What it is to be a Man

Many years ago, when I used to drive down Ring Road to work, I often noticed her.

- Bhaskar Roy

In a frayed yellow ghagra and short red blouse, making a provocative display of her fleshy midriff, she stood just above a stretch of thick long grass and wild shrubs—her face an interplay of disdain and defiance. She kept looking towards the Sarai Kale Khan bus terminus across the road. The smudged cheap lipstick could not hide the flaring bruise in the corner of her mouth that she nursed unconsciously.

Two men crossed the road from the bus-terminus side—businesslike, in a bit of a hurry. They walked up to her, and the pantomime show from my car window suggested some bargaining going on. A deal struck, she slid into the long grass, one man in tow. The other amusedly looked on—his smile seemed to be saying, “What all happens in a city, huh!”

The light turned green and I drove towards South Extension. The image playing in my rearview mirror was of a dressed goat carcass hung upside down from a skewer.

This was from a time when the pandemic was still a couple years away. By now, that thick curtain of long grass, along with the drab, the chaotic traffic intersection, all is gone. A brand-new flyover has made the ride smoother. In fact, Sarai Kale Khan has given way to Birsa Munda Chowk, acknowledging the new political priority. The neon glow from inside the multilevel terminus gives you a momentary illusion of being at an interstate bus hub in the US.

The yellow-ghagra-red-blouse woman recently came back while I was reading David Szalay’s Flesh. Winner of the 2025 Booker Prize, the novel disarmingly talks about sex as a way of life, sex as a survival kit, stripped of inhibition and middle-class taboo. The woman was not even a streetwalker with exaggerated hip movement or slow pacing. She performed at the rudimentary level, to earn a living with her base capital.