I'm scared of two things in life: a savarna man's d*ck and a savarna woman's tears.

I'm scared of two things in life: a savarna man's d*ck and a savarna woman's tears.
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It was before Covid. I was in my modelling era, trying to get gigs. An actress reached out to me to ask if I'd be interested in modelling for her friend, a makeup artist who wanted to do a makeup demo on dusky, dark skin. I'd already been told there was no payment involved and that it would be a collaboration. So I genuinely asked, What's in it for me? If it were a collaborative photoshoot, at least I'd get photographs out of it. So (naturally) I knew they dropped me because there was no follow-up. Since this sort of thing is pretty normal in the industry, I didn't think much of it and moved on.

Years later, I met the makeup artist again, this time as a staunch feminist. Her surname had changed, so I didn't recognise her at first. Eventually, I realised she was the same person. I shared the incident with a friend as a joke and we laughed about it.

By then, she was part of our feminist WhatsApp groups. One day, the incident came up in a discussion. What surprised me was that she denied it had ever happened. Her question was, Why should anyone believe my account over hers?

When more people started questioning her, the conversation on labour, fair wage, exploitation of dalit bodies, exoticism of dark bodies came up, she left the WhatsApp group. Then she began reaching out to friends, crying and insisting that she hadn't done what I was accusing her of. Some friends tried to mediate. But I wasn't having any of it. Instead of all this drama, she could simply have said, Oops! We could have laughed about it together and I would have moved on, just as I'd already done years ago.But she doubled down, accused me in return and cried.

But still I wasn't scared of this phenomenon. I was just mildly annoyed. Little did I know that, years down the line, I'd make more savarna women cry and that it would cost me everything.

Well, not everything. But some things. Lol.

But today, years later, I'm sitting with more life experiences and wondering what exactly was the mediation supposed to resolve, when she had already denied my account and implicitly challenged my credibility? Because once she had framed me as potentially lying, the mediation was no longer about an awkward interaction that happened years ago, even though she was much much older than me, I'm sure we both have been immature and less smart then. If she maintained that the incident never happened, a resolution might have required me to admit that I was mistaken or had misrepresented her. I might have been expected to acknowledge that she didn't mean any harm, even though my story wasn't necessarily an accusation of deliberate harm. Perhaps the desired outcome was for me to agree that, even if it happened, it wasn't serious enough to warrant bringing it up. Also, in feminist circles, mediation can be way of making the conflict disappear without resolving the underlying disagreement about whose account is credible. So in other words, the expectation is that I'd simply let the whole thing go so everyone could return to being feminists together.


The fundamental problem was that I had very little room to participate in a mediation without surrendering something. If I stood by my account, I could be seen as the unreasonable one for refusing reconciliation. If I withdrew it, I would be accepting responsibility for a false accusation I didn't make. If I agreed that the incident wasn't serious, I would be asked to negotiate the significance of an experience I had originally shared as a joke.

And what would she have had to concede?
That she might have forgotten an interaction? That she had handled it badly? That my account could be legitimate even if she remembered it differently? Those are very different starting points for mediation.

But the interesting distinction here is that I wasn't necessarily asking for accountability in the first place. I was recounting an old incident that I had already moved on from and the conflict escalated when my recollection became something she felt compelled to dispute.


But I also think it's worth examining what happens to a savarna woman when she's accused of something and what prompts those tears. We can end the conversation at savarna entitlement and victim mentality. But for anyone who's curious, I think there's something more happening here. At least this is what I believe. Savarna women don't usually get enough opportunities to sit with their own complicity in oppression even though it happens around them all the time. Imagine a savarna woman growing up in a patriarchal society. Nobody respects her. Her parents, brothers, teachers, husband, in-laws, even her own children. She's treated like shit. She's treated as a body. At every turn, society repeatedly tells her that she's less intelligent, less capable, less deserving of respect. Daniel Sukumar, poet and my dear friend, insists to signify that they're also conditioned to ignore the plight of women or people less privileged than them and it doesn't register in their minds as injustice. Then she rebels, break rules, find a community of like minded women far away from familial relationships. She may spend years trying to establish that she is a good person, a feminist, an ally, someone who is different from those who hurt her. Then a little girl with dark skin and curly hair tells her that she's problematic, or anything resembling that. There's a chance of her whole identity built around being a good person collapsing.

I can understand that. I can understand how someone who has spent her life being diminished might find it unbearable to discover that she, too, is capable of diminishing someone else. I can understand the instinct to defend herself against yet another person telling her that she's done something wrong. But understanding this is precisely what makes the situation so difficult for me.

Because I can see her pain and I can understand where it comes from. I can imagine the conditions that produced it. And now I have to choose between my own self advocacy and my empathy for someone who may be suffering. And I think this is one of the things we don't talk about enough when we discuss solidarity between Dalit and savarna women. Larger strategic relationships with savarna women, regardless of how progressive they are, can demand that Dalit women suppress their empathy to advocate for themselves.

So a 25 y/o Aleena would shake her head, put on a stony bitch face and say, "Whatever." But deep down, she'd feel guilty. Because there's a particular kind of guilt that comes with watching someone cry when you know you're the reason they're crying. It doesn't matter that you might have a perfectly legitimate reason for confronting them. It doesn't matter that they've hurt you, but somewhere inside you, there's still a person who finds another person's pain difficult to bear. And then you remember why you're having this conversation in the first place. You remember that you came here to speak about your own hurt and you were the one who had something to say. And now you're standing here, watching someone else cry, trying to decide whether you can afford to be a human being about it.

We would all agree that if protecting oneself can feel like hurting someone else, something is terribly wrong with the relationship. If you have to choose between your own safety and another person's emotional comfort, we'd recognise the toxicity of that dynamic immediately because we know how easily empathy can be recruited against the person who offers it.

It's laughable and almost Stockholmish, to publicly admit that you feel sympathy for your oppressor. I feel terribly disgusted even writing this. There's something humiliating about confessing that some part of you still wants to comfort the person whose comfort has become and historically has been, an obstacle to your own liberation. The toxicity of this situation isn't just in the asymmetry, the assymetry here itself is injustice. Because when I tell you this, I am often expected to choose which truth matters more. There is no correct way for me to be hurt that doesn't also require me to manage how you experience my hurt. That is the kind of injustice I am talking about. Because we arrive at the conversation carrying different histories, different kinds of social credibility, different degrees of protection from the consequences of conflict. We do not have equal freedom to be angry, to be misunderstood, to refuse reconciliation or to walk away. The savarna woman gets to cry. The Dalit woman has to learn not to respond to the crying. And if the Dalit woman finally becomes hard enough to withstand all of this, that hardness can itself become the indictment against her. What kind of justice requires this much emotional self violence from the person seeking it?

Coming back to the Stockholmish part (not the false psychology, but the pop culture meaning of the term) of this, I wonder how much of my empathy is also a way of making sure that the savarna woman doesn't hurt me more. I am not saying that empathy is fake and that's what makes this so uncomfortable to admit. The logic could be perhaps if I am sufficiently gentle, sufficiently patient and generous in my interpretation of her actions, she will not hurt me any further. Perhaps if I can make her feel safe enough, she will allow me to be safe too and that is a terrible bargain to find yourself making. Because now my empathy is no longer an expression of how I see another person and it has become a way of managing the risks that person poses to me. And the more I do this, the harder it becomes to distinguish between being compassionate and being afraid. Perhaps I tell myself that I am choosing empathy because I am politically mature, and I understand intersectionality and I refuse to flatten people into their worst actions. But there is also a part of me that knows what can happen when a savarna woman feels humiliated by a Dalit woman and wants to avoid finding out what happens when that humiliation turns into hostility. And perhaps the most painful realisation is that I may have been trying to earn, through empathy, a kind of safety that should never have been conditional on my ability to provide it.

But at the same time, I don't want to become too cynical about empathy and my capacity for it. I don't want to look back at every moment of tenderness and dismiss it as fear, I don't want to surrender that part of myself. But I want to know, as a part of justice, when my compassion is freely given and when it is being extracted by the possibility of punishment. Even when I am trying to be politically conscious, even when I am trying to see the humanity in someone who has hurt me, some part of me may still be bargaining for my own safety and that, my friends, is caste.

Now let's come to the fear part. Last year, I was performing at the biggest poetry show I'd ever done and afterwards, a friend told me that some women in the audience were crying. Instead of feeling pleased with myself for having managed to evoke emotions in people, I was startled. I asked a lot of questions: Were they angry? Did they leave? Did I trigger them? My friend was surprised that I had so many questions and asked why I bothered. And this was when I said the famous title lines.  "There are two things I'm scared of in this life: a savarna man's d*ck and a savarna woman's tears."

I was trying to explain a fear that had become so familiar to me that I hadn't realised how strange it might sound to someone who didn't share it. The d*ck is easier to explain. But tears are harder to explain because they don't look like a threat. They look like pain and invite sympathy. They make you want to reach out. And in certain situations, they can make you afraid of what happens next.


Most of the time the cost is bigger than the immediate fallout of a disagreement. Sometimes, the cost is emotional. Sometimes it is your reputation. You become the angry evil bitch woman who made her cry. That becomes the story people remember and repeat. Sometimes, the cost is your friendships. People who might otherwise have listened to you begin asking whether you could have handled things differently. They might not deny what happened exactly, but they want you to be more understanding and more forgiving. They want everyone to be able to coexist again.

Sometimes, the cost is professional. Feminist networks are not separate from the worlds in which we find work and encounter opportunities. When relationships overlap, a conflict that begins in a private conversation can impact professional spaces. I cannot claim that every disagreement result in these consequences, but the possibility itself is enough to make you cautious about what you say and how you say it. And most of the time, the cost is much harder to explain because nobody has explicitly threatened you with anything.

And now, you may wonder how an ideal conflict resolution should look like in a friendship or community with members belonging to different castes. Or is it possible to even have a friendship with these many layers. What does it say about the agency of the dalit woman? But this essay is already too long and we'll discuss that in another one.

So my point is not that I want savarna women to stop crying. I don't want them to become incapable of feeling hurt. I want their tears to be allowed to exist without automatically becoming more important than the experiences that preceded them.
I want them to be able to cry and still listen and reflect. And internalise the politics of their tears, what it means to cry, cry in public view, how it impacts another individual and what they can do differently?

I wish we could all get along like we used to in middle school.I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy. But ideally, I can only wish you well without making myself available for further harm.