A couple of hours after Jagannath De was beaten brutally for protesting eve-teasing on a bus, I was subjected to harassment of a bizarre kind. This is what happened to me...

It was a rainy Sunday evening and I was headed for a friend’s place in Tallah for dinner. I took the Metro from Kalighat and got off at Shyambazar, from where another friend was to pick me up. It was 7 pm and my friend was still 10 minutes away.

As it was raining intermittently, I stood at the Metro station entrance, put on my iPod and waited. The roads were quite deserted so I felt safer seeing two khaki-clad policemen on duty at the Metro exit.

I was to be proved horribly wrong.

Suddenly, I noticed them leching at me. They were most blatant about it. Then, one of them came up to me and said: “You cannot stand here. Get out of the station.”

I was shocked. “I do not know north Calcutta well. It is raining outside. I am waiting for a friend,” I explained.

The man in uniform refused to see reason. “It does not matter. You cannot stand here. Get out of the station,” he barked.

A few other passengers were also waiting there for the rain to stop. He did not say anything to them. Not wanting trouble, I went and stood under a tree. But it started pouring and I had to rush back to take shelter at the mouth of the station.

The policeman immediately picked on me in the crowd — there were at least 20 people there sheltering from the rain — and ordered me out.

I protested. “There are so many people standing here. Why are you singling me out?” His reply? “They are waiting because of the rain; you have been standing here for the past half an hour.”

That was a lie. It had hardly been 10 minutes, of which I had spent five minutes at the receiving end of this man’s lecherous look and abrasive tongue.

At that moment my friend arrived and I told him what had happened. He demanded an explanation from the man in khaki, who nonchalantly said it was his duty to throw me out of the Metro station premises.

When he refused to identify himself, we approached a sub-inspector near the ticket counter. He heard us out and then apologised on behalf of his subordinate for his “misbehaviour”.

I left Shyambazar Metro station, pacified by the attitude of the sub-inspector but with a bitter taste in my mouth. I will never again tell my friends in Delhi or Mumbai that Calcutta is a safe city for women — not as long as there are protectors who turn tormentors.

Metro Rail officials said on Monday there “is no bar on people standing at the station entrance”, but if cops find someone “suspicious”, they can challenge him or her.

“This is an unfortunate incident. We have been urging our men to behave properly with citizens.... I will definitely look into it,” said Gyanwant Singh, the deputy commissioner of police (headquarters).

(Chandralekha Tulal, 28, was with The Telegraph till January 2007.)