A woman walked into a bar. Met two men, and this is what happened.
Minutes after attending a discussion by Arundhati Roy about her book Mother Mary Comes to Me, I walked over to a local club, where I had parked my car. At the outdoor bar, I met two men I am acquainted with. I would have probably joined them for a drink and a little light conversation about media and art.
One of them is a journalist, and the other, a retired businessman who is supposedly interested in art. I told them where I had just come from. And the art collector says to me, with an expansive smile, “You know, if I were to see Arundhati Roy, I wouldn’t hear her talk. I want her just to sit quietly, and I want to just look at her.”
I don’t know what he expected me to say. Perhaps he thought I’d laugh and congratulate him on his taste. The journalist obviously knew the waters were getting dangerous and looked at me warily.
I didn’t unleash my fury. In behaviour completely atypical of me, I announced that this was not the table where I would like to spend my evening. The journalist nodded with relief, and I walked away. By now, I know which battles to pick and which to ignore. This wasn’t even a skirmish.
Would I have achieved anything by calling him out on his misogyny? Was he going to see the error of his ways? Would the scales fall from his eyes, and would he be transformed into a decent human being? And he was hardly unique in his view in the bar. It would have been hard to find another man there who would not have thought he was funny or who didn’t agree with him. I would have been the odd woman out and added to my reputation of being difficult and temperamental, and oh yes, a feminist.
I chose to relive the evening’s delightful conversation between the two Arundhatis (Roy & Ghosh) and enjoy my chilled beer in blessed solitude. I would not allow this barfly’s misogyny to define my experience. And in a case of life imitating art, weeks after that, I watched Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep’s character) in The Devil Wears Prada 2, telling Sasha Barnes (Lucy Liu), the ex-wife of a billionaire, “You should not be defined by him (her ex-husband).”
This is my personal credo: to not be defined by the limitations or expectations of men. Let me amend that—to not be defined by anyone else’s expectations, gender no bar, as proved again by a character in the film, Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway).
This credo is shared by the three strong women with whom I watched the movie—an award-winning educationist, a well-known artist, and a beauty queen turned entrepreneur.
Single, independent, self-made, we have made the most of the cards life has dealt us. We forge our own paths, handle our finances, run our lives, careers, and businesses. Some of us travel economy, some first class, but we try to be a class act in all that we do.
It’s not that life gets easier with time, but we get better at dealing with it. And if there’s one thing we have learnt, it’s not to accept less than what we are worth.
A lesson that came home forcefully at a college reunion. Why do guys from college think they still have game? And if perchance they do have traces of it, would we want it? And yet we saw some guys trying to fan old flames without even an iota of doubt that they would be unwelcome.
Time has written stories on all our faces and bodies, but for the most part, thanks to healthier life choices and the aid of good cosmetics “her” story usually makes better reading than “his” story. But those guys (and I reiterate, not all) must be looking in a different mirror than others. Oh, what about their wives? “We lead separate lives.”
We don’t need the sweet mother of Jesus to rescue us from these wannabe players. We got away from them once, and we are staying away.
- Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, podcaster, and publisher at Raintree Media, offers a distinct female gaze of the world in this column.
