A fortnightly column by Garima Behal on learning to ride the highs and lows of everyday life

For the better part of this year, most of the conversations at home have been ending in my family emphasizing one undeniable, inescapable fact. I am slowly heading past what’s considered a ‘marriageable’ age in Indian society. I am 27, single, and sadly for them, so not ready to mingle.

What could my reasons be, everyone wonders out loud. “I don’t want to compromise,” I mumble. And if The Oxford Thesaurus would accept it, I’d like to submit the word as a synonym for marriage. I won’t compromise, I repeat ad infinitum. But who am I kidding?

I am a woman born to a set of mildly conservative, mildly progressive middle-class parents in the patriarchy that is India. Compromise—a wicked thing that my folks worked really hard to protect me from—has been the story of my life. And like charity, it begins at home, usually a few hours before I step out of it to participate in the marvels and mayhem of my life.

A typical day out with a friend, a quick errand, a solo date, everything starts with ransacking my closet for the ‘right’ clothes (not that there ever are any, but a girl can try!). It’s like the Olympics—only the strongest outfit survives the process of selection:

• Is the weather too hot for it? Too cold? Too rainy? Too windy? 
• Are my arms and/or legs going to be visible? Do they need to be waxed, or am I confident enough to pull off body hair?
• Is the neckline too deep? Is the hem too short? Is the cropped top, um, too cropped?

You see, what I wear outside is perceived as a direct reflection of my character on the inside. And like any girl next door, I neither want to be labeled a dirty ‘slut’ nor a socially challenged nerd. So, I compromise. I wear not whatever I want to, but whatever people I don’t even know might approve of. No wonder I’ve spent the last four years wandering through India’s coastline, wading into oceans, and sunbathing on the December sand without ever wearing a bikini. 

And even if I wanted to wear it, I’d have to battle the next compromise: waxing. At some point, someone decided body hair was okay, even desirable, for a man and plain disgusting for a woman. The conditioning seeped through generations, and a few hundred years later, I dutifully ship myself to the beautician every month so she can mercilessly pull harmless body hair off my tender skin. In the words of Sherlock Holmes, this whole thing would be “poppycock.” In the words of my contemporary, the oft-needlessly hated poet Rupi Kaur, it goes against common sense:

“hair,
if it was not supposed to be there,
would not be growing
on our bodies in the first place.”

But when has society ever cared enough for a female to let her body be her own damn business? Take, for instance, the all-knowing, all-seeing bench of Supreme Court judges in the U.S. who overturned Roe v Wade and took away the erstwhile constitutional right of a woman in the country to have an abortion. I don’t blame them, not when my body itself rebels against my will by preparing to birth a hypothetical human being every month, like clockwork, whether I want it to or not. Even God gave no woman a say when he made her body the keeper as well as the gatekeeper of the universe. We got the only option we often have as the last option: accept the hand that was dealt to us.

Just like I accepted the 10 p.m. curfew my parents imposed on me even as I surpassed the “marriageable” age. This curfew has caused me to miss my college farewell night celebrations and leave many conversations unfinished in dinner plates I shared with beautiful dates. Just like I accepted staying on the phone with my mom during a late-night cab ride because how else would she know that my cabbie didn’t sexually assault me and leave me lying in a dark ditch in the middle of nowhere? 

I won’t compromise, I tell everyone. 

But I do and stick to Bumble, the only dating app that prevents men from messaging me first, making me feel relatively safer. I compromise and give up solo travel or pack a Swiss knife and pepper spray, just in case. The camera does not like my dark circles or facial hair, so I compromise and cover them up with BB cream. I don’t tell my guy friends I love you as often as I do my girlfriends, and I rethink posting my heartfelt feminist opinions on social media because I don’t want to deal with rape threats. 

I compromise so much as a woman that sometimes it’s all I think I do every day.

It’s enough to drive anyone crazy. Maybe that explains why I feel that way sometimes. Especially when I refuse to take it lying down, all this compromising. Sometimes I wear war paint on my face, carry smoldering embers of revenge in my heart, and just decide to do all that I am asked not to do. 

“To be a woman is to be warbound, knowing all the odds are stacked against you.”

― Amanda Lovelace, The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One

Because the best part of having the odds stacked against you is that you have no choice but to root for yourself. To tell your mom you’re going to wear that teeny-tiny bralette on a Goan white-sand beach and get unevenly tanned, and no, she cannot get you to change her mind. To remind her that creepy smiles and lascivious eyes are not your fault. To question years of conditioning and wash your menstrual blood off reusable sanitary napkins because it’s not dirty and impure like you were always made to believe and because this is so much better for your body and the planet. To pick your battles and start a worthwhile fight.

I am not saying you’ve to break glass ceilings you don’t want to or give up that dupatta you’re extremely fond of wearing or chastise a wayward loved one when you’d rather hug them. No. There are times when acceptance, as Buddhism preaches, is the only way. And when that’s the case, we can go ahead and be radically, powerfully accepting of the compromises life and love require us to make.

But when the tables turn and when silence and submission hurt more than speaking up, when it’s unmistakable injustice for us to not stand for what we believe in, when compromising means suffocating our dreams, desires, heck, our destinies to a slow, cruel death…that’s when I am against it.

That’s when I remind myself that I may have been created the keeper of the universe with an obligation to the greater good of humankind, but the first and foremost responsibility I have is to myself and to act like I am THE hero of my life.

That’s when I tell myself that no matter what the world believes, what I carry up there inside my head is unequivocally more important than what rests down there between my legs. And if the world thinks otherwise, well, they are welcome to compromise 🙂

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author’s own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of MyndStories.