Memories of bad dreams

I had a strange dream some nights ago. Something about a young woman being killed. It bothered me all day long — Who was the girl? And why wasn’t I feeling the helpless terror of bad dreams?

It took me a while to realise that I wasn’t really dreaming; I was just remembering sketchy details my mind had collected from the newspaper. I hadn’t paid much attention to the report since it was a brief item on the inside pages. Either some girl was killed or her boyfriend was killed by her brother.

There had been another report weeks before that. A 19-year-old went to Kurla (LTT) Terminus to meet her boyfriend. Her brother-in-law took off in hot pursuit and, along with a neighbor, managed to haul her back. On the train ride home, something happened. Either she jumped off or she was pushed. Or else, she fell out accidentally.

One detail from that story continues to haunts me. Her brother-in-law was yelling at her. Perhaps he was shaming her for being so hungry for love, or being ungrateful. Then he began to criticise her slippers (the report said ‘footwear’). Her slippers were worn out, ugly, and he asked her to get rid of them. So the girl went to the train door to get rid of those ugly slippers, and she fell.

Round and round goes that image in my head. What was her brother-in-law thinking? Did he expect her to walk home barefoot? Could she expect worse punishment at home? Did she jump?
Round and round in my head go the questions —Why did it matter so much if she wanted to elope? What’s the worst that could happen? A failed love affair — or even a girl being saddled with unwanted babies — is not a bigger tragedy than her jumping off a moving train. Or is it?

The absolute terror with which we treat this business of young boys and girls would be funny if it wasn’t tragic. It spills over into our fear of ‘free’ spaces, including campuses where adults are treated like adults. When I was applying to Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of my uncles had laughed, winked and said: It has a very ‘free’ reputation. I asked him to clarify and he said JNU has mixed hostels. Co-eds!

I’d just stepped out of a strict convent and I’ll admit that the idea of gender-neutral hostels was shocking. Anyway, JNU didn’t admit me. Years later, I visited friends on the campus. That’s when I found out the hostels are not co-ed.

Then why do people outside JNU think they are? I still don’t know. But I do know that a ‘strict’ hostel is considered a special incentive by parents of girl students when choosing a school or college. Co-ed dorms are probably too ‘free’ an idea for us to swallow yet.

If an Indian campus tried to introduce the system, I can imagine howls of protest from students, teachers and parents alike.
It’s taken decades even for the western world to accept the idea. Rutgers University in New Jersey allowed ‘gender neutral housing’ very recently. Even so, it took the suicide of a gay student for them to reach that decision.

I’m just wondering what it will take for us to decide that the loss of a child isn’t worth any face-saving system. And yes, I’m still wondering about the girls that weren’t born in the last decade. Lakhs of girls missing from the census books, lost to what god knows what strange nightmare. Strange, isn’t it? What could be more terrifying than a missing or dead child?    

Annie Zaidi writes poetry, stories, essays, scripts (and in a dark, distant past, recipes she never actually tried)