“I was twelve years old and had no desire to tell anyone that I’d got my period.”

Meera Vijayann looks back on being a reluctant participant in a coming-of-age ceremony to celebrate her first period. Years later, the impact of the incident would define an important moment in her life.

On a December morning in 1998, when I came home for the holidays from boarding school, my mother told me there would be a small ceremony. I didn’t know what kind of ceremony it was going to be or what it was called — only that it would involve some sort of ritual to symbolize my coming of age. I had got my first period a few months ago and I was a mess of emotions. Thrust into a life of blood-stained underwear and maxi pads and cramps, I made no sense of my body. But as a child who grew up in a Tamil home in Sivakasi, an industrial town near Madurai, I knew that puberty ceremonies were common around the region. My classmates from Erode and Tirupur sometimes brought back fat, mammoth-sized photo albums capturing moments from their Manjal Neeratu Vizha or Turmeric bath ceremony. In each of these albums there were photos of them seated on gaudy, ornamental thrones, dressed in saris, false braids, and heavy gold jewellery. In one photo, women marched on a busy road alongside a horse-drawn chariot carrying plates of fruits and silk. Inside the chariot was my classmate seated solemnly like a bride, demure, her eyes tired. In another photo was a huge billboard, a sign announcing her puberty ceremony to the town. When I saw these photos, I shuddered, worried that my parents would also do something like this.

I was twelve years old and had no desire to tell anyone that I’d got my period. Yet, there it was, this bewildering announcement from my mother that she’d invited our relatives to the ceremony. Would I be marched through town? Would I be dressed head to toe in Kanjeevaram silks and gold? I had no idea.

On the day of the ceremony, when I was seated on a bench in our backyard in a blue nightdress, I was in disbelief. My worst nightmare was unfolding. I was happy to see my uncles and aunts but I was terribly upset. I wasn’t asked if I would be okay with the ceremony. I didn’t know what the ritual symbolized or asked if I consented to it. I didn’t even understand why my parents — both of whom were a bit more progressive than the others in town — decided to observe it. All I knew was that the ceremony meant to celebrate that I’d become a woman, which implied that I would soon be ready to marry.

But I was twelve years old and angry and ashamed. I didn’t feel like celebrating anything.

Unlike my classmates who seemed to have accepted, and even enjoyed, their ceremonies, I felt as if I’d lost control of my own body. There I was, on display, coming of age in front of curious faces. There I was, reduced to a vessel that would prolong life. I was excited to become a woman, and wanted so badly to enter womanhood, but I despised the focus on my bleeding vagina and ability to give birth. It was the late 90s and as a teenager, I just wanted to buy cute skirts, date and wear real bras. Womanhood for me was desire and love and beauty. Nothing about the ritual felt like an initiation into the real world of women — my mother and I didn’t talk about what periods meant or what sex was or why my stomach cramped or how often I had to change sanitary pads.

The ritual was considered enough and that was that.

The Tamil tradition of holding puberty rituals is hazy — some communities consider menstruating women unclean and exclude them from daily life, others shower them with gifts to prepare them for marriage, but the central idea has always remained the same. A fertile woman is a gift from the gods. For young girls, their first period meant that they would now be able to put away their paavadai-chattais, skirts and blouses, and wear dhaavanis, half-saris that symbolized they were young, unmarried women. In some orthodox communities, the youngest maternal uncle of the girl is usually considered first in line to marry her. (Although this practice of consanguinity is slowly fading away, it is still common in communities like my own.) At my ceremony, my mother’s first cousin and a family priest performed the bath, pouring a pot of water over my head while everyone watched.

When I felt the first gush of cold, turmeric-filled water on me, I shivered. I hated myself.

The turmeric bath symbolized purification, a cleansing. It is commonplace in temples to bathe deities with hot turmeric water before they are adorned in silk and flowers. Yet, when I felt all their hands rub turmeric and sandalwood paste on my face, I felt anything but clean. I hated myself. When my parents placed a garland over my neck and asked me to touch the feet of my relatives, I bent down, annoyed. I hated myself. The self-loathing came in fits and starts, mostly because I felt so insignificant. It felt utterly disrespectful to be ‘celebrated’ without being included. So later that afternoon, as some of them handed gifts to my parents, I swore to myself that when the time came for me to marry, I would never touch anyone’s feet ever again. In that single afternoon, something inside me snapped.

For years after the ceremony, I questioned every traditional ritual I witnessed. I wanted nothing to do with any of it. My family moved to Chennai, where the dynamism of city life left them with little desire to follow through with all the rituals that accompanied Hindu womanhood in our hometown. So, none of my younger sisters had the turmeric-bath ceremony. I watched my cousins return home after we graduated, marry once their marriages were arranged, and observe the traditional ceremonies of my childhood all over again: the Valaikaappu, a baby shower, the Mottai Addithal, tonsuring an infant’s birth hair from their head, Kaadhu Kuthudal, the ear-piercing ceremony. I, on the other hand, was adamant that any ritual I observed had to reflect my values. I wanted to embrace my identity on my own terms.

I met my husband, Dan, in my twenties, found work, and moved to the United States. We decided to plan our wedding without help from our families. In doing so, I knew I was breaking tradition, but I felt a deep anxiety that if I allowed anyone in the process of decision-making, I’d have to compromise on my personhood. I was terrified that on my wedding day, I’d become small and invisible again. I was thirty-one years old, but the scars of my childhood had not healed. All through 2016, I spent time looking up Hindu or Tamil priests in the Vancouver area who would be able to perform marriage rites that treated me as an equal.

I couldn’t find anyone.

When a priest finally replied, I called him from a café and told him that we’d like a wedding where our Sanskrit rites were translated, and our vows treated us as equals. To my horror, he agreed to perform our rites but refused to listen to me.

“Let me talk to your father or your soon-to-be husband,” he said, when I told him I didn’t want the Kanyadaanam, a ritual where the bride’s father gives her away to the groom. “Let them tell me they don’t want to do that.” The Tamil word “daanam” (a donation) infuriated me. It took an entire afternoon for Dan to explain to the priest that our wedding rituals had to be equal because he saw me as an equal partner in marriage — and that I would have a say in it.

“We want to exchange vows that reflect our values,” he said, “We don’t want to do rites that we don’t believe in.”

The priest reluctantly agreed.

On the day of the wedding, my mother helped me put on a silk sari and a red blouse. My mother-in-law brought me a rose that I tucked in my hair. I looked at myself in the mirror and saw in it a young woman who was terrified and eager to take the first steps into married life. No one knew that the previous night I had told Dan a million times over that, we would not fall on anyone’s feet after the ceremony. I was so overcome with anxiety that I’d be judged for breaking the traditions of my childhood that I hadn’t slept.

When I walked down the aisle and sat near him that morning, all I could think of was the priest. The garden we were in was bursting with flowers. June was blue and bright and scented. My sisters and parents stood by my side. But the priest kept his word. He read the vows just as we’d asked him to and laughed when he translated texts that were archaic.

After the ceremony, Dan and I stood there, our hands folded while we received wishes from our guests. We didn’t bend over and touch anyone’s feet.

“See?” Dan said, turning to me. “I told you no one cared.”

“That’s not true.” I replied, “I did.”

I had reclaimed a part of myself that I’d lost as a little girl.

Meera Vijayann is a journalist and writer based in Seattle, Washington. She is now working on her debut novel as a Hugo House Fellow.

*This story is republished from The Soup, Oct 5th, 2022.

The Ceremony was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Where can a 16 year old get some solid love advice? Rajesh Rajamani takes us on a Deep Dive into 1990s Chennai to find out.

Click here for a playlist of the music referenced in this piece.

I was determined to fall in love. Several of my classmates claimed to be already in love. The peer pressure was getting unbearable and I had no intention to be left behind. But there was a slight problem affecting my earnest motive. I wasn’t sure whom to fall in love with. But I didn’t want to let it affect my enthusiasm and was confident I could eventually find a person of interest.

Our evil school management had separated the boys’ and girls’ school campuses by half a kilometre or so. Which meant that the bus stop was the only place to meet girls. In those twenty-odd minutes spent waiting for the bus, one has to bump into the right person of interest, fall in love with them and pursue the romance. But like I said, I was determined.

I was just fifteen. Or maybe sixteen. And I hadn’t even watched Ron Howard’s A Beautiful Mind or read about John Nash. But I can proudly say that I was shrewd enough to borrow some of the essential features of the Nash equilibrium in finding romance. I had no interest to fall in love with the prettiest and popular girls of the school. That would mean very stiff competition and a high risk of failure. Some of my friends were already fighting it out and fighting dirty.

I decided to find someone who was attractive but still not very popular. That way, I could have a greater chance at my love being reciprocated.

After days of prowling at the bus stop and missing several D-70s that could have taken me home straight without scurrying for a connecting bus, I finally found this girl. What caught my attention was her short hair. That made her stand out in the crowd. I wasn’t sure why it took me so long to find someone who stands out in the crowd. But I was glad I eventually did. Every day after school, I would promptly wait for her at the bus stop. And would leave only after she did. In a few weeks or so, I think I felt something. It was this dizzy, light-headed feeling.

But I wasn’t sure if it was love. I mean, even today when we have WebMD and Wikipedia, one isn’t sure what love’s symptoms are. And we are talking about a time when the internet was still at a very nascent stage.

So how does one find out if what they are feeling is actually the feeling of love? My classmates weren’t very credible in this department. The best advice I got from a friend whom we all believed to be a lady’s man was that if a girl looks at you but turns away when you look back at her, then it is love. But then, this only stated if the girl is in love with me or not. But how was I to understand what I was feeling?

This is not something I could have discussed with my parents or teachers. Not even with my older cousins, because it could then somehow reach my parents. The only available wisdom was from the hundreds and thousands of romantic Tamil songs. Because all those poets and lyricists sure sounded very knowledgeable about love and its ways. So I naturally turned to them and listened to their lyrics repeatedly whenever in doubt.

Trying to understand whether my light-headed feeling was love or just plain dehydration, I found assistance in this song about first love Mudhan Mudhalil (Duet version) from Ahaa..! (1997). It describes a man and woman who fall in love at first sight, as clearly as if it was a clinical problem.

The song claims the following as the man’s symptoms,

Nodikkoru tharam unnai ninaika vaithaai
Adikkadi en udal silirka vaithaai.

That he thought every moment about the woman he had just met. And how that gave him non-stop goosebumps.

Which seemed to perfectly fit my symptoms. Except, in my case, the girl wasn’t yet aware of my existence.

But not for long. One day, to my surprise, she took the same bus as mine. And because we shared the same school uniform, even if from technically different campuses, we acknowledged each other’s presence in the bus. And I think she smiled faintly at me. When I later caught her looking at me, she abruptly looked away. Which was enough for me to assume that she probably was interested too. It might seem far-fetched but our romantic songs don’t think so. In the same song about love at first sight, the woman talks about her symptoms,

Idhayam muraipadi thudikkavillai
Idharkumun ennakidhu nigazhndhadhillai.

That there was a marked difference in the way her heart beats and how that had never happened before.

It would only be fair if my non-stop goosebumps were matched by the irregularity of her heartbeats.

The lady vanishes

It is amusing how Tamil songs often describe the feeling of love. Not as an emotional or mental state but as a purely physiological change in the human body. The song Ennavale Adi Ennavale from Kadhalan (1994) mentions another symptom of love,

Vayitrukum thondaikum uruvamilla
Oru urundayum uruzhuthadi!

About how an invisible ball moves back and forth between the throat and the stomach when one is in love.

But before I could recollect the other songs, the bus reached my stop. And I had to get down quickly. When I turned around to see if I should cast a goodbye glance at her, I saw that she had gotten down too. Why should she get into the same bus and get down at the same stop? Was she trying to follow me home?

That’s exactly what was happening. She was literally following me. And it was all surreal. After a point, I wasn’t sure if I was elated or panicking. And realised that I might be the one suffering from both the goosebumps and messed-up heartbeat situation. Eventually, she went into another building in the same housing society.

Immediately I began imagining the possibility of her moving into the neighbourhood. And how we would have the opportunity to travel in the same bus every day.

But wait a minute, reader. I forgot to mention something. I didn’t know her name. Neither did she know mine. People say that love needs no words. But I wondered if it was all right to not even need each other’s names.

There was thankfully some solace offered by the song Manam Virumbudhey from Nerukku Ner (1997) where actor Simran confidently claims to be filled with pleasure by the very thought of a man’s face even though she didn’t know his name. And how her heart desired him.

Ninaithale sugamthanada
Nenjil un mugamthanada
Aiyayo! Marandhenada
Un pere theriyadhada
Manam virumbudhey unnai.

I thanked Simran for assuring us that names don’t matter in the business of love. Because if we think about it, in a conservative society like India, love at first sight is almost a social necessity. There is very little space or opportunity for young men and women to interact with each other. The class, caste and gender divides are so steep that they don’t allow for casual interaction between two strangers. So if one has to find love, they are forced to take a leap of faith and not bother about small bureaucratic details like name, Aadhar ID or PAN card number.

However, when I returned to class the next day, I tried to find her name through my friends’ network. No one seemed to know her well because she was new to the school. Everyone uniformly remembered her as the “short-haired girl”.

Meanwhile, I continued to accidentally bump into her in the evenings at the bus stop. But I was still too awkward to strike up a conversation or ask her name.

This stagnant routine of seeing her but not being able to talk distressed me. I remembered the lines from Poove Punnagai Kaatu from Parthen Rasithen (2000) where actor Prashanth claims how his life is stuck in knots in his lady love’s hair. Just like how mine was entangled in my short-haired woman’s.

En vaazhkkai ennum pattam
Un koondhalil sikkiyadhenna
Adi eppadi sikkal edukka!

I was in a very similar situation.
The song further captured my sleepless and anxious nights with the line,

En iravu padukkaiyai kelu
Naan puranda kanakkugal sollum!

Where it accurately recorded the number of times I was twisting and turning in bed thinking about the nameless girl. I wondered if she was having similar nights too.

Did the song have a message for me? Because actor Laila claimed in the song,

En nighty aadaiyai kelu
Naan nanaindha kanakkugal sollum!

Suggesting that we ask her nightclothes how many times she had gotten wet. My naïve teen mind assumed the line was referring to the woman sweating it out in the man’s absence. It took me another decade or two to fathom the physiological function tucked in there.

Some critics accuse male lyricists, particularly Vaali and Vairamuthu, for overtly sexualising the romantic songs. But I only felt glad that they did. Because like in this case, these songs have helped in articulating one’s desires and longing. And also in understanding the experiences of women. Even if the understanding came a few decades late for some of us.

As an adult I realised that Tamil film lyrics have primarily been written by male lyricists from the times of Kannadasan and Pattukkottai Kalyanasundaram, who were known for their songs on agam (matters of heart) and puram (the politics of the outside world) respectively. It is only after Thamarai arrived in 1998, other female lyricists like Kutti Revathi, Rohini, Uma Devi and Parvathy made entry.

Female lyricists have offered a new perspective in understanding not only the woman’s desire but also the man’s vulnerability in romance. Their lines are often infused with political thought and has received significant attention in recent times.

In the song Kangal Irandal from Subramaniapuram (2008), Thamarai captures a teen girl’s surprise at her own desire.

Karaigal andaatha kaatrum theendatha
Manadhirukkul eppodhu nuzhaindhitaai
Udalum alladha uruvam kolladha
Kadavulai pol vandhu kalandhitaai

Where the young girl wonders how the man has managed to enter her airtight heart that she had kept free from all sorts of blemishes. And like the all-powerful Lord who is formless, how he has now blended with her as one. She further adds,

Madiyinil saindhida thudikudhae
Marupuram naanamum thadukudhae
Idhu varai yaaridamum solladha kadhai.

The young girl yearns to rest on her man’s lap but in the conflict between desire and modesty, she is forced to stop herself. And observes how she never had to deal with such problems before.

Meanwhile, one day, the short-haired girl didn’t turn up at the bus stop. I assumed she was unwell or something. I continued to wait every day but there was no sign of her. I checked with some of my friends whether we could connect with the other girls in their school to know what happened to her. But my friends were as useless as I was and we learned nothing. Weeks passed and she still hadn’t turned up.

Had she bought a two-wheeler or found other ways to commute? I investigated further to discover that she hadn’t turned up in school for a while. I waited patiently every evening at the bus stop for longer and longer. My mom was suspicious about why I had been returning late every day from school.

I blamed the state of the city’s bus corporation and she pretended to buy my story, like most mothers do.

Almost a month later, a reasonably useful friend who was then trying to court another girl from the same school found out that the short-haired girl had left for good. Her dad had been transferred. And we knew nothing beyond that.

Those were the pre-cell phone, pre-social media days and internet cafes were just beginning to appear at fancy places. It was almost impossible to find or connect with her again. I was broken. It is one thing to fall in love with someone and be rejected. But in my case, the girl herself had vanished.

I nursed my broken heart in the months that followed, listening to the vast world of heartbreak songs. I wondered if the nameless girl still remembered me from that one bus ride we had coincidentally shared. And if she too took solace in the comfort of such songs. Because actor Shalini clearly claimed to survive her heartbreak with such strategies in the song Evano Oruvan from Alaipayuthey (2000).

She sings,

Kangalai varudum thenisaiyil
En kaalam kavalai marandhiruppen
Innisai mattum illai endraal naan
Endro endro irandhiruppen.

Of how she drowned her sadness in the comfort of songs and how she might not have survived without the beauty of music. A universally accepted practice. I wondered if we sought these sad songs because we were sad. Or if the sad songs were the ones making us sadder. But what the hell, I did what I thought heartbroken lovers do. So Evano Oruvan was played till the neighbours got increasingly passive-aggressive and complained.

You’ve got mail

A year passed by and I was now in college. The first three months, I put in a lot of effort to learn every girl’s name. Not that I was in love with any but I didn’t again want to be in a situation where I was in love but didn’t even know the girl’s name.

My engineering college was one of those on the city’s outskirts and I had to take the college bus. After a term or so, on a monsoon day, the rain was beating down, threatening to sweep in through the windows as we struggled to shut them and keep our seats dry. Sometime during that damp journey, I saw the back of a girl’s head from my seat. There was something amusing about the way she was fidgeting with her hair. I couldn’t really see her face from the rear of the bus where I was but by the time we reached college and got down, I was sure I felt something. It was either the monsoon doing some tricks or I was falling in love. When we disembarked, I realised that she was actually from my own class. And thanks to my diligence, I knew her name this time. Let’s call her, say, Amsterdam? To protect her identity and to make sure I don’t get beaten up if she happens to read this fictional memoir.

I knew her name but barring a few acknowledging smiles when we bumped into each other on the building corridors, I hadn’t talked to her yet. She had the prettiest smile. I am saying this with utmost objectivity and not because I was already in love. A gifted dental arrangement made her smile absolutely gorgeous. One day, I noticed from my back row in the bus that she was wearing flowers. It could be predictably cheesy, but I wondered if I could someday buy her flowers. Not one of those boring bouquets. But flowers that she could wear in her hair.

Tamil songs clearly stated that this was a tried and tested technique to court a woman. In the song Paakadhey Paakadhey from Gentleman (1993), the woman unequivocally instructs the man of interest,

Pookum poovellam poojaikunu ennathey
Ponnukum poo pidikum maranthu vidathey!

Men shouldn’t assume that flowers are meant only for the gods but to take into consideration that women too love to adorn themselves with them. And in Mouna Raagam (1986), a besotted Revathi sings that she wore the jasmine flowers thinking about the man she loves.

Mannavan perai solli
Malligai soodi konden.

In Tamil culture, gifting flowers to a woman is considered a very intimate act. Particularly, if it is something she can wear on her hair. In fact, in popular culture, gifting halwa and flowers to a woman you desire is believed to be a foolproof seductive practice. But over time, halwa might have lost their place but jasmine flowers still hold court. So it is only fair that these Tamil songs have captured this vitality.

Meanwhile, I was too awkward to speak to Amsterdam. Particularly because she was very chatty and extroverted and that can be really intimidating for someone from a boys’ school who only saw girls at the bus stop. I threw an occasional hi and hello when we waited in the bus at the end of the day but struggled to make any significant progress. It was in that week a classmate collected everyone’s email IDs for some project-related work. I swiftly smuggled the sheet and memorised Amsterdam’s ID.

Back home I wrote a mail to her. It wasn’t about anything specific but just to make it obvious that I was curious.

It might strike you as very roundabout — writing emails to someone who was literally in your own class and who took the same college bus. But shy people have their struggles, so kindly let them do what they can.

After this brief moment of bravery, I worried about the possible permutation and combination in which it could pan out. I wasn’t even sure if she checked her mails regularly. But to my surprise, in less than two hours I received a reply, saying nothing specific but clearly acknowledging my curiosity. I floated among the clouds for the rest of the evening. Or maybe the rest of the week.

We wrote each other almost every day. And this led to a very strange situation as I was still awkward in person and didn’t talk much to her in class. Neither did she make any effort to talk in spite of her social skills. This seeming aloofness in college juxtaposed with the intensity with which we were regularly writing to each other was quite odd. But I was not one to complain. Instead, I slyly changed the way I addressed her in the mails. From “Hey/Hello Amsterdam” to “Dear Amsterdam”. I only wish I was this smooth in person.

Sometimes she’d take more than a day to reply. Or sometimes she wouldn’t reply at all. That would make me very anxious and I would pensively wonder if I had said something inappropriate. But I was never anxious enough to not send a “gentle reminder” mail. And she’d reply to that.

I also tried to deliberately delay my mails at times to see if she’d miss getting them. This was a trick I learnt from the song Alai Meedhu Vilayadum from Kadhal Kavidhai (1998) where the woman claims to wait fervently for the man’s letter and how the lonely evenings tormented her.

Maalai andhi maalai
Vandhu ennai mayakkum
Olai avan olai pera
Ullam thudikkum!

I hoped I could recreate such passionate feelings in her with the staggered delivery of emails. But I wasn’t sure if these tricks had any effect on Amsterdam.

Tamil songs can sometimes give conflicting advice. In the song Unnodu Vazhadha from Amarkalam (1999), Shalini sings,

‘Melliya aanmaganai pennuku pidikaadhu
Muradaa unnai rasithen
Thottadhum vizhundhu vidum aadavan pidikaadhu
Garvam adhai madhithen.

She states that women don’t like men who are too gentle. Or those who easily fall for them. But would rather prefer someone who can be egoistic and a bit of a ruffian. On the other hand, in the song Thirumana Malargal from Poovellam Unn Vaasam (2001) actor Jyothika claims that she is in love with a man who is as gentle as a flower that has been soaked in the rain, a man who is so perceptive that he understands her mind from the sound of her anklets.

Kolusu idam osai kettu
Manathil ulla bashai solvan
Mazhai nindra malarai polae pathamanavan.

How could my teen-self understand a woman’s mind if these lyricists couldn’t make up their minds? I guess I just lived with the confusion.

I noticed that at times Amsterdam addressed me as “Dear Rotterdam” in the mails. While the mail exchanges were really pleasurable, I wasn’t also sure why things weren’t moving beyond them. It had been twelve-ish weeks but we weren’t talking much in college.

To push things ahead, I took her number. And called her one evening. It turned out to be a strange conversation. Not because something specifically strange happened, but because it almost felt like talking to a different person. The familiarity and intensity of the email exchanges seemed so different from the boring formality of our phone call. I was not sure what was going on but I convinced myself that in time the phone calls would catch up with the intimacy of the email exchanges.

But the phone calls got stranger and stranger. Maybe it was the absence of privacy that restricted the nature of these phone calls. We were using landlines and calls had to be often routed through other family members. Those days, the landline phone was often located at one corner of the drawing room and incoming calls were often picked by my dad or mom. And if you didn’t have a cordless phone that could be taken to your own room, you were almost guaranteed to have your entire family sitting around and eavesdropping.

While I gave myself these plausible explanations, it was still baffling to understand the huge romance gap between the phone calls and the emails.

It was like the song Mazhayum Neeye from Azhagan (1991) that captures the oscillating extremes of love.

Mazhaiyum neeye veyilum neeye
Nilavum neeye neruppum neeye
Adadaa unaithaan
Ingu vaazhum maanidar kaadhal enbadhaa?

That you are the rain and you are also the scorching heat. You are the cold moon but you are also the fire.

Maybe this is what it is to be in love? These lofty analogies accurately captured what I felt. I wondered if that’s what Amsterdam felt too. Because love, whether in your teens or later, is always laden with intensity and inconsistency. Probably it is the effect of the deep but fluctuating desire that makes one feel all dizzy when in love.

Meanwhile, the phone calls that I had hoped would bring us closer did the opposite. The distance grew between us. And the mail exchanges too took a beating and we weren’t writing as often as we used to. Occasionally there was excitement while talking to her in college followed by a flurry of emails that evening. But that quickly fizzled out too.

For the next six months we hardly spoke or wrote each other. Much later, during the middle of a semester break, she called me. On my birthday. We spoke briefly and I felt confused and overwhelmed.

Not wanting to beat around the bush anymore, I took the plunge and wrote a long mail telling her how much I love her.

And how I would like to hang out with her. And preferably, grow old with her too. Looking back at it now, I think these were very dramatic claims. But one shouldn’t underestimate the optimistic, long-term vision of a seventeen-year-old. She replied saying that she would rather have this conversation over the phone.

On that phone call she told me that though she liked me, she wasn’t even sure if she believed in the idea of love.

It was heartbreaking. Later, when I ran through the conversation several times in my head, I was reminded of the song Netru Illadha Maatram from Puthiya Mugam (1993). The woman here claims that though she had believed love to be a lie, she changed her mind on meeting a specific man.

‘Kaadhal poi endru sonnen
Unnai kaanum varai.

Very clearly this hadn’t happened to Amsterdam though I was silly enough to tell her that I would come back later when she believed in love. I was just being creative in rationalising the rejection to myself.

Thinking about it now, I do think it wasn’t easy to understand and differentiate curiosity, interest, desire and love at that age. While most boys tried to prove their seriousness by talking about love and marriage, the girls were a lot more measured and practical with their feelings. I particularly remember how my male friends would promptly fantasise about long-term plans with every girl they met. While female friends would at best only talk about how cute or hot the boy they bumped into was. This has always made me wonder if women in general are a lot more accurate than men in articulating what they feel or desire. This was further proved by the song Ye Ye Ennachu Unakku from Kadhal Virus (2002), where a group of young women brainstorm and list the precise things they seek in a man.

Romba iyalbaa nadappavan vendum
Veli padaiyaa iruppavan vendum
Eppovaachu kovikka vendum
Chella peyar vechchu koopida vendum.

A man who can be at ease with himself and be frank at all times. One who could squabble at times and be willing to give a sweet nickname to his ladylove.

But after that phone call, Amsterdam and I hardly spoke in college. Several years later, I found that she was managing a multiplex chain and I used her contact to get tickets for Rajinikanth’s Enthiran (2010). In the song Kilimanjaro from the film, the woman in love instructs her man to,

Malapambu pola vandhu
Maankuttiya pudiyya
Sukkumilagu thatti enna
Souppu vacchu kudiyya.

Where she demands he hold her tight like how the python would grab a young deer. And to make her into a soup with pepper and ginger and drink it all up.

Very passionate lines but I guess I had no appetite or desire to get into any such soup with Amsterdam.

Dial R for romance

Sometime after things with Amsterdam ended, I noticed a girl in my building — my dad’s office quarters. She was on the same floor as I. Her family had been in the same building for a few years, but it was only now that I noticed her. Let’s call her New York, in the spirit of keeping her privacy intact. She was in the same year as me in college and one day, we bumped into each other at the parking area and talked. And it made me realise something. It wasn’t awkward or difficult to talk to her. I was being myself and whatever I said, she giggled and blushed a lot. All this was so new to me. When had I become so funny?

We continued to bump into each other in the corridors of our building, the parking area and the road outside. We talked a lot. About everything and nothing. It was possible to stand under the hot Chennai sun and talk to her about random things. And it was always difficult to end the conversations. Because who wants to end anything that is very pleasurable?

During study leave one semester, I was busy trying to figure which part of the syllabus could be ignored without much risk. I got a phone call around then and, surprise, it was New York. This was the first time she had called. We talked a lot. Talked and talked non-stop. For six hours or probably more. Thankfully no one was at home and I didn’t have to make up excuses. It was so much fun that it made no sense to not speak to her every day.

During the entire study leave, our afternoon calls became a daily affair. It was utterly delightful to hear the landline ring post 2 p.m. It was only then I truly understood the metaphor of the lines in the song Telephone Manipol from Indian (1996).

Telephone manipol siripaval ivala?’

Apparently it was indeed possible for a telephone ring to sound as lovely as a woman’s laughter. I had heard it myself, you see. Some calls down the line, New York said she was curious why I wasn’t dating anyone in my college. She clearly didn’t understand how awkward I was with other women. When I explained my poor social skills, she thought I was pulling her leg. But she was repeatedly curious if I was interested in anyone. To the point, it seemed she wanted me to not be interested in anyone apart from her. Like how the woman in the same song from Indian dictates,

Pengal vaasam ennai thavira
Ini veesakoodaadhu
Annai Theresa avarai thavira
Pirar pesakoodaadhu!’

That the man shouldn’t get closer to any other woman’s breath. And the only other woman he was allowed to talk to is Mother Teresa. All flattering only, because it was a playful song.

I suppose jealousy is an intrinsic part of the teen courting phase. Because it clearly recurs more than once. The uncertainty of the relationship in the initial days does make one easily jealous. Only to realise several years later the triviality of it.

Our conversations became increasingly flirtatious. I wasn’t sure if I was overdoing it. So one day, I clarified to her that I only intended to be friends and not to flirt. She agreed that she also felt the same way. And after that quick agreement, we continued to flirt outrageously.

I wasn’t sure if I was in love. But I was clearly very, very attracted to New York.

Like I said, it was easy to be myself with her and that was addictive. And she’d laugh and be entertained however bad my skills at flirtation were. Once I claimed how I wasn’t seeing anyone in college because there was no one as pretty as she was. And she said that she was flattered even though she knew it is a lie. I was amused at that line. That someone can recognise a lie and still enjoy the flattery. Actor Reema Sen claimed something similar in the Vaseegara song from Minnale (2001).

Kulu kulu poigal solli
Ennai velvaai
Athu therinthum kooda anbe
Manam athaiyethaan yethir paarkum!

That you would win a woman with your flattering lies and even if she can recognise them as lies, her heart still yearns for them. It was extra reassuring because the lyricist of this song, Thamarai, is a woman too. Even saint-poet Thiruvalluvar has stated in one of his couplets that lies that do good to all concerned parties must be treated as truths. The English translation of the couplet says,

Falsehood may take the place of truthful word
If blessing, free from fault, it can afford.

Our afternoon conversations continued. And the rest of the day was filled with either the excitement of expecting her call or thinking about the things we had talked the previous day.

As you must have registered by now, it was New York who was making those daily calls. Not that I didn’t want to call. But the fact that she was taking the initiative put all my insecurities and anxieties to rest. Probably that’s what helped me talk to her more easily. And also the fact that she was chilled out even if I struggled occasionally. In fact, it became more rewarding to fumble about something with her than to act all confident. I was reaffirmed by the claim of the dialogue portion in the song Oh Sona from Vaali (1999) where the woman advises,

Pombalingalukku theriyum solra
Aambalainga vida theriyathunnu
Solra aambalaingala thaan
Romba pudikkum.

That in matters of romance, women appreciate men who accept their ignorance than those who feign confidence. Because that way, the woman would herself school the man on the science of romance, which could actually lead to more intimacy between the couple. So I thought I was doing very well with my ignorance and shortcomings.

It all went fine until one day my mom got curious about these long calls and asked who the friend was. When I told her it was New York, she freaked the hell out. She got worried that flirting with a neighbour could result in serious trouble with her family. Particularly when my dad and hers were colleagues.

My mom’s strict advice was that “please flirt with anyone in your college; but not in the neighbourhood”. But how would I tell her that no one wanted to flirt with me in college.

From then on, my mom heavily filtered the phone calls. Much later, I learnt that New York was told that I am not home even when I was. With my mom’s intervention, the brief but intense conversations with New York came to a screeching halt.

She was brave enough to suggest that we could discreetly hang out if phone calls were an issue but I wasn’t courageous enough. Plus, I had a net pocket money of Rs. 10 at any moment. With such budgetary and bravery limitations, it seemed just impossible to hang out regularly. New York was clearly disappointed with my lack of courage and this time she didn’t school me on romance. I think she gave up on me.

Much later, I bumped into her at the IIT Madras cultural fest, Saarang. I was hoping that she had missed me all these days and this occasion would help us reignite things. I had read somewhere that distance makes the heart grow fonder or something. I obviously mean the metaphorical distance since we lived on the same floor. The woman in the song Sowkiyama from Sangamam (1999) claims to have lost weight due to the stress of her lover’s absence.

Anbu naadhanae
Nee anindha modhiram
Valaiyalagavae thurumbena ilaiththen
Andha modhiram ottiyaanamaai
Aagumunnamae anbae azhaiththen.

She says the ring on her finger would now fit her wrist as a bangle. She demands the man return before the bangle fits around her waist. In our case, both of us seemed to have only put on a few extra kilos. But, hey, stress-eating is a thing too.

At the festival I tried to talk to her and be her old flirtatious phone buddy. But she said a polite “hello” followed by a “bye” and left with her friends. Well, I guess that was the end of that. I was disappointed. Both with myself and my romantic fortune.

I went back to my loveless teen life. Until I met a friend who loves to play Cupid. She tried to set me up on a blind date with her friend. She said, “Both of you are romantically challenged. So I think you two might get along!”

Without expecting much, I decided to go on the blind date.

When we met, I realised she too had short hair. I felt something in my belly. That old invisible ball was moving back and forth between my throat and stomach. We can safely call her San Francisco because she eventually did go to that city to study.

But wait, before I get into the story of San Francisco or the other cities I followed, I’d like to pause. What did my teenaged boy-self learn from these experiences? Two things, for sure. One, that I discovered these songs while falling in love with these girls. And two, I understood the girls and myself better through these songs. Romance and songs share a bilateral relationship with each other. Which is why whenever we think about past loves, it is always in association with the songs we listened to at that time.

In fact, in the song Ninaithaal Nenjukuzhi from Appu (2000), Prashanth reflects on the new sensation he is experiencing, wondering why he feels a warmth within him even in the cold weather or why he trembles under the hot sun,

Kuliril enakoru puzhukkam
Adhu yeno?
Veyilil edukkudhu nadukkam
Adhu yenoo yeno?

And actor Devayani promptly replies that it could be what the poets and lyricists have diagnosed as love.

Kaadhal endru kavigal solvaargal
Adhu dhaano?

Because when in love, we are back to being clueless and need the wisdom of poets and lyricists. In the matters of the heart, they are just the reassuring and overconfident friends you need.

Rajesh Rajamani is a film critic, filmmaker and writer based in Chennai. His most recent films include Haiku Love and The Discreet Charm of the Savarnas.

At 16, Tamil Songs Were My Heart Specialist was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What challenges do young interfaith couples face in modern day India? Read about the bitters and the sweets, by Raksha Kumar.

Charulata pushes her thick black hair behind her left ear and wipes a tear off her cheek surreptitiously. This is not the first time she has witnessed Kavya Singh and Rakesh ‘Humpty’ Sharma’s temporary separation. But her sorrow does not seem to abate.

It is 1 a.m. on a wintry Thursday and she has to leave for work early the following morning. But Charu — as her husband lovingly calls her — says, “No matter how late it is, I never switch off the TV when Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya is on.”

Her polyester nightie is tucked between her legs as she sprawls on the diwan. Red, blue and green lights from the TV dance on her face, adding colour to her emotions.

Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya is a romantic comedy that fits a well established Bollywood template:

Boy likes girl.
Girl likes boy.
Girl’s father doesn’t approve of the match.
Boy rattles off an emotional speech.
Girl’s father gives in.
Everyone lives happily ever after.

Charu says she has always been a sucker for Hindi cinema. “I need entertainment; something I can enjoy, something I can get inspired by.”

What is inspirational about Humpty Sharma Ki Dulhaniya? “Kavya’s love for her man,” says Charu, with a twinkle in her eyes. Kavya’s character in the film, played by Alia Bhatt, abandons her passionate dream of wearing a wildly extravagant Rs. 5 lakh lehenga so as to gift her loved one the car he always wanted.

Charu also wants to work hard to fulfil her husband’s dreams. “After all, we only have each other now,” says the 21-year-old Hindu woman from the Thakur caste who has been married to Murad, a Muslim man of an oppressed caste, for four years. Charu and Murad know they are exceptions for having married outside of their communities. And since their elopement, they have also felt themselves in severe danger. (Their original names are withheld.)

Although India has been a society of many cultures and religions, endogamy is the norm. According to a Princeton University study, only 2% of the 10 million marriages every year in India are inter-religious. Non-conformists are shunned or banished or worse, sometimes killed to save a community’s ‘honour’. These figures are hard to quantify as many do not want to register their marriages or keep them secret for fear of retribution. It is clear though, that every year around 200,000 couples — like Charu and Murad — try to chart their destinies in the face of extremely oppressive societal structures.

On 15 September 2015, Murad and Charu had walked out of the Jama Masjid in Meerut with their Nikahnaama, or the Islamic marriage contract, in hand. The witnesses who signed were elders of the mosque and some friends of Murad. They were officially married.

Murad was 23 and Charu only 17 when the marriage contract was signed. She lied about her age since according to the law, a woman must be 18 to be married. “Afterwards, I pranced about the little hutment we lived in, stuffed jalebis into my mouth and cried buckets,” she recalls. A part of her was hopeful for the future while another missed her family dearly.

Charulata was born into a Thakur family in Badanpur village. The third daughter of her parents, she says she did not get enough attention growing up. “We were three girls at home. They never saw us as separate human beings.” The girls got similar clothes; it did not matter that they liked different ones. Books were handed down to them from their elder brother, the only male child in the family. The girls had no choice but to pick humanities after Class 10. It did not matter that Charu’s scores were very high and she wanted to pursue science. “I quit studies in protest,” she says. “No one cared.”

Throughout her childhood, Charu regularly skipped meals, stole her brother’s watches and deliberately returned home late in the evenings. “All I wanted was attention from my parents,” she says. Her strategy backfired. Charu was branded a ‘problem child’ who needed to be starved of attention so she could mend her ways.

Her sisters were married off when they turned 18, leaving Charu acutely aware that her fate would be similar. The one thing she did not want was to feel neglected in her marital home as well. “I didn’t want anything more than to get some love and respect from my husband.”

Charu says some people in their hometown call their marriage ‘ Love Jihad’. The term that combines the distaste for ‘love marriages’ along with repugnance for marital alliances with Muslims, ‘Love Jihad’ gets the desired reaction from conservative Hindu communities. That of anger and retaliatory violence, as has been seen in several instances. Greater segregation has also ensured that communities intermingle even less frequently than before.

In this context, even the 2 % who choose inter-religious marriage can be objects of curiosity.

What makes young Hindu-Muslim couples marry, knowing the dangers involved? This leads to another question: how do young couples define love in the face of imminent threat? While some like to flirt with danger, others resent conservatism. But each couple, like Tolstoy’s aphorism about unhappy families, have reasons of their own.

Charu and Murad, for instance, think of their marriage as an achievement. “At least, so far,” laughs Murad. For Charu though, her happy marriage is her triumph.

“My marriage is my only achievement,” she says with pride. Her voice reflects the confidence of a woman who stood by her choices. It is not an achievement because she believes that a woman’s life goal is to be married. At school, Charu squirmed whenever she heard a friend describe their life goal as marriage although her goal kept changing — for a few years she wanted to be a beautician, then she wanted to open her kirana store, then she thought she would be better off as a door-to-door saleswoman.

Soon after her marriage, she worked in a factory to ensure she contributed to the household income.

Charu and Murad demur when you ask if they are different from other couples. They have their happy days and their sad days. They both come home from work tired on some days and at times, they catch a film in the local movie hall. They fight, they make up, they are angry at each other, they love each other.

One difference though: they fear for their lives at all times. Over a decade, the term Love Jihad has gone from being an obscure right-wing bogey to a ‘real’ threat leading to legislation in 11 states that makes it almost impossible for inter-religious couples to marry. Not to mention a spate of violence on couples and young Muslim men.

“We have that too in common with other Indian couples; those who have married outside their religion,” says Charu.

Others like Asmita and Aqeel.

Asmita hails from a Rajput (a dominant Hindu caste) family in Rajasthan. She married Aqeel in January 2019. She says she felt an inexplicable pull towards him when they met in college six years ago. “He talked about complex issues of exploitation, inequality and caste with such ease!” she says. “That attracted me a lot.”

Both Asmita and Aqeel (not their real names) were 29 when they married each other. When I met them, they had been married for almost a year. Their families had no clue.

For four years before their marriage, they rented apartments near each other’s homes in a Mumbai suburb and went to work in swanky offices close by. “We were scared to live-in,” admitted Asmita, “but we met each other for lunch every day.” Her colleagues were not invited to the wedding. No one at work knows she is married.

Unlike Charu, Asmita was the apple of her father’s eye.

As the only daughter, her wish was — more often than not — her parents’ command. Her brother doted on her too. Her father told her that if she prayed to Ganesha, all her wishes would be fulfilled. When she asked her father for a laptop, Asmita was told to wake up at 6 every morning and pray to Lord Ganesha for a new laptop. A few weeks later, seeing her dedication, her father brought her the laptop she wanted.

“I got everything I wanted,” Asmita acknowledges. “But, after praying for it.”

Families hold up two kinds of examples to young people: ones that should be followed and ones that should never be. Asmita’s father constantly narrated stories of an aunt who was banished from the family because she dared marry someone from an oppressed caste. “What was left unsaid was how I should never, ever follow such an example or I’d face similar consequences,” she says. It never occurred to anyone to tell Asmita what would happen to her in case she crossed religious lines, not just caste. No one in the family had seen any such marriage near them.

Leading a secret life for years has taken its toll on Asmita. She has to always be on guard about what she says, whom she invites home and whose invitations she accepts. “Mentally, I am not single anymore. I think of us as ‘us’,” she says. “But I have to tell myself to never let that show.” She realises, though, that she cannot keep it a secret forever.

When will she tell them? “Only when I am fully prepared to live without them.”

Severing ties with them is the best-case scenario, she says. “We fully understood the danger we were in. Our families might not kill us, but ostracisation is a real possibility,” she says, thinks for a few seconds in silence and then adds, “Who knows! They might actually kill us.”

Legally, a couple of any religion in India continue to be able to marry each other under the Special Marriages Act of 1954, without converting. Though every day it becomes harder and there are several instances of some lower courts advising inter-religious couples to separate as their marriage could create communal trouble in their towns.

Charu feels that religion has become a central identity for many Hindus and made her romance with Murad that much more dangerous. “Earlier, our wedding would have been shunned socially. There would have been a boycott or something. But, today, it is life-threatening,” she says.

Merely four months after the 2014 election when the BJP came to power with a simple majority, Charu’s sister was to be wedded to an electrical contractor from a neighbouring village. The house was lit up on that warm September evening with tiny strings of lights. That was the first time Charu saw Murad — in the blue-pink-green of those small lights. In true Bollywood style.

Murad’s father had been contracted to provide serial lights for the wedding. The second son of his father, Murad had begun assisting in the lighting business at a young age.

Since that first meeting, their fondness for each other grew. “I had never believed in love at first sight. We don’t believe in something until it happens to us.”

Charu’s father, brother and uncles — all of them — beat her when they found out about her romance. She still hides marks of the lashings on her back and neck.

One morning, her mother seized Charu’s phone and locked her up in a room. “They wanted to get me married,” says Charu. “To someone else.”

She remained locked up for three days. Ironically, Charu feels lucky about her solitary confinement. “Girls have been killed by their families for wanting to marry Muslim men,” she smiles. “I had heard of many such stories. Thank God, I was only locked up.”

What was to say that her family wouldn’t harm her further, I asked her. Nothing, she replied.

“Through invocations and related concerns about Hindu female purity, Hindu male virility attempted to reassert itself in a public-political domain in more forceful ways,” writes historian Charu Gupta in her 2016 essay, Allegories of ‘Love Jihad’ and Ghar Vāpasī: Interlocking the Socio-Religious with the Political.

“The Hindu woman has often been regarded as an exclusive preserve of the Hindu man, and safeguarding her virtue is identified as his exclusive prerogative.”

The logical conclusion to this line of thought is that the men of the community should protect their women in order to keep the honour intact.

Women exercising their sexual choices are a fundamentalist’s worst nightmare. “My family would have frowned upon any man I would have chosen,” says Asmita. “I just pushed the envelope by choosing a Muslim man.” She wonders why she is allowed to choose her profession, her location, her political representative, but not her life partner.

The larger question in Love Jihad remains that of the control over women’s sexual choices.

Would Hindu fundamentalists object to a Hindu man taking a Muslim bride? Yes, but not so much.

(Not that such a marriage is then necessarily free from violence. In 2018, a 23-year-old man was killed by his Muslim girlfriend’s family in Delhi because they disapproved of the relationship.) Hindu fundamentalism weaves its own reasons for it. Most of the Muslims of the subcontinent converted from Hinduism, it believes, and if Muslims want to re-convert they should be welcomed with open arms.

But they have a problem. Hinduism doesn’t allow conversions. So some right-wing politicians have found a way around that too. A Muslim woman is required to undergo a process of shuddhikaran or ‘purification’, after which, rituals of ‘ghar vapasi’ will be performed on her. The process of converting a person (back) into Hinduism is termed Ghar Vapasi or ‘return to the fold’. Eventually, she is accepted as a Hindu.

Talking about conversions into Hinduism, Gupta writes in the same research paper, “It produces and enforces notions of a primordial religious identity, whereby all and everyone are declared Hindus.”

Less than four months after Charu married, Akhila Asokan, a 24-year-old homoeopathy student, from Vaikom in Kerala, left her college dressed in a hijab. She did not return home.

A few days later, after her parents filed a missing person report, Akhila appeared before the Kerala High Court and confidently asserted that she had converted to Islam. She now wished to be known as Hadiya. Her father claimed she was forcibly converted.

Hadiya’s case, until then, was that of forced conversion versus a woman’s right to choose her religion. However, in December 2016, she married a Muslim man. Now, the case took on a completely different hue. It became India’s most high profile, alleged Love Jihad case, and as a new bride, Charu keenly followed it in newspapers and WhatsApp forwards.

Around this time, Charu and Murad moved from Meerut to Ghaziabad in search of work. She worked in a sugar factory while he did the odd construction jobs. Since Murad had left school after Class 7 and was uninterested in reading, he checked with Charu for news updates on the Hadiya case. When her colleagues in the factory sensed her increased interest in the case, they assumed it was because she was a Muslim woman, by virtue of being married to a Muslim man.

“All Murad and I knew was that Hadiya was a grown woman and she should be allowed to marry whoever she wants,” says Charu.

Six months later, Hadiya’s marriage was annulled by the High Court of Kerala. Charu was especially annoyed at the ruling of the Court, which ordered Hadiya to return to her parents’ home.

That night, Charu went to bed on an empty stomach. She doesn’t know why she didn’t feel like eating. Perhaps because she saw aspects of her life reflected in Hadiya’s, she admits. “Does the court have the authority to forcefully separate a husband from a wife?”

The court ruled that Hadiya was a victim of what might be called brainwashing or indoctrination. It then gave Hadiya’s custody to her father who had initiated a habeas corpus petition in February 2016. The court observed, “As per Indian tradition, the custody of an unmarried daughter is with the parents, until she is properly married.” When Hadiya married, she was 24 and when she was handed over to her father, she was 25. In 2018, it would take the Supreme Court to un-annul the marriage and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to declare that there was no evidence of Love Jihad in Kerala.

In Mumbai, Asmita too was engaged with the Hadiya case. It did not have emotional hold on her, she says. “I was rooting for her to go live with her husband. But I saw reports which mentioned that her husband was a part of an Islamic party. That is dicey, you see. We would never know where her agency began and where it ended,” she says thoughtfully.

The last thing feminism wants is for a woman to release herself from the shackles of one religion to be bound in the iron chains of another, she observes.

Why did she risk her life? I ask Charu one day. “For love,” she says. “Love is everything.”

A few months after her wedding, she realised that love was not everything. In fact, love made life’s bitter pill only slightly sweet, only slightly less bitter.

Charu lost her job due to the pandemic-induced lockdown. The couple now rely on Murad’s meagre income. Unlike the millions of migrant labourers who walked back to their villages as they could not afford to live in the cities, Charu and Murad don’t have that option. They severed all ties when they moved out. While she still holds the Bollywood idea of romance close to her heart, she also realises that real life is not filmi. “We fight over small-small things,” she says. Like where to keep their clothes, how to wash vessels and how she should do up her hair. “These days, we fight most over how to spend money.”

Since Asmita and Aqeel dated each other for a few years before they got married, Asmita feels she knows him well. “But living with someone is always different.” They are trying to decide if they can afford to pay rent for two houses, given the salary cuts they were forced to take, after their companies suffered losses in a post-pandemic world. “We are married, it is ridiculous to live in two places and pay rent,” she says.

How many of their friends would come home, who would come home, and how long would they stay? These are some of the biggest points of conflict between them.

“Anti-Muslim thought is so ingrained that some friends inadvertently say things that are hurtful,” Asmita says, “They don’t mean it though.” Just a week ago, her friend spoke about ‘Islamic terror’. When Asmita pointed out that no one community can be blamed for terrorism, the friend asked, “Why then are all terrorists Muslim?” That was when she stopped arguing. “I let it go. I cannot argue all the time. I need peace.”

She is still very careful about not posting images on social media with Aqeel. She grabs her phone every single time there is a call from home. Her nightmare is the family deciding to surprise her with a visit.

Asmita and Aqeel are non-religious. But they invite friends over on both Diwali and Eid. “Our ‘Jihad’ is for love and not against it,” she laughs.

One evening as Charu, Murad and I sit down for dinner, Murad throws requests at her. “What did Pooja say to Nisha when the former was on her deathbed?” he asks. These are not quiz questions, more like his farmaish for a performance. Charu is quick to respond. Now for instance, she rattles off a bit of dialogue from a 1994 classic, Hum Aapke Hain Kaun. She adds tears and hand gestures to the mix.

What about that one when Sonia sees Raj for the first time? he asks her. Charu has the lines from Kaho Na Pyaar Hai ready.

“We kill time like this a lot,” Murad laughs.

Unlike Asmita, who believed she needed to be with Aqeel because they had interests and ideology in common, Charu says she had little in common with her husband in the beginning. “I made him fall in love with films. He never used to watch them earlier.”

Sometime after they were married, Charu was watching a Bhojpuri film one day, in which the lead couple run away from home and get married. They change their names and identities completely. It struck her that she and her husband should also change their names too. They did it, but decided to keep names from their respective religions. From that day on they were Charu and Murad. Murad and Charu.

Raksha Kumar is a human rights journalist, with a specific focus on land and forest rights. Since 2011 she has reported from 12 countries across the world and a hundred districts in India. She is also a documentary filmmaker. Find more of her work here.

*Visuals by Vaishali Soni, Point of View.

Charu, Murad and Other Very Special Marriages was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The people in my village said that after he had killed me, my husband ran all the way to the police station. Apparently, he held up his wrists and announced, “Hang me quick. This world is a wilderness to me. I am impatient to join my wife in the next.” As though he had not dispatched me from this one by his own hand quite recently.

Before I was married, my stepmother gave me the ornaments that had been collected, piece by piece, for the day I would be married. She counted them out to show them to me, and not just because I was to wear them. She showed them to me so that I could count them too, for their guardianship would finally pass to me, and from me they would require the same watchfulness they had asked of her.

Each bedazzled offering had a twin — my stepmother’s admonitions.

The infinite loop of a pair of gold bangles, each as thick as her ring finger.
“Elokeshi, you must always listen to your husband and his family.”

Six pairs of earrings, small and medium and large.
“Do not complain even if he vexes you.”

Tinkling anklets.
“Do not show your face in public.”

Little toe rings.
“Make your father proud.”

A nose ring.
“Make me proud.”

A kiss, and a gentle finger on my cheek to wipe away my tears.

It was not the warnings that made me cry — I was used to existing in the narrow room between point and counterpoint, knowing that every pleasure I was ever warmed by must be tempered by a glint of guilt, a sense of sin. No. It was that I was finally becoming her, leaving the sun patch of girlhood for the shadows of a stranger’s home.

In age, my stepmother and I were closer than my father and she; in experience, still far apart.

Maa had come into her new marital home nervous, hesitant — and even now was prone to cowering before my father when he was enraged. But she had looked at her life and taken what she could from it: with her chin set, she had taken control of our home and my upbringing while my father absent-mindedly stumbled through his days.

I now know the cards she was dealt, for soon they became mine.

I had one course of action — to listen. And so I listened.

Until the moment my life as Elokeshi, Nobinchandra Banerjee’s wife, ended, I obeyed Maa to the last letter. I listened always to my husband, went to him when he called me to his bed, stifled my cries even when he hurt me. When there was no child and I was already sixteen, I listened to his parents and mine when they decided I had better return home. There, I listened to the furrow of worry on my stepmother’s brow and the frown on my father’s lip when they took me to the priest of the Tarakeshwar temple. When the priest asked me to drink the noxious potion he had made for me, I listened. When I awoke in a torpor, my clothes a mess, and he didn’t want me to cry, I listened. When there were no more potions, for that was a pretence they finally dropped, my father wanted me to keep going back to the priest, I listened. When my husband returned and called me names that racked my body with sobs, I listened.

And then, in the final moment of my life, the moment between when my husband’s bloodshot eyes bored into me and blade pierced flesh, I knew that all the listening in the world had come to nothing, for the story of my life and death had become the story of my sacrilege and my husband’s salvation.

Meanwhile, for three days and three nights, my little ginger cat Pnuti prowled the spot where my husband had stabbed me with a fish knife. The stains on the ground grew lighter each day, until they mixed with the mud and earth, and disappeared.

In the starless night, far away from home, I awoke.

I was drenched in sweat, lying on a soft bed, in a dimly lit room. There was a young woman sitting by my bedside, in a saree the colour of collyrium, writing calmly in a diary she balanced on her lap. I watched her as she wrote unhurriedly for another moment, put her pen down, and raised her head to look at me. “Elokeshi,” the stranger said in a gentle, almost hushed voice. Her eyes were huge in her small face; they held mine steadily. “Do you want to drink some water?”

I shook my head. I could have gulped down the contents of a well, but I did not trust the words to leave my mouth, I did not trust anything but the steady drum of my heart, so loud I was certain the stranger could hear it too. I… shook my head? In an instant, the memories struck my mind, like a punishing hand — his red-rimmed eyes, his guttural yell, the cold hint of steel on my skin. The unmentionable, unnatural, undignified pain. The certainty of my life ebbing away, pooling around me in arterial blood.

I raised a trembling hand to my neck, to the impossible place. To the place I had carried the gilded necklace my stepmother had given to me to wear as I became a bride.

To the place where he had dealt the killing blow. My fingers landed on clammy, smooth skin. There was no wound. That’s when I sat up.

Every hair on my arms stood to attention. I touched my neck as I sat on that mahogany cot, with its four posters, but found nothing. Only one word in my head, wound wound wound wound wound, looping endlessly and obliterating every other thought. But it was nothing I found. No wound, not even a trace of blood. I raised my eyes to the stranger; she was watching me still, totally unfazed by the violent shaking of my legs. Presently she laid a steadying arm upon my shoulder.

“Stop, Elokeshi. You are not hurt any longer,” she murmured.

Not hurt? If I hadn’t been so confused, I would have laughed. My head was grasping at stray possibilities, and found that there were really only two. Either I had survived my husband’s murderous intent, and still lived. Or I was dead, and I was wherever souls go when it is their time. Perhaps this stranger was to ferry me across the last river. Perhaps she was to be my final earthly connection, someone to help me make sense of the brevity and the details of my life.

I wanted to ask her which was true. I swear to you that this was my intent. But as I looked up at her and tried to talk to her, language itself eddied around my mind and the words scattered, and I found that I could not gather them to form a full sentence.

“I…” One word, one entirely inadequate word, and no more would come.

There was not a shred of impatience in that young woman. Not a single crease on her wide forehead, nothing but a strange kind of watchfulness in her eyes.

I tried again. “Who…”

“Who am I?” she supplied.

I nodded, slowly.

“My name is Binodini. You are in my home, where I live with my companions. You are safe here. Don’t try to speak now, Elokeshi. Listen, listen to me. You are absolutely safe here. No one will hurt you. But you must not strain yourself right now. You need to get your strength back.”

In her home, with her companions? Perhaps it was the strangeness of it, or the fact that she did not pressure me to speak, but I found myself saying without effort. “Am I …alive?”

A ponderous knock at the door. And another. Again I began to tremble. If I was still alive, how had I ended up here? Surely my husband was looking for me? And if he was, I certainly wasn’t safe.

But she was already working at the brass latch, and I gaped helplessly at the gentle waves of her hair that fell loosely down her back, mingling with the black of her clothes. Someone stepped in.

I saw the alta on the woman’s feet before I saw the rest of her, red, red as the saree of rough cotton she wore, red as the huge bindi rising like the sun on her forehead. Red, red as dried hibiscus, red as a child’s painting of an apple. Her hair was gathered at the nape of her neck in an enormous bun. Her face was kind; the corners of her mouth turned up at me in a slight, quiet smile.

Behind her, in strode the most striking person I had ever seen. The angles of her nose could cut through stone, her silver hair illuminated her finely lined face like moonlight. In it she wore a single, enormous rose, white like the saree she was in. She hurriedly closed the door behind her, and latched it decisively. “How is the child?” she asked Binodini, for she had not looked around the room to see me. I had shrunk into the covers, cowering, not daring to try to speak any longer.

She whirled around then, to see me, tut-tutted, and reached towards me. Instinct should have told me to shrink away, but it didn’t. To my own surprise, I stared back at her without flinching. Her black eyes, touched with crow’s feet on either edge, looked into mine for an instant. And then the world went dark.

Binodini had snuffed out the lamp. In a flicker, the flame returned.

We were no longer in the room, but in a cavernous, dark space filled with a heady scent. No one except me seemed surprised by this.

The three women were huddled together, talking in urgent whispers, not in the least bothered by the fact that we were here. The woman in red disengaged herself, and came towards me. “My name is Sukumari. You can call me Golap,” she said. “I can see that you’re scared. Don’t worry about anything. We brought you here so we can keep you safe. Now, you must stay calm, all right? We will go back home very soon. Okay?”

There was something about her that reminded me of home, in those quiet sunlit afternoons during which I shared food with Maa. She was older than Maa, by at least ten years, but she was comforting in a way I could not really explain. I felt myself loosen my vice-grip on my muscles, felt the breath flow back into my lungs. As Binodini and the silver-haired woman joined Golap and me, I saw with a heightening wonder the mouth of the cave we were in. The night outside was still and moonless, but filled with stars pulsating against the pitch-black endlessness of the sky.

I stood at the threshold and gazed outside. Beyond me I could see a hushed wilderness, with three muddy paths that diverged like streams from a river, in three directions. The one that stretched out in front of us was completely deserted, but as I gazed out to the one on our right, my jaw fell open. In the distance, I could see a slight figure lying on the mud, a small animal scrabbling in the soil beside it. As I looked at it my heart grew tight, and I was overcome with the desire to run to the person, whoever it was. But another, stronger feeling in my gut said I couldn’t go there, shouldn’t try to go there. With effort, I made myself look away, and my eyes wandered to the bushes that lined the path to the left. It seemed deserted too, but the night wasn’t moonless as I had thought. I saw the faintest sliver of a crescent moon, with the evening star glittering next to it. The bushes were laden with the night-blooming jasmine flowers that filled the air with their fragrance, that overpowering, obscene sweetness that is like no other sweetness.

Binodini was calling me back in. As I turned around I thought I could hear the air reverberate with what sounded like distant clapping. It was coming from the place I’d just been staring at. But it was gone just as soon as I turned my attention to it, and the night fell still once more.

I sat with them on the ground, and Binodini passed a steaming cup around. As Golap handed it to me, and I held it, warm, between my palms, she started to hum. Binodini lit another lantern, while the silver-haired woman regarded me gravely. “Drink up, child,” she said. “And believe what you see. Pay heed to what you hear. And trust what you know.”

I drank deeply from the cup, a spicy, honeyed tea, and I felt the burning and the richness on my tongue, sliding down my throat, warming my entire body. I passed the cup to Binodini, and felt my head start to swim even as Golap’s humming turned into a full-throated song. We drank and the lantern flickered and Golap sang her wordless melody.

Listen to what you hear.

I looked up and saw the spectre of my former life come apart before my eyes. The father who had sent me, willingly, first to husband and then to priest. The stepmother who was powerless to stop this. The priest who had touched me because he could. The husband who fervently believed he was a good man. The mask dropped, and what I saw was not the devil. No. He was an ordinary coward.

Believe what you see.

And all of a sudden it became clear to me that my life had ended. I was dead, and I was safe. But I was also not dead, because I was here. As my head spun like a darvesh, an eye inside of me opened. Disconnected visions appeared to me, swirling and shifting before I could fully grasp them — the silver-haired woman putting rouge on her cheeks, fastening a golden choker around her neck, followed by a longer necklace. Golap in a room overlooking the river, talking animatedly with a man while a group of seated people watched intently. Binodini, standing behind a dark curtain, before stepping into a spotlight.

Actresses. They were actresses.

Trust what you know.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself on the floor, cool hands on my cheek. Golap’s. Binodini brought me water. The silver-haired woman was towering over me and when I met her eyes she saw the certainty in them. She grinned, and shifted. A small ginger cat with an unmistakable ringed tail trotted into the cave with a trumpeting meow. “Pnuti!” My voice was faint as a whisper. My little cat had found me.

The sound of purring filled my ears, and as I looked up, I saw there was a full moon in the sky. I stared at it in disbelief, and my eyes widened when I saw that the watery-looking crescent moon I had glimpsed earlier was still there too.

The silver-haired woman leaned towards me again, the two moons eclipsed by her now grinning face.

“Welcome, child. My name is Khetramoni.”

The rules were clear: go nowhere near my village, or the courthouse, or to my husband’s house in the city. My realm was Binodini’s house, the house by the river where the troupe rehearsed, the theatre, and when I was free, the streets and markets of the great city.

Was life sweet in the halls of the theatre?

Yes, to be sure, I loved everything about this demimonde.

I watched rehearsals, saw heated arguments, witnessed their drawn-out resolutions, fetched water and tea, helped with hair and makeup, ran around in all directions for set-up before and then pack-up after. I made myself so useful they retained me as part of their company for thirteen rupees a month, money that was my own to do with as I pleased. This I kept carefully tucked away in a box in the room I had woken up in, the room that was now my own.

I met the other people who made up the cast of characters in the women’s lives — Binodini’s mother, Golap’s son, Khetramoni’s lovers — and also Girish babu, the man with whom they closely worked.

So upset were some of the same men who advocated for widows to be remarried over the fact that women they considered base would be part of the city’s cultural life, they quit the theatre in disgust. Among them was Vidhyasagar, or “that old dolt” as Khetramoni called him. (“Good riddance!” when news of his quitting reached her ears.)

Girish babu, like the other men who worked with the women at the Bengal Theatre, treated the women with a kind of patronising affection, giving them directions, talking with them for hours about acting. He was a towering, officious man with a great big laugh. They called him the Garrick of the Bengali stage.

Binodini herself was called Signora, Golap was known for the range and control of her singing, Khetramoni for her tremendous stamina and stage presence — not a week passed where their shows were not praised in the papers. A story about Khetramoni’s extraordinary turn as Durga, painted and laden with jewellery (even costume jewellery gets heavy quickly if you pile on enough), standing stock-still for over half an hour on stage, collapsing only after the sound of the last clap had died down. Binodini changed costumes in a furious hurry, playing both Ayesha and Tilottama, daring the audience to think the two characters were played by the same person. Golap could convincingly play an ingénue, a beguiling wife, a tired mistress, a mystic.

The hectic days we gave to rehearsals that would give way to shows; the quiet nights were all ours. I cannot tell you of the arcane practices in those rooms without betraying the confidence of the three women I love most in the world — I can only tell you what is mine, and hope that you will guess at least some of the rest. I am permitted to tell you one delicious thing, though — Girish babu may have thought it was a section of the self-important bhadralok who decided that women could play parts in the theatre, but that, too, was part of the women’s design.

It was in those quiet nights that my sentences, at first halting, hatched.

In the domestic torpor of those evenings, I was safe, and for the first time in my life, to be completely myself. Around Golap knitting or practising on her tanpura, around Khetramoni reading or lounging or petting Pnuti, her great black eyes narrowed in repose, around Binodini, my friend and my instructor, for she insisted on returning me to a habit of reading and writing that I had left behind before I was wed. Around them I could be irritable, or chirpy, or too tired for chores. This should have been delicious freedom, and it often was, but you know as well as I do that life doesn’t work like that.

“You have some mourning to do first,” said Khetramoni, on the evening of the sixth consecutive day that I had tried to run lines with Binodini and failed. The words caught in my throat — it’s not that I couldn’t speak them, for now they came fast and easy in conversation within the sanctuary I had with these women, but it was a different story in public. At rehearsals, they would not come to me. My body would flood with dread, and though I knew each line as if I myself had written it, I did not speak them.

Once upon a time I had not wanted my own words — I had kept them on a tight leash because doing otherwise would put me in harm’s way — a sharp word or a slap in my father’s house, and my husband’s, or a look of contempt that would flatten me. But now I was in a house of words; the women spoke constantly to each other, of new plans, the cycles of the planets, of lunations and seasons, of new plays and poetry and how to tackle such-and-such problem — an ex-lover of Golap’s who had returned, angry that she would not quit the stage to be with him, promises that were broken, payments that were late, or shows that didn’t sell fast enough.

And I spoke with them of the two things that plagued me when my mind was not completely taken over by the theatre. I couldn’t tell you which was more uncomfortable — the dreams, or the rage. I had never been used to my body being my own.

In my new life, inhabiting it was difficult — but in my dreams, I returned to the original violation. I replayed over and over again hands on my body that I did not want, hands that only knew how to grasp or to harm, that filled my memories with breathless discomfort. I saw the hate and contempt that filled the bastard that was my husband, felt the unspeakable horror of his final attack, the way he thought my body and my life were his to do with as he saw fit.

The thoughts came to me unbidden, in clammy afternoon naps, the same hands and eyes over and over and over again, and sometimes they belonged to the priest and sometimes my husband.

I awoke, restless, feeling them still, wanting my aching body to be held differently, in a way that did not grasp or harm, but held, held still. I shivered in sweat from the dreams and then the rage started building up, the rage at everything I had lost, and everything that had never been mine in the first place. I had given and they had taken, and they had taken and the price I paid was the loss of my life.

Sometimes the rage took me when I was right in the middle of the theatre, while I was watching a scene or scurrying in the greenroom helping with costume changes. It caught me unawares, winded me. Khetramoni had taught me to swear and I found myself muttering under my breath. Goat-fucker, asshole, pig. Balled up fists, nails digging into my own palms, that was me, full of rage, crystalline, brilliant rage, full of memories that bruised me as surely as if I was still in the village standing in front of my recently returned, murderous husband.

I would have liked to tell you it was simple — that while the memories hurt me, the rage purified my mind and clarified my purpose. What a story that would be — girl has something taken away, girl has something given back to her. But you know as well as I do how life works, that rage too cracks you open in ways that hurt you still, that rage finds new and incredible ways to hurt you, that rage poisons so much what used to be good, until it feels like this good life, too, was part of the litany of precious things that were taken away.

But fortunately, if you know this, you also know that this is not where it stops. You have made of your own life what you could, even while you hurt and even while you rage at all that was taken from you. You forge forward, in your way. I did, in mine. What I could not speak in public I spoke in private. What I could not speak to even with Binodini, or Golap, or Khetramoni, I spoke to myself. What I could not sit with myself, I started, at least, scribbling in great sheets of loose paper I had bought with my salary. I summoned the words, and slowly but surely, they came.Alchemy.

The story of my life and death had not died down. The buzzing that had reached the bylanes and alleyways of Calcutta became a ringing that nobody could have kept from me even had they tried.

“Ei shunecho, Nobinchandra Banerjee’s trial starts today.”

I was passing the market in Binodini’s phaeton, by myself, and the shock of hearing the name made me breathless. Over the next few weeks, every time I was out, I heard of nothing else.

By this time, the story of my husband’s histrionic surrender had become well known. It was the work of a man who knew he was absolved, because he had already absolved himself and knew that everyone else was bound to do the same.

In village gossip, his apparent contrition was held up as a shining example of his great passion for an unworthy wife. Village gossip spread like an epidemic and reached the street corners of the city. There, the words escaped into the air and were trapped in fresh ink. News of my demise and the court cases that followed, against my husband and against the priest, was printed in the English papers and the Bengali ones. Both men had wronged me, but only one was despised — not for his violation of me, but because people felt he had wronged them.

Playwrights and songwriters made a fortune turning gossip into entertainment. The people of Calcutta reached the courtroom and the playhouses, in person and through their reading glasses, peering at the story of my fate and pronouncing their opinions.

Mostly, their opinion was the same. Mercy for my husband, for doing the only right thing a good husband could have done under the circumstances. Contempt for the priest. Contempt for my father, for taking me to him. But most of all, downright disgust for my stepmother, who, like me, had done nothing but listen all her life. I saw proof of it myself, in a play about an old man crazed with lust for his young wife, in which she was shown as a harridan who had ensnared this man — a fool who, unable to meet her sexual demands, contrived to buy her jewellery by pawning his daughter off to the highest bidder. In the court of public opinion, my stepmother and I were the first offenders. The priest was the second. My father was the third. My husband, the hero.

And so, in their righteous fury, they stood by my husband. A ten thousand-strong crowd signed a petition asking for him to be pardoned. They cried for clemency for him, and more punishment for the priest. They howled when he and the priest were both sentenced to prison — they wanted more time for the priest, none at all for my husband.

As for me, perhaps you will only understand if I show you what the painters in Kalighat made of what happened to me. These images of me were printed in the dozens in Battala — to adorn homes all over the city. In the most popular of them, I am shown being beheaded by my husband, the quarts of blood that he shed missing from the pristine parchment, which was streaked only with the contours of two painted bodies.

There were more paintings — of myself, sometimes with a rose in hand, sometimes with luxuriant, loose hair, always with a full bosom and full hips. In some, I was shown looking at the priest, eyes smudged with desire and intent. In all these paintings, I was a mature woman. This woman looked like someone I might have turned into had I been allowed to live, to be with a man I had chosen for myself. In the paintings I was never bloodied, never cowering, never scrawny, never small, never frail, never terrified. In the paintings I was never sixteen — never, never a girl, never just a girl.

Perhaps now you will understand when I tell you that the mercury boiled in my veins, that every word and every piece of news, of which there were hundreds, set me aflame. The angrier I got, the quieter I became. I made a room inside myself, and disappeared into it regularly, locked the door behind me.

I lost sleep; I burned.

People sell anything they can possibly sell. They sold my death.

It was not just plays and paintings they sold. Sarees began to appear in the market, my name embroidered on them. You could buy oil for headaches that was said to have been made by the priest, a product of hard prison labour. You could buy a betel-leaf box with my name upon it, and, even more cruelly, a fish knife.

I myself bought a saree, mustard with a malachite border. It said Elokeshi in a ridiculously ornate style. I wore it with a green ruffled blouse that Golap had bought me. In the mirror, I looked like a waif with quiet eyes. My body was nothing like the imagination of the patachitra painters. I started to ruminate again on the images they had painted, so many of them depicting the priest and their fantasy Elokeshi alone.

Compared to that robust, wilful Elokeshi, I felt spectral.

I began to walk the markets where they were talking about me.

“Poor child, she was only sixteen, after all,” I heard one woman say about me while on one of my excursions.

Her friend, with whom she was waiting to buy fish, snorted. “She knew very well what she was doing. Of course he killed her, would anyone spare such a girl? Anyway, I am not even sure that he did it.”

“Of course not, mashima. Girls are dropping dead of their own accord, aren’t they?” I had not meant to speak, but the words had slipped out of my mouth.

A man who had so far been silent through this exchange snapped at me. “Don’t be ridiculous. No true wife behaves in the way she did. It’s because of this that we have been arguing for so long — don’t let these girls read and get strange ideas in their head. Why was she even allowed to go back to her father’s house after she was married?”

I looked down at my saree, proof of so many things about where I came from and who I had to be, and I started to laugh. I could not stop. The man who had addressed me looked as though he had encountered an apparition, and shuffled quickly away.

What does a girl do with her burning? She speaks it.

That night I stood before the three women who were now my family and I said, “I have something to show you.”

Wordlessly I handed them the manuscript — the pages I had written and rewritten and revised, not wanting to let them go, changing a word here and a phrase there until I drove myself into a frenzy with how badly I wanted it to be just right.

I watched their faces as they read, first Khetramoni squinting at the page, then handing it to Binodini, who then handed it to Golap. As I watched them go over it, page by page by page, I held my own hands to stop them from trembling, felt my lower lip quiver as I saw from their quiet entrancement that I had written a thing that was true.

When Golap looked up from the last page, the other two quietly waiting, and looked at me, her eyes swimming in tears, my own finally overflowed.

Binodini clutched at the papers and shook her head, beaming. And Khetramoni? She pulled my tightly coiled palms towards her, shook them loose, so that I looked down and saw in sudden, giddy awareness at the object that had fallen out of them.

It was a set of handsome brass keys, one for every room in the house that was me.

Epilogue

A year and a day after Nobinchandra Banerjee murdered his 16-year-old wife, Ami Elokeshi opened at the Bengal Theatre on Beadon Street.

The play was announced just as the company’s otherwise sold-out shows suddenly started failing. The patriarch of the theatre, Girishchandra Ghosh, was on the verge of selling to a wealthy businessman when, it was whispered in the theatre circles, the quiet girl who served the tea at rehearsals came to him with a script and one extraordinary condition.

“She said she wanted to star in it… and she claims her name is actually Elokeshi, can you believe it?” Indubala, who hoped very much to join Bengal Theatre herself one day, said in an excited whisper to her companion as they waited for the show to begin. The man, entranced by Indu, not quite believing his luck, smiled at the way her eyes sparkled.

In the dressing room a girl called Elokeshi looked in the mirror, staring at her own reflection, anxiously checking to see that her costume was all in order. Her lips were painted coral, her eyes kohled, and she adjusted a pair of gold bangles — infinite loops around both her wrists.

With one last look at herself, Elokeshi went to the wings and waited for her cue.

And when she heard it, she stepped on to the stage, her heart leaping with a nervous ecstasy inside the cage of her chest.

The lights were bright on her powdered face. She could not see the two-hundred strong crowd in front of her, but she felt its electric anticipation, its watchful regard.

She took a sharp inward breath, and began.

Note:

This is a piece of short fiction based on the real-life Tarakeshwar Affair.

The year that Elokeshi was murdered — 1873 — was the same year cis women first appeared in the public theatre in Calcutta.

This story owes a debt to the work of scholars on Elokeshi, and on Binodini Dasi, and the Bengali public theatre. The quote from Nobinchandra Banerjee, Elokeshi’s murderer, is taken from Tanika Sarkar’s 1997 paper, ‘Talking about Scandals: Religion, Law and Love in Late Nineteenth Century Bengal’.

Shreya Ila Anasuya is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, an independent journalist, and the managing editor of Skin Stories, our publication on disability, sexuality and gender.

Demimonde was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In this Deep Dive on #AgencyOrAge, Anannya Baruah sets out to discover what young girls in Assam and Meghalaya between the age of 15–16 are dreaming of. Little does she know that she’s in for a rollercoaster ride.

I often dream I’m running away from someone who wants to kill me… I run so fast, all the way from the ground floor to the top floor. The funny thing is, every time, it is a different building I’m running up — sometimes they are incomplete flats that are in different stages of construction; or scarier still, empty flats with dead people inside them.

Naina, 16, is from Guwahati and loves Kdramas, music and basketball. This is one of her recurring dreams.

It had seemed like a simple enough proposition — find out what young women between the ages of 15 and 16 dream of, especially if they had had any particularly vivid or memorable dream recently. However, when I first began interviewing various young women, bright and articulate as they were, most initially responded by telling me about their dreams for the future.

S,15, from Golaghat, a large town in upper Assam, said she wanted to become an officer in the administrative services. Prajyapti Gogoi, 16, talked about wanting to be a doctor and to educate people about taboo topics like mental and menstrual health.

The conflation of dreams with hope/ambition struck me as curious, especially when most of them hesitated when I explained that I wanted to know what they saw in their actual dreams. “I rarely dream at night,” was the most common response, often followed by, “I barely ever have dreams, and I don’t ever remember them.”

I was puzzling over it when I watched Netflix’s adaptation of Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s celebrated comic book series. In Episode 4, A Hope in Hell, Morpheus, lord of Dreaming, battles Lucifer in order to win his Helm back. It is a battle of words, but words can wound to kill here, and when Lucifer delivers a near-lethal blow, “the dark at the end of everything”, it has Morpheus gasping for life, unable to respond. Morpheus’s raven reminds him that he is the one thing that can survive the anti-life, because “dreams don’t die, not if you believe in them”. What Morpheus comes back with, though, is, “I am hope,” something that even Lucifer has no counter to. And if Morpheus, the literal anthropomorphic representation of dreams, could conflate the two, I realised that I needed to dig a little deeper into why my teenage subjects in Assam responded the way they first did.

As an older millennial still recovering from her awkward teenage years, I, like this Sarah Andersen comic, might be intimidated by Gen Z’s seeming poise, but it took me a little while to remember that adolescence still is a time of vulnerability when one begins trying to make sense of the world around them and who they themselves are.

Perhaps in expecting my subjects to immediately open up to a grown-up who is a relative stranger about their messy, half-remembered, often incomprehensible dreams, I was asking them to tread far more uncharted waters than I’d initially thought.

Seeking guidance, I spoke to a few therapists and dream workers — professionals who study the formation of dreams and work with their clients to analyse and understand them better. Brinda Jacob-Janvrin in Bengaluru is a movement-based, expressive arts therapist who uses dream work as part of her toolkit. She helped bring my understanding of dreamwork up to speed from undergraduate lectures on Freud and dream interpretation. Brinda explained, “We no longer think about interpreting dreams, which means that each dream has one meaning; rather, we explore dreams to see what wants to open up within the psyche as we work with the dream images… What is interesting is really how the dreamer resonates with these different meanings, how the body responds as we revisit these images, what the emotions are that are held. There are of course symbolic, or archetypal references, but what is more important is how the dreamer resonates at the personal level at this moment. The same dreamer might respond to the same dream differently in 10 years.”

Benjamin Newman, a dream worker with nearly three decades of experience and who had worked with teens in the past, contextualised my respondents’ initial responses for me. He pointed out that the teenage years are a period of major transition — of learning to differentiate from the family unit and develop one’s own sense of individuality in the world — a time for exploration, as well as risk-taking.

It isn’t perhaps entirely surprising, then, that when so much is already in flux, these teens found it easier to define dreams in terms of more tangible, outward-facing dreams for the future rather than what they dreamt of at night, and it would take a little longer before some of these young women could share a few of their dreams with me.

Cew, 16, from Golaghat, is busy with preparations for her Class 10 boards, but planning to make more time for her hobbies and interests, which include playing the ukelele, journalling, painting — especially mandala art and canvases, and reading. She’d initially found it hard to remember any of her dreams, so I suggested she try maintaining a dream diary for a few days, and it was interesting to see how diverse her dreams often were.

Okay this might sound a bit off the track but yeah once I saw my sibling choking me💀 Like I’m really obsessed with a YouTube channel (Jombae’s diary) where a [Darjeeling] guy showcases his academic life, I mean his college life and how he enjoys it and travels with his friends… [It’s] basically a vlog and I love his vlogs…

So I saw in my dreams that me and my sibling were going somewhere and I saw her texting him (the vlog guy). I requested her to show me what they were talking about since I was a bit jealous💀 and she refused. After asking her for the 100th time I was really pissed off and I asked our driver bhaiyya that I don’t want to go with her anymore so I requested him to take me to my [parents’] house and when I told him that, he was returning back (sic) and then she started choking me and our driver bhaiyya was just driving💀 and the choke was so real that I really felt it on my neck and woke up shouting… and my sibling who was sleeping right next to me that night asked me if I was okay and I was half-asleep and all I could think was that she will choke me again now so I punched her which was barely a punch and my confused sibling just went back to sleep. The next day at our breakfast table my sibling told my parents about how I first shouted and then hit her and they started to laugh and that was embarrassing🐽.

Prajyapti Gogoi, from Dibrugarh, also maintained a dream diary for a few days in the middle of her busy schedule of higher secondary classes and prep for medical college entrance examination, and her dreams ranged from teen detectives and Pride and Prejudice to zombie apocalypses.

“Surprisingly, I had a pleasant dream today. I dreamt that I was a character of the book, Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen. Unfortunately, don’t remember everything… but I do remember attending the ball where the two protagonists met for the first time.

“Today’s dream was both fun and strange. Apparently, I was a secret detective who was trying to solve a mysterious case. One thing I can confirm is that the dream was a very scary one, because I woke up with a heart that was beating very fast. The case was about a few girls who had gone missing without any trace. The scenes I saw were extremely gore (sic). Secretly hoping that I was second in command to Sherlock Holmes.

If directors of horror movies want a new script, they should contact me. Today’s dream was terrifying. I saw that I was going to a park with my friends when suddenly a zombie apocalypse broke out. Me and my friends had to run and hide to save ourselves. I’m pretty sure that if this dream, more a nightmare, was to be turned into a movie, it would beat all the zombie movies out there.

It turns out that if you’re a teenager, you can run, you can hide, but you can’t escape academics — not even in your dreams, and both Cew and Prajyapti dreamt of horrible results. When it rains, it pours, and Cew’s nightmares about her studies were no different.

This one time I saw something related to my academics and this was a really terrifying one… I saw that my Social Science and English teacher scolded me because I didn’t do my practicals well and my Biology teacher told me I messed up my papers when I respond the most in the class and guess what… when my results came out I did worst. I think I got 80 or something I don’t remember but something with 8. And then all the teachers surrounded me and asked me why my marks had deteriorated and all I could possibly think was to give up. Then to spice up my already beaten-up condition, my Headmistress called my parents and I saw that along with my parents my entire family just showed up to my school within a second💀 and I was so freaked out that my over-serious family when it comes to studies will throw me out of the family. And then I don’t remember what happened next. Maybe I jumped to some other inexplicable dream without any conclusion.

Similarly, the night before her board results were out, Prajyapti had a nightmare that she had disappointed everyone with her grades, and it was a huge weight off her shoulders when her actual results were very different.

Not all teenaged dreams are horrific, and romance often pops up in them, albeit in unexpected ways. Naina told me about one such romantic dream, with a twist.

I was on a bus with my best friend, A, when we saw this boy who is our senior. He boarded the bus, and made his way to us, and whispered in my ear that he was going to marry A. In my dream, I was a little surprised, because I thought I was the one he had a crush on, but I totally encouraged my friend that she should marry him. And then he took us to a Bibaah Bhawan (a wedding hall) where her parents were already waiting to marry them off. It surprised me so much that I woke up, and I couldn’t stop laughing!

For Cew, it was a family history of crushing that cropped up in her dream.

The other day I went to my grandmother’s house which is some metres away from my parents’ house to study history about Assam’s revolt for independence and I knew my grandmom would have many stories about that… so I went to her and I did some research myself. And as expected she told me many interesting stories… she [said] by the time she graduated from her college India already got her independence so it was a great feeling for her to go to her college with the great feeling of self-rule and my great-grandfather, who was also a Judicial Officer, used to invite many people to celebrate their victory and hard work. And she also mentioned that among the British people a few were on the good side too… and she used to flex in front of her friends that her father was a graduate from Cotton College and that the white people used to come to their house and one of them was a very handsome one🤣.

These discussions were quite interesting for me so that night I saw my great-grandfather in my dreams… I didn’t see his face clearly but I knew that it was him. He was talking to some of his colleagues and some people were serving something. Most probably they were having dinner or something. I felt good when I woke up, I even told my grandmom that I saw him and all she said was, ‘Did you see the handsome one too?’

Some dreams bordered on the surreal. Fifteen-year-old Vanessa is from Shillong, Meghalaya and loves singing, playing the piano, guitar and ukulele, and painting and sketching — which often help her unwind when she’s overwhelmed by school. She had a rather trippy dream to share with me:

Our grandma called us up and told us to visit her and our grandpa. We usually have to walk down the steps which lead down to her but in that dream I dreamt that the steps were narrow, steep, and one step I miss it’s a death call. So we had to walk slow and steady. We then reached someone else’s house, the colour of the room was sea green … [and it] had a dim bulb, my family and my mom’s family sat in a circle, even though there was no fire on or any board game. We sat there doing nothing. For some reason I think I told them that I would be taking a nap? I don’t remember.

So I had a dream within a dream😂 In that dream, … we were fighting with a devil. The devil was in full black clothes looked like a clown for some reason. And I don’t remember the face but I think it was covered in white cloth. The devil did really hate me for some reason, he held me from my t-shirt and swung from left to right, my family did fight with the devil to let go of me but it was of no use, he’s too powerful. At that point I felt like I my soul was light and it was flying??? I cannot express how I felt at that time. After sometime, the dream in the dream repeated.

He later got tired of me I guess? 😂 because I found out that the roots of a giant tree fully wrapped him up and he was asking me for help. I was so so scared after I woke up from that dream.

Brenda, 15, who studies with Vanessa in Shillong, is a chirpy, musically inclined teenager who loves to read. She told me about the dream she remembered most vividly, and it was far darker than anything I’d expected to hear.

The dream started with me buying medicine for my grandmother… she is really sick these past few months. So the doctor keeps on increasing her dosage… hence why I dreamt of this. I reached home. I told her that the doctor asked her to drink (sic) two pills instead of one before eating. She looked quite crazed but I ignored it thinking it was just because she just woke up… instead of feeling down? You know like… when the doctor asks you to drink medicine you feel more sick? Instead of that she smiled. That smile…

Oh my… Gave me chills..

She asked me if she should drink it now? I didn’t even get to reply. She just snatched the medicine from my hands and tried to take out the pills and swallow them whole. And I was trying to get it back, but she wouldn’t give it back! So I had to fight her off by making her confused with my movements. She scratched my entire face!!! And pulled my hair!

But I got the medicine back. I told her to sit there so that I can go change and bring her food. She smiled and shooed me out.

I kept the medicine inside a container in the room she was sitting in and I went to change… I took only for about 5 minutes?

When I entered the room she was in, I saw her lying down on the floor with the packet of the pills beside her and the packet was empty…

She had overdosed.

I was screaming shouting for help. I was all alone in the house, everyone was working. So I raised her head and put it on my lap. I asked her why why did she do this.

She looked up at me and smiled. These words will haunt me forever. ‘So that you can live an easy life without me in it.’ I just stared at her and cried. And one last breath… she looked up at me and died with her eyes looking straight at me. And then I woke up. I woke up and cried.

Yagna, Vanessa and Brenda’s friend from Seven Set School, Shillong, also enjoys painting and playing the guitar like her friends. She too had a series of unsettling, interconnected dreams that she chose to share.

So I had this dream a few months back and it still haunts me. I saw my friend (a guy) and a person sitting next to him, lifeless, whom I’ve never seen before. My friend said something very weird which I still don’t understand. He said, ‘This man will ruin your life,’ but in Hindi. Then suddenly I find myself in a forest where I see my other friend’s (a girl) sister. She had been crying and her face was swollen. And, I saw a shadow besides her which was taking her somewhere and she said, “Go home, Yagna. Your grandfather has been taken to the hospital.’ And with that, my dream ended and I woke up around 3 a.m.

I told my friend whom I saw in the dream (the guy). I told him about the person I saw. He asked me to describe that person and when I did, he was shocked and I asked him what’s wrong and then he sends me a picture of his friend and that was the exact same person I saw in my dream but the weird part is that I’ve never seen him before in my life. I told my other friend about this (the girl) and I told her that something doesn’t feel right and she should take care of her sister and her family.

Now this literally scared me to death, right? The next day after I told her about the dream, that friend’s grandmother passed away.

Anyways continuing with the dream, after a few months my friend’s (the guy) friend dreamt of something related to my dream. He saw how the person who was present in my dream and who seemed lifeless, died. And even he saw a shadow. The same night another one of his friends dreamt of something related and this friend of his is the guy I saw in my dream. He saw himself in the afterlife.

We’ll call the lifeless guy Jack so that it’ll be easier. Now this is how it’s all related…

One sees how Jack dies.
I see him dead in my dream.
And Jack sees himself in the afterlife.
And all of us see one thing in common, the shadow…

And, I’ve never seen or met these two people.

It’s been months now, nothing has happened and I hope nothing serious happens. So yeah this was the weirdest and the scariest of dreams I’ve ever had.

Death seemed to be a recurrent motif in many dreams. Naina dreamt of being chased by someone murderous; S (16, from Golaghat) told me about seeing a dead relative in her dreams — except they looked happy and content, dancing quite often — unlike their last days which had entailed a lot of suffering. I asked Mr. Newman, the dream worker, about this recurrent motif, and while dream exploration is really beyond the scope of this essay, he reminded me that there is a death of our previous selves in each stage of growing up, and rarely do most societies have room to acknowledge, let alone grieve, the loss of parts of ourselves as we fit into newer roles. It is perhaps in sleep, in our dreams, that we come face to face with those hidden parts in different forms — and the archetype of death might just be one of them.

I was curious to know how their dreams made these young women feel, and if they’d shared them with anyone else. Some of them tried to make sense of their dreams in the light of whatever else had gone on in their lives around then. Once she was done laughing over her ridiculous dream, Naina felt that she’d dreamt of her friend’s impromptu wedding because she’d watched a wedding video earlier that evening. Prajyapti thought she’d dreamt about doing badly in her exams because stress made her sleep really badly the night before her results.

Some of the young women often turned to grownups around them to help them make sense of their dreams, particularly the scary ones. S asked her mother what her recurring dreams about her dead relative meant, and her mother told her they were probably trying to tell S that they were finally in a good place and that she needn’t worry about them anymore. Cew’s family reacted with amusement after she punched her sibling in her dream, while her grandmother was keener to hear about her old crush. When Brenda told her family about another dream about seeing them seated around their hearth with an unusually large snake nestled in their midst, they said it probably meant that they had a snake among their family, because culturally, snakes are seen as both witty and cruel.

However, when it came to the terrifying nightmares, Vanessa, Yagna and Brenda all said that their families had a similar response, “Just go and tell the toilet your dream and then flush it out!” which often startled them into hilarity and helped them feel a little better. Vanessa’s mother asked her if one leg was pressing down on the other one while she slept on her side, which made Vanessa think her physical discomfort might have led to her dream — especially because she still was in some pain from her appendix surgery.

“A nightmare’s purpose is to reveal a dreamer’s fears so that they may face them,” growls Gaiman’s Morpheus to a rebellious nightmare in Sandman.

While most people around teenagers probably do not encourage deep dives into dream analysis, they help young people parse their dreams in ways that help them deal with the messiness of incomprehensible, or even disturbing, visions.

If our adolescence, as Mr. Newman had pointed out, is a time of flux and learning to grow into one’s own person, perhaps the ways in which we learn to make sense of the world around us and the worlds within us aren’t all that different — with a little bit of help from those around us: sometimes using humour, sometimes with very literal explanations that help rationalise things that seem beyond reason, and sometimes with pragmatism that might involve pushing some things to the side for later. When you’re a teenager, the world seems to be brimming over with an infinitude of possibilities, and even as these young women take sure-footed steps towards becoming who they dream of being, perhaps some of those roads to finding who they are and who they can be might also lie in these journeys inwards in their dreams.

Anannya reads a fair bit, writes a little, and translates occasionally. She gave up on studying Bio as quickly as she could, and feels the same way about having to write a bio.

The Dream Diaries of Teenage Girls was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Is age a simple fact of our everyday lives? In this piece, historian Ishita Pande argues otherwise, uprooting the idea using census records, forensic data and the most absurd cases of bureaucratic bungling.

For some reason, you had to be below a certain age before you could begin school. I have never properly considered the oddness of this before and it is only now as I think it that I realise its strangeness. If you were over a certain age, it was as if you had gone over the point beyond which you could be instructed, like a coconut that had overripened and become undrinkable, or cloves that had been left too long on the tree and had swollen into seeds. And even now as I think of it I can’t come up with an explanation for this stern exclusion. The British brought us school, and brought the rules to make school work. If the rules said you had to be six and no older than six to be allowed to start school, that was how it would be. Not that the schools had things their own way, because parents shaved off however many years it was necessary to have their children allowed in.

- Abdulrazak Gurnah, By the Sea

What is your age? Children around the world are taught to answer the question as soon as they enter schools. This intimate fact about our lives is imprinted on numerous identity documents necessitated by modern life. The question used to be answered in discrete ways, with reference to a major event in the past, to seasons that had passed, to the birth order within a family. It might still be answered in quirky ways, some less truthful than others, but most responses now contain a reference to chronological age, or years since birth. Laws prescribing age limits for driving or marriage, to cast a vote or receive full punishment for a crime, rely on a consensus that chronological age is a reliable measure of human capacity everywhere. The application of such laws is premised on belief that chronological age can be measured objectively for everyone. Much like the narrator in the epigraph above, few of us spend time contemplating the strangeness of the various age-based restrictions that govern our lives. While the ubiquity of such age limits makes them appear not only inevitable but also natural, let us pause, like Gurnah’s narrator, to consider the oddness, arbitrariness and historicity of the rule of chronological age over our lives.

Was it indeed the British who brought the rules regarding chronological age to India, and to their various colonies, as the epigraph above suggests? Is it odd to consider those below a certain age too young for certain activities, just as it is strange to consider those above a certain age too old for some others, “like a coconut that had overripened”? When was chronological age enshrined as a pervasive mode of regulating everyday life in India?

Would it be correct to surmise that the British not only brought us schools, but also chronological age itself, to dictate when one could enter these schools?

Does this colonial history of chronological age in India imply an utter eradication of earlier, indigenous modes of measuring physical and intellectual capacity? Or, did people “shave off” — or add on — years to dodge the colonial laws, much like the parents Gurnah writes about? Were there technologies in place to establish age beyond reasonable doubt, so the various laws that rested on an accurate measure of age could be upheld?

A Minimum Age of Marriage and the Arbitrary Borders of Childhood

There are contexts in which setting a minimum age for specific acts seems eminently commonsensical, if not natural; for instance, the minimum age of marriage is currently set by the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act at 18 for women, and 21 for men in India. There is nothing inherently meaningful about these age limits of course, as these limits have been altered over time. The Child Marriage Restraint Act, the first such law passed in 1929, had defined the child as a person below 18 if male, and below 14 if female. These limits were raised to 21 and 18 years of age, respectively, in 1978. An amendment proposed in 2021, which is currently under parliamentary scrutiny, redefines the child as “a male or female who has not completed twenty-one years of age”. Though the minimum age of marriage varies around the world, it is most commonly set at 18 — which corresponds with the United Nations’ definition of a child as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.” India’s redefinition of the “child” to include women under 21 years old seems oddly detached from reality not only because the current minimum age of 18 has been hard enough to implement (one of four women is married in childhood, i.e. before 18, according to UNICEF data), but also given the lofty objects behind the amendment.

While the amendment is ostensibly intended to uphold the principle of “gender equality and prohibition of discrimination on the grounds of sex” guaranteed by the Constitution, and to ensure the “progress of women in a holistic manner” including progress in “their physical, mental and reproductive health,” it can effect the very opposite. By redefining women between the ages of 18 and 21 as children on paper, the amendment also infantilises them in practice by making youthful marriages of choice particularly vulnerable to parental or community objection and to state intervention. It makes children of men and women considered adults for all other purposes, since the age of majority remains 18. While the recent amendment has been overwhelmingly criticised as being detached from reality, such age limits, even when necessary, are often artificial and arbitrary. Age limits for drinking alcohol, or labouring in certain occupations, vary from nation to nation, and sometimes even within nations. And yet, these age limits are often justified as grounded in bodily matter or based in the measurement of biological capacity.

For instance, when the age of consent was raised to 12 in 1891, the colonial sponsors of the bill represented that age as the median age of puberty in India, suggesting that it captured an intrinsic truth about the female body and its readiness for sexual intercourse. In the reams of paper generated in the passage of legislation, however, no medical consensus emerged to rationalise the selection of the age of 12 as the age of puberty. While some doctors argued that the onset of menstruation was a sign of “attaining puberty”, many others saw it merely as the first signs of a process of maturation that occurred over the next three to four years. Others pointed to the differing rates of maturation based on location, diet, ethnicity, or even cultural practices, and even critiqued the faulty methods used to arrive at the median age of menstruation. The signs of puberty were many, as several doctors consulted during the deliberations pointed out, and these appeared between the ages of 11 and 17; several argued that the age of consent could be set much higher than 12. Religious commentators — both Hindu and Muslim — also pointed to the arbitrariness of selecting the age of 12, and wondered why the “age of puberty” could not simply stand as a referent on its own, with the capacity to consent to sex varying in each individual case.

It was not simply a matter of one group pushing for a higher age of consent and the other for a lower one; the two sets of objections had distinct bases: while the doctors were debating the particular chronological age that could best signify the capacity for sexual consent, the religious commentators were questioning whether chronological age as such — whether 12 of 16 — could be used to dictate normative conduct for the Hindu female. Indeed, it was precisely to assuage religious anxieties that the colonial state rationalised the age of 12 — the new age of consent — as the “age of puberty”, which was significant to the understanding of ritual personhood and legal capacity among Hindus and Muslims alike. But this epistemic compromise with Hindu and Muslim legal cultures did not include a concession to an individually grounded understanding of puberty. A standard chronological age was picked to stand for the “age of puberty” and preferred on the grounds that it was universally discernible, easier to record and confirm, and less contaminated by cultural, religious, ethnic and racial distinctions.

But did everyone really have a chronological age that could be ascertained as required?

Telling Age in Colonial India

Not everyone believed that chronological age could be recorded for everybody. In fact, during debates over a child protection bill in the 1920s, a colonial official had pompously opined that “age is not a matter of fact as in England, but a very doubtful matter of opinion.” In fact, census officers in charge of recording data on gender, caste, religion and other such facts that helped order facts about the population complained about the difficulties with ascertaining age with any degree of accuracy.

Officers recounted the variation in how Indians accounted for age: while some counted from the period of gestation, others considered a child to be aged one at birth, such that there could always be a discrepancy on the age reported on two children born in the same day. They mentioned the use of the same word for previous and next in several Indian languages that led to any return of age being off by a year or two. Other obfuscating factors included the use of natural events to recollect age; the deliberate exaggeration of the age of adolescent girls and the elderly; a taboo on revealing a child’s name before it reached a certain age; and superstition that a statement of age might shorten the length of life. Most misleading was the propensity to round up or down, or a preference for particular “digits of age” due to which, as the 1911 census report noted, a fourth of the population had reported ages that ended with a 0 (i.e. 10, 20, 30, etc.), a fifth had used 5 (5, 15, 25, and so on), while the remainder displayed “a very curious preference for the even numbers . . . with a marked preference for the particular age 12,” which was, significantly, the age of consent at the time.

The misreporting of age was rarely the result of any deliberate attempt to thwart the colonial state’s designs; age was simply irrelevant to most people outside of their encounter with the state. The 1931 census report commented that women in particular were “ignorant about the passage of time” and thus “inclined to give the most wild statements as to their age.” As a magistrate in court, the reporter had himself “heard a woman of about 35 to 40 years give her age as 100 years and having caused a titter at the bar, hurriedly restate it as 200 years.” Those trained to record ages around the country were no better than the rest of the population: as a colonial official wryly noted in 1921, he had had his age “guessed by hundreds of supervisors and enumerators” during the time when they were being trained, “and the estimates were seldom within five years of the truth, and varied between 16 and 60.” While these statements reek of colonial prejudice, the recollection of chronological age presumes a common understanding of time, and a widely agreed upon way of measuring its passage.

The standardisation of time is a recent phenomenon, and hence also the measurement of chronological age.

During discussions leading up to the passage of the Majority Act of 1875, which standardised the age of majority as 18 across various sections of the population, legislators acknowledged the multiple cultures of time that coexisted on the subcontinent, and discussed their implications for computing age. A draft of the bill had referred to “the first moment of the day” as the start of the year in the life of an individual (instead of the time of birth), but a critic pointed out, “the day in the estimation of Europeans, Hindus and Muhammadans, commences in different hours,” and recommended that the bill should specify that the “day” ran from midnight to midnight. Another respondent clarified that the years of age had to be computed “according to the Gregorian calendar only,” hinting at the chaos that would follow if different communities continued to calculate their ages according to local, religious, and lunar calendars. Indeed, the notion of “hours” differed as well. It was only in the 20th century that the colonial state began to unite the several clock times that were in use, and local resistance persisted even after Indian Standard Time was established in 1905.

Each time a new age limit was instituted in the legal code, legislators insisted that better modes of accounting — a wider network for registering births, or more scrupulous record-keeping in schools — would eventually get rid of the contamination and errors in records of age. While birth registration had been introduced in India (in restricted areas) since 1886, it remained patchy into the 1930s. In 1930, the Age of Consent Committee made several recommendations to stabilise chronological age further — by making it a legal obligation for parents to report a birth within seven days, and for local bodies such as the municipal council or village panchayat to maintain an accurate register of births and deaths. The sheer multiplicity of documents that could be produced as evidence of age didn’t help matters; in 1918, a document regulating civil services examinations had specified that candidates could produce horoscopes, family books, or tradesmen’s account books showing entries relating to their birth. Other documents such as school admission registers, the record of the candidate’s age at various periodical school examinations, or a certified copy of a candidate’s application for matriculation, were also accepted. Even the oral testimony of persons acquainted with the candidate’s family was accepted as evidence of age, although each candidate was required to comply with any request to provide further clarification relating to such oral evidence. If a public officer in British India had recorded the date and place of birth, an extract from such a register was accepted as sufficient proof of the date and place of birth. While these varied documents were all accepted as legitimate evidence of age well into the 20th century, few were considered infallible.

In this scenario, legally mandated age limits were notoriously hard to enforce in courtrooms. In cases involving child marriages, dozens of appeal cases ended in reversals of sentences passed on fathers who had initially been found guilty of marrying off underage daughters, since no document could be found to prove the age of the married children. Given the poor documentary records, forensic science was often brought to the rescue. Texts such as the widely used Lyon’s Medical Jurisprudence for India instructed expert witnesses — doctors testifying in courts — how to estimate age through the examination of teeth, height and weight, hair and breast development, degenerative changes, and the extent of ossification. While the stages of bone formation, or the state of degeneration of the body provided clues in the case of corpses, for those still alive, such signs were more difficult to read.

For the young, the order of appearance of the milk teeth in infancy and of the permanent teeth between ages six and 12 years, provided clues. But Indian evidence was deemed unreliable in comparison to England. As a study by a prison doctor in an Indian jail had confirmed, while canines usually appeared between 10 and 13 years of age, they were known to appear as early as at nine in India. Wisdom teeth were “scheduled” to appear between the ages of 14 and 27, but had been observed in Hindu children aged at 12 years 2 months. As late as 1918, there was no information on average height and weight available for India. A table for England was provided as a guide, with the helpful hint that “the average height and weight in the majority of Indian races is lower than that of Europeans.” Moreover, widespread notions of Indian precocity had made age determination unstable at the very ranges when it was most crucial for enforcing the age of marriage.

In the end, it was no easier to diagnose age through medical scrutiny than it was through the examination of documents.

Despite these difficulties, just as age standards contained within the penal code proliferated and became more important, age consciousness was developing in domains outside of the law. In fact, despite the difficulties with ascertaining age in individual cases, as the mechanisms for measuring age became standardised, chronological age came to be referred to as a self-evident fact outside of the legal domain. The new science of psychology, to pick just one example, not only took chronological age for granted, but also helped further disseminate the understanding of age as real, measurable and meaningful. In an article published in the Indian Journal of Psychology, Ananthnath Datta analysed the freehand drawings of the human figure produced by 300 Bengali children aged between six and 13 years with the intention of tracing the gradual stages of development in childhood. The drawings were classified according to the artist’s ability to draw in profile, to depict various parts of the body in their correct position, to capture the proportions of various parts of the body, and to represent the style of clothes, etc. with the understanding that “there should be gradual increase in score with increase in age.” Chronological age was taken as a stable, measurable quantity, and one that was inherently meaningful. The attempts to put in place age-gradation in schools, aided by such psychological studies, likewise encouraged the accounting of age as an everyday habit, instead of a matter of governmental imposition alone.

Do such examples indicate that age had finally ceased to be a doubtful matter of opinion and had become a routine matter of fact?

The Culture of Science and the Politics of Age

Perhaps a better question to ask might be this: Is age a matter of fact anywhere? By following historians of science to acknowledge that any scientifically grounded fact is historically specific inasmuch as it relies on the methods of verification available in any given time and place, we can understand why age remains “a doubtful matter of opinion,” shaped as much by bureaucratic procedures and forensic technologies as by cultural and political biases, even in our time, and around the world. The ways in which politics and culture continue to shape the “scientific” or medico-legal construction of age is captured in the case of a young woman, Yong Xiong, recalled in an excellent podcast by Nadia Reiman.

Yong had travelled from Laos to join her fiancé in the United States in 2017 and, as she walked up to the customs desk at the airport in Chicago, she was asked her age. Yong spoke no English, and indicated she was 19 by gesturing with her fingers. She was then asked to write down her birth date. What she wrote down matched the date of birth recorded on her passport: June 4, 1997. Seemingly unsatisfied both with her oral testimony and the documentary evidence, the officer interrogating her sought the aid of colleagues. Five customs and border protection officers looked her up and down and concluded by sight that she appeared to be under the age of 18. They said she was a victim of child trafficking.

Her answer to the question — what is your age — was deemed either dishonest or inaccurate. At 4 feet 7 inches, Yong stands just below the average height for women in Laos, which is 4 feet 9 inches. As Reiman reports, “It is obvious that Yong is being measured with a Western ruler” by the border agents to whom she appeared to be a child.

The officials were not acting in malice, but a zealous desire to rescue her from becoming a victim of child abuse. They were also acting from a misplaced confidence in their ability to evaluate chronological age by sight, based on their familiarity with standards or averages in their own location. These officers assigned Yong a new birthday: January 1, 2000. This made her a minor, and transformed her into a victim of child trafficking. While altering her birth date had already lowered her chronological age, officials were keen to ground this new fact in and on her body.

Yong was sent to a dentist to further confirm her age. The X-ray of teeth is not an infallible technology for determining age today, any more than it was a hundred years ago. Such X-rays only provide an estimate that ranges over five years. In fact, the US Congress — and the European Union — has warned against the use of this technology to determine the fate of immigrants and asylum seekers at various borders. Identification documents are supposed to trump such tests, but the suspicion that forgery is rampant in some parts of the world creates a veracity gap that is then filled by these fallible tests. In Yong’s case, the dentist reported that “the range of possible ages is 14.76 to 19.56 years.” That is, while Yong might well have been 19 as she claimed, the officers concluded she was 17. Her childhood confirmed, Yong was driven to a children’s shelter in Chicago, by the orders of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR).

There she remained until her newly assigned birthday loomed. When Yong was to turn 18, once again, as per the random date of birth bestowed on her by immigration officers, a second dentist re-examined the X-ray of her teeth and pronounced she could be anywhere between 15 and 20. The ORR then used the lowest end of the possible range to modify her birth date once again. They also ordered an X-ray of her wrist to determine age via ossification tests. The X-ray suggested she was likely 18; the doctor interpreted this information to opine she was a 15n-year-old with “advanced bone age”. Yong had landed in the United States as a 19- year-old, and had aged backwards to 17, then to 15. Despite the availability of documentary evidence — including her passport, the family registry in her village, and her fifth-grade and ninth-grade school certificates — she has been made to age in reverse by her zealous saviours. The case not only provides a striking reminder of the blinding power of the “child” (especially one perceived to be in sexual danger) to provoke interventionist action but also points to the constitution of this “child” — and of chronological age itself — at the nexus of legal norms, bureaucratic procedures, political ideologies, majoritarian moralities and cultures of science. An unstable quantity so easily manufactured by the bureaucratic and scientific procedures at the disposal of modern states, as Yong’s case shows, chronological age still remains unshakeable as the measure of legal capacity in our times.

The case provides a most extreme example of how modern states manufacture age and how age continues to be naturalised as an inherent fact about the body.

This unshakeable faith in the universality of age as the measure of legal capacity, and thus as a fair guarantor of protections and rights, is on display in the new legislation on child marriages under consideration in India as well as Pakistan. The age of marriage in Pakistan is currently 16 for females (except in Sindh, where it is set at 18); a bill seeking to raise it to 18 across all provinces is under discussion. Progressive commentators and legal experts take heart in a landmark judgement from October 2021, where the Federal Shariat Court categorically declared that setting any minimum age limit for marriage by an Islamic state was not against Islam. This openness to chronological age — instead of references to the “age of puberty” which is considered a sign of maturity in various schools of Islamic law — is seen as a positive development even though one of the problems with the revision, as a newspaper report explains, is the “slippery slope” of documents accepted as evidence of age by courts.

For instance, the person administering a marriage can provide an affidavit confirming they are satisfied that the parties in question are above the minimum age. But, as we know from history, this officer can be bribed or misled, or can simply make a mistake. An attested copy of the government-issued Computerized National Identity Card (CNIC), while seemingly infallible, can simply be swapped with that belonging to a close relative. The medical certificate accepted in lieu of a CNIC might likewise be obtained through bribery or influence, and even at best, it offers an expert’s opinion, with a significant margin of error.

Instead of implementing the laws already in place, looking to alternative solutions, or fully exploring alternative measures of maturity (including the “option of puberty” that permits the dissolution of a marriage contracted in childhood, granted by Muslim personal law and extended to Hindu wives in India since 1976), why do states periodically raise the age of marriage? Historically, the alteration of minimum ages of marriage has had as much to do with political ideologies, or political virtue signalling, as it has had to do with the protection of women and children. In the 1920s, for instance, the League of Nations’ Child Welfare Committee had conducted a survey of minimum ages of marriage across the globe, an exercise which, in turn, hastened the passage of a slew of new laws around the world, including in Britain.

The committee’s inquiry had put Great Britain in a group of 10 states with the lowest minimum age of marriage for females (12), along with Cuba, Greece, Hungary, Irish Free State, Italy, New Zealand, South Africa, Uruguay and Venezuela, thus threatening the representation of colonisation as a civilising mission.

Pressure generated by the League of Nation’s transnational gaze hastened the passage of the Age of Marriage Bill (1929). The bill was rationalised in the spirit of national competition and imperial responsibility. “What another country does is no guide whatever for what this country should do,” the sponsor of the bill had noted, nonetheless reminding the House that Turkey, “which we have not been taught to regard as a country very far advanced in these matters,” had a higher minimum age of marriage (15) than Britain. In Britain, the age of marriage was raised from 12 to 16 the same year as it was raised to 14 in India.

What kind of national and international political imperatives lie behind the proposed amendments to the existing child marriage laws in India as well as Pakistan? In each location, discrete political parties, women’s organisations and NGOs continue to be embroiled in a politics of age, with various chronological age limits being used as shorthand to signal distinct ideological positions. While historically, more “progressive” political positions had been hitched to higher chronological ages, this last round of legislation (especially in India) has shown how a further elevation of the minimum chronological age for marriages will only rouse suspicions. But instead of continuing to debate the correct age limits to various activities, or seeking out greater state surveillance to verify age, it might be time to pause to reflect on the oddness of hitching our quest for human rights, child protection, and gender justice to such a “dubious matter of opinion” as chronological age.

Ishita Pande is a historian of post/colonial South Asia and the British Empire. Her recent book Sex, Law and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937, is a dual biography of the 1929 law on child marriage in India, and of “age” itself as a scientific object. Learn more about her work here.

The Matter of Age in Colonial India was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Caste, class, gender, sexuality, age, agency. At the nexus of them all, in the very heartland of U.P, is Kashvi. Written into history by journalist Pooja Pande, this is her story from 16 to 22, navigating life, work, family, politics and most fearlessly, love.

In Bundelkhand, or, you could argue, anywhere in India, a curious nature is not the most desirable of qualities. Especially in women, where it’s best stifled and strangled upon first sighting.

But that summer of 2014, 16-year-old Kashvi* felt the mightiest stirrings of curiosity when she encountered Ritwika*. Here was a girl who appeared as a mirror reflection to Kashvi in her non-conforming behaviour, and yet was different in her almost child-like wonder, which often translated as stubbornness in a world run by those who have long crossed 17.

‘It is just who she is,’ Kashvi says. ‘She has this child-like quality about her that she manages to hold on to. An innocence, a purity, a continuous refusal to comprehend the complicated realities of growing up, of life.’

Now 22, Kashvi sounds just a wee bit miffed. Five years, familial betrayals, forced marriages, social censure, an exodus, and an unsettled existence at 10k a month in brutal suburban Delhi will do that to you. It makes you feel that everything, including and especially you, is fragile.

But we’re still speaking of 2014, when Sam Smith was topping charts on summer love pop hits, and worlds away, Kashvi and Ritwika were slowly but surely falling in love.

North India’s heartland regularly makes news headlines during the annual heatwave of May and June. The rising temperatures can get unbearable — they break hearts, they bend human wills, they test patience and compassion like nothing else. But, perhaps most importantly, they can forge bonds for life — bonds melded in an unforgettable fire. And if there’s one thing we know, it’s that the perfect collision (and collusion) of a school’s summer break and a teenager’s frenzied hormone levels spell out HEAT on myriad levels.

That summer of 2014 in Hamirpur — a district in Uttar Pradesh that is afforded newsprint real estate diligently every five years during elections, or when brutal crimes, usually of violence against women, occur — was a particularly hot one, as recalled by Hamirpur local Kashvi, who was a few months short of her 17th birthday.

Having just graduated from high school, she was visiting her mother’s side of the family in the neighbouring village of Kanhauli, Muskara — a tradition intrinsic to desi summer holidays, one of those well-hidden aspects of a patriarchal culture, because almost nothing negative can be thought of in connection with nani ka ghar (grandmother’s house) — right?

‘It’s about 20 kilometres from my place [in Raath tehsil]’, says Kashvi. She shares some trivia about the tehsil or sub-district’s name: ‘Actually, it was king Virat’s nagri (domain), and in Bundelkhand, it changed to Raath ki nagri, which was then just shortened to Raath.’

She’s always had a keenness for history, and fleetingly mentions wanting to pursue it if she has the opportunity. ‘I think it’s basic curiosity to want to know about the areas you belong to, where you’re from. It’s thrilling to know these secrets of a past that are somehow yours too, by virtue of being present in the same geographies.’

Their connection came through family. ‘Ritwika’s older sister was a friend of mine. Number teen hain yeh, chaar behnon mein (She is the third of four sisters). Her sister, my friend, was nothing like her.’

In other words, nothing had prepared Kashvi for Ritwika.

‘She would storm into the house. You know how other people walk in? Not her. Ritwika would storm in.’ And this would only be for a few minutes, she adds — Ritwika is a creature of the outdoors. ‘Bat an eye and she’d be out the door again, kanche khelne mein maahir aur time waste nahi ho sakta (A pro at playing marbles, she wouldn’t waste any time).’

Her ways were boyish, and while this was similar to Kashvi’s own demeanour, Ritwika was a few leagues above and beyond. From the way she dressed to the way she walked and talked, ‘sab 100% ladkon jaise’ (just like boys). She wore her hair short and you’d never find her in anything except ‘pant-shirt’, hanging out with the boys in her neighbourhood, beating them at kanche (marbles).

It took Ritwika some time to warm to the attention that Kashvi was directing her way. ‘I think she was slightly offended at first, wondering why I would be staring at her so. But then I think she started liking it.’

How did Kashvi sense this? ‘Because she would make 100 excuses to keep coming over. And she would come by 8–10 times a day, no less!’

Kashvi had been stewing in a personal rebellion of her own. She had been wanting to break out of a feminine identity. A good student, she’d won the first fight at her home when she’d succeeded in convincing her parents — both daily wage workers — to let her leave home to attend high school in the big city of Prayagraj (then Allahabad).

‘I had my first taste of freedom then,’ she recalls, as Ritwika, who’s also present as a silent witness to the story, leans in to hear about this part of her girlfriend’s life. Yes, Kashvi’s first girlfriend (or two) belonged to the Allahabad era, though she’s unwilling to get into details, perhaps as a mark of respect towards Ritwika.

Her fondest memories of the time revolve around wearing jeans: ‘My father never let me wear them at home,’ she explains.

In Hamirpur, girls wearing jeans — along with doing, wearing and eating other things — is severely frowned upon. In large swathes across north India, the sight of a newlywed woman is invariably one of a swaddled young girl, weighed down under yards of synthetic fabric decorated with salma-sitaare (spangled stars) that scratch at her arms, stomach and back. In turn, she spends every breathing second praying for a moment when she can maybe, just maybe, pull back the stifling ghunghat (veil). But centuries of patriarchy require physical discomfort for women, and the damned men always seem to be around.

That summer of 2014 also included attention from the opposite sex. How could it not? Kashvi has a mirthful response. ‘Any time a boy would tell me he loves me, can’t live without me, and all that — you know how boys swear undying love at the drop of a hat — I would tell them you can do that all your life, but you must know that I can never reciprocate.’ She is still friends with some of them, she adds. ‘Some are working, some are still studying, married or about to… the usual.’

Back in Hamirpur for her summer holidays, Kashvi was the big city-returned ‘didi ki saheli’ (elder sister’s friend) for Ritwika. Although she almost always shied away from Kashvi’s ‘hi’s’ and ‘hellos’, the long, unrelenting days of May and June finally had their way when one fine (read: blazing) morning, Ritwika made eye contact with Kashvi for the very first time.

‘There was something so hat ke (unique/edgy) about her,’ Kashvi said. ‘I was drawn to her, completely mesmerised.’

‘She has this innocent face, and then she has this edgy attitude complementing it. If you think about it like that, it doesn’t connect or seem to work. But somehow that’s her, that’s Ritwika. You either find it attractive, or you don’t,’ says Kashvi, who often calls her lover “bachcha” (child).

In the year that followed, the girls turned 17 and Kashvi pulled off another bold move vis-à-vis her parents: She got them to sanction her “inter ki padhaai” (Classes 11 and 12) in Muskara, Ritwika’s village. ‘I knew I had to move to be closer to her. Or at least try to. There was no other way to be around her, be with her…’

The Navratras(the Hindu festival across nine nights) marked a milestone of this journey. The Ram Leela mela (fair) was in town and local excitement was at an all-time high.

‘It’s a big deal in the village. It’s like the mood is electric.’ Kashvi, like most other people there, was prepped to pull an all-nighter.

The show usually started late in the evening, after the mela’s activities had been wrapped up and ‘a thrilling sense of fun was in the air.’

As Kashvi packed a few blankets and shawls for the night out, she was all nerves and anticipation. ‘Nobody had plans to come back home that night.’

Onstage, as the much-eulogised battle of good versus evil played out, with the finale of the epic build-up that everyone had been waiting for — when the righteous Rama faces-off with the erring Ravana — Kashvi and Ritwika cosied up under a shared blanket.

‘It was my plan all along,’ says Kashvi, ‘What better opportunity than that night? I knew that everyone would be busy watching the Leela and nobody would notice us, or what we were up to.’

A night of discovery unfolded for the couple as they became lovers. Even though they had seen their own reflections in each other long before this night and were familiar with each other’s bodies as images of their own, the climax of their union brought about new feelings. As they shared a first kiss, Sita was reunited with Rama. Euphoria, bliss, and the definitive afterglow of a pact sealed with The One marked this night as forever memorable.

In 2016, spaced apart by mere months, both Kashvi and Ritwika found themselves married off to men — the culmination of parental exhaustion with daughters who spent night after night on mobile phones, desperate to stay in touch.

The memories of that Ram Leela night stayed with Kashvi and Ritwika as they refused their lawfully wedded husbands consummation, denying them, in that act, not just their bodies, but their souls, their identities. Who they are had become inextricably linked to one another ever since that night. They had pledged a sacred vow to each other and to their own selves, even at the risk of violence from their marital families and larger societal structures.

‘When I got married, I would spend all my waking hours plotting excuses to return to my parents’ house. It would be a migraine one day, and a debilitating illness on another. I think my in-laws would get quite worried that I might pin something disastrous on them, something that would implicate them.’

Kashvi was barely 20 then, and had already threatened suicide to both her in-laws and her parents. Her parents’ logic had been that a marriage would fix it all.

‘I can’t even blame them,’ says Kashvi in hindsight. ‘I’ve seen this many a time. Girls, some of whom I even know, simply change their orientation after marriage. It’s just another adjustment for them.’​

Ritwika had tried to convince her lover to elope on both their wedding nights, but had allowed herself to then be talked out of it. Ritwika often allows herself to be talked out of things when it’s Kashvi doing the talking.

Soon enough, both her husband and her in-laws gave up on trying to persuade Kashvi to live the normative life of marital bliss and the ‘divorce nama’ she had been gunning for all along began.

In April 2019, the couple, who’d been living with Kashvi’s parents, anticipated outstaying their welcome. And in a bid to earn a living so they could live independently, they decided to leave the place they had always called home in search of a new life.

Since then, Kashvi has been doing the bulk of the heavy lifting involved in ensuring subsistence in her new life as one-half of an adult couple, sweating it out at a garment factory in Gurugram. ‘When we moved out of Hamirpur, I had hoped for us both to be able to find work. But it is not easy for bachcha to cope with what it all means.’

Home, today, is a one-room bedsit where the women often take selfies together, lounging about on the sofa, snuggled up close, staring straight into the camera. They sometimes cook together, but not much on weekdays. That is ‘simply impossible’ for Kashvi who runs gruelling shifts Monday-Friday and also works Saturdays. ‘Please Sunday hi phone karna,’ was a constant refrain on WhatsApp while reporting this piece.

At 17, even though they had not envisioned the precise shape of their future selves and lives, Kashvi and Ritwika had never entertained illusions around the possibilities of their relationship being anything more than Bundelkhand’s best-kept secret. The realities of inherent differences in their social-familial structures were a strong deterrent, too. Kashvi is of the kotar caste, a Dalit, while Ritwika belongs to the darzi community, generally regarded as OBC, the same as the Indian Prime Minister.

It has morbid echoes of what a gay man in south Delhi said a few years ago: ‘I feel like now my parents are kinda cool with my sexual orientation. But I still can’t bring home a Muslim boyfriend, or someone from a lower class.’

Many Indians have so much to show today that passes for progress — the jobs we go to and cars we drive and rents we pay and Netflix shows we stream and the English we think-speak. But there are some things that never change. For Kashvi and Ritwika, the social censure that comes from a same-sex, inter-caste relationship, coupled with the fact of their economic realities, means absolute isolation. It places them firmly at the margins.

At work, Kashvi tries to keep engagement with her peers to a minimum, in a bid to keep her ongoing live-in relationship a secret. The agony in her voice is apparent even when she says, simply, almost matter-of-factly, ‘It’s like nothing can ever work in our favour. And this when we have some common family connections. Ritwika’s father is my moonh-bole mama.’ (uncle of sorts).

She speaks of Dutee Chand and the attack on a lesbian couple in London as she juggles her busy Sunday schedule that has been further complicated by the arrival of ‘gaanv se aaye chhote bhai’ (the younger brother from the village). ‘He’s here to explore opportunities. There’s nothing worthwhile left to do back in the village.’

As for her life path, the one she has charted out with her lover, there isn’t a definitive roadmap. ‘We registered for a consensual live-in relationship at the district court in Hamirpur when we heard about Article 377 being revoked. But of course, we cannot still be officially married or anything.’

Against all odds, Kashvi and Ritwika embarked on the journey together that will eventually make them Hamirpur’s first (documented) same-sex couple. They even see children in their future for which they need to establish themselves financially and independently.

There was a moment of heightened emotion that year of 2014, during those Navratras, when they both ‘got married at the temple’. It was a quick affair, urged on by Kashvi, ritualized by a pandit friend also their age. It was akin to a note of affirmation that she felt she needed: ‘We did it because it seemed romantic then. It does seem a bit foolish now.’

Given their life choices, there isn’t much room left to rebel, Kashvi says. ‘We’re women. As you must know so well, women have to be cautious all the time. There is just so much we are expected to keep in mind, be respectful of, hold the fort, et cetera.’

Even rage and sorrow exist in gendered notions. ‘A boy, when his heart breaks, just drowns himself in alcohol. As women, we’re not supposed to do even that. Even grief and its expression has boundaries for us.”’

‘It’s a difficult life,’ says Kashvi and adds in the next breath, very U.P.-like, the famous line from a Hindi movie which has become a queer anthem of sorts: ‘Pyaar kiya toh darna kya?’ (When you have given yourself to love, what is there to fear?)

** Note: names changed.

Pooja Pande is a journalist, writer, mother, and Co-CEO of Chambal Media home to Khabar Lahariya. Her latest book ‘Momspeak: The Funny, Bittersweet Story of Motherhood in India’ is available here.

Watch our social media space for snippetes from our conversation with her on love, parenting and media production.

It happened that night was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Life begins on Thursday was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rukhmabai stirs up the pot was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

by Tricia Wang

What happens when your own data becomes your enemy?

Just shy of his 42nd birthday, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams found out.

In January 2020, the Detroit police uploaded a photo captured from a store robbery video to DataWorks. DataWorks — a mugshot management company turned facial recognition software company — then matched the video still with an outdated DMV photo of Williams, a Black man. That led to Williams’ arrest for felony larceny. But the match was wrong. And Williams became the first documented case in America of a wrongful arrest due to a mistaken identity match from facial recognition algorithms.

In an op-ed, Williams writes that prior to his experience, he was a supporter of facial recognition technology. He rhetorically asks: ‘What’s so terrible if they’re not invading our privacy and all they’re doing is using this technology to narrow in on a group of suspects?’

Williams goes on to answer his own question. Because of the wrongful arrest, he had to miss several days of work. Despite proving that he wasn’t the person in the photo, his case was only conditionally dismissed. This means he could still be charged again for the same crime — pending further evidence. Even though he was released without charges, he now has a police record for a crime he didn’t commit. This could adversely impact his chances of getting a job or finding a home. What’s more, his neighbours saw him getting arrested. His daughters saw him getting arrested. While his op-ed does not go into detail about the emotional trauma an event like this can cause, we know from other cases that this kind of trauma is real.

If what happened to Williams was only a threat to privacy, then we would be talking only about Williams’ control over his data. We might be talking about the State’s right to access his old DMV photo without his consent. But instead, what we’re talking about, is how processes that involve algorithmic decision-making over human beings can become fundamental threats to our lives and our communities. The wrongful arrest compromised Williams’ agency to live his life freely without harm or fear, to do a job, and to be part of a community.

Williams’ experience is not just an invasion of privacy. Something even more terrible happened to him that we don’t have a widely shared language for yet: the invasion of personhood. If privacy is about our ability to control information about ourselves, personhood is about our fundamental agency as human beings.

***

In the digital age, individual privacy in the broadest sense is about control over protecting one’s personally identifiable information (PII), such as information about health, credit, shopping, or communication. But the types of information deemed ‘personally identifiable’ and the amount of control one has over them varies around the world.

I’ve done a lot of work to try and document concepts of privacy and identity, and found that conceptions of privacy vary radically across cultures. It’s quite common for Chinese internet users to share their blood types on social media platforms, whereas Westerners would see that as deeply personal health information. In Peru, people give out their DNI, the equivalent to a social security number, without even a second thought when asked by store cashiers.

Regardless of the types of information it encompasses, privacy is about controlling which pools of data are protected. If the operative word for privacy is ‘control’, then personhood is all about agency. Personhood is the agency to determine one’s own life decisions and outcomes. Personhood is tied to the qualities that make us people. It’s about making decisions about everything: our careers, personal lives, homes, and relationships. It’s about having the freedom to determine where we live, who we live with, and how we live. It’s about self-determination.

Today, privacy and personhood are both mediated digitally. Our primary language for conceptualising the data we produce is through privacy, which treats our personal information as separate from us, a piece of property that can be measured, negotiated over, sold, and reused. But data doesn’t just belong to you in the way that your house or car might; it is also you. It is like a quantum particle that can exist in two places at the same time, as both a representation of who you are and also a commodity that can be sold.

Violations of privacy are violations of data as a commodity. Violations of personhood are violations of the actual person represented by that data. That is why violations of personhood lead to unintended and debilitating effects that last beyond the violation itself. So not only is it important to talk about the privacy violations that come with algorithmic decision-making, but to also about the bigger threat to personhood. Evaluating the threats of automated decision making tools through the lens of privacy obscures the nature and scale of the threat, and it obscures who will be most negatively impacted: people and communities who are still fighting for their personhood.

Even though we don’t use the concept of personhood widely, we may actually understand it better than we realise. The current Black Lives Matter protests in the USA did not start because protesters were demanding privacy around their data. They were, and are, demanding the right of Black people to live without discrimination — in other words, the right to their personhood.

Perhaps the value of personhood is most intuitively understood by those who have had it taken away, either within their lifetimes or inter-generationally. Removal of personhood comes in many forms: abuse, surveillance, racism, genocide, homophobia, slavery, trafficking, colonialism, torture, and human rights violations. Immigrants who are detained, ethnic groups who are discriminated against, and prisoners kept in solitary confinement are all systemically subjected to dehumanisation, which is one way of removing personhood. The poet Joshua Bennett describes how Black people have historically been deemed as human nonpeople. Essentially, anyone whose sense of self has been reduced to a single identifier or data point by a majority group has experienced violations of personhood — and viscerally knows what it’s like to be denied agency and autonomy over their lives and decisions.

The violation of personhood is not a new experience. It is, however, now happening in unfamiliar ways because the entire process is invisible, automated, and designed to obfuscate.

For example, the typical smartphone app user or Amazon shopper is aware that their behaviours are being tracked and purchases catalogued. But most people usually don’t understand the extent to which data is being gathered, by whom, or how it is being or could be used. People often don’t account for less obvious use cases like transit companies recording conversations on trains and buses, or advertisers tracking consumer travel patterns through billboards and smartphones. . Even something seemingly unrelated to data, like high school students taking SAT test, results in this data being sent to tech advertising companies. When people do see the extent to which their preferences and activities are being monitored, they feel overwhelmed.

When it comes to privacy and data ownership, most of us feel downright helpless. High-profile stories like the Equifax data breach or the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal are made public — and yet, here we are, likely still using credit cards and a Facebook product. We feel compelled to agree to terms and conditions designed to protect corporations so we can use the technologies we’ve come to rely upon to live our lives. When we demand better alternatives, technologists will often echo messages such as ‘If you care about your privacy, just stop using social media…and your phone…oh, and the internet!” or ‘Privacy is obsolete anyway, so stop worrying about it!’

These two extremes offer neither helpful advice nor peace of mind. They are also two extremes that only address surface-level privacy without examining its link to personhood. The more our personal data is being collected automatically and acted upon by institutions, the more our privacy and our personhood are compromised. I believe we need to level up conversations around our digital humanity before we can collectively advance solutions to protect it.

***

Let’s be real: the word ‘data’ feels cold and lifeless. Perhaps because of this, many of us believe our data is somehow separate from our true selves. Some people just aren’t worried, thinking: ‘Oh, sure, my data is being collected, but it’s fine. It has never gotten in the way of my life.’ The reality is that as we begin to live more and more of our lives online, and institutions surveil and interact with us digitally, our data selves become just as real as our physical selves. That information you got from 23andMe is you. Those Tik Tok videos are you. That Grindr profile is you. The GPS mobility data from your phone is you.. That chatbot conversation is you. In his book We are Data, John Cheney-Lippold documents how algorithms are used to construct digital versions of ourselves. Companies and institutions can then act upon us in the physical world just by acting upon our digital proxies.

Because your data is you, and because your data is acted on without your consent, and because that action can impact how much agency you have over your life and livelihood, data is at the core of digital personhood. This is why any proposed solution of abandoning connected technologies is bound to be ineffectual. For starters, our digital selves already exist, and quitting social media won’t change that. But more importantly, these apps have become so central to our lives, that eradicating them would make it difficult to be a person.

Facebook and its suite of applications have become many people’s primary means of communicating with friends and family. Without it, they’d not only be without work, but also isolated from their social networks. Abandon Instagram and lose knowledge about the experiences of your friends and family. Abandon WhatsApp and lose the ability to contact people you know. Abandon Lyft and Uber and in certain cities you’ll either pay three times as much for your ride or be forced to walk because there are no cabs in sight. Imagine being unable to email your employer, or check your bank balance, or find the fastest and cheapest flight to see your family. You wouldn’t cease to exist on the spot, but the agency you have over your life would change drastically. Your sudden loss of personhood would be overwhelming.

We carry out so much of our personhood digitally that we don’t even think about it. Every text message and email we send, every map and browser search, every photo we upload to the cloud, every browser search — all of this is data, all of this is us. But our language around our data creates the illusion that it is external to us. And since our data is physically distributed across other people’s computers or companies’ databases, it’s hard to conceptualise that our data is just as much a part of who we are as our hair, bodily organs, arms, or legs.

***

A few years ago, Google released a new machine learning algorithm that automatically tagged photos to describe their content. Jacky Alcine discovered that his friend, who is Black, was tagged a Gorilla. Google claimed it was a computational error, but the real problem is twofold. First, they didn’t have a diverse enough photo set on which to train the algorithm. Second, they likely didn’t have a diverse enough team to raise the issue of diverse photo sets and approaches in the first place. In 2011, the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST) did a study that revealed facial recognition algorithms performed better on the faces that looked like the team developing them. Meaning: Japanese teams produced better results at recognising Japanese faces while Caucasian teams produced better results at recognising Caucasian faces.

In 2019, NIST performed another study on 189 algorithms and concluded that they were highly susceptible to bias. The algorithms misidentified Black and Asian faces ten to a hundred times more than Caucasian faces. Two of the DataWorks algorithms that misidentified Williams and led to his wrongful arrest were included in this study.

What is worrisome is that despite studies showing how automated decision-making systems are inaccurate and extend bias, institutions are still deploying them. Julie Angwin’s work on courtrooms using COMPAS, a machine learning program that gives risk scores, shows that the programme is overly biased in rating Black people as higher risk. This one score doesn’t reflect real risk, but does keep thousands of people, mostly Black, in jail.

Outside of courtrooms, companies are using software to make hiring more efficient. Amazon’s HR hiring tool was discovered to privilege male applicants over female applicants because it was trained on past hiring practices that were sexist. Employers are also paying software companies to perform background checks that include a sweep of all of the public online interactions of potential employees. Companies like Fama Technology claim that they can ‘identify problematic behaviour among potential hires and current employees by analysing publicly available online information.’ Soon after a job interview, Twitter user @bruisealmighty received a package of 300 pages of her tweets printed out. All tweets with the word ‘fuck’ were categorised as ‘bad.’ @bruisealmighty didn’t know that her tweets would be used and taken out of context, and possibly put her job prospects at risk. In South Korea, companies are using AI software to sort interviewees based on facial expressions. There are now facial coaches to help candidates prepare for algorithmically run interviews.

In 2013, Dr. Latanya Sweeney demonstrated how the algorithms in Google’s Ad Delivery are racist. Searches of Black-sounding names served ads for criminal background checks, while White-sounding names did not produce the same results. Imagine the psychological impact on the millions of Black people, as well as their potential employers, who see their names next to racist ads. Many Native Americans, such as Shane Creepingbear and Dana Lone Hill, have written about how Facebook makes it hard for people with non-Western names that mix adjectives and nouns to get an account.

All these stories involve individuals or entire communities whose personhood is threatened by systems that are not designed by them or even keeping them in mind. These are systems that have become embedded in existing systems, creating entanglements that have evolved faster than the law or policymakers can keep up with. These software spaces will increasingly be home to what Madelaine Claire-Elish calls moral crumple zones, instances where responsibility and liability are obscured in complex, automated systems.

We have crossed the uncanny valley of digital personhood, and if we want to have agency over that personhood, we have to have agency over our data.

This is why the work of groups like Our Data Bodies is so important — they help marginalised communities understand and value their data. For this five-person team, community-hood is the basis of personhood, an idea underscored by the work of Sabelo Mhlambi. As more communities completely rely on social platforms to communicate, they are in effect centralising all their data, memories and history into one place — putting their entire community-hood at risk if it were to all be misused or disappear.

***

Tech companies like Facebook have long argued that they own our data because they’ve created free platforms for us to use. At first glance, we may agree: ‘Sure companies can claim my data is theirs. What would I do with it anyway? They’re the ones collecting the data and paying for it to be stored in some server.’ This logic serves the bigger argument that social media companies have the right to do with your data record as they please. And it potentially sets up the perversion that any entity creating a record of us could ‘own’ us because they own a part of our personhood.

Companies collecting our data know that our personally identifiable information (PII) is valuable. They often use the metaphor that our data is oil, which is reflective of their conception that our data is at once both valueless without their refinement and valuable as a tradeable commodity. Seen as a natural, feral and raw resource, our data then belongs to the first company to create a record of us, capture us in their dataset, and create economic value out of it. Much like how oil companies stockpile land or how colonizers claim land as their property, a similar thing is happening right now with data. There is a rush to gather data even when the use case isn’t clear yet. Companies have long defaulted to collecting as much PII as possible instead of collecting the least amount of data needed to get the job done. Data hoarding is rampant because companies are confident that if the data is not valuable now it will become valuable someday. This is compounded by the technology logic that says that machine learning is only possible on large enough datasets, so it is better to collect more rather than less.

This business model is predicated upon a company’s ability to sell data repeatedly, extracting value from it over and over again. An entire shadow industry of data brokers has emerged to facilitate the trading of our PII to pharmaceutical companies, finance, healthcare, marketers, advertisers, and governments looking to act upon our data. The data brokerage industry is estimated to be valued at around $200 billion. It is designed to be opaque and untraceable.

The purpose of this obfuscated market is less data brokerage and more data arbitrage, because it builds on the concept that companies can extract value from your data for less than its actual trading price. It is estimated that a personal data record that has an email address, social media and credit card transactions attached to it has a value of $8 per month. If companies can get that email address from you for free in exchange for signing up for a service or a marketing newsletter, then they have reduced the cost of acquisition of this valuable asset to near zero.

Companies are taking advantage of the lack of shared, collective understanding around personal data by hiding their actions under complex legal terms and conditions, making it difficult to track their actions. While there is nothing illegal about arbitrage, a more accurate way to describe their use of our personal data might be data embezzlement. Companies from Facebook to all the unknown players in the data brokerage industry are siphoning off as much information as they legally can, and selling it to the highest bidder without giving a thought to how it might affect us; how it might interrupt our personhood.

When questioned about their data practices, companies will argue that their actions fall well within the law. But an entity can be legally compliant with privacy laws and still be socially flagrant of personhood. And for now, most companies will continue on their current path of orientating data policies towards privacy — which they perceive as easier to measure and execute than personhood.

***

Our data is being collected all the time. We might think opting out is an option if we don’t want our data collected. Like staying off social media, for example. But it’s not that simple. Just by existing, we expose ourselves to violations of our personhood on a daily basis. If we walk down a city street, surveillance cameras may capture our image and cellphone towers may log our movements. If we need to catch a flight, we’ll be asked to give up biometric data to pass through security. If we buy groceries, the supermarket’s loyalty programme will carefully tabulate how much we spent, when, and how often. These examples demonstrate that we’re no longer in the position to opt out when data collection is so automated and ingrained into our everyday lives.

If you take a walk around the block with your dog, your neighbour’s Amazon’s Ring camera might capture you. If your local police is one of the 630 police departments that Ring has a partnership with, and if they ask to view footage from your neighbour’s Ring, then your likeness could make it to their database without you ever knowing. The increasing use of facial recognition technologies, from cameras to matching software, complicate the possibilities of opting out. Cities, border patrol and police officers around the world have installed video cameras with facial recognition technologies where capturing is automatic and always on. As the costs to capture and store data have decreased, law enforcement is continuously grabbing data — not because they are looking for someone specific, but just because they can.

In a study on facial recognition technologies deployed by cities, Claire Garvey and Laura Moy warn that technology meant to make residents feel more secure can do the opposite by violating neighbourhood privacy and potentially suppressing free speech. These types of warnings are starting to make their way to local, city and state leaders. Over the last few years, a patchwork of policies have emerged against the use of facial recognition at the city and state level. San Francisco, Oakland, Somerville, Massachusetts, and Portland all have bans already in place or that are being put into place regarding its use in law enforcement. Illinois has had one of the most forward-thinking data protection laws, the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA), in effect for over a decade. Illinois residents recently filed a lawsuit against Amazon, Microsoft and Google for violating the BIPA by using their faces without permission in a database used to train facial recognition systems.

This flurry of bans on facial recognition technology across the country is a step forward in curtailing automated data gathering. Susan Crawford notes that the annoyances that tech companies experience in having to comply with the variations of local and state laws is often what brings them to the table to negotiate with policymakers. In June 2020, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM introduced a call for a national law on facial recognition (the same week they all agreed to temporarily stop selling facial recognition to the police).

The advent of social media has hastened the trend of passive, automatic data collection wielded against U.S. citizens. In 2015 the Baltimore police labelled two Black Lives Matters organisers, Deray Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie, as ‘high threat actors’ through monitoring their Twitter, Instagram, and email. The US Immigration and Customs Enforcment (ICE) department targeted suspected undocumented immigrants by purchasing access to state DMV data in order to obtain high resolution photographs. Most recently, federal agents used YouTube live streams to identify, arrest, and charge protestors with alleged crimes against federal buildings.

Much of the technology powering the government’s data surveillance infrastructure is provided by private Silicon Valley companies. One company, Palantir, has over $1.5 billion in federal contracts and several more with local police stations around the US. Palantir’s role is to create the data infrastructure and software to predict who to detain in ICE raids and who to target in drone strikes. While Palantir describes itself as a mission-based company committed to privacy and civil liberties, many critics and activists have argue that Palantir’s software enables the U.S. government to create a surveillance society and abuse human rights.

This isn’t surprising, because corporations and governments have a long history of working together to define and enforce control over personhood.

***

In January 2020, Zachary McCoy became a suspect in a home burglary case in Gainesville, Florida. About a year earlier, in December 2018, the police department of Avondale, Arizona arrested Jorge Molina as a suspected murderer. These were two very different crimes, committed at two different ends of the the U.S. But despite the fact that Molina and McCoy never met, both their cases had many things in common.

First, they were both proven innocent. Second, they both became suspects only after Google fulfilled geofence warrants from police departments. A geofence warrant is a new type of warrant that enables police departments to request from Google the data of individuals who were near the site of a crime. In McCoy’s case, he had biked past the victim’s home several times while wearing his fitness app that was tracking location data and sending it to his Android device. In Molina’s case, the geofence warrant showed that a cellphone attached to Molina was at the location of the murder, along with his car. In the end, neither of the cases could prove that the person arrested was physically at the crime scene. McCoy had biked by the victim’s home, but that didn’t mean he was the robber. In Molina’s case, it was his stepfather who had murdered the victim; he used one of Molina’s old cellphones and drove his car without his permission.

Neither McCoy or Molina were aware that their data could be used in such a way. Since the passage of the Patriot Act in 2001, corporations have been compelled to comply with government requests for user data, whether they ethically agree with it or not, and irrespective of the consequences.

Both Molina and McCoy’s lives were disrupted by these wrongful accusations. Both of them were mentally traumatised, too scared to leave their homes for fear of being tracked again. McCoy’s parents used their savings to hire a lawyer to clear the warrant. Molina lost his job and was unable to get a new one. His car was repossessed and he dropped out of school.

Molina and McCoy join Williams in a common story. All three had their personal data used by institutions without their consent. In all three cases, data misidentified them with a crime that they did not commit. This experience negatively affected not just their privacy, but their personhood.

But Nathaniel Raymond argues that when data is being gathered remotely, such as through social media or geospatial data, informed consent is not practical. His essay on this topic provides many useful recommendations for how to deploy such technologies. The first suggestion is that organisations need to take the time to understand the potential harm before even seeking to do no harm. And that organisations need to work on data preparedness before data collection, meaning they need to plan in advance how the data will be used, shared, and protected. Raymond’s guidance speaks to why GDPR — the General Data Protection Regulations — was needed as a reset button. Despite its limited scope and impact, the policy is at least mandating organisations to explain what they do with the data they collect. The implementation of GDPR could pave the way for a more progressive approach by governments to link data practices to our personhood.

***

Stephanie Dinkins is an artist who brings digital personhood to life in a very real way. Her work seeks to demystify AI and make it accessible to everyone. In one project, ‘Not The Only One (NTOO)’, Dinkins builds a device that captures three generations of family stories. A locally stored AI is trained on the stories to share them with future generations. In another project, ‘Project al-Khwarizmi (PAK)’, Dinkins leads workshops that teach communities of colour to become more aware of the ways that their data is used to inform the algorithms that shape their daily life.

In speaking to Dinkins about her work, she says, ‘For me, art has always been a space for me to ask about value, internally and externally. In NTOO, I am showing people that my family history has value to me, my community and society at large. I put all that history in a form that people can interact with, hopefully making technologies like algorithms seem more approachable so that it can spark people to ask: “What kind of value does my data have to myself?”’

For Dinkins, people need to see themselves in the product of these technologies in order to understand and even recognise the value in their own data. She goes on to explain that ‘an internal understanding of your own value is important for personhood. But personhood is a radical idea because it means you, as a person, just for being, are valuable. This extends to everything we do. But what happens when others don’t think of you as a being with full personhood?’ Dinkins raises an important question: if on some level we don’t view people as deserving of personhood, then we treat their data that way too. We slide back into thinking that data is not the person, it is just another thing produced by them that could be sold. When we don’t have a shared language to address a new social context, artists are often the ones who help society materialise abstract ideas.

New worlds need new language. There are new things to name. And one of those things to name is what is happening to ourselves and our data proxies. Expanding our language from privacy to personhood enables us to have conversations that enable us to see that our data is us, our data is valuable, and our data is being collected automatically. We must expand our language to keep up with technology. Rights, policies, and laws are crafted in response to new needs, but we first must be able to describe those needs

What would happen if we redesigned systems to protect personhood? Dinkins, along with Williams, McCoy and Molina, remind us that we must keep fighting for both privacy and personhood. This is not a binary decision. Apps, facial recognition software, surveillance cameras, social media and the internet don’t just affect our lives, they also affect what we believe we are capable of accomplishing in life. Personhood should not be for the privileged, it should be for everyone. And that’s something worth fighting for.

This work was carried out as part of the Big Data for Development (BD4D) network supported by the International Development Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada. Bodies of Evidence is a joint venture between Point of View and the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

You are not your data but your data is still you was originally published in Deep Dives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.