When Ruma Banik’s husband beats her up, he is not always drunk. Or, at least, not very drunk. But if there is one major pretext for his violence, it is sexual jealousy. How many men did Ruma talk to on her way to and from work? How many men looked at her? Did she wear those earrings to show off? How many men did she cosy up to when on the train?

Ruma is one of the thousands of women who travel daily by local train to work in houses in the city. She is also one of the numberless women whose husbands thrash them regularly because of imagined infidelities. It does not matter that many of these women are the chief earners in their household, and if they did not go out to work their families would starve. They cannot imagine travelling in anything but the women’s compartment in the train. Such compartments are famous. The derisively labelled “housemaid’s express” is regarded with some nervousness, and a lot of disgust and contempt. The women, packed into the reserved compartment and almost falling off its doors are known to be aggressive, rough, raucous in their sexual comments, and hostile. They are also desperate to prove their sexual integrity to their home and their world.

Two years ago, I asked Shashi, who came to Calcutta everyday from a village near Joynagar, whether she had been ever harassed sexually. I was shamefully ignorant of the sensitiveness of the question at that time. Shashi, who is intelligent, direct and forever cheerful, answered quickly, “No, no, we are not that kind of girls.” I knew she has a kind and supportive husband. Her reaction shows how certain social and cultural perceptions were a normal, accepted part of their lives. Travelling in the reserved compartment need not ever be consciously related to incidents of jealousy, harassment or sexual encounters outside of marriage. It was the only way to travel; gender discrimination within the home had its natural counterpart in the public space.

Strangely, this multitude of noisy women cannot make themselves heard where it matters. The railway authorities suddenly decided to halve their reserved space. Each of the two women’s compartments on each train was divided between vendors and women. The physical risks of travelling doubled, but working women found it impossible, because of their frantic schedules, to get together and protest. They became rougher and more desperate, daily risking falls and suffocation to travel in the reserved compartments. A petition with signatures from domestic workers requesting authorities for more reserved compartments and women’s toilets in local stations was recently presented to the railways. The new trains will have another compartment reserved for women; two new ones already do. That restores the original space that was taken away. If the administration is willing to provide gender-segregated space, it would be nice if there could be some thinking as to who needs it and where.