Stri: Lives of Women

Arpita: In the Hot Seat

It was just the ten of us sitting in a circle, smiling and chatting away.

She was there, the writer and activist. I was hoping to get some answers out of her.

Sipping hot water from the steel thermos, she wiped her eyes intermittently. Her voice showed traces of a bad cold. Nevertheless she obliged us. 

Her parrot green saree stood brightly against her dark, tanned skin that was showing signs of wrinkling. She put on the hard ground a package covered in thin plastic. Facing us, she cleared her throat.

"Ma'am" began one of the girls who was sitting behind me "I read this very offensive joke about the Scheduled Castes on WhatsApp." Her eyebrows rose in fury and her nostrils flared. She listened as the girl narrated the offensive material and brushed off droplets of perspiration from her forehead. "Well, we are nothing more than a joke to them. These people belonging to the higher caste take advantage of us all the time. I tell you, caste is a fixity that you have to live with. Even selecting a place for burial is dictated by our caste despite educational qualification."

I genuinely felt bad for her. While sitting down to tea with my uncle who was an IAS officer he told me about the discriminatory 'two tumbler' policy that was followed in several villages of the South. "Arpita, you live in a city where people do get equal opportunities" he told me in his comfortingly deep voice. I put my palms on either side of my face and listened to him. "The caste heirarchy is prominent in the villages, my dear!" I nodded. "You see, the people of lower castes aren't served coffee in the brass tumblers that are used to serve the people of the higher castes. Often, they are served tea or coffee in steel tumblers that are placed irreverently on the ground. The tea seller would never establish eye contact with the Dalit (lower caste individual) or hand him/her the teacup. That's how terrible life is for them, Arpita!".

I came back to reality as I noticed her eyes focusing on mine. Retracting my consciousness from reverie, I smiled at her. She didn't return it. My face took on a neutral expression. Her expression hardened. "Ma'am" I asked softly. She tilted her head gently and nodded while looking at me. "This is an opinion I picked up from one of our own alumni. Mind you, this is not my personal opinion as I do not agree with it entirely."Straightening up, she said "Tell me". 

"Ma'am, this person passed out of our institution forty years ago. She felt that the college fared better when girls from rural areas were not many in the college. She truly believed that the institution turned them into fine ladies when the reservation system was not in place. Now that the influx of the aforementioned people has increased greatly due to the reservation system, she opines that the standard of the institution has drastically dropped. I will respectfully remind you that this is her opinion and not mine."

Her eyebrows rose a second time and her mouth tightened. "What do you have to say about this, young lady?". I took a deep breath and arranged my words carefully. "Ma'am, I would only like to make one observation. We are a class of fifty and there were thirty five failures in four out of six papers that we were to study three semesters ago. I don't know if this reflects personal incompetence or the fact that the standard of education received by these individuals who have come on reservation basis is so low that they have neither a good command over the language nor can they pass in their exams at University level."

As she sat listening to me, words formed unconsciously on her lips although she tried a great deal to suppress ejecting them. "Ma'am, I am sorry to say this but or department was appalled on having these many failures for the first time in their history of correction. What do you feel?"

I do not know whether it was the anger or the fever that reddened her eyes. There was a twinge of fear in the pit of my stomach. She wiped her eyes with her right hand. After wiping her runny nose with the back of her hand, she opened her mouth to vomit vitriol. "How can you say that? You forward castes expect us to behave in a particular fashion and throw acid on us when we fail. These girls hardly have a chance at education and you blame them from failing? If the quality of their education was bad, blame the government."

As much as she sounded aggressive, her face did not exhibit signs of anger. I was put at ease."Take this case, Ma'am" I continued where I left off  "'A' is a Dalit worker in an office and 'B' is a Forward Caste worker in the same department. B works hard, fixes many cases and gets paid a pittance whereas A loiters by the canteen to eat her fill and gossip with people. She gets paid a six digit figure for salary when B gets paid a little more than A. Isn't this ugly?"

Her expression remained the same. "You are again expecting us to behave in a particular fashion and pitting is against a forward caste member. Do you think that getting a reservation is cakewalk? Do you know how we have to run from pillar to post in order to secure a seat in a college or workplace? You Forward Castes think its cakewalk." This time her breathing became heavy and her shoulders were heaving. I understood that this was getting dangerous. 

The rendezvous ended there. The newspaper that lay on the teapoy had extensive coverage of the Neilesh Patel agitation. He was a young man who demanded that his community also be considered a scheduled caste. He was vocal about how children from his community who had secured 80% marks were denied admission into prestigious colleges when Scheduled Caste children who scored 50% were given admission freely. The Neilesh wave was catching up and vandalism took over. Buses were burnt, streetlights damaged, houses demolished and chaos ran amok in the cityscape.

I tried to banish the bad memory from my mind.