A Mere Piece of Cloth

Another set of eyes stop to stare at me. Maybe I am dressed wrong? I try to adjust the shawl and my own thoughts seem stupid to me. If this is dressing wrong, then I don't know what one would call dressing right.

An hour back, standing before the mirror, my mind was flooding with confusions of what to wear. If it were back in my home in Nepal, nothing could have made me think so much about dressing up. I would have picked my usual set of shirt and jeans, grabbed my earphones, and would have hopped off to somewhere feeling comfortable. But here I was in my hostel in Bangladesh. Going out alone in jeans would have been stupidity. I definitely didn't have the guts to have a 20 minutes long rickshaw ride with people staring at me. So kurtha and salwar it was. Then the usual questions like which one, which colour, with what pair of trousers and with which shawl, bombarded me. The others were easy to answer, but the one I was stuck at was the shawl. I could not find my favourite shawl that went with any kurta I ever owned. Great! Now I had to find another one, in fact a matching one.

So the kurtha was orange and the flowers that blossomed on it were blue for some reason. By the rules of matching, I either had to find an orange shawl or a blue one. The trouble in all this? I had none. Just when I was about to give up all my hopes and submit to my fate, and either change the kurtha or go out in a dangerous combination of clothes that did not match, it hit the front of my mind that there was a blue shawl somewhere in the back of my cupboard. No, my dear kurtha, I did not have to give up on you just yet! So I kept digging like a mole in my own land of clothes, and I found it. Victory at last. Maybe that's how Columbus had once felt.

The reason this one was hiding in the depths of my ocean of clothes was because it belonged to a set of kurtha salwar from my childhood. The child had grown, the kurtha was gone, and all that was left was this shawl, which I had saved in case of an emergency shawl crisis. Today, it had served its true purpose. But there was one other problem, that it was short. It was a different kind of fabric from the ones I used and it wasn't wide enough to cover both my breasts. The sole reason I was supposed to have a shawl was to cover them, but it just refused to do that job. It wouldn't spread enough to cover both of them, so now I had to choose.

I took a look at my watch, I was running late and I definitely did not have the time to change to another pair of clothes. So I hung the shawl across my left side and pulled half of the bulk of my hair to the right side to hide the right one. It seemed like an idea that would work, until I reached downstairs.

As I discovered, when someone walks, their body moves in a rhythm, and their hair has the tendency to keep swinging back. I had to keep holding it to hide the shape of my right breast which would become even more obvious everytime my sidebag decided to rest its strap at the middle of those two. The more I walked, the more attention I grabbed. I tried slowing down, or being a little less bouncy, but even as I stood my shawl was only on one side and that fact was enough to attack predator eyes. I told myself, once I get up a rickshaw and close its hood, this will be all over. So I kept walking, avoiding all eye contact, like an ostrich who hides her head in the sand and stays in a belief that she cannot be seen.

Now I am in a rickshaw, with closed hoods to reduce the field of view, and no, things are not over yet. I kept trying to be an ostrich, but in a street full of people, if you try to avoid looking at the people at the right then you end up looking at the people at the left. And for some reason, the people on both sides seem to be fascinated to look at me. Not because I am a celebrity, not because I am pretty, not because I am just another girl in a rickshaw that they see thousands of everyday, but because my shawl isn't big enough. Because I have breasts, and because today I have failed to cover one of them.

People keep looking back, staring, some guys even whistle and yell stuffs I can neither hear nor understand. Women look at me as if I am commiting some sort of crime. Makes me wonder if I am. But then I take a look at myself. I am wearing a kurtha salwar as this land required. I am covered from top to bottom, with only my palms, wrists, my foot and my face showing. I am dressed as decently as I can, and yet every set of eyes that pass stare at me as if I am stark naked. Just because I grabbed a piece of shawl that did not match their standards.

All this reminds me of a TV show I watched a few weeks before, back home with my grandmother. A city girl was visiting a village named Veerpur. She was wearing a kurta but without any shawl, and the guy she was with was asking why modern women like her don't wear shawls. She answered that if the people changed the way they looked, women would not need any shawls at all. The guy told her that her answer was good to listen to, but she now was in Veerpur and her words would have no effect on the men there. In the next or following episode, the girl was asking for directions from an old man and the man, before helping her, scanned her from top to bottom. She could only adjust her long hair, bring it to the front to cover her shape, like I did. I feel like I am in Veerpur, in some dailysoap, in that fictional village full of people who sell women and treat them as properties. But no, my riskhaw is running in the streets of Dhaka, the capital, with much taller buildings and cleaner streets than my own hometown, and yet, at this moment, it feels no different than the dangerous Veerpur from TV. The girl in the TV was well learned, so was I, and yet we both were left adjusting our hairs, lowering our eyes like we had done something wrong.

I wonder, what makes a shawl so important in the definition of decency?
I look around and I see women with a shawl bigger than their kurtha, wrapped around their head and breast and sometimes even long enough to cover the abdomen. I see schoolgirls whose uniforms have this piece of cloth in a V-shape to hide the shape of their womanhood. And I see girls with shawls hiding something they have not even developed yet. What are they hiding? What am I trying to hide? Am I naked? No. I am wearing clothes. I am wearing clothes that have hid my private parts the best they can, and now I am supposed to wrap a huge piece of cloth around my body just because the clothes I am already wearing fail to hide the shape of it?

What makes a piece of cloth so important? A piece of cloth that interrupts you while you work, a piece of cloth that keeps falling off your body, one that you have to either pin up or keep adjusting the whole time. A piece of cloth that hides off designs from your favourite clothes. A piece of cloth that only adds more sweat in such a warm place. A piece of cloth, that holds you back. A piece of cloth, that defines what kind of a woman you are. I remember being very fond of kurta shalwar, specially shawls when I was younger. I would run around, with the shawl dancing with the wind over my head. I would wait for a festive time throughout the year so that I could wear it and feel like some bollywood actress. But right now it feels like a burden, like someone has thrown it over my body and asked me to cover myself, like my body is dirty without it. Like I am a puppet and someone has tied it to my body to control how I act and how I feel.

When I think of it now, everyday feels like a struggle to hide and cover myself to fit the society. Everytime I dress up, I choose a bra to cage my breasts and reduce their shape and size, to hold them so that they don't bounce as I walk and run. On top of that I wear a kurta, that is long enough to hide the shape of my buttocks and the shapeless front where my vagina rests. Then I have to proofread the shoulders, pin up the bra straps to the sleeves so that they don't play peek-a-boo in public. I then finally have to grab a huge piece of shawl and spread it from my neck to breasts so that no one notices I am a woman. Is that what we are trying to hide? Because every person with a little common sense can tell what a male body is shaped like and what a female body is structured as. And yet everyday, we have to try so hard to hide those shapes, because they are indecent, or offending, or "arousing".

The 20 minutes of rickshaw ride felt like ages. I have reached my destination and now I can meet my friend and we can distract each other off the predator eyes. I look around and I see a few girls dressed in t-shirt and pants and I wonder how many more pair of eyes might have preyed at them. I imagine women in shorts or bikinis in other nations and I wonder what will become of them if they walked these streets. But then I look at myself again. I wasn't dressed in a bikini, I had covered myself as much as I could, and yet I had to go through 20 minutes of hell. I look at my friend with shawl across both her shoulders and I know the journey could not have been any better for her as well. I look at women covered in burka, hidden inside a black can where no ups and downs of their body can be distinguished, and yet I wonder how many eyes would be eager to take those off and prey at them. I wonder what is a safe or decent cloth, because until this morning this was the most decent piece of cloth in my cupboard, and here I am, hoping it gets dark when I return so that people don't stop their bicycle to stare at me.

I look at myself, I ask myself, am I dressed wrong? No, not at all. But how powerful are these people who can make a woman feel so wrong even about her right choices?