How to Escape from Predatory Men: Advice from a Woman with 15+ Years of Experience
Last week, I was groped by the owner of an Airbnb I was going to stay at. His rationale for what he did will blow your mind! (And other common violations by Indian men.)
TLDR? Female solo travellers must listen to Vande Mataram to stay safe in this country.
I first heard of A2 as the owner of Foodiez, a restaurant that was recommended to Bestie and me on our first trip to Kodaikanal. This time, I was travelling there alone. But I’d be received by A1, who had been our Airbnb host last time.
After I sprained my left ankle by missing a staircase in the dark, A1 had been kind and helpful, letting me crash in one of the bedrooms of his ground-floor apartment for a few days, for free. And I’d needed it, because his Airbnb demanded a steep climb on a narrow wrought-iron staircase, which I could not put my leg through after the injury. As soon as the swelling subsided a bit, Bestie and I left, but A1 and I kept in touch: he’d occasionally text to ask how I was; I’d answer and say something about how I hoped to visit Kodai sometime again.
We had spent quite some time in those few days. A1 spoke about his spell living with some tribes around South India, how he’d made money by selling plastic-ware and through his other odd ventures so that now, at the age of around fifty, he spent his time mostly tending to his dogs and farms and properties. Bestie and I had found A1 most interesting; compared to our parents, who are probably a decade older, he seemed to be a beacon of liberation, an example of what life could look like with the courage to detach from conventional society.
But my injury there last year, and my difficulty in getting help for it—the nearest hospital was thirty kilometres away, and neither they nor a single hotel had ice for those nights when I needed it—all confirmed to me that I’m a city girl. I’m a sucker for hyper-convenience; I revel in the psychological comfort of being able to get anything at any time and being around familiar circles and institutions (for example, Manipal hospital).
This time, one year later, I had that lesson hammered into me again.
Once I got there, A1 told me that both his Airbnb and its ground-floor apartment were being renovated because of some detonations nearby. He had moved to his farmhouse some ways away. “It is a hundred years old,” he told me as we stood outside it. “I am the one who put on this green paint and the fixed up the roof.”
After a somewhat awkward night there, I asked A1 if he knew any other spots for me to crash at. He bristled, but I told him my plan was to leave soon anyway. I only had three days—one had already passed—and I wanted to go back with a refreshed mind that could meet deadlines. It was a bright future I envisioned for myself.
“Do you hate me?”, he asked, hurt, before showing me pictures of his friend A2’s Airbnb. The place was beautiful; the owner’s name was familiar; I asked A1 to drive me there. He kept suggesting it was possible to be comfortable at the farmhouse, believing in his hut’s true potential, but I decided against it. This was a rare break for me, and I wanted my own space to relax and do what I pleased without having to tip-toe around anyone’s emotions.
Once we got to A2’s villa, things seemed to pick up. A2 rented out two bedrooms on the ground floor while staying upstairs, all of it overlooking a magnificent valley. I couldn’t imagine living like that, at eye-level with the entire sky, pink and blue homes dotting the green abyss underneath, clouds threatening to swoop into the living room at any time, so bizarrely overbearing for such misty guests.
I planned to occupy one of the ground-floor bedrooms after they were cleaned—but even through this, A1 was persuading me to rent the cheaper of the two, because “you won’t be spending much time in the room anyway, right?”
Frankly, I was becoming grateful for other company. A2 had a Snooker table in the living room, and both of them told me about their tradition of giving each other dares whenever someone lost a game. After I lost a match to A1, I was dared to do 10 push-ups—my punishment for going on about city life, which offered opportunities for strength training. I obliged, not embarrassed to be a source of entertainment.
Perhaps this playful competitiveness rubbed off too strongly on A1 and A2, who started living up to their pseudonyms in this piece, each trying to be the A.
Soon, A2 lost a match to A1, and as dares were being thought of, I learnt about life in this pristine bubble for another recovering overachiever, who had once owned a software company… Meanwhile, A1 tried to do some impressive thing every now and then too, like fixing up a novelty light in the corner, or talking about how he planned to buy some property not far off from A2’s Airbnb.
I suggested a milder game, like Uno, hoping to get into a clean room soon. Perhaps picking up on this feeling, A1 decided to leave, citing some work he had to do.
“But if you guys want, let’s quickly play Uno so I can beat you both at that also before I leave,” he said.
“I’m sure you can beat us both at whatever you want,” I said pointedly. A2 laughed.
Soon after A1 left, A2 held my hand. Withdrawing it, I told him, “Please just be a good friend to me.” My way of saying: I am open to decent conversation and company, but nothing more. I mentioned that A1 seemed to be slightly upset himself, and that I didn’t want any more complications, and he told me not to worry about other people’s feelings.
I agreed, and tried to do that. Some time passed: I played music on the speakers, wandered in and out of the giant living room, taking in the valley, the extremely green grass, the air that was thinner and crisper than in any vibrant part of an Indian city. It began to feel like I’d have my brief sojourn. But after a period, A2 popped this question: “Do you want to make out?”
“Absolutely not,” I said, surprised but using his directness to exercise mine. “As I said, I’m looking for an uncomplicated, non-sexual time. I really just need to be able to chill here.”
“Well, sex doesn’t have to be complicated,” he said.
“It is for me.” My way of saying: I don’t feel like having sex with you, I am not attracted to you, it is not my idea of a good time.
“Do you talk to all your guests?” I asked him.
“No, I’m usually just in my room,” he said.
Some more time passed: music, the view, my thoughts. There are no gripping ways to describe those interim periods of normalcy before the sudden escalation. A2 went in and out of the living room, doing something in the kitchen, or lighting a fire, and I too wandered in and out of the living room and the balcony, playing music or sitting with the view. It was hardly 12 pm. It is normal to think you can share a space in broad daylight with someone you’ve just met and are able to talk to, without knowing that inside, they may be taking your usual outgoing personality personally, calculating moves to make on you, even after your direct refusals—isn’t it? I’m trying to say: it isn’t my fault. I trusted the world around me, as I have many times before without trouble.
We found ourselves talking about A1 again, and I said to him, hoping to get across my point of view, “I’m sick of the attention I get sometimes.” Ever since I lost a massive amount of weight at the age of seventeen—I went from being the fat classroom court jester to the thin (and therefore hot) campus crush—it had become harder to just be around boys. They either love you, and you love them back, which is fine, but if you don’t, which is the case more often, it can become difficult to stay friends, or even just be around them.
You’re going to think I’m complaining about my pretty privilege, and, before this happened to me, I might have thought that too. But, again, some time passed. I went to my room for my diary and some pens, planning to doodle and write on the balcony.
A2 joined me there again, and, sitting to my right, he said, “You know, before he left, A1 told me to make a move on you.”
“What!” I said. “Who the hell is he to say that? I am not here to be made a move on, much less for him to give you permission. I am here to relax and get some time off work,” I repeated. “I am someone outside of my gender and my sexuality, you know. What the fuck!”
“It’s a male thing,” he explained kindly.
“Men are so... A woman can’t even be around them without becoming the object of conquest.”
I looked down at my notebook, shaking my head in disbelief, and A2 got up. “I’m just going to be here, doing my own thing,” I said. “Feel free to treat me as you would any other guest.” My way of saying: leave me alone.
And that’s when the fucker leaned down, his mouth open, his left hand groping my right breast.
I stood up in shock, backing away from him, and he got agitated. “I thought there was a connection! I misread it!”
“What the fuck! You do this to every guest?”
“Don’t create a big thing now. DON’T,” he said, suddenly much louder than he’d been so far. “Did you hear the song that was playing? What about the song that was playing?” he spluttered.
The dude was using my Spotify Liked Songs playlist against me. It was running automatically by then. Not too many minutes before, the music was Laung Da Lashkara and other trending Bollywood fare, which he’d even asked me to change. Only a lunatic could construe this as suggestive, much less use as a defence. Besides, weren’t the verbal rejections enough? What was I supposed to do, listen to the national anthem?
As I backed away from him, he walked towards me, his nostrils flaring, and I started to worry about the state of this dude’s mind, realising he could do anything to me.
I had to stop the fight, lower our blood pressures, and get out of there.
“I told you so many times, but you know what, forget it, please,” I said, at the entrance to my door. “It’s okay. I just need to be alone for a bit.”
Fortunately, he stopped walking and turned around. I shut the door, and bolted it.
I called A1, and said, “Dude, I’m not having a very good time. Your friend just groped me. And you were being quite a dick earlier. Please pick me up, I need to leave from here.”
A1 went downhill. He said he was in meetings, and when I asked him how long they’d take, he said he didn’t know, that he couldn’t just drop everything immediately. I waited anxiously inside the bedroom I was supposed to be a guest at, wondering what was going to happen to me, if this would be lasting trauma, and what in my nervous system had caused this, because they say the outside world is a mere reflection of it.
Was I fucked up? Had I brought this upon myself, and how?
If A2 was to be believed, it was because of my Spotify playlist.
Feeling parched, and realizing I needed to call an actual friend, I stepped out of the room, gingerly making my way out of the Airbnb. A2 was still sitting in the living room, listening to his own music now—what a pure man. He apologized to my back, saying that we should talk, that it wouldn’t happen again, that he didn’t do this to all his guests.
I felt so special. Outside, I called Bestie, and told him everything that had happened. I couldn’t believe I had a friend who knew all these characters, who loved me, and who I knew would do anything to help me. He advised me as I started to cry: Get out of there, find another place for the night, or just come back. Don’t listen to anything That Guy says. Don’t even talk to him, or he’ll try to gaslight you about the music and whatnot. That’s what predatory men do. This is why women don’t feel safe to travel in this country. And I’m ready to leave now and come to Kodai if you just say the word.
Quickly after our call, he texted me: If you blame yourself, I’ll kill you. We texted more and spoke again, and when I told him A1 was also taking his ‘own sweet time’, he suggested I leave that night if I could. He asked for my exact location on WhatsApp, and said he’d call me every hour.
I waited outside in the grass, “in the middle of some field”, as Bestie put it. Half an hour passed—still no A1. There’s no real way to get around in Kodai without private transport. Everything is in the middle of nowhere. I called A1 again, and he got angry about being disturbed, about my demanding his immediate presence, and I realized, Here’s another man whose emotions need to be carefully handled, or else he could be a danger to me.
A1 finally got to A2’s, arguing with me the whole time I asked to be driven to a restaurant called GRT, which I knew to be a safe, neutral location with other people and Wi-Fi, so I could book a bus and get back home, but A1 kept insisting on me not leaving, on “sorting things out”, maybe even with A2, on taking me “back to the farmhouse”, or at least to another restaurant because he “didn’t want to be seen at GRT”, and then I screamed, “It’s not about you! Stop trying to control things! I didn’t call you because I was getting fucking bored at your friend’s place! I was sexually assaulted!”, and he shouted at me to stop screaming and rolled up his windows, which freaked me out more, but, once again, I realized his best interests were no longer mine, and that I’d have to manage him. Perhaps he had gotten too upset about my wanting to leave his hut, or by what he assumed to be some camaraderie between me and A2, or any number of other factors, but I didn’t expect him to be this negatively wired after the kindnesses he’d extended to Bestie and me on our last trip. I’d even met his wife then, and had spoken to her on the previous day, after I reached Kodai. They had a son a few years younger than me. He seemed like an adventurous but essentially good man. In all the time I kept asking him to drive me to GRT, he even stopped to greet some friends along the way, as though everything was okay, and also picked up an old lady worker to give her a lift for a few hundred metres.
People are not two-faced. They are myriad-faced.
Finally, I got to GRT, and after an hour of A1 trying to “help me” (feel in control by offering to book my bus back or drop me at this or that station, insisting he do everything but what I was explicitly asking for), I managed to create enough of a scene at the restaurant that he finally left me alone there, and I got a cab driver to take me to the bus stop.
Twelve hours later, I was back home.
What are the takeaways?
First, I hope as many men read this as possible. Before you say, “Not all men,” which is something A1 was saying too, while trying to out-talk me and differentiate himself from A2, let me just say—I believe you, I believe it is #NotAllMen who are predators. It is #NotAllMen who read into the music a woman is playing to justify a move that has been already been rejected multiple times. It is #NotAllMen who then charge at her and try to bully her into not having a reaction or mistrusting her own emotions and boundaries. It is #NotAllMen who feel nagged when a female friend calls for help, and then try to downplay what happened or control her moves, out of some sense of slight or rejection or guilt. It is #NotAllMen who make their own ego a woman’s burden, who make her feel unsafe, and I am fortunate that some of these men are my friends.
Let it be known: my faith in the world, in people, in the universe, and in myself will not dim, and this is evidence-based. I’ve had enough trauma, some of it at the hands of men, but I’ve also carried myself through it because I’ve had good happen to me, through all that trauma, at the hands of other men.
The world is complicated. Human beings are as bad as they are good. And they often make terrible mistakes.
So, here are some examples of terrible mistakes: Do not make a move on a woman if she has said “no”—that is a terrible mistake. Do not pretend it is not a big deal later—that is an even bigger mistake. Do not scare her. Do not trap her. Realize that as strong as she appears, and as exciting and novel as that may be for you, her personality has nothing to do with you. Do not try to control her. You don’t have to be her fixer. Do not invalidate a woman telling you about such problems—these are realities in her life, in the lives of many women, and in the world that you live in, in the advanced year of 2023. It pains me to write something so unoriginal and so oft-repeated, especially over the last decade, but the fact that such things are still happening means that I need to speak up.
Back in 2018, through the #MeToo movement, I was a more offline person (also for long-winded but gendered reasons, as you’ll find out in my book). As I thought about why this happened to me, wondering how my otherwise calm nervous system could have played a part in all this—I have literally been in my healing era this past year, pottering around my 1BHK with books and paints and whatnot—I realised, for once, that my typical introspection may not be helpful here. This isn’t something I need to investigate, intellectualize, and build a case around. My conversations with a female friend made me realize: Women are so quick to blame themselves for things that should never be happening to them, because of how easily anyone—literally ministers in our country—could go, “Well, she was asking for it.”
How many are the ways in which She “asks for it”! All She has to do is listen to music that appeals to her, or wear the clothes she wants to, or think she could travel alone, or trust a male friend she’s known for a while, or be—or even look—too “modern” or “educated” or “independent”. God forbid she enjoys her own company! There they will be, two men, presuming her demeanour has something to do with them, trying to prove to themselves that it does, outwitting each other for her attentions, whether or not she even gives a damn.
Who gives a damn what damns She gives? Men are told so often that women are asking for it all the time that it makes them feel like “giving it” even when she hasn’t asked for it—even when she has said that she does not want it in louder words than she never asked for it.
Here are all the times I didn’t “ask for it” and got “it” anyway: The first was when I was about eight years old. It was in the elevator of the building I lived in with my family, in Mumbai. I was taking our dog back home from the ground floor. As the lift went up six floors, the lift operator went down, as if to play with my dog, but only to rub his buttocks against my front-body. I shuffled to the left and to the right, trying to get ahead of him, but he stayed pressed against me, until the doors finally opened.
The second time, I must have been thirteen. I was walking from our apartment in Andheri East, Mumbai, to my tuitions about a kilometre away, when a man approached me from a building nearby and asked, “Have you got your periods?” “Why?” I asked, and he said, “My daughter just got her periods and I need some help.” I started following him to his building, only to suddenly get a bad feeling and realize that his question may have less to do with his daughter and more to do with whether or not I would get pregnant if he did something to me. Before he could look, I turned around and started scurrying towards my tuitions again.
The third time, I was probably fifteen, in Mumbai, going somewhere with my mother in an auto-rickshaw. I leaned against its side, tired of the traffic, when a hand out of nowhere squeezed my left boob. A man had just walked past us, and as I looked outside, alarmed and angry, the back of his head could have been any one of the throng of men on the street outside.
The fourth time, I was twenty-three, in Bengaluru, working my first job. I was coming back home to an apartment in BTM, a residential area that gets far too dark after 7 pm. A man on a scooter slowed down as he neared me. In his hand was a pack of condoms, which he shook at me, grinning. I never walked away so fast—except perhaps during the sixth time.
The fifth time, I was on the same road as above, just leaving my house to go out. A man on a motorcycle whizzed past me, and I felt a hard squeeze on my right buttock. By the time I realized what had happened, I was watching his taillights disappear at the turn ahead.
The sixth time, I was in Delhi—the capital makes its cameo(s)!—during the summer of 2019, aged twenty-six. I was walking back towards my Airbnb in Patel Nagar, on the left side of the road. Two men on a scooter deliberately veered off its centre right towards me. They stopped exactly before me, and I looked at them in shock. They grinned, and I near-sprinted to my house a few hundred metres away.
I am not including the times I was stared at or eve-teased, which has happened even since the hero-incident of this piece. I am not including the times someone in a friends’ or extended friends’ circle used their inebriation as an excuse for being overly friendly and touchy. These are all grievances, but they provide room for that “she-was-asking-for-it” nitpicking beloved to anyone who wants to view India, or their own world, as modern and progressive and fundamentally good.
Indeed, you may think it was my bad judgement or stupidity—or whatever misogynistic pejorative you prefer—that got me into this situation, but let me impress upon you how normal it is to want to take a 3-day break in a popular hill station, how one of the parties was known to me and had helped me so much before, how I had no reason to think this would happen, and how one can’t live in fear even when there is reason to. Don’t you know about the King who locked himself in a tower to protect himself, only to die within the tower because something fell on him? I’ll also add that I wasn’t so naive or stupid that I let myself die there; I had the smarts and strength to escape a quite tricky spot.
Perhaps I’ve held back on this subject because I myself have been scared to take off my rose-tinted glasses, which are directed not only at the world, but also myself, because I’ve wanted to avoid the burden of telling such stories, of feeling like a victim, of being seen as a victim, of getting mired in an unhealthy evaluation of my own behaviour, which I want to believe can be unblemished and free.
I want to not only be free to do whatever I want, but I also want the mental emptiness of a man doing it.
But there are 49 offences per hour against women in India. I’m not going to Google and share more apt hard-hitting statistics. You do that. Isn’t it enough to say that almost every minute, some shit or the other is happening to a woman in this country? Isn’t it enough that my female friend and I immediately had example after example to share about such violations to our bodies, our psyches?
We are victims.
As much as I’d like to think otherwise, about myself and other women, we are victims, as hard as we try not to be, as hard as we hope not to be. Really: Who the fuck wants to sound helpless and powerless or like they’re complaining? Who wants to admit that there are times when nothing they can do may be enough to save themselves? Who wants talk about how unjust the world is, the contortions of personality they must put themselves through just to be safe, to do the work of getting people to care about all this, because care and empathy isn’t naturally extended, but must be argued for in a time when there’s way too much to care about anyway? Who wants to talk about what hurt them when it may be disbelieved or used against them?
Who wants to be weak?
This is one of the reasons I am not publicly naming the perpetrators[1]. It requires a degree of heroism and vulnerability—and, frankly, bandwidth of all sorts—that I do not want to, and cannot, spare. It simply would not be fulfilling or restorative to me to drag this out in some legal arena, or via anything that might cause repercussions to me—no, I don’t need more, I’ve been in those spaces, and, as I have had to learn, the process is the punishment. I don’t want anything more from this episode.
It’s behind me.
I’ve been conscious through my struggles to not make them my whole thing so that I can remain multi-faceted, because I value and enjoy various things, most of all making silly jokes. I want my work and online presence to continue reflecting a spectrum of me, from the professional and high-functioning to the goofy and unserious. I will resume tweeting and writing about all kinds of things.
I also don’t want the karma. In other words: “Hate the sin, love the sinner”. It is a moral idea found in many world religions and philosophies to forgive, to find a way to extend compassion to those who have hurt us the most. These A-holes are not even on top of that list for me—what’s family for?—so it’s much easier to do what I find most powerful instead: to write.
You are unfortunately going to have to live with my judgement on this one, because I believe I’m making the most personally and socially useful decision by writing about the phenomenon I just experienced, which isn’t new at all. Even in this advanced era, some men are cherry-picking justifications for non-consensual sexual behaviour despite a woman’s multiple, clear-eyed, even polite, refusals—not that these refusals should have to be polite.
But a woman’s politeness is mostly strategic. They often say that we are the emotional species, but that makes me laugh. Men are so emotional, and, worse, they often don’t even know how to regulate their emotions, so, unless a woman wants to get hurt, she often has to become cool and calculating to secretly placate them, just to avoid disaster.
Let’s cut the drama, I say. My only real takeaway is for any Airbnb owners reading this, for the sake of my future solo travels: Please do not fuck with me. 🙏
[1] If you are travelling to Kodai anytime, DM for any tips or food suggestions. 😊