This year, women hosting house parties in Delhi need not send their male friends to buy booze for them. They can do it themselves by walking into a newly opened liquor store at Saket Mall, which caters to ‘Women Only’.
Here, a female patron can walk in, browse at her leisure, relax on one of the soft white sofas while waiting on a friend, and pay-all hassle free.The presence of female sales executive and female security guards add to the women-friendly image.
On the surface, it seems like a sound idea. There is a very unsavoury crowd of men usually hanging around liquor shops and harassment is the least of a woman’s trouble, if she steps up there to buy it. It would certainly have appealed to me given my own liquor-buying experiences, although that was in Tamil Nadu.
The liquor industry in Tamil Nadu is run by the government as are all liquor shops, referred to as TASMAC shops. While the most expensive and refined liquors will not be available, the cheapest among them, short of country liquor, is sure to be stocked on it’s shelves. Consequently, they harboured the worst kind of customers, labourers drunk on cheap liquor and lolling around the shop, spurious women selling crack and an all-pervasive smell of puke. It was attached to a petty shop, which sold opaque black bags at Rs 5 to carry the liquor home. And if you did not have any male friends to buy it for you, this is what a woman faced.
This and constant staring, sometimes incredulous, sometimes contemptuous. And worst of all, shopkeepers often refused to serve or would pretend that they did not stock anything the woman asked for.
The newly opened women only liquor store at Saket Mall, New Delhi. (Image via Indian Express)
In contrast, a women-only liquor store would be a welcome relief. Only it wouldn’t quite work in our favour in the long run. It would become like the ladies compartment in a train or seats in a bus. Now every time we climb into a general compartment, we are stared at, told to go to ladies compartment and why are we invading their space and so on. There has been so much emphasis on a women-only compartment for safety, that we are no longer welcome in the general compartments.
The same is likely to happen with the women-only liquor stores. Pretty soon we will be pointedly told to go buy liquor in the ladies’ wala stores, never mind that this is closer and more convenient.
Every time a women-only safe space is created, instead of making it safe for women in general, it eventually robs us of the right to be in the general public space. Ironically, that is what we have been fighting for, the right to go anywhere and do what we want without being sexually assaulted.
It takes time, but it works. The next time I visited the same TASMAC, the owner was a little less rigid and eventually they got used to me. And there are still high-end liquor stores, in other states, not Tamil Nadu, where the crowd is slightly more refined and wouldn’t even raise an eyebrow if you walk in looking for a bottle of bourbon.
And then, there was this other store, a mid-level liquor store in Hyderabad, where I suddenly walked in because I had to pick up a bottle for a friend’s party. The crowd was startled initially, but one of the assistants unhooked a picket link in the shop to make way for me and get directly served instead of standing in the queue. I opted to stand in the queue with the rest of them. There were some odd looks, but nobody jostled, passed comments or made me uncomfortable in anyway. Acceptance is the key, not segregation.
