Dinner

"Outside the restaurant, the two girls felt the hot wind blaze against their bodies. It hadn’t been just another day." Parul Shankar recounts an incident and wonders about the realities of patriarchy as internalised by women and as exerted by men in our society. Parul can be contacted at dreamsnlife@gmail.com 

The lights dimmed further and the record took a stronger flavour of country music. Closing one’s eyes, it felt like an American cowboy hangout on a cold, grey evening. It was only when the eyes were open and the world not in a whirl that one could distinguish the setting to be much more sophisticated and urbane – a modern-day restaurant that had to its credit the exclusivity of a beautiful glass-panelled bar, a fibre floor flooded with coloured light, LCD screens telecasting a live cricket match and walls and a ceiling customized to create the ambience that the name of the restaurant promised. One smiled coming back to this privileged world, realizing that the chill only signified a comfortable air conditioning meant to keep out the stubborn heat of mid-March in this tropical part of the country, greatly distanced from the American cowboys in both time and space.

It was supposed to be a normal get-together with friends on an equally normal day. Nothing could have prepared the two young girls for the chance that this dinner could make them question and bring about a chaos in the way their education and upbringing had shaped their perception of the world.

Too excited to have finally managed a dinner, and with it the possibility of a meaningful conversation in the midst of strict deadlines in college, X and Y could barely keep their voices low despite the classic charm of the place. Their faces slightly flushed with the effect of the cocktails on the dark wooden table, they talked of how events had shaped since college began and the extent to which they might change by the end of the academic year. Educated in the social sciences, their conversation was loaded with ideological analysis of all that they saw and discussed.

They had just kept the glasses down when they noticed a middle-aged man slouching against the counter behind their table. He looked harmless enough, one of the many faces one comes across each day. It was peak meal time and the tables around were slowly getting occupied, mostly by office-goers and a few college students. Everything seemed fine until the man muttered some words directed towards them which neither X nor could Y discern in the busy hum of the restaurant. Only when they could understand his words did they notice that the restaurant hardly had a single table which was occupied by unaccompanied women.

The words “Are you available?”  did much more than spoiling the girls’ evening or making them speak up against what offended them, which they did, much to the surprise of the silent spectators sitting around in the restaurant, and unsettling them to a great extent.

The incident reaffirmed the feminist argument that despite the surface agency allowed to women there are public spaces that remain denied to them. It made clear the message that women who cross these defined boundaries deserve to be punished. It rendered illusory the idea of selfhood and the image of the independent urban women depicted in the broader socio-political discourse.

Significantly, the incident also brought to fore larger realities that do find mention in the syllabi of our elite education system but often go unrealized in real lives. The feelings the event generated in the two girls clearly reflected a fracture in the understanding of the internalisation of patriarchy by women. The justified anger to an offence was accompanied by a sense of shame, where the offence seemed personal and the shame public – despite the awareness that the personal is the political.

Outside the restaurant, the two girls felt the hot wind blaze against their bodies. It hadn’t been just another day. They wondered if the cowboy theme wasn’t so fictional after all. For the first time could they see both themselves and the larger world on the same platter of patriarchy – and the cowboy world of male chauvinism continued to be a reality.