The dreams of others

On the Green Line from Mundka Station, I strike up a conversation with a young woman sitting next to me. I’ve always been interested in the “ends of the lines” of the Delhi Metro. How they reach out to the hinterlands, that is, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. 

When you get down at Mundka, a line of small white vans waits for you at the bottom of the escalator. Young men call out place names, all across the Haryana border. Mundka is also a place of its own, a Delhi village, but at the moment it feels more like a place of transit. As you descend the escalator, there are cow dung patties drying in the sun to one side and a highway to the other. The area around the station is more built up than it was a year ago. From the station, currently the last stop on the Green Line, you can see the aboveground line under construction, extending further west. Soon, in a year or so, there will be seven more stations beyond it. Then Mundka will be incorporated in a different way, with the Metro coming before and after it.

Raveena, the young woman who alights with me at Mundka, tells me that her father drops her to the station, and then she takes the Metro a few stops to Paschim Vihar, where her college is. She is very clear on one point: she would not be on the Metro if there were no ladies’ coach. “After Mundka, it’s good,” she says, “but before Mundka, it’s very bad, the crowd and all.” And then: “Haryana is not good, not good for girls. Men are not good, even boys. They stare at me, sometimes they vent at me. I can’t do anything.” 

We are sitting at one end of the ladies’ coach, just next to the in-between space that connects to the general coach, where the men stand, often chatting with women they are travelling with, looking down at their phones, or looking into the ladies’ coach. It’s a different stare from the one you encounter on the street. It is less aggressive, more circumspect, and women can look back in perhaps a slightly different way as well. Is it the women’s ability to look back that tempers the men’s stares?

I am struck by Raveena’s use of the word “vent.” On the street they see her as a species rather than a person. What are they angry about? That she is a girl in public, that she moves with confidence, that she is protected, that she studies, that they don’t have girlfriends, that they don’t have jobs, that, ironically enough, there aren’t more women around. We have heard all of this before. 

We didn’t need Barack Obama to tell us about the plight of women in public spaces (women should be able to ride the bus in peace, he said); and yet the fact that he did, during his speech at Siri Fort Auditorium in the heart of cosmopolitan South Delhi, offered up different connections to ponder. Not only because of the high rates of female foeticide there, among the supposedly educated and enlightened, where Haryana apparently lives on in the mind, but also because of the connections across gender, caste, and class that permeate most households. In this regard, Obama spoke of the “dreams of domestic servants” as well as of labourers’ families at Humayun’s Tomb. He is able to make political poetry of such associations. And what he is saying, to put it simply, is that the question of dignity can’t be posed in isolation. It is not about one group’s rights and dignities versus another’s but rather something shared. Just like in daily life. How, then, might we come to recognise the dreams of others?

This American president does not use the word “dream” lightly, as it always carries the resonance of Martin Luther King Jr’s powerful idea of the fulfilment of “the dream” as marking the end of segregation and the beginning of real equality among people of different skin tones. Dr King, Obama reminded us, came to India and introduced himself as a “fellow untouchable.” In an American context, this kind of move would be seen as “keeping it real,” never forgetting where you came from no matter how high you go. 

Although Obama began his speech by pointing out that India and the United States are both former colonies of Britain and so shared the values created from being post-colonial nations, it rang much more true to me when he spoke of his grandfather having been a cook for the British government in Kenya. Aspiration, he seemed to say, is not only about looking up and ahead, but about recognising the dignity in the history of where one has come from.

Still, there is much anger to be unleashed.

My ride out to Mundka featured BJP election posters (chalo chalein Modi ke saath), and my ride back features promises of a mobile phone safety button and CCTV for all of Delhi, courtesy of the AAP. Women are sleeping and chatting under the posters. 

It being election season, even if only up to the Haryana border, I ask Raveena if she thinks politicians can change things. She smiles and says, “Of course. They can have people follow traffic rules and have driving licenses,” she starts. I’m surprised that she’s mentioned that and not something more transformative, but then, on reflection, I suppose she is referring to the rule of law more generally. Maybe if some rules are enforced, other less tangible ones will be too.

The Metro ride from Lajpat Nagar to Mundka takes about an hour and twenty minutes. You can take the Violet Line to Central Secretariat, the Yellow Line to Kashmere Gate, the Red Line to Inderlok, and then get on the Green Line to Mundka. Or you can take the Violet Line to the Blue Line, changing at Mandi House, and then get on the Green Line at Kirti Nagar. It doesn’t matter how you do it, but either way you get a sense of a continuum at work, as supposed centers give way to outskirts. There is no here and there, there is no urban and rural, there is no us and them. It is all in-between.

The author teaches at George Mason University and is the author of English Heart, Hindi Heartland: The Political Life of Literature in India