My terror bus ride

Early this week, a video of an altogether awesome nature went viral. The recorded confrontation by an Indian woman naming and shaming her harasser was shared on many online news portals.

In the video, the woman accuses an elderly man of touching her inappropriately through the seat gap of the plane they were in. With the rest of the passengers looking on, she goes on rebuking him while he hides his face behind his hand, avoiding her gaze, or in this case, the camera.

“I’m videotaping you, mister! If you ever do this again, you’ll remember this episode. You think us girls stay silent and you can do anything, right?” reads the translated transcription of the video by Buzzfeed India.

The perpetrator repeatedly begs for her forgiveness, to which this incredible woman retorts indignantly, “You’re asking for forgiveness. Why? Because I’m a girl? And you have the right to touch me any time, anywhere you want to?”

How I wish I had the guts to confront the various perpetrators who have harassed me the many times I have used public transport. But I never did. I was young, and afraid. The first time I encountered a molester was when I was in primary school, sometime in Standard 6.

I was queuing up to get on the public bus in my sleepy hometown, up this rickety bus with its aluminium siding and faded singular yellow stripe around its middle. Or that is how the bus always appears in my thoughts whenever I let it wander to the darker edges of my subconscious.

At the end of the long queue snaking slowly up the bus was the young me in my navy blue pinafore and thick long braid that my mother suffered upon me each morning. While it was common for some jostling to take place, this time around it was a tad too insistent, too pervasive. I felt a long, taut body pushing against me, its height towering above me.

Thinking nothing of it, or the incessant poking I felt around the small of my back, I ignored the person behind me. I was 12, completely unaware of how the male genitalia worked. But that was all about to change soon.

As I climbed the bus and made way to the empty seat near the exit, I was free of the intrusiveness. Only momentarily, for the moment I sat down, I saw something clutched in a palm, just below my line of vision, somewhere between my face and my right thigh. Cylindrical, like an engorged sausage or finger.

Not registering what exactly I was seeing, I looked up to see the most terrifying face I had ever seen. A man, tall and dark, with a deranged look in his eyes was smiling down at me, all sinister and wholly menacing. His eyes, I don’t think I’ll ever forget them peering at me, taunting.

Just as quick was this exchange that he dashed out of the bus, leaving me in a state of shock. No one around me had noticed anything from the looks of it. A few startled moments later, I bursted out laughing hysterically.

And laugh I did until the reality of what had transpired sunk in. How I wish that nightmare was the only such encounter I faced while using the public bus. All throughout secondary school, until I was in Form 5 when my parents got me a motorcycle, numerous and uncountable were the various indignities and terrors that I had to endure.

It has been almost 10 years since I rode the public bus in my hometown, and the thought of it still sets off anxiety attacks. Interesting though, because I have taken the Rapid KL bus numerous times on my visit to the capital, all by myself. I have ridden sardine packed public buses in Bangkok and crushed in trains in KL, Singapore, Bangkok and Tokyo during rush hour, but never once with trepidation or fear.

I have never confronted my harassers, nor did I do anything to draw attention to what was happening. Perhaps I was afraid no one would believe me. More than anything, I believe it was because I was ashamed. I always asked myself what I did to make them do what they did.

But, like the woman in the video above, I now know the truth. “Only us girls are expected to have shame. You have a right to be shameless” – are just some lies we tell girls and women to subjugate them.

Yet the mere thought of hailing a Rapid Penang bus or whatever buses they have plying Bukit Mertajam sends me in a fit of anxiety and fear. For I still see his eyes, mocking me, taunting me to challenge him. – February 8, 2015.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insider.