Around midnight in Mumbai, there are still women on the roads: driving out for coffee, taking a stroll down Marine Drive, hurrying back home after catching the last train, talking on their cellphones as they shift smoothly from a bar to another pub.
I?m one of them, except that unlike the rest of my laughing, chattering friends, I can?t take this casual freedom for granted. Travelling around India, you learn the rules: the mountains are women-friendly, so is the South, Bihar is a nightmare, the East, for all its vaunted respect for gender equality, can be primly conservative.
In metros like Calcutta, you learn the unwritten rules very fast. It?s ok to walk down Park Street at 10 pm alone, but not at 2 am, women may amble and shop and drive but still draw disapproving glares if they smoke in public areas ? however, it?s perfectly all right for four women to go out alone to a disco or a pub. In crowded Mumbai, no one cares what you do.
It took just two days to lose the Delhi glare ? the don?t-you-even-think-about-it-buster look that?s armour against bottom-pinchers, molesters, singers of sleazily suggestive songs and other choice specimens of North Indian manhood. It took a bit longer to figure out appropriate danger signals: in a city where you don?t have to put up defences, it?s hard to know when to be wary.
My male friends in Mumbai are puzzled at the almost childish glee with which I do ?normal? stuff: go for walks, take autos, revel in the absence of hostile or leering glances. It?s hard to explain that the looseness in my walk is brought about by the oddness of freedom from fear in a big Indian city. It?s a feeling familiar in London, where you might worry about being mugged or the odd racist attack, but not gender issues too much, or Edinburgh, or even Chandigarh ? but not the capital of India.
My women friends are gleeful as they rack up points in the eternal Delhi versus Mumbai debate. ?Lit up a cig in an auto in Delhi once, and everyone stared!? ?The way they brush up against you ? no one does that here, even though Mumbai?s much more crowded.? ?Went out with three other women friends to a bar and had the waiter bringing us men?s visiting cards all evening!? We agree, politely, that Delhi has more parks. Tactfully, no one mentions that no sane women would stroll alone in them.
Back in Delhi, the city?s healthy paranoia begins to look? sick. Instead of sticking my elbows out or stepping out of some lustful cretin?s way, I meditate on the uses of Kalashnikovs. I?m used to absolute freedom, in Edinburgh, in Gangtok and Kanyakumari and Mumbai. Anywhere but home.
The day after I return, a friend calls to ask me over for dinner. But my partner can?t make it, she lives far away and dinner will be late ? too late to drive back or cab it safely. ?Not this time,? I say. She understands. And a question one of my Mumbai friends asked comes back to me: ?How do women survive in a paranoid city?? As I step out, I check my ?hands-off, creep!? glare, reposition the handbag to double as weapon, and think of that old adage: only the paranoid survive.
