Again

 I was scrolling through my social media feed, and it was filled with videos and photographs of girls carrying slogans and banners, protesting and rallying through the streets of Delhi. There were students protesting in Punjab, women marching elsewhere, and videos of men and women trying to explain what was happening in the country.

There were so many of them that I eventually lost track of the exact context of each one.

But somewhere between one video and the next, a strange feeling began to make its home inside my mind. I did not like it.

So I closed my phone.

I had done the same thing about two hours earlier. But two hours ago, I had told myself that I should write something today.

So here I am.

Perhaps I should begin much earlier.

I think I was in standard eighth or ninth when the Nirbhaya case happened. Until then, I was barely aware of what rape actually meant. I remember the details of the brutality appearing everywhere—in newspapers, on television—and my thirteen-year-old self shuddering in disbelief. I could not comprehend that something like this could happen to a girl.

I also remember watching a video on some random news channel in which a man, speaking with what seemed to him like complete honesty and earnestness, said that what had happened was wrong, but the girl had been out late at night with her boyfriend.

I was thirteen. I was neither intellectually mature nor sufficiently educated about the subject to have a fully formed opinion. But something about that sentence stayed with me.

For years afterwards, whenever I came across another incident of sexual violence, victim-blaming, or restrictions imposed on women in the name of their safety, my mind would return to that man.

Then there were the conversations we had at school.

The female teachers would have special interactions with the girls, warning us about our interactions with boys, about our skirts getting shorter, our lip gloss, our nail paints, the little flicks of hair framing our faces. Somehow, all of it was interpreted as an attempt to attract the attention of boys.

I had a boy cut then. I was studious and serious and not particularly interested in any of these things. So I did not have much of an opinion.

Or perhaps I did, somewhere underneath it all.

And perhaps that opinion was simply the one I had been taught to have.

Years passed.

I finished school, went to college, and slowly learnt to unlearn.

I became rebellious and questioning. I became more logical, more willing to challenge things. I stopped accepting something merely because an authority figure had told me it was right.

Then, in college, the girls’ hostel curfew was suddenly restricted to 6 p.m.

Six in the evening.

It seemed bizarre to me, and to most of the girls.

When I spoke to my parents about it, I told them how unfair and unjust I thought it was. They told me it would be better to follow the rules and not get into trouble. After all, what work did I really have after six?

And, in a very practical sense, they were right.

My classes ended at 4:30. Anything I needed from the market could easily be managed before six. On most days, I was already inside the hostel by then.

But that was precisely what bothered me.

The question was never really whether six o’clock was enough time to finish our work and return safely to the hostel.

It was about who got to decide when we were allowed to be outside.

It was about the choices we were allowed to make about our own lives.

I was disturbed by that distinction.

Looking back, I sometimes wonder why this particular incident affected me so deeply. There had been other things in my life by then—things that perhaps should have disturbed me equally, if not more.

But this one did.

So the girls in our college decided to protest.

One morning, we sat outside the director’s office in the sun in a silent protest. Most of the girls had covered their faces with dupattas and scarves. Eventually, the administration came out to speak to us. Some of the boys joined us too, supporting the protest.

And eventually, the administration gave in. The entry timing was changed from six to around 7:30 p.m., though I don’t remember the exact time anymore.

I remember something else, though.

I had been quite rebellious in college. I believed that if I was right, I had no reason to hide or make myself smaller.

So while everyone else had covered their faces, I sat there bare-faced.

The administration saw me. The crowd saw me. I spoke fiercely.

And then, after the protest, came the messages.

I don’t even know what that section on Facebook is called anymore—the one where people could send anonymous messages without revealing themselves. But I remember receiving plenty of them.

They were abusive.

I didn’t know who had sent them.

I didn’t know what I had done to deserve them.

I read a few.

Then I stopped.

Perhaps this is why, when I look at my social media feed today, something inside me feels so tired.

Because none of this feels new.

That is the part I have been struggling to articulate.

It feels like déjà vu—not the harmless, fleeting kind, but the unsettling feeling of finding yourself in a room you have somehow already lived through.

The slogans are different. The faces are different. The cities are different. The arguments have new vocabulary, new hashtags, new explanations.

But underneath them, I recognise something I have encountered before.

I recognise the girl being told that her safety depends on how she dresses, where she goes, when she returns, whom she is with.

I recognise the logic that begins with concern and quietly ends with restriction.

I recognise the instinct to ask what she was doing there, why she was out, what she was wearing, whether she could not have simply followed the rules.

I recognise the protests too.

And I recognise what comes afterwards—the explanations, the outrage, the abuse, the endless need to justify why something that should have been obvious is, in fact, unfair.

Maybe that is what has unsettled me today.

Not merely the negativity on my feed, but the familiarity of it.

The feeling that despite all the years between that thirteen-year-old girl watching the news and the woman sitting here scrolling through her phone, I have somehow arrived at the same conversation again.

And I don’t want to have it today.

I don’t want to open social media and decide which posts to like, which people to support, which arguments to engage with, which men to educate about patriarchy, or which people to explain the long history of women’s negotiations with it.

I don’t want to explain, once again, how these bargains begin quietly—often at home, often disguised as concern, protection, propriety, or good sense—and how they accumulate until a woman’s freedom becomes something she is expected to negotiate for.

I know how to make these arguments.

I have made them before.

I have been the girl sitting in the sun outside an administrator’s office, face uncovered, refusing to move.

But today, I am tired.

I am too tired to be that version of myself again.

At least not today.

So I close my social media for another hour.

Perhaps when I open it again, I will filter my content and fill my feed with brain rot and memes.

It sounds frivolous.

But perhaps there is something comforting about choosing, for a little while, not to witness the same story being told again.

Not because I don’t care.

Perhaps because I care enough to know that I cannot keep reliving it every time I open my phone.

For today, I think, I am allowed to look away.