older madder angrier

Angry email from years ago.
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I cannot imagine what it's like to be able to walk around at night without worrying about every car that drives by too close. About what you're wearing and where you're standing and how you look at people and who is looking at you. This paranoid wariness has become so internalized that we do not even realise it, it's like traffic noise that turns you deaf slowly and truly over the years, until you wake up one morning drowning in white noise.

What is our deafness then? I think it is apathy, not worrying about your fellow being because you are always worried about yourself and your own safety.

These constraints make me mad, like they make you mad, it's true. But then I cannot seem to sustain this, this madness. I smoke a joint and forget. I read a book and forget. I have a luxurious hot bath, and forget. But then hopefully what makes me different from the average Delhi yuppie is that there is an underlying uneasiness under this state of inertia I keep myself in.

I have been helping V with her PhD thesis on Migrant Construction Workers, at a site in D School, and so we've been interviewing the workers at the site. It's an interesting experience. The ones who have been here for a while are more cynical and hardened by the city, and this is true, they have been exploited and have a reason to be so hardened. The ones who are straight off the boat, so to speak, are more like who we;ve met in the villages. People who stop their days work to talk to you, to look at you, to let you sleep in their aangan. V and I stayed and ate dinner with Preeti last night. Preeti is this young mother of three from Bilaspur in chhatisgarh. She and I are friends, somehow. I'm very awkward with people so I usually just sit in her room and play with her children while she finishes the backbreaking amount of housework she has to do after she finishes her 9 to 6 shift. It got really late so she and this other woman, Mamta were telling me and Val to stay the night there... I had to get home but V said she would. But then the women got nervous and changed their minds- she later explained to me in hushed undertones that she was worried about V's safety in the settlement, because "anything can happen at night". Just like that- through the happy estrogen bonding and woodsmoke there was this unsettling underside- I shivered and remembered something I'd read about the rape statistics in urban slums being ridiculously high, (I don't remember the exact figure now) but this is just what life here seems to be. It's enough to make you want to just curl up and go to sleep in your soft comfortable beds, the air con turned down and your music turned up.

Also I don't know how much of what they say to us is just being rude and cynical, whether asking someone to spend the night somewhere is just a way to call them "loose women" - do you know what I mean? I remember in one village in MP they thought that since I was a Delhi urban college going girl I would be, pardon my language, an easy fuck.

It drives me mad.
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