Stares (Chupulu)
- Jayaprabha
Looks / From two eyes
Dart like needles / Roam freely on flesh.
The looks never / Look into the face
The words never come from the heart
They crawl on the body like white ants
Disgust every time I see them.
Those eyes / Belong to a million classes
But their looks are all the same.
Only one signal / In those looks
Hunger like a salivating dog’s
An ugly bear-fist / Chases you even in dreams
No difference between day and night
In this thick forest / No place at all
To escape these looks
On the road / In buses, classrooms
Behind your every step
Wounding
Some part of the body / Looks tipped with poison
Keep pricking you
Frightened / I
want to disappear
Into the distant sky, into emptiness
But
Escape is no solution
So I began to teach my eyes / The sharpness of thorns
To fight those poison looks
Now to chase away those eyes
I fight with my eyes / Timid eyes which
Cannot look straight / For two seconds
Run to the underworld
A day will come
When women in this country have
Thorns
Not only in their eyes
But all over their bodies.
The above is a poem about how insensitive men are and how uncomfortable they make women feel by staring at them, scanning through them ruthlessly. As a female, all of us have gone through this ‘ordeal’ of being stared at without any mercy. The Blank Noise Project may have had their way and stared right back at these animals but isn’t there a better solution to this than just stare back? Why do what they are doing? I am all for staring back; in fact I think it is one of the best ways to punish these gentlemen. But I have always wondered if there was a better way of dealing with this.
As a woman, my blood literally boils when I see a man staring right at me. It happens everywhere, all the time. In buses especially, the men just have nothing to do. In spite of us staring back at them, they continue staring at us. It just makes me want to hold them by their collars and give them a piece of my mind. When are they going to learn? What is going on in their minds? What do they get out of staring at us?
It is just plain insanity. Why can’t a girl or a woman be able to walk on the road without being stared at? How much ever we try to fight against letching, it is not going to stop. It is their eyes after all. They can look where they want to. There is not much we can do about that. We can sit all day and all night and talk about etiquette and every other possible thing. And these guys would have stared the life out of a hundred other girls by then.
Being a girl may not be the easiest task in this world because you are constantly under the scanner not just by people who know you but also strangers. The one thing I would like to do is extend a request to all the male members of society and tell them to do their bit to make us women feel at least a little more comfortable in our own skin.
