Life on Their Own Terms
Fiza and Geetika were equals in a ruthless man’s world
Newspapers are often like jigsaw puzzles, they present fragments, each of which is a story in itself. When one arranges the stories together, one gets a more meaningful narrative, a more poignant story. The last few weeks saw a spate of such stories. There’s Pallavi Purkayastha, murdered by her flat chowkidar for resisting his advances. There’s Fiza, alone and dead for three days before anyone found her. There’s Geetika Sharma, the air hostess who committed suicide, tired of a politician’s harassment. Then there’s Shehla Masood, the activist murdered by a jealous rival. One can add to it the tales of Nupur Mehta and Simran Sood. Each story has been presented like a sordid tale, a scandal of women who looked free, who did not sound right, ending predictably in violence. These women were not saints and yet there is a strange symphony of similarity and solidarity about their disparate lives.
Each was a professional, a career woman, proud of herself and her body, confident of making her way in a man’s world. These were ordinary women made extraordinary by the fact they saw pride and dignity in autonomy. They felt that they were equals in a man’s world. Many of them worked as lawyers, managers or starlets. There was openness about their lives, a confidence that patriarchal society found threatening and sordid. Many died terrible deaths, some were destroyed through scandal but there was heroism to their lives, vulnerability in the courage which newspapers sought to ignore. Their stories when presented in isolation do have a touch of scandal but read together one sees a group of courageous women, contemptuous of hypocrisy and open about their relationships. They did not know each other but many were tied together by tragedies of their endings. But it is the beginnings that made them. Oddly, while women raise a flag of transparency and freedom, men hide their selves under a patriarchal coyness. Gopal Kanda harasses Geetika Sharma and pretends to be cock of the walk. A Pakistani umpire admits to hugging a starlet, Leena Kapoor, and portrays himself as otherwise correct. Fiza’s husband sits silent as if he is in political purdah. Stereotype comes to the aid of convention. When men in small towns are ambitious, we see it as upward mobility but when women join the same economy, we often call it trafficking.
These women are not appealing to the domesticity of the family, the contract called marriage, but to the vitality of the relationships and the freedom to be together. Oddly when you string these stories together it is not scandal that you see but the hypocrisy of male society that refuses to see them for what they are and treats them as objects. Some of the women used their bodies with eloquent effect. Strung together, the scandal erases itself and what you get is the roll call of freedom fighting sexual hypocrisy. Told separately, each woman’s story seems an obituary with a sad ending, presented as a puritanical story how sexual licence destroys the self. Collectively, what we have is the testament of openness, a sense that love and sexuality need passion and togetherness, not contracts. For all their vulnerability, the women appear strong and committed to the unorthodox lives they lived. Each of these anecdotes is the tribute to the courage of beginnings, a fable of how women are writing and living freedom differently.