She had opinions about a great many things, and one of them, formed early and held firmly, was that her body was hers and nobody else’s business. This was not a political position, at least not initially. It was simply a fact she had established by the age of four, when she refused, categorically and without negotiation, to be bathed by her father. Her mother handled these duties. This was non-negotiable. Her mother understood. Her father, to his credit, did not press the matter.
The system held until primary school, when her digestive tract staged a unilateral revolt and the school aya — the attendant, the fixer, the woman who handled the situations that fell outside the official curriculum — had to intervene. She cleaned her up, which was kind of her. She saw her in a state of partial undress in the process, which was, to her mind, a catastrophe of the highest order.
Her mother heard her before she saw her. The sobbing was audible from the end of the road. The rickshaw driver, a man entrusted — as rickshaw drivers in India commonly were, without paperwork or background checks, simply on the basis of showing up every morning and knowing where the children lived — delivered her home.
Her mother asked if she was alright. She was not alright. Her mother offered the reasonable explanation that sometimes, when one is very unwell, the body makes decisions independently of its owner. She listened to this. She considered it.
That, she said, was not the problem.
The problem was that the aya had seen her naked. And she smelled like a toilet.
Her mother, whose entire world was organised around this child, bathed her again and applied Ponds talcum powder with the dedication of someone plastering a wall. Order was restored. The incident was filed away, where it would be retrieved periodically by her mother for the rest of her life, in the way that mothers do.
She was from several places, depending on who was asking and how much time they had. Born in Baroda. Then Baroda again, for a while. Then Faridabad. Then Gurgaon. The geography of an Indian childhood that followed work, opportunity, and circumstance.
It was in Faridabad that she learned something she had not been taught and would rather not have needed to know: that existing in public, in a female body, required a management strategy. The dupatta — the long scarf, the veil, the garment that technically completed an outfit — served a second, unspoken function. It was armour. Draped across the chest, held in place by vigilance, it was the barrier between her and the hands of men who appeared to regard public space as a petting zoo.
She stopped wearing jeans. She stopped wearing skirts. She carried bags at specific angles. She developed, without anyone telling her to, the particular spatial awareness of someone who has learned that a crowd is not neutral.
There was an incident in Gurgaon that she has not forgotten, because it is not the kind of thing one forgets.
She was returning home with her parents in a shared rickshaw — a vehicle that, it should be said, could accommodate up to nine people through an arrangement that defied several principles of geometry and all principles of health and safety, though for a driver making a living it was simply efficient mathematics. She was seated with her back to the driver. Her parents were not beside her. She was fully clothed, in a salwar kameez, which is to say she was wearing exactly what the people who have opinions about these things would have approved of.
For thirty minutes, a hand touched her. She thought about her homework.
This is not a proud memory. It is an honest one. She thought about pending assignments because the alternative was to announce, in a vehicle containing nine people, what was happening to her body — and her father was not within whispering distance, and she was not yet equipped with the language or the fury or the sheer nerve that the situation required. So she did her mental arithmetic and got through it.
When they got out, she told her father.
He asked why she hadn’t said something.
She explained, with the patience of someone who has already lived through the thing being discussed, that saying something would have required shouting it across a crowded rickshaw, and that this had not seemed like a viable option at the time.
Her father did not have a good answer to this. There isn’t one.
She has since heard the argument — heard it many times, from many directions — that women invite this kind of attention through their choices. What they wear. Where they go. How they present themselves.
She finds this argument unpersuasive, given that she was twelve, in a salwar kameez, sitting next to her parents, doing mental homework, and it happened anyway.
The clothes, it turns out, were never the variable.
She sometimes wonders whether, alongside the various behavioural therapies that exist for the full range of human difficulties, there might be space for one specifically targeted at teaching men how to be in the presence of women without treating them as a resource. It seems like a gap in the market. It seems like it might be useful.
It would probably need to start quite young.
© Rangan Gupta 2026
Cogitatio 
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