Four hitch-hikers and smashed stereotypes

When you move cities, you don’t simply move into a new physical location, you move into a new narrative of collective life. You land from one persuasive story of what it means to inhabit a city into another. This story too, like most stories, is laced with stereotypes

MUMBAI: About 20 years ago, my teacher in Delhi University, Christel Devadawson, said something which has remained soldered in my brain ever since. Although the precise context now escapes me, her sentence is clear as day: “Stereotypes have their hook in truth,” she said, “but the problem with stereotypes is that they market themselves as the only truth.”

Four hitch-hikers and smashed stereotypes

About one and a half years ago, I moved from Delhi to Mumbai. When you move cities, you don’t simply move into a new physical location, you move into a new narrative of collective life. You land from one persuasive story of what it means to inhabit a city into another. This story too, like most stories, is laced with stereotypes.

About half a year into my move, something happened which made me reckon with the stereotypes both of the city I had left and the city I now called mine. What happened could be seen as a very ordinary thing: I was driving my scooter and someone took a lift. What happened could also be seen as a very extraordinary thing: the person who took the lift was a woman.

Some things rupture the sedimented patterns of your experience. They make you step out of the habitual ways in which you have understood and ordered the world around you. This one experience did precisely that. I had lived in and ridden around extensively on my two-wheeler in three Indian cities before Mumbai – mainly Delhi and Lucknow, and to some extent, Bareilly – and had never seen something like this happen there. Which is not the same as saying that it did not or could not happen there for others, just that it never happened within the remit of my experience, or within my estimation of what was possible in the larger urban cultures that concretized in those places. In short, it did not tally with my stereotypes of those cities. For me, trained in the instinctive blueprints of what is safe and unsafe for women, what is construed as risky or unrisky for them, something simple like a woman hitchhiking with a man was largely in the realm of the unthinkable, and if not unthinkable, certainly undoable.

Some women readers may chuckle at this claim: all it takes for a woman is to simply take a lift and the world of this dude goes upside down. In some respects, it did. That hitch-hiker, a young woman in her 20s, did not just take a lift from me. She invited me into another narrative of what it means to live in a city, how we understand and practice the relations between genders on a daily basis, and what may define us as people together when we exceed the most banal and also the most lethal binaries of gender. That we may, in some meaningful way, be city-dwellers before we are men and women, a relation which is often marked by suspicion, with very good reason.

Over these one and a half years of living in the Greater Mumbai region, women (counting strangers, not friends) have taken a lift from me four times. That’s the rate of almost one every four months. Compared to the zero in all my years before, that’s a fair sum in contrast. The first time it happened, I was passing by Kalyan-Sape road, having just crossed Ulhas river, and the young woman who hailed me meant to go to Shahad station. Which is exactly where I was headed, so she got on. All along I repeated to myself, slightly dumbfounded: “this could never happen in Delhi”. The second time, I was gallivanting on my scooty, starting from Mira Road, having reached the lush green turn to Uttan and Dongri, that northern tip of Salsette, when a woman in her mid-40s stopped me and asked to be dropped near Uttan. On the way, she briefly complained about her tiring day and made me overtake a garbage truck in order to dodge the odour.

The third and fourth times, it happened when one of the arterial bridges in Shahad closed down, and one of my historian colleagues suggested an alternative route - insanely breathtaking in parts - through the towns and villages of Ambivali, Galegaon and Manivali (all of which are contiguous with Kalyan) to reach my university. In both these instances, the women were in their late 50s or early 60s. The first one shared one or two time-tested generalities about her daughter’s in-laws from whose place she was returning, helped me with the directions, complained about the village roads, and beamed the crescentest of smiles when she alighted. And the second one, was more school-principalish: pragmatic, no-nonsense, and was mildly disappointed, in the way family elders are, when she found out that I wasn’t going further down her route that day.

What explains this? Should I try to explain this in the first place? Will I jinx it by explaining? The fact that each of these four instances happened on the suburban edges of Mumbai -– in Kalyan, Shahad, Uttan, and Ambivali — rather than its dense urban thoroughfares, does that point us towards other cultural logics of connection that the lift-taker and the lift-giver were implicated in. Perhaps these logics were of some sort of an assumed neighbourhood or urban-village camaraderie, of a projected regional-linguistic community (two of them switched to Hindi when they discovered that my Marathi was at best monosyllabic), maybe there was even an assumed caste-ordained economy of trust at work, that could trump gender, or at least one of gender’s primary frame as a grid of unsafety. Maybe my avuncular rotundness now appears ‘safer’ than my younger, bullish self. Maybe, at least for the older women, age’s assumed respect cancelled out gender’s assumed frictions. Or maybe these instances are telling me: shut up Akhil, let it happen. Maybe you have genuinely entered a space where gender is not as big and lethal a breach as it is elsewhere. Savour this possibility. It is telling you that here, if I were to borrow partially from my poet-friend Aditi Rao’s book title, “a kind of freedom” is possible.