An Incurable Shyness

Last week in Bombay, the hospital mask became a sudden fashion. Men dangled from moving trains wearing the mask. People walked over the tracks and crossed the road as they always did and escaped death more narrowly than they imagined, but they were wearing the mask. I could not verify it, but I am very sure at least one man was with a prostitute in Kamathipura wearing a mask but not a condom. Life went on as always in Bombay with the imagined reassurance of what was called the Swine Flu mask. (I saw a hasty man lift his mask just for a moment, to spit.)

There was a far greater absurdity though, especially the day when people first began to wear the masks. There was a strange coyness in the air. People were very conscious of themselves, embarrassed in a very Indian way for wearing the mask. A woman who was wearing a light green mask and walking down Colaba Causeway went with her head bent, terribly embarrassed. Every time she looked up, her eyes searched for ridicule. At that point, if I had looked at her and chuckled, she might have crumbled in shame.

Extremely simple things can make us feel conspicuous. For example, there are men who feel shy to wear sunglasses because they suspect it makes them look a bit too dashing. Others cannot bear to eat a burger while walking on the streets because it draws too much attention. I feel oddly shy the first few minutes after I walk out in a sleeveless running vest. I want to tell everyone, “This is not a peacock dance, I don’t think I’m a stud at all, I’m not better than you, it’s just that I feel very comfortable wearing this.” Long distance running, too, even in a city like Bombay, involves overcoming one’s shyness and the initial discomfort of enduring naked public stares. I used to think that my desire to somehow hide my face while running on the roads was a unique mental retardation, but I was greatly consoled when I read the Japanese writer Haruki Murakami who felt the same way when he first started running in Japan. (Considering the way the Indian public is, I have a better reason to feel shy. As a schoolboy, when I first attempted to run on the roads of Madras, absolute strangers would tease me saying things like, “Come back hero. If your parents don’t want you, we’ll keep you.”)

Part of our shyness is because we know exactly how cruel we are when we judge those who stand out. For example, I find studs hilarious—their gelled hair, their tight axiomatic T-shirts, their dragon belt-buckles, their inability to look up from the road because they feel they are so hot, so incandescent right now. They deserve our ridicule or our appreciation because they have chosen to be peacocks, it is a social risk and so it has its just punishments and rewards. But most of us do not want to be conspicuous (most of the time) and it is only fair that we are granted that simple fortune when we do our humble things.

Sometimes I am amazed at how women in India go through life being women. No matter what they do, they can never be invisible, and it is very important to be invisible. There is a peculiar stoic expression they have when they stand out in the open and smoke. They know everybody on the street has judged them. Even on my lane in South Bombay it is true. I’ve not conducted a poll yet, but I am certain that nobody on Third Pasta Lane believes that a woman who smokes can also be a virgin.

Normalcy is a strangely fragile condition here and it crumbles at the slightest tremors of the smallest cultural shift. As a result, the optics of modernity are easy to achieve, a certain urban coolness which is really not there. I remember a day not very long ago when Shashanka Ghosh was the creative head of Channel V. He was in a banquet hall waiting for a press conference to begin. He decided to sit on the floor. That simple act created quick, though transient, opinions in the hall. “So cool,” someone said. But there were people who appeared to wonder why Shashanka’s fashionable haunches do not like chairs.

Those were the days when it was easy to be famous. Any fool who had an understanding of the media would be written about for doing almost nothing. I remember an article about how someone called Kaizad Gustad was an interesting man because he wore red pants.