Ladies and General of the Delhi Metro

The numerous metro lines that run across Delhi are like colourful veins that keep the city’s heart pumping. Before moving to this city, which was almost five years ago, I was told by numerous relatives who reside in Delhi that to truly experience the city, one has to experience the metro. This, and that Delhi was unsafe for girls, the rape capital of the country. I moved to Delhi in the burning summer of 2013 with a very regular fear in my heart about my safety. I tiptoed around the city, avoiding any corner that had two or more men standing in a group and avoided the city on the whole after sun down. As someone who had never been around large groups of men being in a girls’ school and then moving to a girls’ college, I was petrified of them. Plus, the news had also “informed” me that men in large groups were dangerous. With the Nirbhaya case still fresh in mind I swore off buses and decided to take a metro ride to go and meet my aunt and get me some home cooked meal. Better be safe than sorry!
I remember anxiously getting into the large crowded building lined with autos, rickshaws and always a Café Coffee Day. The serious grey walls and single, straight files of people familiar with their journey was intimidating. People passed through the security checks and ticket panels like trained machine parts helping in the smooth functioning of this well-oiled machine. They were so accustomed to this routine that they could do it with their eyes glued to their phones or between the pages of a book (the two most common sights on a metro). I, on the other hand, felt like a dysfunctional part of this machine, slightly rusted. I observed closely, the ways in which people got the entire process done and I focused on copying them. Balancing the change and my wallet in one hand, my bag on my shoulder and a bottle in the other hand, I stood in the ticket line. I was embarrassingly clumsy and walked into the male security checking booth. “Memsahab udhar,” the guard pointed in the direction of the women’s booth. I walked sheepishly towards it and made sure not to make eye contact with the lady checking me after my blunder. The girl on the gateway next to mine put a blue card against the counter and the gateway in front of her opened to give her way. Did the ticket guy give me the wrong kind of a ticket? What if this grey plastic disc wasn’t the ticket? I got anxious regarding how to open my gateway. Panic was slowly rising in me. The fear of coming across as stupid refrained me from asking for help. The line behind me was increasing with a few people getting restless about the delay. A boy behind me probably sensed my crisis and offered help. Reading the boards and following the arrows, I climbed up to the platform. I was super relieved to see a pink poster stuck on the ground that said “Women Only”. I remember thinking how pretty the poster was with white flowers sprinkled on the pink around the cursive calligraphy. Suddenly I wasn’t anxious as I followed other women in the women’s compartment. Metro rides are going to be hassle free, I thought.

Now half of the “Women Only” sticker on the floor has faded and with that, my uncertainty and hesitation as well. With my head bowed down to my phone or kindle I pass through the gateways and go to the platform without seeing any direction boards. I stand on the dull pink sticker that reads only “Women” now till the metro arrives and I mechanical climb onto the women’s compartment as soon as the metro door opens with a beeping sound. Sounds are my cue now. Sight can be used for other important stuff. I take the violet line daily from Nehru Place to Kashmere Gate. Yes, it connects to Kashmere Gate now. It is my daily route; monotonous and insipid. The metro empties a little at Nehru Place, fills in at Moolchand and Lajpat Nagar. Hardly anyone gets on or off at JLN or Khan Market. A chunk of the crowd gets off at Central Secretariat and I finally get a seat at Mandi House. I make space according for the incoming and outgoing crowd without even looking up. I don’t feel the need to be super alert all the time and I am so familiar with the process in these five years that all my self-consciousness has vanished in the thin air. However, one thing that still remains is that I religiously travel only in the women’s compartment. As far as I can recall, I have travelled in the general compartments twice in five years. One of those times I was accompanied by two male friends which made me feel safe and the other time I was with my father. Otherwise, I always preferred the last (or first) ones reserved for ladies. Prevention is better than cure and fear of safety is stronger than missing a metro because one could not reach the ladies’ coach. And life in the metro went on.

On September 6^th, 2018 when our class had to go on a field trip for a class assignment. The trip involved us travelling on the violet line, from one end to the other, that is, from Kashmere Gate to Escorts Mujesar then back to Kashmere Gate. We all assembled at the metro gate ready to start our journey. It was not a journey that strayed from my daily routine so I walked on my daily path to the violet line area conversing with a friend and guiding the ones who did not travel by this line regularly. Keeping to my routine, I stood near the pink sticker and got inside the women’s coach. I sat down on a seat and covered the entire journey till Escorts Mujesar on it. This was my comfort zone. It felt pretty regular till my daily getting off station, Nehru Place. A girl with her earphones on was watching a popular romantic Hindi television show on her phone. How was she getting any signal here? What network connection did she have? Two women were talking about their household chores and one woman was setting up boundaries for her over-active kid who hung around all the poles in that coach. This was such a mundane sight that I could hardly notice anything that was worth writing about. The humdrum of my daily route made my observational skills numb. It was only after Nehru Place that I started to look outside the window. The view was unfamiliar and unfamiliar always made me uncomfortable. I had never travelled past Kalkaji before. The buildings, the trees, the roads were subtly changing with each metro station. As I got down at the Escorts Mujesar station with the rest of the class, something about the view reminded me of my hometown Lucknow. A specific area of Lucknow that wasn’t completely residential yet. There were wider open grounds, less houses. The metro station was so empty that we were the only group creating a little hustle bustle.

It was time to make the return journey, I really wanted to find something that would strike an idea in my mind. That would speak to me. After much deliberation with my own self I decided to board the general coach of the metro for our journey back to Kashmere Gate. Our entire group dismantled to find their own little details to focus on. I sat on the corner seat near the charging point and noticed that for the very first time I was the only woman in that coach. All the seats were occupied by men. Three young men stood leaning against the metal poles situated in the centre of the coach. An old fear rose in me. A fear that I had put at bay with the help of my old friend “caution” who was introduced to me by my mother. My eyes automatically searched for a female in the coach to ease my sudden restlessness. As soon as I saw one of my classmates casually leaning on the seat in the very next coach, a subtle relief washed over me and I sat back on my seat ready to observe. However, instead of observing around me, my mind got preoccupied with the abrupt and uninstigated fear that I just experienced. How was it that one coach of the same metro made me so comfortable and at ease while the other had me on the edge. The consciousness and the hesitation I had in my first metro ride returned unknowingly after five years. Just then, a middle-aged man in a bright red shirt occupied the seat just next to mine. The man was talking on the phone in a raw Haryanvi accent and even before he was about to sit down, I sat up straight again and shifted more to the left of my seat, increasing the gap between him and me. This action on a two-seater space with hardly any room to shift was a subtle sign of my constant edginess. Even though the man was extremely polite and was standing up and offering his seat every time one of my girl-friends stopped to chat with me while they were scanning through the metro, I could not shake off the uneasiness. He was busy watching a music video on his phone if not talking to someone on it every now and then, oblivious of my awkwardness. A part of me wanted to get up and go to my safe space; the ladies’ coach. More than half of my journey went by trying to be careful not to brush up against his shoulder. I sat very still and very straight. I was adamant not to leave my seat because I did not want my fear to guide me and box me up in a singular box. However, the fear was still there. At Jangpura, when an elderly uncle entered the coach booming with criticisms about the economy and the government, I swiftly got up to offer my seat to him and placed myself in a non-crowded corner of the coach.

I observed a number of things on that metro ride but this feeling that I had was something that got stuck in my mind for long after.

The ladies’ coach, “Women Only”, was no more than an air-conditioned cage which I walked into willingly because fear. The so-called “general” coach was actually a men’s coach if you think about it with one or two women sitting there in their allotted seats under the green stickers. Most of these women were accompanied by their male peers or relatives. If, by chance, they happened to be alone, they were careful to look down on the floor or phone and not make any eye contact with the fellow male passengers. They were cautious enough to put on earphones throughout their travel and sit straight with their bags in front of them on their laps. They often crossed their legs and refrained from sitting back comfortably. These were like the unsaid codes for women sitting in the “general” coach; the masculine space. I realized that Delhi Metro’s claim of a woman’s safety is a huge illusion made of glass that would break the moment a woman decided to travel in the general coach. If a woman makes a choice to not sit in the first or last coach of the metro, her safety was not guaranteed. A feature of the Delhi metro that felt like a boon to me, suddenly felt suffocating. It was another way of pigeonholing women under the context that the outside world was dangerous for them. Haven't we heard similar arguments for several other things like going out of the house or going out at night? Making a separate coach just for women is a solution but an utterly short-sighted one. It propagates the archaic idea that women need to be separated from men in order to be safe or to even feel secure. Creating a safe space for women should not necessarily mean creating a space where men aren’t allowed to enter. These “pockets of freedom” are merely an illusion. They act like small concessions in the public sphere which is otherwise entirely dominated by men and even functions on their terms. The presence of a conscious and scared female in the general compartment of the Delhi Metro, waiting for her station to arrive as soon as possible, is a proof that the claim of safety for women is a hollow one.
This deliberate compartmentalization of men and women in the capital’s most sort after public transport creates a risky rift where there is no possibility of forging a decent human connection. There is always a danger in such separation where the former might see the latter as a distant object while the latter’s fear enables a predatory perception of the former.
I mean I could have just had a mini interview with the man seated next to me for this piece, but my fear washed over that possibility.