What is sexual Harassment? How safe is it for solo female backpackers to be hitchhiking in India? Here I share my experience of getting sexually harassed while hitchhiking in a truck in Uttarakhand.

Hitchhiking in India. The phrase itself brings fear and eyebrow-folded curiosity. Then there is ‘Hitchhiking in India as a female traveller’. The eyebrows drop below the feet.

Being furiously on the road for three months pushes you in all kinds of directions. Backpacking isn’t about picturesque lakes and distant treasures. When you travel like a traveller, you expose yourself to the soil. And the soil is real. Deep, life-giving, and also sometimes barren. A question that is frequently asked by the people I meet on the road paraphrases as ‘Why travel?’ I stubbornly try to explain the storm I feel inside, about travelling, about life, about living. ‘I want to see life’. I know it would never suffice. But I have become smart in answering now.

Riding on the shoulders of life everyday, in one way or another, while hitchhiking or camping in remote villages in India, life will show you the vile sides of the validity of human nature, along with the vibrance. No, not every person is good, or bad. Maybe someone who immensely helped me out (people love playing the saviour to strangers) beats the shit out of his wife at night. You can understand a person (or the designated life of that person) only to an extent. That will always be true. Yet I see life as much as I can, without letting the curtains obscure my window, even if the window is half-ajar. In the third month of backpacking and hitchhiking across Uttarakhand in India, I finally came in close contact with the other side of the coin. The coin is not travel, the coin is reality.

A Little Intro – Harassment

Harassment isn’t a word or a reality that grinds well with social norms. In villages in Kasar Devi in the Almora district of Uttarakhand, I have heard how women pretend to have ‘fallen off’ to justify their wounds after being raped or harassed. In Maat Village in Almora, widows are being teased and sexually bullied by married men from the village. 90% of women I personally know, or have known, have been harassed at some time, may it be in childhood, or in adolescence.

Before I proceed, I feel obligated to shed some light on one typical misconception people tend to have. Harassment doesn’t always mean being raped. Any kind of violation of the ethics of your body falls under sexual harassment. While taking a shower intimately, if you feel an intruder’s eyes on any part of your body, an act to which you didn’t give consent, is also sexual harassment. Every single inappropriate touch is sexual harassment.

Give me the airy space to digress a bit further before I jump to my own experience, because, I need space at this point.

I won’t copy-paste some statistics, or percentages and numerics, or a lifeless pie-chart from an academic website. I don’t believe in surveys or the results that come out of them anymore. I believe in the stories I have personally heard, while traveling or not. I base myself on that only.

On that note, harassment is a common phenomenon not just with women. I know several men who have also been sexually harassed. Yes, it’s more common with women, but it’s also very much there with men. In fact, a guy told me recently how he got harassed while hitchhiking on a bike in India. The man who gave him the bike lift happened to be a doctor (hence ‘educated’ and ‘sophisticated’). At some point, while addressing my friend as ‘son’, he started moving his butt convulsively against my friend’s penis. All this while riding the bike.

Also read – Is Travelling/Hitchhiking across India Safe for Solo Female Travellers?

How Safe is Hitchhiking in India?

To those who keep asking me if it’s safe for a solo female traveller to hitchhike in a country like India, my answer remains the same. It’s safe and not. Because I can tell you numerous stories of harassment from women’s lives who have never travelled solo, or hitchhiked. It’s more important to associate safety with life than with travelling. Safety is a relative term, balancing on a lost meaning. Who is safe in this world? It’s all a matter of choice. The truck driver may have chosen not to harass me that day. I would have gotten out of the truck, feeling satisfied with my first hitchhiking on a truck in India, or with an elusive idea about the goodness of the Kumaoni people. My whole built-up idea would have changed. But that didn’t happen. I got out of the truck feeling shitty and violated.

Would I stop hitchhiking in India? I hitchhiked in five minutes after the truck driver dropped me off in the middle of nowhere, harassed. Would I think ill of the Kumaoni people or the truck drivers? No, I know solo backpackers who have had great experiences hitchhiking in trucks in India, and bad experiences as well. So, get this. It’s one filthy individual doing one filthy deed. Forget these sets or subsets we create to simplify things for ourselves.

Now, the final question: Is it a good idea to hitchhike on a truck in India? The truck is a bit tricky to get out of. It’s high. One can get out of a car, or a bike, if the situation calls for it. But a truck is surely tricky. I would say it’s better to avoid trucks, in India or anywhere, for that matter. (Updated: I hitchhiked in a truck in Himachal Pradesh at night alone and was perfectly safe)

But I have a more concrete point to make. If a vehicle (car, truck, tempo, or any other) stops without you asking for a lift, and offers to drop you off on the way, it’s highly advisable not to entertain that vehicle. It’s not necessary that the driver has a bad intention. But the possibility is more sound here, because you didn’t ask for it, a person is offering it at his/her own whim. There may be something underlying.

Also read – Solo Hitchhiking for Two Days from Kaza to Manali

How I Was Sexually Harassed in A Truck in India

From Nainital, I got a smooth bike ride till Bhowali. The man was sweet enough to show me the road that leads to Almora. As I was walking towards the end of Bhowali to find a suitable spot to catch the next ride, a truck stopped. The driver was a local pahadi man, Jagdish, from a village near Almora. He asked me where I was headed and told me that he was going the same way, he could drop me off ten kilometers before Almora. I was exceedingly happy to get a ride on a truck, because to tell you the truth I had never hitchhiked on a truck until then. From the very start, we got into talking. His stories about Kumaoni life, language, and rural culture turned into seasonal fruits and flowers. For the first hour, we had a pleasant and healthy conversation about the hard life in the hills. ‘It feels like I have known you all my life’. Was that a romantic declaration, or an enthusiastic expression of meeting a backpacker for the first time? I took it in a positive way.

Only after an hour or so, he stopped the car (told me that the truck needed to cool down) and asked me if I would like to go behind the bushes with him for ‘ten minutes of entertainment’. With the consistent “no’ and ‘no’ and ‘no’, I tried getting out of the truck with the excuse of enjoying the view. He immediately started the engine with the ‘assurance’ of ‘nothing would happen without both of our consent. It’s not fun if both are not willing’.

After that, it was pretty much a series of horny insinuations. Apparently, he has seen on pornographic sites that Bengali women are super fiery in bed. So, he wanted to try it out with me. After this and twenty other offensive comments and my growing ignorance, he understood that he wasn’t going to get what he wanted. Here are some instances for your benefit: ‘My penis is getting erect just by talking to you’, ‘Nowadays we can get sex online’, ‘It will only take ten minutes, come with me behind the bushes’.

The disgust that was piling up inside started booming out of me in the form of ignorance. Showing arrogance in a situation like this only accentuates the danger, especially on a highway with not a vehicle around. Noticing the ignorance on my face, he stopped the truck in the middle of nowhere (kilometers before he was originally supposed to drop me off) and asked me to get out. Boy was I happy to finally get the opportunity to leave! As I turned to open the gate, he leaned over me, cupped my breast, and started laughing like a child. All I could do was jump out of the truck, as my curses were receding over the laughter of my molester.

Also read: Kasar Devi in Almora: The Worst Volunteering Experience

Any Conclusion?

Incidents like these are common. Only a few people are vocal about it. As soon as I share this incident with the people around me, similar kinds of stories climb back at me. Another solo female traveller I met recently told me how on a local bus, a guy started touching her breasts from outside the window. My friend, let’s call her Priya, fell asleep on the local bus and woke up feeling a stranger’s hands all over her upper body. She wasn’t hitchhiking in India, she was travelling in a local bus, then how would you put blame on one mode or another?

By a cousin, or by an uncle who casually walks into the makeshift washroom when she takes a bath, a male stranger on a train caressing another male’s penis, a grown man in his 50s ‘accidentally’ touching a school girl’s breasts in a crowded bus – these are real stories from real people. Then why aren’t we talking about it out loud? Are we waiting for a full-fledged rape to stir up an excuse to shout moralities?

We all know the source of it all – Sexual Repression in India.

Talk about it in gatherings, make those uncomfortable who want to be, and share it like a story, not like a secret. I told the incident to the next person on whose bike I hitchhiked for the rest of the way to Almora. I talk about it with everyone. Why? Because it’s not a secret.

Just so you know, I intentionally did not put up any pictures with this article. Let’s focus on the words for once.

Would you like to share your story? Let’s open conversations around sexual harassment.

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