The evening moved the way it always does in my grandmother’s house in Golaghat—slow, like the dusk light creeping in through the slats of old windows. My aunts, my mother, and I sat gathered in the sitting room, cups of lal saah (black tea) warm between our palms. The conversation moved from one thing to another, unhurried: someone’s new neighbour, someone else’s blood pressure, a wedding two houses away. And then, like mist curling at the edges of a field, the talk turned. Not all at once. Just a sentence here, a phrase there.
It began with the memory of a Silchar town bus. My youngest aunt said, almost absently, “Those buses never had space, but somehow they always made room for the wrong hand.” The room went quiet, not in shock, but in recognition. My mother nodded before replying. She remembered the weekly market in Bokakhat—the rush of elbows, jostling for fish, the slippery mud underfoot, and the one man who brushed past, again and again, as if the crowd made him invisible.
I spoke of Guwahati— of the crowded foot overbridge near Paltan Bazar, the long line for the city bus, and the man who stood just close enough for it to not be obvious, but just close enough that you could feel the line between accident and intent. A single step back becomes defiance. A turned shoulder becomes a strategy.
What sat heavy in the room was not the shock of the stories—we’ve all known versions of them—but the fact that our stories overlapped without ever having been told before. Like layers of silt in a riverbed—separate, yet pressed into the same shape. The geography changed—Delhi, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata—but the pattern held. The narrow staircases of cinema halls, the alley behind a college canteen, the silence of a shared auto on the highway after dusk.
We were each a decade apart. My aunts grew up in the Assam of curfews and landlines. My mother, in a town just waking up to cable television and the promise of phone booths. I came of age with prepaid recharges and women’s helpline stickers pasted on the backs of bathroom doors. But we had all learned, quietly and thoroughly, how to carry ourselves in public space. The same choreography, one hand holding the bag across your chest, the other gripping your phone, thumb hovering over a fake call screen you kept ready.
What moved me most wasn’t the bitterness, it was how matter-of-fact it all was. No dramatics. Just the way you speak about the weather, or the price of vegetables. These weren’t confessions. They were recollections. And in Assam, recollections are slippery things. They live in the language of implication, in half-phrases, in the way someone pauses before finishing a sentence. You know when someone says “he didn’t do anything, but…” they’ve already said enough.
But the conversation didn’t stay there. It moved, the way rivers do, carrying sediment and song. My mother recounted a moment in college when she turned around and said, firmly but without raising her voice, “Keep your hands to yourself.” It was in Assamese, soft but stern. The boy backed off. Years later, at Fancy Bazaar, I remember doing the same. Not yelling. Just looking him in the eye and saying, “Moi dekhi aso”—I’ve seen you. It’s strange how power sometimes lives in the smallest utterance.
There is something specific about the way women here remember. We don’t separate the personal and the political. A bruise becomes a proverb. A gesture, a lesson. My grandmother had once said that the women in our family walk like we’re late for something, even when we’re not. I think she meant it as a joke. But that evening, I heard it differently. We walk fast because we’ve learned to. Because slow is luxury. Because stillness invites attention.
And yet, within these stories, there was an odd comfort. That I could sit between women who had lived different versions of my life, and still feel held. That long before laws changed, long before we had words like “gaze” and “agency,” we had strategy. We had instinct. We had each other.
The women in my family are not activists. They don’t post or protest. But they remember. They speak. They warn without frightening, and teach without naming it. What I inherit from them is not fear but a way of seeing. Of moving through the world with both caution and clarity. Of laughing, still, with strength in the gut.
We didn’t end the conversation that evening. It simply thinned out, like smoke after firewood. Someone poured more tea. But I left that room knowing that across years, towns, and lives, we had built a map together. One where every turn, every crowded corner, every glance held a memory and a lesson. Not because we chose to remember. But because our bodies already had.
– Edited by Alphin Tom, design by Vasuki
Article 19 