long hair is for girls, dude

it wasn't my fault; i was paid to do it. grow my hair way below my shoulders, that is. paid to grow it long so i could put on my make-up, don a pair of silver-tinted glasses and gyrate on stage for the amusement of little children (a whole other story), so sue me. the rest of mumbai, however, seemed to think it was incredibly funny.

first came the stares. from all quarters. at bus-stops. on the street. at grocery stores. from men, women, schoolchildren, cleaning maids, municipal workers, some of my aunts, pretty women, ugly men, guys who thought they were funny, guys on motorbikes, guys in cars, a whole lot of guys. they simply had to stare. the bold ones would comment: 'kidhar chal rahi hai?', 'aati hai kya?', 'hai hai' (all roughly translated into: i'm a barely literate indian male. i was born desperate. would you go to bed with me? would you? would you?) they assumed i was female because, let's face it, when you have a 21-inch waist and hair that almost reaches down to it (i did), most people under the sun would assume you weren’t blatantly male.

when they did turn to look, my excuse for a french beard would catch them off guard ('saala, aadmi hai'). it took me a while, but i managed to get thick-skinned enough to ignore it. the groping in trains was another story. that took me months to handle.

i remember stepping out a swimming pool, once, where i was swimming with a female cousin. me: slim, tall, with long, straight black hair. she: short, fat, and with hair cropped close to her forehead. most men sitting around almost fell into the pool that morning. the thought of a topless woman walking around 5 feet away from them was too much to handle. when they finally figured i was male (no breasts, idiot), the disappointment was acute. again, that morning, an aunt i had never met thought i was my uncle's daughter, assuming my cousin was my father's son. *sigh*

it was a fairly confusing time. i knew i was male, of course, but here i was, for six years, with access to what a woman on the streets of mumbai felt. i came away more than a little scarred by the experience. i couldn't understand how, for every waking day of their lives, women of all ages could walk down the street and get to work and go shopping and get back home, all while being at the mercy of the kind of men that groped me.

i came away with a tremendous sense of respect for the kind of strength it takes to live your life in the face of such blatant hostility (sexual advances can, after all, take on overtones of hostility in an environment of overwhelming repression). i also came away with a lot of anger, at the people who assumed it was their god-given right to behave the way they did (blame it on the manusmriti and stupid fucking pativratadharma).

i remember chanting every morning, a school, with thousands of others around the country, the national pledge: ‘... india is my country. all indians are my brothers and sisters of brothers…’ remember? I’d like to have most of the brothers of my sisters castrated.