The Courage to Wait
and watch...
I woke up in the middle of the night because of a nightmare. It was not all that scary, something about me fighting to protect someone. I don’t remember exactly who I was trying to protect. My faint memory of the dream suggests that it was a small girl.
Apt I thought and tried to go back to sleep.
Just before going to bed that night, I happened to read Aubrey Hirsch’s newsletter, in which she chronicles the hate she receives online and in real life, for saying some ‘uncomfortable’ things such as ‘knowing she is pretty’, ‘men should share in the labour of contraception’, ‘the right to abortion’ and so forth. In this particular newsletter, she writes about her tweet going viral, after which she received multiple types of threats from white supremacist, neo-Nazi and misogynistic groups. I sat on my table, reading the entire post which came with a “trigger warning for everything” and tried to physically protect myself from the vitriol that came Hirsch’s way, as if it was also directed at me, from all the dark corners of the internet. I wondered, if some day, it was going to be me.
*
My father once angrily asked me to shut up and threatened to beat me if I didn’t. I still completed my sentence and continued with another thought I had. My teachers, who thought had unquestioned powers to treat children unfairly, were surprised when I told them that I saw what they were doing. I remember sitting in a BEST bus once, Mumbai’s public buses, with a student pass that allowed concessionary travel to students in the academic year. The academic year was over, but I had shown my pass and purchased a discounted ticket, even when I was not going to college. All my friends were mortified when they saw the ticket checker entering and questioning others why they were using the student pass outside of the academic year. My friends looked at me because they knew me, and were probably worried that I would be paying the fine. When asked, I told the ticket checker, that my pass had a printed date until which it was valid and so, I could use it until the pass had expired. My friends looked at me wide eyed, half relieved and half amused. I must have come across as brave. The ticket checker nodded his head and left.
When my sister was getting married and I had to do multiple rounds of the church office for papers, I told the parish priest, who was determined to power play with me, that I had limited time, to which he had no access. I must have come across as arrogant. It’s not like I have never kept quiet. I have. But only one, because at that time, keeping quiet was the courageous thing to do.
*
I heard someone say once, that women are to be seen and not to be heard. I know for a fact, that women are punished whether when they are seen or heard, or both. I think of Atishi, now Minister in the Delhi Government, who some tried to malign through pamphlets that were distributed by anonymous people during the 2019 Lok Sabha Elections. Atishi’s fault was not that she played a pivotal role in turning around government schools, or that she was spokesperson for the party, or that she contested polls from her East Delhi constituency. Her fault was that she had dared to be heard and seen, taking on political space, which is traditionally the space for men. Like all public spaces.
I remember watching a documentary on Monsanto some years ago, where there is a scene of a scientist who speaks of how, when he pointed out the dangers of the pesticide, he was offered hush money. He decided not to accept it, as he was committed to his profession and continued to tell the truth. A few years later, he saw that funding for his research and work in general, had dried up.
The examples of punishments for speaking up are endless. Surely, there are multiple you can think of, as you read.
*
Punishments for not keeping quiet and speaking up came my way too. Slaps and beatings, sidelining and outright being ignored. People who speak only with each other, and never to power, progress and earn enough to feed their families and even take them on vacation. I see them on panels and podiums, conversing and agreeing with others in public while having differences in private. As much as speaking up is glorified, it is keeping quiet that is rewarded.
*
My first and hopefully last panic attack came when I was in Nagpur for a field visit. It was February 2020, late at night, when I had returned to my hotel room and was getting ready for bed. I received a message on my WhatsApp number, from an unknown sender. I was used to these messages and calls from this particular person, who I didn’t know because I had wrongly messaged him months before. When he, <it is a he, who else> asked me who I was, I told him that he didn’t need to know because I had dialed the wrong number. But this man couldn’t take no for an answer and called me every single weekend, at least five times, using five different SIM cards, because I blocked each number that called. I remember getting calls from calling software as my phone was unable to recognize the source of these calls.
That particular night in Nagpur, it felt like this person had reached the end of his rope. He sent me multiple lewd messages using slurs. My curiosity got the better of me, and this time, instead of immediately blocking the number, to my greatest mistake, I had read the messages before blocking them. I thought I could be brave, but maybe I was naïve. I suddenly felt my heart rate rise- I could feel it below my jaw in my neck- throbbing at around 100 or more per minute. My breath got shallow and I was convinced I was getting a heart attack. I was alone in a hotel room, my colleagues had already left the city and I contemplated sitting in the lobby, just in case I needed immediate medical attention. I didn’t know it was a panic attack, until the next day, when I went to the doctor. The vitriol in the messages had triggered it.
*
After reading Hirsch’s newsletter and all the lewd comments, threats and insults, I found it hard to fall asleep. I am just getting serious about my newsletter on everyday sexism and feminism a lightning rod for right wing trolls in India too. I meditated a bit, in anticipation of what I thought was inevitably going to be my fate. Nobody reads my newsletter. Newsletters have limited reach unlike tweets or other social media posts. We don’t have too many avenues where trolls can gather and plot nefarious take-downs. The police in our country are more effective too.
*
And thus I told myself a few things to simply continue to have the courage to show up and speak up because I have not known any other way of being. I am probably not wrong when I think that the one, I was protecting, in my dreams was a small girl. It was probably me I was protecting. Maybe I was telling myself that we have reached a point in our lives when being quiet might just be the courageous thing to do. Maybe, I was telling myself, to wait, and that we will cross the bridge when we get to it.