I’m 13, barely growing into my body, and I don’t know the city enough. Home to school to back home, my relationship with the city’s roads are defined in bus rides and sweltering Sundays spent in Connaught Place, surrounded by café-hoppers and chewing tobacco lovers. The only place I can recognize like the soles of my feet is the round bookstore near the place where my mother buys her jhumkas and kurtas. People only look at me to sell me things, as I navigate the city on my mother’s terms.
I’m 15, and we trace footsteps to the mall and back. We make space for ourselves in movie theatres and coffee shops. My friends learn to be loud in groups while I follow them with feathery footsteps and a pair of lips permanently stitched together with shyness. I chalk it up to the fact that I’m just the girl we’re all supposed to learn to be anyway – my silence is a head-start as we all grow into the gender the billboards teach us to become.
I’m 17, body growing in places I don’t understand the meaning of, and no one bothers to explain. We look at the women in Swarovski and Chanel posters and try to figure out where our bodies fit. We become more acquainted in the mall and corners where it’s safe for boys to touch us. We become more acquainted with “safety”: don’t stay out past 8, don’t step into an autorickshaw without calling your mother first, don’t invite boys at home, don’t, don’t, don’t. I am taught to spell “woman” before I am taught to spell “freedom” but I am told I’m allowed to experience both equally. “Equality” is reduced to a set of syllables like the murmuring of my mother praying each morning, and I wonder what do these words mean – if this is meant for me, why is it that I’m still taught how to use pepper spray before I am taught how to drive? “Equality” is an auto-ride into cognitive dissonance. “Freedom” is a trip to the mall. My reality is a world apart from the white women in all the advertisements. Sometimes I feel like a consumer, but mostly I too feel like a product, and the city is moulding me to become both at the same time.
I’m 19 and freedom tastes different: it tastes like wet earth in parks we were always forbidden to visit, passive smoke and cheap chicken rolls. Freedom looks like the walls of forts and monuments and history I’m just beginning to discover. Freedom looks like a city I’ve lived in all my life and am only now experiencing. The city teaches me to revel in it, to brave the crowds and the staring, the “eveteasing” and the hands trying to grope you on busy metro trains. We shed the word “safety” and “security” and learn the ways of the world as we wear down the broken footpath edges with our busy feet.
I’m 21 and the city is on fire. I become part of the protests in university, I run from the men who chase us with slurs about our bodies in one breath and slogans about the nation in another. Freedom looks more and more like transformation of the city and the self. It is no more centred on my desire to consume. I loiter in parks after dark but only when I am allowed to. The possibilities in the city present itself: public spaces, accessible to all, that can change the nature of how we mingle with each other. Finding friendship on sweltering afternoons at Arts Fac, or at chai stalls in CR Park, I finally understand this is what it means to be part of a city, and for the city to be part of me.
Shirin Choudhary is a poet, activist and enthusiast of hugs from New Delhi, India. They love to talk/write about human rights, poetry, literature, love and the pleasures of holding your friend's hands.
