The Line

When I first went to the US, I was very impressed by how people respected your turn in lines at public spaces: at coffee shops, bus terminals, airports. Once you were in a line, you held certain visibility and authority of your turn. It was in sharp contrast to public spaces in Nepal: here your visibility was determined by a complex set of factors that ultimately determined your power. Your turn at public places had a more blatant display of power play and authority. Most of the times, there were no lines, just an aggregation of people, pushing and pulling, more aggressive among the dogs snatching the bone first.

I thought the lines in the US were profoundly right. Especially impressive was when people would open and hold doors for others, especially women and children. This is profoundly and deeply right, I used to tell. And I tell myself now. For a South Asian in America, there was no option to disrespect this system, but I deeply admired it, regardless. I would follow these rules with a full conviction. I thought the habit had hammered in deep, irrevocably.

Apparently not!

I was with two other doctors, chatting, and we walked in the cafeteria. We ordered our coffee and were doing back and forth about one of us wanting to pay. A young woman who was ahead of us suddenly raised her voice.

"Why did you not complete my order?" she asked the man in the counter. Then she turned to us and said, "For him I am garbage. No. 1, I am a woman. No. 2, I am not wearing the white coat you guys are wearing."

What had happened was, the boy in the counter just stopped mid-order with the woman and took our order. We didn't even notice that the woman was ahead of us. She was short woman in simple kurtha surwal.  And in our jolly disposition we catered to the attention the boy in the counter paid us. It seemed all natural. And probably would have gone unnoticed in the incessant flow of things in this mighty nation of Nepal. Except that this young woman did not have penchant for the order of power in this cafeteria.

Suddenly I felt completely ashamed. But more than that I felt terrified. Consciously, and in deliberating mind, I would have never used my masculinity and white coat to trample over the line. But here I was, doing exactly that. Against the value I held dear. In this unconscious exercise, the woman without a white coat was an entirely invisible figure.

I apologized to her profusely. But the saltiness deep inside couldn't be washed away with those apologies. The uneasiness persisted for days.

In Ralph Ellison's fiction "Invisible Man" the reason for invisibility of the main character is largely racial. Or, at least, the narratives suggest such. It is one basis of invisibility. But in our society, as I ruminate, the bases for invisibility are plethoric.You could be a woman. You could be a consumer. You could be a filthy fellow covered in city dust or village mud. You could be old. You could be a child of a farmer. You could be a patient at a public hospital who does not know any body in the system. You could be a village student trying to get a citizenship certificate at the district administrative office....

We are a society of invisibles. Visibility assured only after mounting ourselves on top of other invisibles. Bigger the pile of those invisibles underneath our feet, the higher our cliff.

No one is spared in this dog fight, it seems. If you hang around long enough. However much you trumpet on the solidity of your moral foundations.