A Walk In The Park
Of places that are open to all, but not everyone is welcome. Thoughts on public parks, private homes, clothing choices, invisibility, and the city of Delhi.
There’s news that my city will soon have its first all-women’s park. Should I be thrilled, or is dystopia finally at the doorstep?
I’m taken back to sometime in 2010, when the Delhi Metro announced that one coach in every train would be reserved for women commuters. I had felt similarly then, which is to not know how to feel. In some ways, this was an enabling measure, but in many more, it reified the gender divide. Who was to decide who is a woman and who is not?
The regular coaches quickly became synonymous with ‘men’s coaches’. On the rare occasion that a solo woman commuter dared to enter the general coach (where everyone was allowed, but not necessarily welcome), they were said to be “asking for it”. On many occasions, I witnessed a man unknowingly enter the women’s coach. The merciless manner in which they were driven away, sometimes driven out, divested them of dignity, of their right to exist in that moment.
Ultimately, the segregation (or “reservation”, however you choose to look at it) appeared to say, “If the men are making the women uncomfortable, then, here, let’s give the women their own safe space, because men will be men (i.e. incorrigible)”. The women can veil themselves in the safety of the all-women’s coach. Even outside the home, the women were expected to be in a home-like environment, ensconced in the safety of invisibility.
At Home, or Not
For many of us, the pandemic brought into focus our relationship with the place we call home. This relationship, I realised in one of my quietly epiphanic moments, can be understood through your feelings towards the front door of the home. Home is the place that either beckons you to enter or tempts you to escape. Which side of that door would you rather be on?
Does your stomach sink before you step in? Does your heart flutter before you step out? Do you wear the same kind of clothes on either side of that door? What kind of lock do you put on that door? Is it a glass door, or is it an opaque and impenetrable block of solid wood? Maybe you didn’t have a choice there. Home is also where you live with that which you haven’t (always) chosen.
In the months and years of the pandemic, choices were scant. For those of us who could afford to, staying at home was the mandate, if not simply the more prudent thing to do. The only permissible activity that offered a relative degree of safe freedom was a walk in the park.
No Walk in the Park
Let’s now talk about the public parks of Delhi, where a fate similar to that of the Metro appears to unfold.
In the last couple of decades, urban India has witnessed a dramatic shift in the demography of public parks. When I was growing up in the Delhi of the 90s, the idea of recreation was contained within a small picnic basket and wrapped inside a humble straw mat, both of which would unfurl and come to life in a chosen corner of the park, often as an age-old monument looked on in its quiet magnificence.
Before there were shopping malls, the park was the quintessential melting pot. Entry was free, and there were no gatekeepers stationed to measure your purchase power.
Although open to the public, each type of park in India’s metropolitan regions now goes by an unwritten code of whom it seeks to admit. The gates are open to all, but not everyone is welcome. Socio-economic stratification, sexual orientation, marital status and gender identification seem to be some of the more pronounced barriers to entry into public parks in India. When I choose to walk in a park in Delhi, air pollution and soaring temperatures notwithstanding, I must first get into the safety of a private vehicle to drive not to the neighbourhood park, but to one further away because it welcomes people of my kind. A walk in the park, therefore, is preceded by a drive in the car. Once you know which park to go to, what you wear to the park is another matter that calls for careful consideration.
I recall an evening in the summer of 2019, on a visit to Sunder Nursery, a glorious arboretum by Humayun’s Tomb. The park was lovely, but the evening was not. Clad in a thick denim jacket on a sweltering day, I felt every bit as uncomfortable as I looked. The jacket was my reluctant companion, a shield against the piercing gaze of the onlooker, in case my weather-appropriate clothing falls short in their eyes. To this type of invisible violence, there are no means of resistance.
I wore the jacket all evening, until I thought I would pass out from the discomfort. Even then, the thought of taking off the jacket was more unbearable, so I left for greener pastures (read a closed, private space that selectively admits people of my ilk).
For me, a walk in the park is a failed attempt at wanting to be, without wanting to be seen. Not wanting to be seen is different from wanting to remain unseen. You don’t have to be invisible to have to be left alone. To be is a verb in its own right, yet it hangs in the air, seemingly unfinished.
More recently, I was at Safdarjung’s Tomb, a quaint sandstone mausoleum in the geographical heart of the city. Interestingly, my architect friend pointed out that this tomb served as a kind of blueprint for the iconic Taj Mahal. [One of the reasons I love Delhi (correction: I have grown to love Delhi after years of having taken it for granted, especially since having partially moved to the clogged, congested, characterless and culturally-homogenous Bangalore) is how seamlessly the historical monuments blend with the modern landscape.]
On a beautiful Saturday winter afternoon, hardly anyone in the populous city of Delhi thought this place worthy of a visit. The crowds, I conjectured, were thronging the shopping malls, where you get a glimpse of what life can be. Collectively, we hunger for what is yet to come, represented by the futuristic arcades, multiplexes, malls and marketplaces that masquerade as a museum of aspirations, where every item is dangling on a price tag (yes, the inversion is deliberate!).
Relics of the past, like monuments and parks, are for those who are either prohibited elsewhere, for the lack of purchasing power, or for those with the privilege to romanticise the past. On a balmy winter afternoon or a blazing summer evening, you’ll find those at the two ends of the socio-economic spectrum occupy the heart of these parks, albeit different ones.
Most tacitly, they assert that here, in this place without doors and walls, they are at home.
Do you have a go-to safe space outside the home?
Goddess. I saw that you had written another when I was speaking on the phone with that woman I told you I read a number of your pieces to, which she loved. Let me emphasize this before I give you verbatim, her response to this piece. She has traveled the world, been to many of the earths greatest vortexes, loves clothing and travel, was trained as a lawyer, is a seer, councils business people how to create what they most want... She said this: "Wow. This woman, I love her writing. It just takes you in so many different deep places. I love it. But it's the dichotomy and the perception of a woman's only... Yeah, gives men to claim the rest of the space. It's crazy! Wow. I love that. I love that!"
I'm not sure why you doubt yourself. I'm not sure why you think this is a fairly ordinary piece in the scheme of your larger writing pursuits. I think this piece is brilliant. I noticed that I like, as my mom liked about my writing, the use of alliteration. I think you have a voice that can speak for both educated and uneducated. You can reach those hungering to understand that which has always escaped them.
My take on why you doubt yourself and judge this one as fairly ordinary, is because a man, or some men, in your past belittled what they were afraid of or couldn't understand that you brought to their attention, and they didn't want to appear less than. They put you down, because they were feeling doubtful of themselves. This is something I'm uncovering with someone who has been in my life for over quarter of a century. I'm finally being direct with the put downs that have more to do with him, than with me.
I grew to love Delhi. It’s a city that has no pretensions. Yes, life is hard there. Yes, the weather sucks. The pollution stings. Yes, the people can be aggressive. But the truth is...life is equally hard in all the other cities too, a point that people who point fingers at Delhi don’t seem to understand.
As for women-only parks I hope if doesn’t go the way of the Delhi metro.
Beautifully observed piece!