Shishur Sevay

“Two Old Ladies with nothing to do all day.”  I didn’t know what he was saying at the time, but he was trying to push me away from an office entrance at the school.  He spoke in Bengali, still difficult for me. Sometimes it’s better not to know what people are saying especially when I am making a disturbance.

I’ll skip all the details because even as I wrote them I was bored.  I was at a parent’s meeting where our six year old attends.  I was meeting with the Coordinator when a big man came into the office and tried to have his meeting and I refused to let him take over.  But after the meeting another man tried to burst into the office as our neighbor was having her meeting. I was blocking the entrance.  He tried to push me away and I refused which led to the outburst.  I was with Seema Gupta our Vice President, and retired Joint Registrar of the Calcutta High Court.  She was horrified.  He probably said even worse.  She holds back on telling me the really bad stuff.  He was aggressively saying he had to to go office and we were two old ladies with nothing to do with ourselves except stand around talking.

But here is the kicker!  I called aside one of the women officials who had seemed sympathetic and said I was upset about the men just taking over.  She said, “Maam, this is India and you have to follow the culture,”  I told her I wouldn’t.

Back home at Shishur Sevay I was telling the teachers and one said, “Yes, and I have to go through this at my child’s school next week.”

Why do I make a scene?  I have nothing to lose.  The women around me have too much to lose.  They accept it because they have no choice.  I resist openly just so other women can hear that someone thinks this is not OK, that they should not have to live as they do.  Living in the West we don’t really get it, because it’s not about incidents, but about living as a lesser person.   And for women like me, transposed from a sense of freedom and empowerment, these insults hurt.  They make me want to go back and pull out my accomplishments, to say I’m not just an old lady with nothing to do.  But he would never understand, neither of those men would.  To them I really am just an old lady.

This is hardly the first time, and certainly not the last, and I tell myself to ignore it, but in truth, I feel bad.  I feel devalued, and that was exactly their intent.