Calcutta: Perverse old me took the Metro on Thursday to see if anything exciting would happen. Nothing did.

From Netaji Bhavan station to Chandni Chowk, the office-time crowd stood in rows in front of the seats. I also stood and sometimes I felt a light press of male bodies on my back, but not much else. It was crowded, but not very.

The most exceptional things that happened in the 20-odd minutes of the ride were the incessant cry of an infant who remained hidden behind a forest of torsos and limbs and a pair of young girls who hung before me as I finally got a seat.

The girls were sharing a headphone attached to a mobile phone that one of them was holding, and each girl had an earplug squeezed into an ear and looked conjoined, but I wonder what they were listening to, as they never, for a moment, stopped chatting.

In these circumstances, I wondered what would happen if a young couple was spotted behaving rather freely. It was quite difficult to imagine the rows of faces that were arranged above and around me, bland, or self-engrossed, or in conversation, with many of them presumably belonging to the "gentleman" (bhadralok) class of Bengalis, erupting into fury, about anything at all. Even if they had, famously, on Monday evening, in the Metro, when they assaulted a young couple for being "obscene".

So I tried to imagine what I would do if the amorous young couple was sitting next to me. I think I would be filled with pure envy, looking at them. I would regret my lost youth spent not having as much fun, or freedom, as I should have had, because I would have been controlled by the gazes from the faces that were arranged above and around me. Much as I could not imagine them erupting into fury, I could very well imagine them looking at me, stopping me, inhibiting me. I have known those gazes all my life. They have always hung over me.

And then looking at the young couple again, I would have felt angry. All anger is sexual, Anne Carson has said. And all that is sexual is political. That is how the Sanghis could invent "love jihad". And anger transforms everything.

So at that moment I could, too, transform from my bland middle-aged self and want to beat the brains out of the two young people who were doing what I could never do.

I always remember the subway scene in Irréversible, in which Monica Bellucci's character is battered and battered and battered, with what looks like great patience and commitment and perfection, by a stranger, till she turns into pulp. I have always tried to figure out the man's anger. Belluci's character had what he didn't. It is the same anger that makes young men target a young woman in a Delhi bus and brutalise her. It is the same anger that the Metro couple would have inspired in their audience.

Obscenity is just an excuse. The assault is a matter of pride, for the perpetrators of the violence, in the name of respectability.

The Metro incident brought a weird sense of déjà vu to me. Only a few months earlier, one of my closest friends, who lives in Wellington, called me up from there. She was very disturbed, she said. One of her mother's friends, a good, dependable woman in her early 60s and a Calcuttan, was very glad that she had taught a young couple a lesson, she was saying, and was spreading her story all over the world.

The mother's friend was travelling in an autorickshaw, when, lo and behold!, she sees the young couple next to her indulging in unspeakable behaviour. She warned them once, twice, yet again. But they wouldn't listen. So she, with her commanding personality, stopped the auto, got down, dragged the couple out, and slapped them, repeatedly, and threatened to take them to the nearest police station. The girl and the boy fell on their knees. She relented and let them go, but not before the crowd gathered around them congratulated her whole-heartedly.

A bit of Calcutta, a bit of the bhadralok, or bhadramahila, was always like this. The tidal wave of conservatism everywhere is only helping him and her to show their true colours, which are not only saffron.