CHENNAI: With just two days to the biggest holiday of the season, one that is meant to celebrate love in all its gloriously romantic representation, there are preparations aplenty across the city. Hotels and restaurants are taking out their pink- and red-themed decor from storage and offering aphrodisiacs amid candlelight, florists are buying bulkier, greeting cards and trinkets that were collecting dust are flying off the shelf, and stationery shops are running out of wrapping paper.
While the city is intent on capitalising on the demand generated by this demographic — lovers, partners, couples — it barely seems to want to accord them even the basic rights otherwise. For it is this demographic that finds itself ostracised from Chennai’s sprawling public spaces.
“You see it in the looks people give you at the beach and the parks. When you’re with a woman — it could be your girlfriend, friend, wife or sister, you’re subjected to stares and sometimes choice remarks,” says Manikandan R, an entrepreneur. While most couples, particularly the women, are now used to being stared at and talked about, it doesn’t always stop at that.
Threats and questions
Rahul (name changed) recalls a time when a man in a bus threatened to call the police on him for...talking! “My girlfriend and I were in a bus, standing. It was extremely crowded and we were forced to stand on each other’s foot. She whispered into my ear asking if the woman in front of us was someone we knew and she couldn’t possibly say it out loud. A second later, we had this man screaming at us. We were in our early 20s then and looked younger, so I suppose that was understandable,” he says.
While Rahul was able to shut him down, others have not been that lucky — especially when the aggressor was a cop. A couple of years ago, Mugil had been out with a friend (a girl) to a restaurant for lunch. Seeing that the place was packed to the door, they decided to collect their food and eat it elsewhere. But hunger took over and they decided to stop the car by the side of the road, in Velachery, and finish the meal. Minutes later, he found a couple of policemen trying to open the car door and peering through the raised glass of the window. “I lowered the window on my side and they found us with burgers in our hands. The senior officer sitting in the patrol car nearby warned us not to be “sitting in a parked by the side of the road in the middle of the day”,” Mugil recalls.
Sameer was forced to pay Rs 4,000 to be let free after a cop threatened to take him and his fiancée to the station when they were found sitting in their car by the Besant Nagar beach one weekday evening. The first question the cop posed was if his fiancée were a prostitute, he says. The city’s beaches, parks, malls and common recreational spaces continue to present couples with such treatment. The men and women are forced to live with the risks or eschew these places for a restaurant or pub. But some find that they do not even get to claim the roads for their use. Sandhya says she and her boyfriend were stopped by patrol cops when they were riding to Kerala from Chennai.
“We had not even crossed Sriperumbudur. They saw a man and a woman on a bike and flagged us down. Even after producing his licence and the documents, they made us call our parents on the phone and got them to confirm our story. All for just riding down the road,” she points out.
Safety first
Despite the numerous anecdotal evidence — too many people know someone who’s been through something like this — the police maintain that the department abstains from moral policing. “As long as people do not inconvenience anyone, we do not question them. But there are instances when we find people sitting and talking in isolated places, in the odd hours; then we have to warn them about certain elements that may do harm. It is for their safety,” assures P Pakalavan, deputy commissioner of police, Adyar.
He admits that there could be some unscrupulous individuals who stoop to such mechanisms and insists that the public report these incidents to higher officials. “We have to behave responsibly; the police too,” he says. Perhaps, the scales are not all that balanced but for now, we are happy if we get a Happy Valentine’s Day.