Two women

I looked at myself in my new Lauren by Ralph Lauren dress in the mirror and was suddenly and most anticlimactically reminded of a news piece I read about a few weeks back. A dalit woman being paraded naked in Punjab (more states would follow or had already done so).

What she had done to deserve this is probably immaterial and to ask why too frivolous. It was enough that she was a dalit and that she was a woman.

Like me.

We are the same women. I could have been her. She could have been me.

In flashes of atavistic imagination, I saw myself stripped of that dress with numerous Rajput male eyes on me. On her behalf, I tried to experience a fraction the helplessness, insecurity and shame and found myself vaguely incapable. In dense irony, technology would come to the service of misplaced archaism, and cellphone cameras would go into overdrive.

The country we live in is a study of contradictions. People become animals, animals become Gods, Gods become people. Then people become Gods and cultivate with indulgence an obssession with heirarchy that is evident not just in religion but everywhere else. It is what makes us ignore the many convoluted, mystical, theatrical layers of hinduism and take back only the classification that can help us discriminate. Dalit womanhood spread so thin as to incorporate me and her within and still have no evidence of indigestion, no revolts, no talks of abnormality.

Of course I would keep my dress. I would like to wear it to that pind in Punjab. I would like to manifest the contradiction, and the abormality.

Status - Of all the things I feel right now, the strongest is gratitude. My father crossed several worlds on his own with no one to hold his hand. The many, many things I take for granted (like being clothed) would not have been possible were it not for his simple self-belief.