All in the Head

India is truly free when a woman can fearlessly walk the streets alone at midnight – Gandhi

I was fifteen and a very precocious fifteen! I was loud, outspoken, and read books that no fifteen-year-old should be reading. It did not help matters that I was growing up without the supervision of my parents who lived in another town. I lived with an older brother and sister who were barely nineteen and twenty-three themselves and did not know how to deal with a precocious fifteen-year-old. No wonder I was disliked by most parents of my friends – especially, by the father of these two girls who lived about half a mile from our house.

He just hated my guts!

I sensed it. I usually tried to avoid him when I went to hang out at their place. And I hung out at their place quite a lot. I liked the girls and I liked their TV even more. They had a big color TV which was way better than the tiny portable, black-and-white thing that passed for a TV in our house. Unfortunately, it was not an easy task to avoid the father because he owned a small grocery store attached to their house; he dropped in on us unceremoniously and that too usually when I was in the middle of telling the girls some wild story or the other or when we were loudly guffawing at a stupid joke.

You again! He would say to me. Corrupting my girls! I should have guessed from the laughter I could hear out in the street.

It would shut me up pretty quick and I would fidget uncomfortably wishing I could just vanish into thin air. The girls always found it funny.

He just messes with you, they told me, why do you take it so seriously? He doesn’t mean it.

This was probably true too because he could have easily forbidden them from talking to me or asked me to stop coming to their house. He never did. But I still made sure I went to their house during peak business hours when he was distracted with his customers.

One day all three of us, the sisters and I, decided to go jogging in the early mornings.

Come to our house sharp at 5:30 a.m. tomorrow morning, they told me. We don’t want to be jogging when the sun is out and everyone is up and about.

Sure, I said and came back home all excited.

I set the alarm for five in the morning and for good measure I begged my sister, who was an early riser, to wake me up exactly at 5 in the morning so I could be at my friends’ house by 5:30. My sister couldn’t be bothered with such things. So she gave me a suggestion.

Directly under the apartment we were living in, there was a dairy booth. A truck came to the dairy booth to deliver milk and according to my sister, it came every morning between 4:30 a.m. and 5:00 a.m. She said it was loud and if I slept close to the kitchen balcony, the noise of the truck should be loud enough to wake me. I liked the idea and spread a makeshift mattress near the balcony, practically in the balcony, of the kitchen. I left the balcony door open so I wouldn’t miss the truck and its noise. It was summer and a cool breeze blew from the balcony door that made me fall into a deeper slumber than the ceiling fan in the bedroom ever could.

I woke with a start when I heard the loud engine of the milk truck. It was parked directly under the balcony and was roaring! I looked at the time – 5:30 a.m. I got up cursing myself for oversleeping and dressed quickly and was out of the house in a jiffy. I walked as fast as I could to my friends’ house expecting them to be ready and waiting for me and hopping mad because I was late. There was none of that. In fact, there was no sign of anyone even being awake. I didn’t know what to do and waited for a few minutes hoping to catch some sign of life in the house. Nothing happened. After some time, I decided to go to the back of the house where the bedroom was.

The window to the bedroom was open. The entire family was sleeping in one bedroom (not uncommon in India) – the mother, the two sisters and then the father! I called out the sisters’ names, one after the other, in a loud whisper. But no one budged. I was afraid I would wake the father instead so I had to keep my voice really low. After trying for five or ten minutes without any luck, I came back to the front of the house that was leading to the main road. I stood there unable to decide what I should do.

Should I go back home? Or should I just go jogging by myself? These girls seem to have just forgotten!

As I stood there contemplating my options, a couple of young guys walked by. They saw me standing there and one of them whistled softly.

Hey, baby! He said.

Arggh! I thought. If I went alone I may encounter such idiots.

So I turned and went around the house to the bedroom window again. This time I picked up a few pebbles and threw them gingerly at the sisters. I was praying I wouldn’t mess up my aim and hit the father instead. I didn’t. The older sister woke up at some point either because a pebble landed on her or because of the sound of the pebbles landing. She opened her eyes and looked at me in the light of the dim zero-watt bulb glowing in the room. Luckily, for someone woken up by a shadow from the window, she didn’t scream.

Come on, I whispered. We have to go jogging.

She got up sleepily and looked at the clock.

Why did you come so early? It’s only 1:30, she said. Go back home.

With that she turned and went back to sleep.

I froze where I stood. It was 1:30 a.m.? Why did I think it was 5:00 in the morning?

Then it occurred to me. It was the stupid milk truck! Unbeknownst to my sister, it seemed to come at any time of the night. Obviously, in my sleepy state, I must have misread my watch. And I had walked all alone all the way from home practically at midnight. No wonder those guys were whistling at me. And to think I almost went for a run by myself!

My friend had fallen back into a deep sleep. I did not have the heart to wake her up again because I was too chicken to walk back alone now that I knew the time.

I went jogging alright – jogged all the way home. The same roads that I had walked quietly and confidently a few minutes ago turned into scary paths of hell! Every movement in the dark shadows scared me – it was a ghost; it was a pimp who wanted to sell me into sex trade; it was a street dog infected with deadly Rabies.

That was just the longest way home ever!

I got into the house quietly and climbed into my makeshift bed near the balcony and pulled the covers over my head, shaking. I don’t know how long it took me to fall asleep but I woke up when I heard the sisters calling out to me from under the balcony.

Miss Midnight adventure! Want to go jogging?

Needless to say, I did not go jogging with them. Not then not ever. But that didn’t stop them or my siblings or the other friends at school, who found out about it, from giving me a hard time. They all teased me mercilessly.

Finally! India got its independence, they said. You proved it by walking alone at midnight.

It went on for days, years even.

Reader, you don’t want to know what their father had to say to me!