Malavika’s Mumbaistan: No country for young women

Struggling to keep it all together, attend to their duties, fulfil their responsibilities, keep up with the fashions, look good, eat right, exercise, find a life partner, make it to work on time. When will we become a country for young women

Young women in their twenties. Working girls. Rushing to their offices on zippy scooters. Standing behind shop counters, selling goods and services in their cut-price fast fashion. Welcoming guests at banquets and weddings with rented smiles and saris; dressed up as princesses and goddesses on the gruelling shabby sets of TV serials; winning medals for the country in international tournaments, under God only knows what circumstances.

Malavika’s Mumbaistan: No country for young women

Young women, barely out of college, living at home, often in challenging socio-economic situations, at the receiving end of society’s insidious patriarchy, traditional censure, domestic dissonance, peer pressure …struggling to keep it all together, attend to their duties, fulfil their responsibilities, keep up with the fashions, look good, eat right, exercise, find a life partner, make it to work on time….

Young women in their twenties are eulogised in popular culture. Single and fancy-free, unfettered and buoyant, they are depicted as having the world at their feet, the sky as no limit. And yet, in the past four months the stories of four young women which have surfaced as breaking news headlines, reveal the grim, stark reality and the bone-crushing sadness of what being a young woman in India can be today.

***

Shraddha Walkar, living with her mother and brother in Vasai, in Maharashtra’s Palghar District, the product of a broken home, was a pretty, twenty-something, employee of a call centre, with a winning smile and a penchant for posting wistful reels on social media. Then, her mother died and her relationship with her father appeared to be in limbo and she met Aftab Poonawalla on a dating site.

Blame it on a girl caught between the extremes of two worlds, one the reality of where she lived and the other which she inhabited in her imagination, fuelled by OTT dreams of American sitcoms, bubblegum pop icons and media-propagated ideas of romance and freedom; two worlds whose realities crushed her eventually.

How does a twenty-something girl from Maharashtra end up as a dismembered carcass in a freezer in Delhi? How does a twenty-something woman from Palghar move in with a man she meets on Bumble? Yes, her so-called lover wielded the knife and will most likely hang for his gruesome deeds. But how much of the blame is his and how much should be borne by the times she lived in, times that appear to be particularly challenging for young women like Shraddha, trying to make sense of so much, so fast?

***

Anjali Singh, the 20-year-old whose death in a stomach-churning hit-and-run case had grimly heralded in the New Year, had lived in a small house in north-west Delhi’s Mangolpuri area, the second of six siblings. After the death of her father, she dropped out of school as a teenager to support her family, earning her living by undertaking small jobs with an event management company and offering make-up services to women in her neighbourhood.

Though her life was unspeakably hard, her family and friends say that Anjali was always cheerful and optimistic, posting videos of herself on Instagram in glamorous attire, while lip-syncing to popular Bollywood songs. The pride of her life had been her scooter, which she’d bought with her own savings on EMI, the one which she rode to partake in a New Year’s celebration with her friends and the one on which she met her tragic end under the axle of a car, driven by a claque of drunken men.

The men of course will meet their fate, but how much of the blame is theirs and how much can be disbursed to the hard circumstances of her brief and lonely life, in which there seemed to be no outside relief or mediation? Even had she not met her tragic end in the manner she did, how many years of welcoming guests at weddings and events with a plastic smile would Anjali have to endure before there’d be some light at the end of her tunnel?

***

There is a heart-wrenching video of the late Tunisha Sharma the twenty-year-old TV actress who died by suicide on the sets of a TV serial in late December. It is of a call-in she’d made a few years ago as a fan-girl, to Punjab-based singer Diljit Dosanjh on an open line. Unaware of her actress status, Dosanjh, a gentleman of the old school, enquires about Tunisha’s reasons for being so bundled up in a hoodie and duvet in sunny Mumbai. “I like cosy” replies Tunisha, most likely still a teenager and one of the busiest actresses in that rigorous industry of unending daily shoots and cold hard TRPs they call the world of entertainment.

Tunisha had begun her career at 15 and had been the sole breadwinner of her family. For a girl from Chandigarh, what must it have been like to weather the never-ending demands of a TV actress’ life in the harsh and remorseless landscape of Mumbai?

Even before she‘d taken the extreme step of hanging herself, Tunisha had suffered from anxiety and depression. Her calls for help, besides the one on a random fan girl call, had been soft but persistent. Why had they not been taken into account by her family members? Was it because admitting to them would have meant cutting off the source of their income?

How precious and fraught were the sunny smiles that Tunisha had flashed for the camera and at what cost had they come?

***

As far as the outside world is concerned, Vinesh Phogat’s life is one of success and achievement. The 28-year-old woman wrestler, a recipient of gold medals at the Commonwealth and Asian Games after all, has triumphed over immense pressure and opposition from the patriarchal disapproval of her village in rural Haryana, to reach where she has, albeit with support from her family. For all practical purposes, Vinesh is a poster girl for twenty-something-year-olds in India today.

But listen to the anguish in her voice and see the despair in her eyes and those of the other female wrestlers, protesting against the sexual harassment and mental torture they have to daily face at their workplace and the story once again points to the dark and harrowing lives of young women in India.

***

Young women in their twenties. Working girls. Rushing to their offices on zippy scooters. Standing behind shop counters selling goods and services in their online cut-price fast fashion. Welcoming guests at banquets and weddings with dial-up smiles and rented ensembles as event managers. Dressed up as princesses and goddesses on the faceless shabby sets of TV serials; winning medals for the country in international tournaments…

Young women, caught between tradition, modernity, misogyny, bias, financial anxiety, the demands of fashion, patriarchy, consumerism, the Kardashians, sexual harassment and mental abuse at the workplace, Yo Yo Honey Singh, the insidious pressures of social media and Insta culture and the daily onslaught of expectations and aspirations, while they struggle to hold it all together and get to work on time.

So, spare a thought for the young women you come across in your day and life.

When will we become a country for young women?