It was a warm spring evening in Bengaluru. Purple jacaranda blooms leaned heavy against the dying light, and warm puffs of exhaust sat suspended in the air, as if urging the monsoon to break. Leaving the newsroom at the end of the day, I decided to stop by an office-warming party for a mapping company I was considering writing about, right by my apartment in upscale Indiranagar. Around two dozen people milled about the open-plan space, sipping beers and bobbing to the reggae playing in the background. This crew was distinct from the regular Bengaluru startup crowd: they had travelled to places like Poland and Peru for mapping projects, and there were quite a few women as well; the lead told me they wanted to reach gender parity soon. They seemed eager to get to know me as a fresh-faced foreigner new to the city, not as a reporter who might feature them in the paper.
Before I knew it, it was almost 10 pm. As I took my leave, my host offered to walk me home. It was rare for me to be out drinking midweek but I shook my head no: I lived just a few blocks away! ‘Are you sure? It’s pretty late,’ he said, with genuine concern in his eyes. I dismissed his worries with a flick of my hand. The gesture felt a little too intimate between a reporter and a potential source; besides, I had chosen to live in Indiranagar precisely because of its reputation for being safe: for the right to walk home without worry. Before he could press further, I made my way towards the exit and spent a few minutes getting lost inside the maze of shoes, my vision woozy around the edges.
Once I’d stepped out of the building, the euphoria of the party took all of two seconds to fade. The road ahead was pitch dark, deadly quiet. A gust of wind whipped against my torso, then another. I steeled my jaw, hunched my shoulders, and began marching the hundred or so metres back towards the bright-lit main road. I’d walked home after sundown a number of times, but this time, approaching the junction, I realised something was amiss: the streetlamp on the corner was not on. The road stayed dark. I figured there must have been another blackout – they had become more frequent as the days grew hotter.
A low-pitched buzz was approaching from ahead – I could just make out the contours of a motorbike scooting towards me at full speed. Before I knew it, a hand had thwacked my chest. When I finally gathered myself to react, I spun around and saw his face, turned towards me from the receding vehicle, shiny with sweat in its red backlight. Tuft of hair on top, double chin bulging from the bottom, the offending arm held out like a weapon. A wicked smile that said: Gotcha. Did you think you were safe?
It was 2015, and I had moved to Bengaluru to work as the only foreign reporter at a national paper. India was fresh off Narendra Modi’s arrival to power after decades of Congress rule; the rupee was strong and projected to grow stronger in those innocent days, pre-demonetisation, pre-COVID-19 pandemic. The promise of political change and prosperity was thick in the air, overshadowing the looming threat of Hindutva violence. One of the world’s largest emerging economies seemed poised to turn a new page and I wanted to be there. I had just graduated from a prestigious US university with no specific aspirations other than to experience as much of the world as possible. When I received an offer from the paper, I took it.
Violence against women was one of India’s defining features at the time, as an outraged global media gave extended coverage to the brutal gang-rape and murder of a young physiotherapy student, Jyoti Singh, on a night bus in Delhi in 2012. What became known as the ‘Nirbhaya’ case (for ‘fearless’, in Hindi) was just the tip of the iceberg. More than 34,000 rape cases were officially reported in India in 2015 – one woman raped every 15 minutes – and nearly 10 times as many crimes against women were logged. Born and raised in Hong Kong, I’d had the privilege of growing up taking my safety for granted. I’d ambled across town alone at all hours as a teenager, had walked home after midnight without a second thought: though casual sexism abounded, I’d never had my personal space impinged upon. The few instances of public sexual assault in the region were reported with dramatic condemnation in the news. It is common for Hong Kong natives to live abroad – in industrialised nations with high living standards. Meanwhile, my move to a developing country, and one as unsafe as India, was so far beyond the bounds of convention that some of my peers took me for a joke.
Did the violent crime that claimed Nirbhaya happen here too? Or were things getting better?
Still, I had spent the previous summer visiting the metropoles of Delhi, Mumbai and Chandigarh, and witnessed how the gender landscape was changing. For many women whose lives had previously been circumscribed to the family home, the smartphone revolution meant they now had unprecedented access to the wider world. A generation of women was becoming educated, completing high school and university at unprecedented rates, and eager to make their own living, heading for the big cities where they would find work and a hitherto unimaginable independence. By 2014, it was estimated that more than 30 per cent of Indian programmers were women.
Besides, Bengaluru was meant to be different. The city, now known as the Silicon Valley of the Global South, had jumpstarted the country’s software boom in the 1980s, on the back of the success of Infosys, co-founded by N R Narayana Murthy (father-in-law to the former UK prime minister Rishi Sunak). Bengaluru had amicable weather, live music venues, even a flourishing craft beer industry. And it was south India: liberal, educated, peace-loving and English-speaking. I arrived to find women thronging its dusty avenues at all hours of the day, lingering in restaurants and negotiating with rickshaw drivers and subziwallas (vegetable sellers), in groups and alone. They were just as likely to wear jeans as salwar kameez. Some bleached their skin with Fair and Lovely creams, others threaded and pencilled-in their brows or coated their eyelids with kajal, a look I later attempted to adopt.
In the newsroom, I was placed within a predominantly female team. Krithika drove a scooter around the city for interviews and events, and before long I became a frequent rider on her backseat, catching the ends of her dupatta flying behind her helmet. Avani always had plans for a party or a festival, and the outfits to go with them. Shraddha, impeccably dressed, had her share of harassers and stalkers, but she deterred their efforts with masterful aplomb. Then there was Radha, the only female editor at the paper, who conducted herself with unfailing poise, sailing through the office among male reporters and executives in her carefully pressed, gold-bordered saris. These women appeared to have nothing to fear. They taught me everything about the country I would report on, and eased me into daily life in Bengaluru. I queried them on my worst fears: did the violent crime that claimed Nirbhaya happen here too? Or were things getting better? ‘That kind of thing won’t happen to you,’ they assured me in lowered voices. But with a few caveats: don’t wear anything too revealing, keep your valuables in a safe place, make sure you always have someone to call in case trouble strikes. Don’t go out on your own at night. Otherwise, do anything you want, go anywhere you want, wear whatever you want. This is Bengaluru, the safest city in India!
The assault on my way home was not my first brush with violence. A few months before, as my first New Year’s in the city approached, I canvassed the newsroom for celebration ideas. Most of my colleagues planned to stay in with friends and family. Some restaurants and hotels were advertising countdown parties, charging thousands of rupees a head. I wondered whether there was a central place where people counted down to midnight, like they do in Times Square in New York City. It seemed that Brigade Road, the shopping street just blocks from the newsroom, might offer what I was looking for: the area was blocked off from traffic every New Year’s for a mass celebration. No one on the team had ever attended, but I was keen to check it out. ‘Be careful na, it’s going to be very crowded,’ said Krithika, but I was not concerned: I had grown up in one of the most crowded cities in the world.
My friend Meghna and I started the night with a few drinks at her apartment, along with our friend Max, a tall American in his 30s, all of us recent arrivals. Before leaving for Brigade Road, I patted myself down – bank card in my bra, small wad of cash in my left pocket, phone in the other pocket – then smoothed a long kurta over my jeans.
The main roads were choked with cars and pedestrians hurrying towards their merrymaking destinations. To avoid them, we took a quieter path up Museum Road and around the moonlit curve of Rest House Road, past convent schools, consulates and the line of Tibetan malls I often visited for momos and noodle soup, finally arriving at the intersection with Brigade Road. The juncture was fenced off by a makeshift security checkpoint, guarded by two policemen wearing signature khaki uniforms and slouch hats. Beyond this barricade, Brigade Road was strung with coloured fairy bulbs and neon signs, just like every other night when I passed by on my way to the Metro. However, tonight the lights shone upon a roaring tide of humans, every single one male. Men in polos and plaid shirts, in gold necklaces and bandannas, bald and bearded, pot-bellied and skeletal, pushing and shoving. Drunk, belligerent, hungry for mayhem.
It was a roiling sea of testosterone and sweat and euphoria, lurching vaguely southward. Smelling sour. I took a moment to soak in the scene. This was Bengaluru’s version of the New Year crowd: it resembled nothing I had seen before. We had come all this way with a white man escorting us, what was there to do before midnight but paddle along? I turned to Meghna, who looked a little hesitant, but she nodded. ‘Hold on to me so we don’t get separated,’ she said, and we clasped hands. A policeman moved the barricade to let the three of us enter, his eyes idly surveying the mass, barely paying us attention.
A dark face glared into mine from centimetres away, a bloodthirsty glint in his expression
At once we were swallowed up by the heaving stew and knocked about in its current. My legs buckled forward, my sandalled feet were stamped on before they could find firm ground, my shoulders were shoved side to side. The stench of alcohol and perspiration was overpowering. I reached for my back pocket to stop my phone being snatched, but my hand landed on something else, plastered around my body, in the small of my back, pressing against my shoulder blades, pinching at my chest, digging between my legs from behind.
Other hands. Sweaty hands. A dark face glared into mine from centimetres away, a bloodthirsty glint in his expression: I am going to swallow you whole. I cried out for Meghna and turned to meet her eyes – as wide and stricken as mine were. They told me everything I needed to know.
The next instant, she was tearing through the mob back towards the barricade, yanking me along with her. We jostled against another dozen hands intent on folding us back into the riot, yet we somehow broke free and pried ourselves out, Max a few paces behind. We bolted all the way back to Meghna’s apartment, arriving right before midnight. The countdown roared through the window. Max cracked open a Kingfisher and handed it to me. I took the beer and headed to the bathroom, where I spent the first hour of the year crumpled on the floor, my face in my hands. We had been on Brigade Road for all of 30 seconds. It was 30 seconds too many.
Back in the newsroom, I recounted what had awaited me on Brigade Road, careful not to blame my colleagues for suggesting the option. They reacted with expressions of open-mouthed awe, but I could tell they were not entirely surprised. ‘It isn’t your fault,’ they said, ‘but what were you wearing? Were you with anyone?’ Anger flared in my cheeks and quickened my breathing. My female colleagues – my guardians and friends – had not prepared me for what I’d experienced, and when things went south they resorted to finding fault in my behaviour: it felt like betrayal.
I pulled in a lungful of office air. They had not meant to deceive me. Most of them had moved to Bengaluru from more violent reaches of the country and were enjoying greater independence than they had known elsewhere, without any clear idea of its limits. They were also upper class and upper caste, accustomed to unspoken norms of respectable behaviour that shielded and coddled them: the possibility of attending a public celebration with thousands of strangers would scarcely have crossed their minds. Meanwhile, I had been confronted with the scene and still misread it entirely. We were just beginning to fathom the gulf between us, the different expectations we carried when it came to our liberty and safety.
In Radha’s office, I repeated the story, this time careful to qualify who I was with and what I was wearing. She was pensive while I blew my nose into a napkin. ‘I am very sorry these kinds of things are still happening in this country. Everywhere, every day.’ Her face was grave but firm, her eagle eyes beady as ever. There was a finality to her words, as if she were delivering news of a death. ‘I do hope things will get better, but unfortunately this is the way things are for now. And there is nothing you nor I can do about it.’
Before I left, she added: ‘Just stay away from these situations, OK? You have no idea who those people are, what all they can do. They’re not educated, they don’t know how to behave. All you can do is stay away.’ Those people. The mass that was the lower class, impenetrable when it came to their caste, religion, language, values and norms of behaviour. As I was starting to learn, othering was a handy tool for my companions when confronted with the less savoury realities of their society, one whose lauded diversity can just as easily morph into social division.
As women in India make tentative strides towards greater liberty and individual rights, their progress has not been taken kindly by all sectors of a staunchly patriarchal, misogynistic society. Living in Bengaluru amid the changing winds and careless promises of the early Modi era, it was easy to forget that this was still a country ranked 130th out of 155 in the United Nations’ Gender Inequality Index (2015), and where, according to the UN Population Fund (2020), almost half a million baby girls went ‘missing’ every year through sex-selective abortions and infanticide. The average age of marriage for women hovered around 19, and, despite the gains made in education, the International Labor Organization (2014) estimated that only a quarter of adult women participate in the labour force – among the lowest rates in the world. While upper-class women have ascended to the C-suite, even the office of prime minister, male supremacy remains the status quo.
As India’s riches have grown over the past decade, they have coincided with historic levels of inequality, with the top 1 per cent accruing 40 per cent of the country’s wealth, while the bottom half continues to survive on less than $3 a day. Hundreds of millions of men continue to find themselves in a poverty trap, increasingly left behind by India’s generational growth story and, as their grip on entitlement start to waver, they feel even more threatened. It is easy to imagine how, when confronted with women’s onward march toward greater independence, men resort to violence to put women in their place and reassert their own power. If they control nothing else, they can control women’s bodies; and any female is a target – from infants to elderly widows, in public spaces, in the home.
There is a grievous lack of sex education in India, driven by conservative attitudes that regard any discussion of sex as taboo, while several populous states have banned sex education outright. The researcher Madhumita Pandey and the journalist Tara Kaushal, who each spoke to rape convicts in the aftermath of Nirbhaya, affirmed that none of their subjects had received sex education or understood the concept of consent; in many cases, they even failed to understand the crime they were being charged for. In this vacuum, many young men learn about sex through pornography and Bollywood movies that glorify men who stalk and aggressively pursue their romantic interests until they relent. While the global discourse around Nirbhaya condemned the country’s ‘rape epidemic’ and framed the rapists as ‘monsters’, inside the country itself there was an equally potent narrative that blamed the victim. One of the accused, sentenced to the death penalty, openly said that they had wanted to teach the female college student a lesson for staying out after hours with a male acquaintance.
It is a liberty with definite bounds, enjoyed only when supplementary arrangements are afforded
In my conversation with colleagues, interview subjects and local acquaintances, I heard approval for growing gender parity in the same breath as they lamented that society was simply not ready. Backed into a corner, the reformists concluded that women had to be protected for their own good. This was the overriding logic behind the various safeguards I discovered while living in Bengaluru: the gender-specific curfews in college hostels and paying-guest accommodations; the segregated security lines at the entrances to malls and hotels; the women’s sections on public transport that I never strayed from.
As more women enter the workforce, particularly in manufacturing, states have passed legislation limiting women from taking on night shifts and requiring employers to provide them with safe transportation home. In their groundbreaking book Why Loiter (2011), Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade focus on Mumbai, another purported safe haven for women, and point out that so-called safety for women is limited only to middle-class women, implicitly assumed to be ‘young, able-bodied, Hindu, upper-caste, heterosexual, married or marriageable’, and that their access to public space is conditional at best: ‘subject to [her] knowing the “limits”, restrictions that often do not apply in quite the same way to her brothers.’ It is a liberty with definite bounds, enjoyed only when supplementary arrangements are afforded. The problem is never with men, nor the society that continues to perpetuate masculine ideals of dominance and violence.
To me, it was a relentless cycle of violation and retreat, followed by advances that met with further violation. Social change is slow: women have to buy time until, one day, the values of equality and respect sufficiently penetrate the majority, and the guardrails can come off. But how can this happen when ‘those people’ continue to be othered and shut out of systemic reform?
In 2024, more than a decade after the Nirbhaya murder, another high-profile case shook the country: the rape and murder of a trainee doctor in Kolkata, in her college building after a long hospital shift. Her death was at first ruled a suicide – despite her body having been found with eyes, mouth and genitals bleeding. Later, after the principal of the medical college blamed the victim’s decision to rest in a seminar hall alone at night, cities around India erupted in protest, asserting women’s right to ‘Reclaim the Night’. The chief minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, one of only two female chief ministers in the country, led one of the rallies and offered to resign.
I am curious as to why, out of tens of thousands of reported rapes every year, the Nirbhaya and the Kolkata cases alone have sparked this level of outrage. Both victims had been training to enter the medical profession, embodying the aspirational woman in the rising middle class, and yet education and hard work had not exempted them from being targeted. In the months since the Kolkata case, doctors and medical schools across India have staged numerous strikes demanding heightened security for medical workers, recycling the same worn logic for more protection, more gilded cages. They argue that hospitals should be safe places, islands of exemption from the broader, uglier reality. But where are the protests for the vast majority of rape victims, the less privileged majority who are somehow seen as less deserving of protection? Are they, too, simply ‘those people’?
In 2020, in the Hathras district of Uttar Pradesh, a 19-year-old Dalit (lower-caste) woman was raped by four upper-caste men and subsequently died of her injuries. The police initially declined to file an official report, then hastily cremated her body without the family’s consent. Protests were held, but these never garnered the attention given to the two students. Only one of the accused was handed a life sentence; the rest were acquitted. Or take the documented practice of rape carried out by the Indian military in the past three decades, during armed conflicts against Muslims and Indigenous Adivasi communities, as a weapon of power alongside murder, arson and mass displacement – crimes that are never called to account. The Free Press Journal last year reported that ‘in many cases, law keepers like the police were the perpetrators. Rapes in Kashmir and the northeast by men in uniform are routinely dismissed.’ This kind of impunity sanctions the use of rape by official state forces. Meanwhile, marital rape is yet to be considered an offence, despite a legal commission after the Nirbhaya case recommending its criminalisation, effectively granting men inalienable rights over their wives’ bodies. Indeed, it has emerged that the accused in the Kolkata case had a history of assault against his wives: no cases had been brought against him for his actions, and he had been allowed to continue his duties as a police volunteer.
Taken in sum, an implicit hierarchy starts to take shape. As the writer and activist Meena Kandasamy described it in a blog post in 2014:
The caste-Hindu male has a sense of entitlement over the bodies of caste-Hindu women … over the bodies of Dalit men (the most ruthlessly exploited working class in the nation today), over the bodies of Dalit women (who are not only exploited as a class, but also victims of sexual violence). As rape is an act of male entitlement, it becomes a dangerous weapon of war in the hands of caste-Hindu men who use sexual humiliation and violence to sustain a system that keeps intact their supremacy.
By attributing standalone cases to ‘those people’, educated Indians, women included, sidestep the root cause: an implicit belief system that maintains inequality between the sexes and castes, and holds the country back from broader progress.
A wedding invitation meant I was to be initiated into wearing the sari. Traditional Indian clothing for women tends towards modesty, obscuring body parts deemed off-limits to the public eye. Long kurtas with churidars, salwar kameez sets, dupattas draped over the shoulder – all are composed of loose-fitting, flowy fabrics that are comfortable but not exceptionally flattering. The sari is a different affair: made of a tight, midriff-bearing blouse and a long cloth carefully wound and bound around the body, like a bow on a present, it accentuates the female figure while concealing less attractive bulges. It is said that no woman can look bad in a sari. In recent years, the outfit has been claimed as a symbol of liberation by South Asian women.
I stood in my living room in my underwear, amid a whirlpool of stiffened silk, while Meghna inducted me into the delicate craft of draping, the way her mother and aunts had taught her. First, I was to tie a knot at the edge of the cloth and hold it in my fist, letting the rest of the fabric fall to the ground; then, wrap the cloth around the waist twice, effectively rendering the lower body immobile; next, I had to pleat the cloth carefully, back and forth, tucking the pleats into the front of the sari, before throwing the remaining cloth over my shoulder where the pallu could tumble down the back.
All night they danced. Hands placed delicately on their waists and the back of their heads, they thrust their hips
A few clumsy tries later, I waddled gingerly towards the mirror to assess the effect. The blouse was form-fitting, and the pallu fell over the curve of my waist. The pleats fanned out prettily along the floor. I felt beautiful. But in my amateur attempt, I also felt constrained, devoid of agency, as though the bandages holding together my guise might at any moment fall apart to reveal my naked foreign self.
Yet at the wedding there was only ecstatic joy. After the pre-wedding rituals of the sangeet and the haldi, after the bride had led the groom around the sacred fire three times and uttered her vows to provide him with abundant health and bear his children, the lights dimmed and the dancefloor glowed, beckoning. The sweet sitar tune of ‘Om Shanti Om’ poured from the speakers, and women of all ages whirled into the centre of the room. All night they danced. Hands placed delicately on their waists and the back of their heads, they thrust their hips to the amplified bass, feet stamping. Rolls of flesh spilled from beneath the folds of wound fabric like blessed abundance; pallus unwound and tossed about. Heads were thrown back, braids flying, eyes closed in rapture, faces crinkled with laughter.
How carefree these women appeared, as if all worries had been strewn to the air, forgotten. A wedding is the most regimented of rituals, and yet it also grants women a space to celebrate the womanhood that cost them so many pains to share. Every culture burdens its women with a blanket of expectations regarding how to dress and speak and behave, and in that moment it was easy to believe that the blanket was resplendent in all the suffering it conferred, that it was very much worth it. I stood in my inexpert sari on the edge of the room, wondering whether it was only a matter of time before I could learn to shoulder the blanket with grace.
The authors of Why Loiter call for women to idle on Mumbai’s streets without clear purpose, just like their male counterparts, and claim full rights to the city even if that means courting physical risk: to them, the greater risk lies in not experiencing the pleasures of public space. The Bengaluru writer C K Meena endorses this idea: despite regularly encountering harassment in public spaces, she refuses to have her freedom of movement curtailed, and is instead determined to change male behaviour by putting up a fight, one instance at a time. As a young arrival in Bengaluru, armed with my privileged upbringing and Jane Jacobs-ian theories of ‘eyes on the street’ as a guarantor of personal safety, I would have agreed with them. I might have run into minor trouble, but that didn’t mean I had to shrink, or make my life smaller. Call it bloody-minded, but I did not move all the way here to live the life of a second-class citizen.
Another workday ended earlier than usual: the sun just setting, sending grapefruit streaks across the baby-blue sky. The jackfruit vendors were still in their daytime spots by the Indiranagar Metro when I emerged, a saccharine sweetness emanating from the sticky fruit laid out at their feet. I gave myself permission to relax a little, dropping my shoulders as I walked along the main road towards my apartment. Arriving at the intersection near the mapping company’s office, I paused for a moment and peered around the corner. I had remembered it as a desolate shroud of street, a world away from the rushed frenzy of the main road, but at a glance it resembled any other residential street in Indiranagar, indistinguishable from the one I lived on nearby. Would it carry any trace of the sinister for someone who’d not had the misfortune of being assaulted there? I wanted to believe I’d simply got caught in freak accident in an otherwise safe area. I wanted to not live in fear in a city I was trying to call home: it was not too much to ask.
So I turned into the street I’d avoided since my assault, watching the empty lane ahead darken with every second, and passing sand hills piled up by the construction sites on my left. At an angry revving from some distance behind me, I tensed and turned around slowly, waiting. A benign two-wheeler flew past, its occupants sitting stick-straight in their helmets. The coast was clear. I resumed walking. The next thing I knew, a force hit me on my right – a violent billow of wind, vaguely wet, knocking me off my bearings. I looked up just in time to see another motorbike whizz into the distance. A few stunned seconds later, I dug out my phone and turned on the flashlight. My right arm, shirt and skirt were spattered with a moist, brown goop. It was one more attempt to put me in my place, a place I refused to belong.
They estimated that 99 per cent of crimes in India remain unreported
This time, my newsroom collegues encouraged me to lodge a formal complaint with the police. ‘After Nirbhaya, they have been taking such cases much more seriously,’ they said. ‘Why don’t you give it a try?’ That case in Delhi had exposed just how inept the Indian police force was at handling sexual harassment, and a series of reforms had been swiftly announced, expanding the legal definition of rape to include all penetration without consent, and lengthening the jail sentence of convicts from seven to 10 years. For rapes that result in death or a vegetative state, the death penalty was introduced. Women police officers were purportedly now designated to file sexual assault reports at police stations. Fast-track courts were established.
But the Indian legal system has a reputation for woefully uneven implementation. The Indian Penal Code, imported from the British in 1860 and written in a colonial language spoken by only 10 per cent of the population, is vastly limited in reach and effectiveness. (It was replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita – the ‘Indian Justice Code’ – in July 2024, but even that retains much of the IPC’s offences and language.) Cases that do make it to court are often bogged down by poor conviction rates and a liberal bail regime, factors that a female police officer writing in The Indian Express attributed to the law’s failure to deter rape culture as a whole. In 2022, out of 26,508 rape cases presented for trial in Indian courts, only 5,067 led to convictions – a 19 per cent conviction rate, compared with over 60 per cent in the UK that year. An investigation by the Mint newspaper that crossed national health survey data with official crime statistics estimated that 99 per cent of crimes in India remain unreported.
The women around me grew up enduring an inborn hostility against their gender and spent their entire lives accommodating it. They’d become almost blind to the manoeuvring and compliance necessary to keep themselves safe, as they cheered each baby step towards progress, hoping that things would get better. Unlike me, they did not have an escape hatch. It was simply the most bearable way to survive, and to do so with dignity. Why could I not be as strong? Why did I not have a thicker skin?
I wondered if the carefully constructed cocoons of my companions ever frayed, whether they too had experienced violations that justified their instincts towards self-preservation. I knew better than to ask: they had professional relationships and reputations to protect, and an admission of harassment could destroy careers and bring shame upon extended families. Writing in New Lines Magazine in 2024, Surbhi Gupta says that: ‘Historically, a family or community’s honour has been tied to women’s virginity in India, and South Asia at large …’ It is this weight of women’s dignity that gives sexual assault its potency. And the shame it bestows transcends class lines. As a free-wheeling foreigner tied to no one’s honour, I had much less to lose.
A few blocks north of the Metro, I found the Indiranagar police station. The reception area was low-ceilinged and lit with a stark fluorescence – and empty, apart from a few officers sprawled on battered wooden chairs, playing games on their smartphones. I walked up to the man at the front desk and told him I wanted to lodge a sexual harassment complaint. He led me up to the main room, where another elderly male officer was seated at a large table. He had a bushy grey moustache and serious, benevolent eyes; his hands neatly folded on top of a wrinkled ledger book. I sat across from him, pressed my palms to the sides of my legs, and laid out the facts. The date, the time, the street. The first incident, then the second. The triviality of my complaint became painfully apparent as I spoke, my small voice barely projecting in the sparsely furnished room. Despite everything, I had not been seriously harmed and never had reason to fear for my life, while every day across the country women suffered truly horrific atrocities. But I had already come this far.
‘Understood,’ the officer was saying. He looked at me in half-amusement, making no move to record my story. The thick black cover of his ledger book was streaked with scratches. ‘And do you have the licence plate of the vehicle, ma’am?’ It had all happened too quickly for me to register what was going on, let alone note anything down.
There are offices in the area full of working women. Any man riding by could do whatever they want
‘You know, it’s almost impossible for us to track that down, ma’am.’ I stared at him wordlessly. His whiskers were still. ‘Would you like to file an FIR complaint, ma’am?’ I considered this. The first information report I could provide was scant; besides, filing a complaint would result in an official record, traceable to my identity and my visa. I did not want to invite further trouble, or have anything further to do with the police.
Would it be possible at all to install a streetlight around there? I asked instead, my tone pleading. The street is pitch black at night. There are offices in the area full of working women. Any man riding by could do whatever they want. It was a weak ask. Yet it would probably involve six government departments to get a streetlight up and running, none of which had to do with the police. ‘That would be very difficult,’ the officer confirmed, with a dance of his eyebrows. He leaned back in his chair. ‘Very complicated, I tell you. But maybe, we can send more officers to patrol the area.’
A few days later, I spotted two police officers standing by the streetlamp next to the house. They slouched, chatting at leisure, not paying me any heed as I tramped past.
Two years after my New Year’s experience on Brigade Road, the Bengaluru event made the global news. Women who might have been Meghna and me had come to celebrate, and were molested en masse. CCTV footage showed mobs of revellers running down the streets and circling any lone women in the crowd, grabbing their necks, backs and waists. Hauling women into side streets, they forced their heads down to their crotches, then threw them to the ground while bystanders gaped. Responding to the ensuing outrage, the state home minister said: ‘Such incidents do happen on New Year[’s] day and on Christmas.’ He said enough police had monitored the event. The police insisted that no cases had been filed. By then, I was preparing to leave Bengaluru for places where the spectre of violence no longer hung over my head. But I felt heavy, as a now-familiar soup welled up within me – a stew of anger, despair and helplessness. But not surprise.
