To be good or to be safe?

CHENNAI: Mrs Elizabeth George was rattled when she walked into our class. She put her books down on the holy teacher’s desk and said to us, “I have something very important to tell you all, and I want you to listen carefully to this.” Most of her peers would’ve done this to set the stage for a talk on bad behaviour, grades or announce extra classes to finish the portions on time. But Mrs George, or EG Miss as we would refer to her, was a cut above many.

The previous day a bike accident had cost two young girls their lives. The pillion rider had been sitting on one side, and this EG Miss said, had caused the rider to lose her balance at a turning. They had fallen down on the road and the truck behind them couldn’t stop before it was too late. EG Miss spent half the precious class period on this news item, trying to drill into the heads of nothing-will-happen-to-me teenagers that no risk is worth our lives.

Her ask was very simple: Do not ride pillion on one side, whatever the reason. What she said was meant to be applied by all of us, though it was a given that none of the guys would dare sit on one side and have their masculinity questioned. She didn’t speak to the girls separately.

She said, “If you know you have to sit on a bike, wear appropriate clothes, if you cannot sit with a leg on each side of the bike do not get onto it.” She knew her audience too — the kids she was addressing mostly came from a social class where the ‘Scooty’ was an exciting supplement, not the only means of commuting for the family.

“To be on it is a choice, not a compulsion for you all so if you want to ride a bike wear the right clothes, sit with legs on both sides, put balance and safety first and you can still have your fun,” she said.

You can imagine the mark this lesson has on me if I remember it the way I do, 17 years after it happened. The girls I grew up with and I never had a reason to break the promise we made to EG Miss so we have ridden pillion on a bike with our legs swinging on either side, been the rider if our clothes didn’t allow it or didn’t get onto the bike at all. Today I can say that EG Miss was a rare teacher that brought the outside world into the classroom, but it was still not enough to break the bubble of the world we occupied; it was no happy bubble but no friction or fight we had had prepared us for the real world of stark differences and inequality that lay outside the school.

“Ey, enna kaala virichita okkaramudiyum?” (Ey, how can one sit with her legs spread?) a classmate asked me in the early days of college. I was supposed to drop her off at the station to shorten her commute on public transport. This spun everything I had taken for granted or the privilege of ‘choice’ I had on its head. It exposed me to the ways in which matters so simple to me were internalised by others and the oppressive systems that held up our beliefs. I learnt then that the cultural aspect of sitting on the bike (good girls don’t spread their legs) almost always overtook the safety aspect of it. 

It didn’t take long to notice while watching cinema critically, as was expected of us in college, that films boxed women pillion riders into neat categories. Vijayalakshmi sits behind Shiva in Chennai 600028 covering her face with a scarf, Kamalinee holds onto Kamal Haasan for her life through the duration of a song, Samantha is in shorts behind Suriya in Anjaan, Nithya covers most of Mumbai on a bike behind Dulquer in OK Kanmani — all of this is believable. They’re clandestine lovers, beloved wife, modern women, and chill partners in that order. The first two sit one-sided behind the men, the latter do not. They reinforce the stereotype of the good and the bad woman but at least they kept in line with the character and if nothing else points to the various kinds of people there are. 

I can’t say the same thing about Pragya Martin’s Nethra in Guitar Kambi Mele Nindru. It was for me the most nail-biting moment of the entire Navarasa anthology, and it was terribly disappointing to watch Nethra (self-proclaimed walker, in shoes, in pants, pointedly sporty with a big watch and headphones, confessing her love a few minutes from then) get on the bike one-sided. “I know this girl,” I was screaming in my head, “this is not the kind that will sit like this on a bike!” I wondered why she sat one-sided long after the film ended. In fact, this weighed upon me more than the big break up question that most had after watching the film. “What could she have possibly internalised,” I think, “did she believe he’d see her as a ‘good woman’ if she sits one-sided? Did someone teach her that?”

And then I thought we deserve better backstories. We deserve real portrayals, and thoughtful writing. We could also do with informed parenting and kinder worlds, but we all also need an EG miss in our classrooms, whom I didn’t say before was a Biology teacher. I’m sure she’d take no offence if I said on her behalf, “Girls, spreading your legs is besides the point — it’s better to be safe than sorry, whatever it is that you’re doing.”