New Girls in The City

 “He was sitting on the sofa and asked me if only girls were going to live in here. When I said yes, my sister and I, he took a brief pause and then took a heavy disappointed sigh that bordered annoyance. He didn’t even try to conceal his touchiness about the matter like most other landlords do,” my friend Subiya told me in a rather exasperated manner after another day of failed flat hunting.

At that time we were both looking to shift our accommodation separately but our situation was quite similar. She wanted a two bedroom flat in South Delhi to move in with her sister and so did I, but the intricacies of the stark difference in our experiences became pretty evident to me as we casually conversed or even vented or ranted after multiple failed attempts of finding a flat in the capital city.

“Di, he even told us that no one apart from family is allowed in the house,” she continued her rant about her recent encounter with an obnoxious landlord. “We don’t want any media in front of our house because of what girls do nowadays,” she mimicked a heavy voice to quote the landlord and we all eventually laughed at the silliness of it. The entire story behind such a comment was that this landlord had previously rented his place to a single girl who ran away flouting the contract and did not pay rent for three months. Even though I understood where his prejudice and assumptions seemed very misplaced. According to Subiya, he agreed to rent the place to girls only if they followed a long list of rules that he laid down for them. He started with the basic ones regarding no drinking or smoking in the house. No one apart from family was allowed in the house, not even female friends. He even told them about the guard who would keep a close check on them. “We politely declined his ‘favour’ and got out of there as soon as possible,” Subiya told me amidst our collective laughter.
But there was something to it, because almost every landlord and every broker that we came across was anxious about the fact that just girls were going to live in the apartment. However, the anxieties did not stem from just the gender. It wasn’t as simple as that.

Before I started looking for flats for the first time in my life, I was given a dense set of instructions that I had to follow to pacify the landlord into giving us the place. It was like an orientation program that my sister and my mother conducted for me since neither of them could be in town to take charge of the process. Some of these instructions included the kind of flat I was supposed to give a green signal to and the locality that was acceptable. However, most of the directives were regarding how I was supposed to conduct myself in front of the landlord if I liked the house and how I what all was I supposed to say.

1.      “Don’t tell them that only two girls are going to live in this flat. Tell them it’s for family. First thing you tell them is that it is mainly for your sister who is married.

2.      “Don’t go to see the houses alone!”

3.      “Don’t go in shorts or skirts to see the houses.

4.      “Ask them if they have any problems in friends coming over. Tell them that it is very rarely that friends would come over and even if they do there won’t be any disturbance created.

5.      Tell them that male friends would come over but not a lot.

6.      Do inform them that parents might come and stay for longer durations.

7.      Tell them all these things on your own before them asking so that they know that you understand their concerns.

Every time I went to see an apartment, it felt like I was going on a mission armed with these tactics. Or it was like going to buy vegetables that suited my diet but instead of a simple transaction, I had to convince the shopkeeper to sell me those vegetables.

Like an obedient younger sister, I followed all the instructions pretty religiously even though I did not think they mattered much. I was in an illusion that if I was willing to pay the said amount I could easily rent a flat in most areas of Delhi. I went from flat to flat and never experienced any sort of a bias or resentment or even hostility. I was never asked questions that felt rude and intruding and never given any warnings because I was very much shielded by the golden instructions I followed.
It was only after conversing with my friend Subiya that I realized the latter part of my sentence above. She was looking for a flat in the same area and she was also looking to move in with her sister. Both of us often gave each other leads about flats that were up for rent but both of us had starkly different experiences. I did recognize my privilege though. Some aspects gave me an advantage in this entire process. I was a North Indian Hindu with light skin. Things that put me at a disadvantage were that I was from Uttar Pradesh and that I was a single girl. The latter got diluted because I was moving in with my sister who was married.
The fact that my sister was married somehow made us a more complete family for flat owners than two unmarried sisters living together away from their homes. They were at a disadvantage to start with and this disadvantage invited a lot of uncomfortable questions that I never had to face.
She was not new to the flat hunting experience in Delhi and had several other experiences to share with me. She moved to Delhi from Saharanpur in 2015 and lived in a girls PG in Greater Kailash while she did her graduation. When I asked about her PG experience, she said that she was just out of school and her house, so she felt that living in a PG was a good mix of freedom and safety. “The time limit did start to feel very restricting but it never bothered me a lot at first, being able to be out of the house till nine also felt like freedom at first,” she told me.

She first started hunting flats with a PG mate near the North Campus in 2017 when all of her friends in the PG were moving out or shifting to flats. “It was my first time and I did not know how to go about it. I saw a lot of flats in Mukherjee Nagar, Model Town and Kamla Nagar but it took almost half a month to finally find a flat that was movable.”
“Most of the people showed us the flat but not all of them were keen to give it to us. They weren’t direct about it but their lack of interest showed. Our broker took us to this one flat in Model Town where the landlady outwardly told us that she doesn’t give her place to single girls. I would not have felt that insulted if she left it there but she made it a point to add that ‘inke harr time bhaiya hi badalte rehte hain.’” Because of the candid nature of our conversation, she told me how low she felt after that visit and how infuriated she was.

She also told me that somehow everyone felt the need to educate her and her roommate about the ethics of living alone in the city. Her brokers told her how to behave in front of landlords like my mother did. The landlords often gave her a set of rules and regulations regarding how to live in the house before even initiating a conversation about renting the house. Even the residents of the locality took it upon themselves to educate her to be “good girls” in case she was not.
“In the Mukherjee Nagar locality we visited multiple flats and on the road inside a colony a middle-aged woman randomly stopped us and started talking to us. It wasn’t a normal conversation that she was trying to strike but another educating session for girls who were  total stranger to her. I don’t remember all parts of what she said but there was stuff like ‘aap logo ko apna dhyaan khud rakhna chahiye’, ‘aisa kapde nahi pehna karo jab pata hai ki yahan kaisa mahaul hota hai’, and the best of all remarks that I can never forget, ‘taali ek haath se nahi bajti beta.’ The gist of that entire conversation was that she wanted to make sure that the girls moving to her locality were the right kind of girls.” She had a lot of stories to tell me about her experiences and all those stories came back to her being a single girl who dressed in a certain way.

“Mostly we got refused because out gender. After a while, it started feeling like that the brokers and the house owners all saw us with suspicion. There were hushed glances that were a proof of shared suspicion and always an underhand warning about prostitution. The assumption that girls living alone can be prostitutes was disturbing, infuriating and sadly, always there.”

Though she believed that it was because of gender in general, I knew because of my own experience that other factors played a role as well. I was never experienced the encounters she narrated to me and they felt outrageous to me. I asked her about how she dressed when she went to see flats and she responded with, “Like I always do Di, I mostly wore jeans and top. The day that woman stopped us, I was wearing a tank top and jeans.”

With her response I was taken back to this one experience I had when I did not follow my usual apartment hunting technique. I had to urgently go to see an apartment really close to where I was residing then in Chitranjan Park. It was early morning and I did not bother to change. I went with my then roommate. We were both in out night pyjamas and tank tops but I wrapped a thin shawl around me. We rushed to see the place which was on the third floor of a yellowish house. It was a big apartment with two rooms and a hall. We were joined by the landlord a little later. He was an old man, well in his sixties and as he saw both of us, I could hear him whisper to the broker, “These two girls want to move in?” The tone of his whispered question had a lot of scepticism in it and his nose wrinkled a little almost involuntarily. The broker immediately reassured him that my sister and I were the ones who would move in and that my sister was married. He was trying to make the sale on my behalf. Even with that piece of information, the landlord did not seem convinced. Unlike the broker, I could sense that he was not trying to make the sale anymore. He reluctantly showed us all the rooms of the house and after the brief tour in which he hardly inquired about anything, unlike most landlords, he showed us directly out of the door. While are way down he made just one remark that made it clear to me that he was not interested in giving the place to us. “Ye ghar thoda bada hai sirf do ladkiyo ke liye rehne ke liye.”

In that candid conversation between my friend and me about our perils of flat hunting, the way we presented ourselves and us being single girls or not came in almost all our experiences. Our coffee conversation almost seemed like a one-sided rant against landlords and their biases and judgements. So I decided to get some insight about how landlords chose their tenants. I talked to my current landlord who lives on the ground floor of a four storey building in Lajpat Nagar 4. He is a young man in his early thirties who lives with his mother. I live on the second floor of the same building now. I remember him telling us while we were finalizing the flats that he only rents it out to families and so I thought he could be a useless addition to my exploration.

“It’s not like I am biased against girls so I don’t want to give them flats. I don’t want to give it to single boys as well. Not because I think all of them necessarily wrong. It is just easy that way. I work till eight in the evening and my mother is alone in the house all day. Sometimes I have to travel as well. I feel safer to keep families as my tenants. Have some biscuit as well,” he gave me a tiny insight of his process while offering me some tea. He was excessively cautious about not coming across as someone who just denied residency to single girls.

“We keep hearing these stories in Delhi and one can never be too cautious. I think most landlords, like me, are just trying to play safe and in this world where everyone watches Crime Patrol, suspicion is inevitable. Plus, renting the flat to single girls means more responsibility for me. But yes I agree, some landlords are way too interfering and obnoxious. I have lived away from home as well and even I was given a lot of rules and regulations while I was renting a flat in Pune. But you know I don’t do that. Have you felt I have been interfering in this one month?” We shared a laugh as I reassured him that I was very comfortable living here.

After a conversation with him I was really unsure about what stance to take and my mind immediately started pondering over the possible solutions for this knot that was created between landlords and female tenants. It was a difficult terrain. As a girl, my sensitivities obviously lay with how almost all the girls living alone in the city had to face the consequences of certain assumptions. But I could not completely ignore the anxieties of the people giving their place to complete strangers. I did not know how to respond to my landlord when he expressed his anxieties. Hence, I prefer to articulate this conflict rather than find a hasty solution for it.

On Health, Illness and Healing

I began this project with the clarifying recognition that many of us who live with mental illnesses or care for those with mental illnesses often do not have the space to talk about the larger structures which determine their mental health in the society. The idea for this project had been brimming in my head for nearly three years. All the artwork is done is by Sonaksha Iyengar, a mental health advocate who shares her journey of healing through illustrations. 

There are ways to seven ways to describe this:

 No tendency to wake up

No spaces to make safe

No human who doesn't appear contrived

No escape from the fear instilled within you by the family and the state

No moment to sleep as sane people do with the lull of fantasies

No sentence that can carry through the social function of its consumption

In the summer of 2015, I had just brought a friend home to Kozhikode after she had her heart broken by her high-school sweetheart. One evening, my mother told me that my brother, Cheta, had the weekend off so he was coming home. When he arrived home, he looked at me and rushed towards me. He held my arms in a tight grip and gave me a hug. I was taken back because this possibly couldn’t be the same brother who hated physical contact and would only perform half-hugs for people. He told me how much he missed me, he strutted towards my room and hugged my friend too. Then he told us that he’s going out and wouldn’t be coming back for a while. Four hours later, he returned home. He said, “I had to go to the police station because someone tried to steal my scooter, which I had parked outside the church.” This statement shocked me even more. Both my parents are fairly indifferent to the existence of a divine entity; they are atheists. Naturally, neither Cheta nor I took any interest in going to religious sites. But the last straw was when we went out for dinner that night. The Arabic restaurant, Al-Baik was serving shawarmas but not Cheta’s favourite Al-Faham; roasted chicken. He looked up with indignation at the waiter when he informed him that they were out Al-Faham. He banged on the table with his fists, brought his face close to the tablecloth and burst out in tears. My mother looked at me across the table, her face turning beet-red with panic. Circling the table, my father went and stood next to Cheta. He rubbed his back as Cheta sobbed loudly into the tablecloth. Four days after that, Cheta had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. That diagnosis has changed the way that I look at mental health and the deafening silence that surrounds it all given moments. Writing this piece is my way of breaking the silence, understanding the stigma that surrounds mental health illness, gauging the consequences of being diagnosed and gaining insight into support networks that are formed.

Since that diagnosis, Cheta has been in therapy for the past three years and is also taking medication in order to keep his mood fluctuations to the minimum. He works as a chef at a restaurant in Kozhikode and lives with my parents, who are his primary caregivers. Recently, I got in touch with my father to learn how to does one get better equipped to deal with the necessities of a loved one who lives with a mental illness. He said, “First and foremost, the primary resource that is to be built up, in the person with a mental health illness is the confidence that the caregiver can be contacted even if the slightest symptom flares up. One must work to build open and non-judgemental channels of communication.” He also emphasised on the importance of caregivers to familiarise themselves with the symptoms of the illness.

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While speaking to a friend A, she added that after she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, she did not know whether mental illness is an identity for her. Is it a noun or an adjective? Is she someone who lives with bipolar disorder or someone who is bipolar? She mentioned how identifying voluntarily as bipolar has been the only way to “take charge of a diagnosis that was imposed on me.”

Having met A while completing my undergraduate degree from Mount Carmel College, three years ago, gave me a sense of how much she had decided to take control of her own narrative. As the child of a single mother, who turned out be abusive at worst and supportive at best, A knew that as she graduated from college she would have to find ways to be financially independent. A grappled with her fraught mental health, and as a queer woman living alone, she knew that she had to reach out for help.Soon, she signed up for therapy at National Institute of Medical Health and Neurological Sciences (NIMHANS), one of the premier institutes that pursue work and provide patient care in the field of mental health and neurosciences. She says, “I was delighted to find a place that charges around ten-fifteen rupees per sitting with a therapist. I went there and realised that I could have been during college too, but the concept of going to a hospital on an allowance or pocket money didn’t seem like a logical thing to do.” The doctors at NIMHANS first diagnosed A with depression and started her off anti-depressants.

Unfortunately when A described traumatic experiences of sexual assault at the hands of a friend, her psychiatrist who was the head of psychiatry department at NIMHANS began victim blaming her. They told her that she should never drink in the company of male friends, as she could never gauge their ‘true’ intentions. She adds, “This was especially insensitive of him considering that I was still learning to live the trauma of someone violating my consent. I went home and cried for hours before deciding that I would never go back there again. I tried going to another psychologist and realised that mental health care can be really expensive.”

 A was infuriated to know that each sitting with a therapist would cost at least 1,500 rupees. She went for a few weeks before deciding that she couldn’t afford quality mental health care, “The therapist asked me to meet her once a week, on top of which I would have to meet a psychiatrist once a month. The added costs for therapy and medication would run into 9,000 rupees per month. So I just fall back into taking care of myself. I’m not in any actual danger of killing myself, I’m able to do day-to-day tasks without additional assistance and I have learnt that depression is a liar, so the recognize those lies which I tell myself.”

Fortunately, A works as UX/UI designer at a company where she isn’t further stigmatised for being mentally ill. I have always known A to be a fearless and outspoken person, she’s the first person who told me that she’s pansexual and what identifying pansexual entails. She lives with her two cats, drives a motorcycle to work, and is decorated with countless tattoos and piercings. She adds, “Most therapists think that I look the way I do because I’m troubled, but they don’t understand that I look the way I want to because my appearance is the only thing I’m really in control of. Some of them ask me ‘oh, so you don’t live with your mother? Let’s talk about that.’ What’s there to talk about if I decide to live alone? They need reassurance that I don’t want to live with my mother and infantilise me in the process. Some have gone as far as guilt tripping me for ‘leaving my mother alone.’ Well, if I’m married and decide to leave my mother to live with my partner, then that’s perfectly acceptable but if I’m a single woman who has made the decision to live alone I’m suddenly selfish and irresponsible?”

A offers that her friends or ‘chosen family’ are the ones who make sure to keep her grounded. “My tight circles of close friends live with mental health illnesses themselves. They do provide care for me, quell the inner demons and act as a voice of reason when I’m in a depressive fog. But I make sure not to misbehave with them simply because I’m in a fragile space. I recognise how much emotional labour goes into convincing a suicidal person that they have many reasons to be alive. Understanding this has been important for me. Before this, I would expect that anyone who cared for me would hug me, pat my hair and let me sob into their arms. But I’ve realised that it's important to be calm and talk rationally to me when I’m feeling depressed or maniacal.” A reiterates that psychiatrists are a product of the society they’re born into, “They might know more depression as an illness but that doesn’t necessarily make them more progressive. My best advice to anyone looking for help is that having no therapist is much better than seeking advice from a bad therapist.”

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While taking an occasional break from writing this piece, I logged on to FB to see that Suzanne, a dear friend who lives with Lupus, which is a chronic auto-immune illness, had published an article about healing and recovery. A line from that article which details the difficult experience of maintaining a positive outlook while living with an incurable condition struck me as an exceptional insight into the difficult work of being optimistic. She wrote, “Sometimes healing itself requires recovery from.”

Suzanne or Suzie, as I like to call her, said that after she was diagnosed with Lupus she had to completely redefine what normal meant for her, “My new normal is to feel extremely tired and it took me a long time to come to terms with that.” For Suzie, the daughter of a pastor and a practising Christian, it's her faith in God that gives her mental strength, “I spent the whole day today thinking about whether I’m delusional to believe in God or not. But my faith is not about believing in miraculous things or trying to shift my burden onto something. I just find more strength in my daily struggles. I have to come to the realisation that faith makes me less delusional  and gives me more mental clarity.”

In the years that I’ve known Suzie, she has edited a film and a documentary, composed countless songs, edited tomes of research material, published a children’s book and visited Geneva as a part of the World Council of Churches. The fact that she was talented at so many things and could juggle all her interests is what drew me close to her. Now she works as a communications strategist at Zapr Media Labs. For her, the most difficult thing about living with a chronic illness is how it incapacitates you from doing seemingly effortless things like sitting in a chair for an hour. “Such a simple thing gives me more anxiety than not knowing where my health is going to head and if I’m going to catch an infection tomorrow. All this time I’ve placed productivity so highly and approached multitasking as if its something that defines me. Now I’m beginning to redefine my identity as someone who needs constant breaks. Until before I was diagnosed I used to value people’s productivity more than their character or their capacity to love. This has changed completely for me and taught me to value my own existence more than what I can get done,” she chuckles.

She acknowledges the value in sharing stories of pain and recovery with other patients of Lupus, but much like A who sees the importance in drawing boundaries while sharing her menatl anguish with survivors of mental health illnesses, Suzanne also thinks that its important be cognizant of ones own mental health, “While talking to other patients I realised how important it is to build support networks but having people share these stories constantly was also very draining for me. Some people have shared stories of amnesia, memory loss and inability read. As a writer, hearing these stories makes me very paranoid as there’s nothing I’m more afraid of than losing my mind. I have understood that ‘giving strength’ to each other also calls for boundaries although it's important to build a community of people who know exactly what it is that you’re going through. It’s a very tricky balance.”