men dragging out a girl by the hair. ‘They were slapping her around, calling her a prostitute and other such insults.’ He approached to try and reason with them. Someone
pushed him. So he pushed them back and, ‘Well, that’s about all of it.’

He takes a slug of his drink. I try pushing him for details. How many girls were there? Did he recognise any of the faces in the mob? He answers evasively.

‘I was boozed,’ the Shining Knight of Mangalore eventually admits, a little sheepishly.

The vagueness of his memory leaves me a little disappointed. It must show on my face because Pawan senses it. He tries to make amends. ‘Do you do marijuana?’ he wants to know. I don’t. ‘Coke?’ I pay for the beer and he drives me back to the hotel. We shake hands. ‘Remember, anyone you want to speak to in Mangalore. Just let me know. I can sort you out.’ He disappears down the road and into the night.

The next morning, I decide to head to one of Mangalore’s universities. I opt for the Jesuit college of St Aloysius perched on top of Light House Hill. Its chapel is reputed to be one of the few examples of baroque architecture in the whole of India. Struggling up the hill, I stop at a wayside juice bar. It is nothing fancy: plastic chairs and tables, a man behind the counter chopping and liquidising fruit, a Hindi pop song playing over the radio. I order a banana shake, which arrives spilling over with froth and tasting sweet and sugary. Three of the tables are occupied, all with young folk in their teens or twenties. They lounge on the seats and fill the room with excitable chatter.

A few weeks earlier, I had picked up a report by a Bengaluru-based civil liberties group about ‘cultural policing’ in the Mangalore region. It is sitting in my bag, unread. Deciding to put off the hill and the heat a little longer, I take out the report and begin reading. It is comparatively short. It is also terribly earnest. Talk of constitutional protection, ‘egregious’ human rights abuses and ‘social apartheid’ fill its pages. The content itself, however, is illuminating.