Where am I safe?

I am a woman who has lived in Delhi for over two decades now. The lessons that my folks taught me as a kid and during all those growing years are a result of the fact that I’ve grown up in a city where over a dozen women get raped and molested every single day. Eve-teasing, verbal molestation and getting stared at, at every nook and corner of the city is a daily affair. I don’t know, when I step out, whether I would come back home, safe. I have grown up living in a fear, that one day, half a dozen men will pull me into their Omni, rape me and render me worthless to my family and to my country. We live in a country where a woman getting raped means, she loses her purity and chastity and that her body is a temple and all that crap. These pseudo ethics were imbibed in me too, by our very own bollywood, news channels and every other media that influences a kid’s mind. I’ve grown up only to realise, this is all bullshit. But I’m still not safe here and I don’t know who, should I write this to. I walk on the road and if a car inches towards me, I change my path. I do not help random men on the road. If I’m alone in an elevator and a man comes in, I walk out. I avoid wearing skirts and shorts in public to avoid getting stared at. And no, I’m not paranoid. Ask a girl and she’ll know what I’m talking about. I am not at peace in my own homeland, my own country. Where should I go? I have been taught to ignore the jerks and their cheesy comments on the roads because apparently if I dare to fight back, I might ‘hurt’ the fucker’s ego and end up getting raped. To say the least, I don’t know what we are growing into. The country’s future is in the bars, drinking their lives away, surrounded by the smoke of the fancy hookas and a girl wrapped around their arms who, more often than not, gets pregnant at the age of 14. Everybody else is too busy blaming everything that’s wrong about their lives on everybody else. You tell women to leave their offices early so that they don’t get victimised? You tell them what to wear and what not so that they don’t ‘tempt’ the men to rape them.  Do you listen to yourself? Is that how you deal with a problem? I don’t trust, any of you to run my country. The windows of our future shut upon our lives like catacombs. I don’t trust the pseudo wisdom of the society that outrages about every superficial hoopla and the weeds that are corroding our roots and eating away our country are effortlessly ignored. I recall, some years back, while crossing a road, a Delhi Police van, full of police officers, passed by and I very clearly remember, one of them passed an obscene comment with a vicious smile, while the other whistled at me. Those were the men who maintain the law and order in the city. That day is imprinted in my memory, for I was left flabbergasted. Not because yet another man misbehaved with me on the road, that’s a routine affair. Because ,the policemen did it. A little something in me, died that day for nothing hurts more than losing hope and trust. Who would I go to, when something bad happens to me? Who should I trust? From bad mouthed auto drivers to horny fuckers in the metro dying to rape your personal space in a disgusting attempt to inappropriately touch you, to attain what? Nirvana? And beat the fuck out of the woman’s life. I’m no where safe. Not in the school, college, home, office, metro, road, bus, you name it. I will continue to express my dissent to the laws that objectify me and tell me what to wear and when to move out. I live here with a disgust and a fear that one fine day my story will feature in the daily newspaper and yet again, the page will be flipped and yet again, dismissed.