Its funny.. how after you read so many incidents on violence, molestations and general harassment, you still think it CANNOT happen to you. After all you are more self aware and alert and lets face it, it does not happen to you.

Enroute from point A to point B in Mumbai's emblematic trains and I was surprised. No. Cannot say I was molested. Or any violence inflicted on. But was accused of being educated and therefore a carrier of prejudices and biases that made me unfit to travel in the train. And, of course, pushed and shoved.

The local trains have two sets of compartments (on a 9 coach train or a regular local train). One of these compartments is a round-the-clock ladies compartment (which usually has a policeman later in the night) and the other compartment is one that becomes "general" after a particular time (which means by that time all women leave it for the gents of Mumbai).

Without knowing this we sit in the compartment (four of us) - three on one bench and one across us. Slowly the men climb into the compartment and most avoid our seats. They too don't want share confined spaces with us - legs, arms and all kinds of nooks and crannies touching and yearning for space. Its an experiment travelling in trains.

But two men finally cannot bear standing any more and come and sit with us. They sit with the girl sitting across us. She very obviously slides her lunch bag in between them and her and that gesture does not go unnoticed. One of the men is on the "fourth seat". Which just means that on a bench which is to seat three, you request for a little space, let your natural aggression take over and push and push till somebody else has given up the seat and is perching while you are now comfortable.

Now she is getting unconfortable and we are telling her that she either asks them to slide a little or comes and sits with us. At that point one guy, not directly related to the shifting, pounced on us and asked us what are problem was and then the other guy jumped in and insisted he was not squeezing out our friend and yaddah yaddah.

Before any of us could react, we were subjected to a barrage of comments with inflections on education, class, so-what-if-we-are-women, take a first class pass or buy your own car! The clincher was "ghar mein inke baap bhai nahi hai kya?" This was not even a face to face flinging comments fight. These two "respectable gents" as they insisted on calling themselves, insisted on loudly commenting between themselves (a tactic usually employed by women I used to think). It was this point that one of us lost our temper and gave it back to them.

For one brief moment I was afraid. We were amidst stations and what if they decided to act funny but they seemed more content on making loud comments, in English only, he pointedly added, as though we could not hear him. Slowly we let go. Really! Whats the point and we seemed to fighting against an attitude, not an event.

Just before we got off, it erupted again, with no impetus from our end and at this point we did the a womanly thing of raising our voices (to holler out some choicest of abuses) and thankfully had the compartment or at least some of them come and ask what the matter was? An off duty ticket collector listened to us both and took a tangent and asked for tickets!!!! We alighted, cursing those two twits for spoiling our mood and shaking our confidence some.

Once long ago, while discussing special ladies seats in BEST buses of Mumbai (while travelling in the buses we can make men get up from these seats, to sit down, which can be quite criminal while traveling long distances), a friend of mine had insisted that it was unfair.

That, if there were ladies seats, there should be gents too. What I did not know that general compartments could accomodate ladies, but who wanted to travel squashed between men? So general always equalled men.

But, on the oft chance, that you do have to travel in "general" compartments, you are either subjected to bottom pinching, squeezing or then comments like why dont you travel in the ladies compartments? Really?!!

Of course am still not sure what we did wrong. May be to be generally suspicious is also a pain. Sigh!