“I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night.”
My favourite photograph of my wife Abhilasha is, of all things, an X-Ray. It’s a side-profile of her face showing the outline of the nose and jaw, with one tiny, jarringly non-organic substance visible in the nasal region. The effect is eerie – you feel like you’re looking at an embedded metallic chip from a dystopian story about people being monitored by a totalitarian government.
Learn the context, though, and it becomes funny. Three years ago, Abhilasha had a nose encounter of the third kind. She had been wearing one of those small nose-rings that looks very compact on the outside, but comes with all sorts of complicated paraphernalia: a tiny cap screw, a bolt, and for all I know a warehouse supply of ball bearings and rotating-gear wheels as well. Anyway, over time the little screw somehow got embedded in the wall of the nose, and the skin closed over it – something she discovered only when she managed to remove most of the ring and found something was still lodged inside, tucked away where only a surgeon’s delicate tools could reach.
Hence the X-Ray. A quick appointment at the local clinic, where all of us had trouble keeping a straight face. (Surgeries involving a family member are not normally things to be laughed at, but…) Hence the giggling doctor – and I tell you, a big burly Sikh surgeon teehee-ing like Tinkerbell as he exits an operating theatre is a rare sight. Eventually Abhilasha came out looking sheepish, a small bandage-gauze awkwardly attached to half her proboscis. “Aaj tumne hamaari naak kaat ke rakh di,” I told her with the sternest expression I could muster.
“The other lakshmana-rekha in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother makes across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion.”
It seemed the obvious jokey thing to say. After all, we are the smugly liberated ones, right? We have grown up hearing – and superciliously shaking our heads at – those melodramatic pronouncements in Hindi movies. We feel we can use them in humour, even though we know they often assume much darker expression in the real world: as condemnations, to suppress rights and freedoms; that they can even be a matter of life or death. A few months earlier, we had read the story about Bibi Aisha, the Afghan woman whose nose was chopped off by her husband and in-laws when she tried to escape them after years of abuse. Aisha did eventually gain a measure of freedom – and became a poster-child for commentary on repressive societies when she was featured on the cover of Time – but one knows that thousands of other women aren’t as lucky.
However, this attempt to construct otherness – to not acknowledge the large spectrum linking our own presumably enlightened lives with the uncivilised lives of those “others” – is self-deceptive. Years earlier, Abhilasha herself had been on the receiving end of a more serious “naak” denouncement. It was during one of her first stints in journalism.
An unexpected “graveyard shift” arose during a week when her parents were out of town and she had been staying at her maasi’s house. Destined to be stuck in office past midnight, and reluctant to disturb a household that had old people living in it, she decided to stay over at a friend’s who lived nearby – after informing her aunt, of course. It was the practical thing to do. But the next day, when her mother returned, hell broke loose: there was screaming, there were wails and imprecations. And that damning sentence: “Naak kaat di tumne hamaari.” What were you thinking? What will they think of us? What kind of a job is this? It may be worth mentioning that Abhilasha’s mother had once been the principal of a small school and had, in her younger days, written short stories that were feminist laments for the ways in which basic freedoms are denied to women. Her apparent volte-face when it came to her own grown-up daughter seems like a classic case of a victim of patriarchy becoming co-opted into the system.
Here was a modern family that hadn’t thought twice about giving their daughter the same level of education as their son, and about encouraging her professional ambitions. But that didn’t erase the Lakshmana-rekha: it was untenable to stay out this late, and to fail to be the Good Girl treading a straight path from office to home.
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The other lakshmana-rekha in the Ramayana – the one that doesn’t get described as such – is the clean slash Rama’s younger brother makes across Surpanakha’s face with his sword, severing her nose and setting a chain of events in motion. It’s easy to see why this ambiguous episode has lent itself to so many literary retellings and alternate psychological explanations. In a short story titled Surpanakha, for instance, the novelist and poet Amit Chaudhuri casts Rama and Lakshmana as posturing bullies, unable to deal with the idea of a woman as a sexually autonomous being. “Teach her a lesson for being so forward,” Rama tells his brother chillingly when Surpanakha propositions him; the words echo “punishments” meted out by patriarchal societies to women who dare express desire.
Lakshman came back; there was some blood on the blade. “I cut her nose off,” he said. “It,” he gestured toward the knife, “went through her nostril as if it were silk. She immediately changed back from being a paradigm of beauty into the horrible creature she really is. She’s not worth describing,” he said as he wiped his blade.
“Horrible creature…not worth describing.”
To see that Time photo of Bibi Aisha is to be reminded of why the nose is so crucial to our perceptions of human beauty as well as dignity. Try looking at the photo with your finger awkwardly blocking out the missing organ, and you get a hint of inner radiance and poise; you see the forthright, proud gaze of someone who survived an ordeal. And yet, without the nose, this illusion becomes difficult to sustain – the organ is, to put it simply, central. With a gaping hole right in the middle of the face, the resemblance to a skull, a death-head, is inescapable, and we are uncomfortably reminded of what we are beneath our hubristic ideas of our own beauty.
The nose is also, of course, the breathing apparatus – directly associated with the most fundamental activity of human existence. And in the naak kat gayi context, it can be an uncomfortable reminder of what existence is for so many women around the world. It means being the repository of a family’s or society’s “honour”, someone whose “transgressions” – real or imagined – can shame everyone around her. It means being custodian and possession, goddess and slave, at once. It means you have no identity as an individual, only as a symbol or as an object. As Nivedita Menon points out in her fine new book Seeing Like a Feminist, the patriarchal obsession with a woman’s “honour” lies at the heart of the appalling belief that rape is “a fate worse than death”; that once a woman has been “shamed” thus, she is no more than a living corpse, a blot that society must purge itself of. (Or, in some cases, marry off to the rapist so that a non-consensual sexual act is retrospectively legitimised.)
Something else Menon’s book discusses at length is gender performance: how women have internalised aspects of behaviour expected of them – keeping their eyes averted, focusing inward, occupying the least possible space in public places. Interestingly, an inversion on the Pinocchio story – Pinocchio’s Sister: A Feminist Fable, written by Abraham Gothberg – features a girl whose nose grows longer when she tells the truth, a metaphor perhaps for how women are often forced into living up to an ideal rather than being their real selves.
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I offered a morbid view of the nose-ring at the start of this piece, which is perhaps unfair. Nose-rings can of course serve graceful decorative purposes, enhancing a woman’s aesthetic appeal (and why not a man’s too?) and make life more colourful and attractive generally. But beauty and ugliness can go hand in hand, in much the same way that so many of our festive rituals can be celebratory fun while also being subliminal ways of exalting a regressive tradition. I have friends – women among them – who cluck their tongues exasperatedly when I say that the large nose-ring worn by Indian brides in certain traditions reminds me of the rope threaded through a buffalo’s nostrils, used by its master to lead it about. And apparently I’m being a wet blanket and a grouch when expressing reservations about customs like the nath atarna – the removal of the nose-ring – which is often a euphemism for the end of a woman’s virginity. Or the sight – so touching to many eyes – of an adult woman sitting on her father’s lap during a wedding ceremony (nose-ring prominent on her face), an object waiting to be transferred from one man to the other.
Of course, in many such cases, the custom is “harmless fun”, containing a sense of irony, with liberated young people joking about the implications of what they are doing even while doing it. But it is always useful to be aware how deeply embedded certain stifling ideas are in our social framework; how they are part of our everyday lives and assumptions, and propagated by the most innocent-seeming aspects of our popular culture. Consider the suhaag-raat scene in Yash Chopra’s Kabhi Kabhie, with Shashi Kapoor removing Raakhee’s ornaments, one by one, as she sings in memory of a lost love. On the face of it, this is a tender scene from one of our most beloved romantic movies, and the film tries hard to present Kapoor’s Vijay as a caring, sensitive man. But think about what is really going on here and it becomes a little icky: a woman, who is in love with another man, is about to be deflowered by a husband whom she barely knows (and in patriarchy, deflowering is of course code for “possessing” – she is now his). The last ornament he removes is the nose-ring, as the song ends and the scene fades to black; it is as obvious a symbol as all those Hindi-movie shots of bees buzzing around flowers whenever two lovers draw near each other.
Metaphors for virginity aside, the author-mythologist Devdutt Pattanaik has noted the many ways in which a woman wearing a nose-ring may be perceived. “The scientist said it has no scientific basis. A rationalist mocked her for mutilating her body in the name of beauty. Another rationalist pointed out that it was an ancient acupuncture technique. A feminist said she was sporting the symbol of patriarchy. A secularist said that made her a Hindu.” And so on. At the end comes the kicker: “Everybody saw the nose-ring. No one saw her.”
In a better world, we would be able to. Perhaps it will happen someday.
