There is no freedom in the blank wall of a veil

We were six or seven in our sociology class. Of these, two were Irani girls – Parvaneh, a Marxist with crazy hair and blue eyeshadow who read Trotsky, in Farsi, under the desk. The other Irani girl came to class veiled in black from head to toe. She fidgeted constantly with her chadar, clutching it tightly around herself, juggling her books ineffectually. With Persian eloquence, Parvaneh referred to her as ‘Prisoner of Night’. I simply called her ‘the Crow’.

She was tall, hunched and had thin white hands, the only part of her that we ever saw apart from an occasional gleam of eye when the chadar slipped. She would swoop into class a minute after the lecturer and swoop out in her wake. In spite of sharing space for two years, we never saw the Crow’s face, never found out the colour of her hair or whether she could enjoy a joke, never exchanged more than a few words. Frankly, even if she had attempted a smile, how would we have known?

In the aftermath of Sarkozy’s now infamous remarks, I have been thinking of the Crow. I have been wondering if she too, like so many in the media these days, would have said that she adopted the chadar through ‘freedom of choice’. Or would she perhaps say, "I wanted to be young, to run and laugh and be free and you made me old, imprisoned." I wonder if she ever saw us walking around on campus, unencumbered by the need to hide our bodies and faces from others, and if she did, did she ever feel like casting off her black and joining us? She probably was, after all, perhaps just a year or two older than us, still far too young to be constrained by the weight that accompanies chadar, purdah or ghunghat.

I am left wondering, unable to answer my own question, because I admit I didn’t try too hard to get to know her. Intemperate 20-year-old that I was, I found her subjugation to the chadar not just disturbing but revolting. It was disconcerting to talk to a shapeless black sheet, trying to make eye contact through that narrow slit. I felt that I had no frame of reference – I enjoy talking to people when I can see their faces, their hands and torsos and arms and legs. I draw my clues from their facial expressions and body language, the twitch of cheek or mouth, the lift of an eyebrow, that sudden frown, even the blank stare – it adds complexity and clarity at the same time to the interaction, it’s what helps me to navigate my way through the labyrinth that is even the most trivial human relationship. I can deal with that dirty sexist stare. I am left speechless by the blank wall of a veil.

In recent media interviews, protesting against Sarkozy’s remark that purdah has to do with subjugation rather than religion (some would argue that as far as women are concerned, the two go hand in hand!), women have been proclaiming how safe they feel in their burkhas, what confidence it has given them. They make the burkha sound like a bulletproof vest – but in that case, wouldn’t it be better to do something about the bullets?

In their fabric fortresses, they claim contentment within the limits prescribed. But the catch is, the men who prescribe these limits have a nasty habit of narrowing the circle, drawing it tighter and tighter so that what is okay today may not be okay tomorrow. "Cover yourself and carry on," they say today. Tomorrow: "Well, you needn’t go quite so far down the road." And then, the day after that: "The threshold is your limit, no further." Or, "Use a dupatta." Then, "Cover your head with the dupatta." And later, "Get behind that door and don’t speak unless spoken to."

I have listened over and over to the purdah apologists, the diversity-wallahs who are making a plea for ‘freedom of choice’, but for me, purdah still comes down to this: A woman’s face must be covered in the way prescribed because it is sinful to do otherwise, offering open temptation to men, the consequences of which men will not be held accountable for. That’s the dirty truth around which everyone seems to be tiptoeing: Control the women because we men sure as hell have no intention of controlling ourselves.

Have women been ‘helped’ to convince themselves that they are choosing the burkha? ‘Freedom of choice’ is what you hear but when I try to read their lips, this is what I understand:

"We’re scared as hell. It’s a small sacrifice to make in exchange for safety."

"We don’t have a choice. It is what is expected."

"In this strange new country, the devil we know is better than the one we don’t."

Coming back to the hornets’ nest that Sarkozy has poked his large French nose into, the West, of course, has always been ambivalent towards the veil. But while it once embodied distant, tantalising, Salome-esque oriental intrigue, the veil is now the symbol of the Dark Stranger sitting on the doorstep, the one who won’t go away and over whom it is rather inconvenient – perhaps even frightening – to step.

I hold no brief for Sarkozy and his diktat on the burkha. It would be naïve to see it as purely spontaneous, unrelated to his political manoeuvrings. I do however understand the confused reactions of many, non-racist Europeans in the street. Just as I understood the outrage of the people in my home town, Pune, when the Rajneesh Ashram swamped us with sanyasins who wore transparent robes and kissed in the street. Just as I understand the bewildered reaction of Englishmen who didn’t know what to make of the Gujaratis who set up shop after shop in their neighbourhoods. Just as I empathise with what Africans must have felt when the Europeans invaded country after country. Again and again, people are left hesitating in the doorway, contemplating the stranger on the doorstep, until, like Sarkozy, they may decide to shout: "Go home, stranger! I want my porch back!"

I imagine shout is what I would do too if tomorrow my neighbourhood full of quirky and personable women, well-dressed, ill-dressed, some barely dressed at all, decided to turn into one where heads, bodies and faces were uniformly covered.

What would I feel like, walking every day through a crowd of veiled women, our interface so bluntly curtailed? How would I feel if the sun no longer touched my forehead? If I couldn’t silence someone with a dirty look? If I couldn’t rip my scarf off and let the wind and rain play with my hair? And, the worst nightmare of all, what would it be like to be taught in class, or cared for in a hospital, or cooked for, day after day, by a pair of hands and a disembodied voice that spoke from behind a length of cloth? What would my memories be, years from now, without eyes and cheeks and hair and throats to people them?

Twenty-five years later I can still remember Parvaneh’s startling smile and frizzy hair. I remember the Crow as a black triangle.