‘WHAT WERE YOU WEARING’

I’ve been wearing mens’ gazes
for so long now
that mere wolf whistles
no longer pierce my calm.
My ears don’t tingle
and my cheeks don’t burn,
in fact I don’t even feel the urge
to turn and say,
(when one of them shouts how he would like to fuck me)
as if.

I do admit,
that sometimes skin on skin,
the brush of thigh or hip or tit,
worries me,
because I’ve grown so numb to fingers on my body
my lover calls me frigid.

I laugh them off,
these stray hands at taxi stands and
“accidental” jolts in buses and trains
that make for a good story,
which I tell well
especially since collective outrage
unites us like nothing else.
Even though I am not outraged
because outrage wears thin with age
and mine disintegrated years ago.

There’s always someone though, who asks,
what were you wearing?
The same thing, I want to answer,
that I have worn for so long now,
it has become my skin
Your gaze.

I wrote this a year ago as part of an Instagram poetry project I was working on. Straight away I realised that this was a performance piece - it was loud, angry, and unforgiving, and I really wanted it to be heard, not just read.

I was just so incensed by the constant victim-shaming, by the fact that every single woman I know has, at some point in her life, been harassed or molested to some degree, to the point where we have actually learnt to live with it. It’s sad how we’ve learned to laugh it off.

Let’s face it, we’ve been raised to perform our lives to the gaze of an audience, male or otherwise. Assessed, summed up, derided, praised, divided piecemeal into whichever part happens to grab someone’s fancy or provoke their rage. Othered by merely existing. Look straight, don’t make eye contact, resist engaging - I hate being told how to dress and behave, I’m so tired of feeling the onus of staying safe weighing us down. Of always, always, hearing the refrain, ‘What was she wearing?’ This poem really was a response to that.

I ended up writing a lot of feminist pieces around that time; it was as if the floodgates had opened.

Follow Gaya Lobo Gajiwala’s work on Instagram

Director: Akshat Gupt
Producers: Ankita Shetty and Avni Murthy
Director of Photography: Siddharth Vasani
Music: Zain Calcuttawalla and Siddharth Talwar