A year ago, in one of Mumbai’s Reddit communities, a user asked: Are there any safe places in Dadar to kiss and make out with your partner? The 400+ responders on the thread offer up several suggestions. Dadar Chowpatty, the area near Kirti College, is infamous for make-out sessions. Booking tickets to the long-running Shah Rukh Khan starrer Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge at Maratha Mandir is another option. Building terraces, too, are mostly safe and accessible. As one scrolls through this repository of lovers’ secrets, one can be thrilled, simmering with an excitement for romance and desire.
The romantic suggestions also come with a wry humour, acknowledging the ever-present moral gatekeepers of the city. One user jokingly suggests Dadar Police station; another recommends trying the Shiv Sena Bhavan—’chill people, and great atmosphere,‘ the user sarcastically writes.
Navigating fear and freedom
Debbie, 29, is perhaps the most excited interviewee we’ve ever had. She speaks with immense joy about romance and meeting people in public spaces—particularly beaches. She begins by telling us, with absolute certainty, that it is possible to have sex in the Bandra fort, even though she’s never done it. ‘You can go horizontal there,‘ she states matter-of-factly. Debbie has lived most of her life in Mumbai.
Navigating privacy with parents, in compact Mumbai homes, can be tough. As a result, she’s frequently found herself walking across Marine Drive and other beaches with her partners. She loves the Dadar Chowpatty, and plenty of times, as she’s walked along the beach with her date, she’s spotted other couples on the rocks, making out passionately. ‘The max I’ve done, though, is walk while holding hands,’ she says.
Rene*, 33, who also partially grew up in Mumbai, loves going on cycling dates in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park or for walks in smaller parks in the city. ‘In a lot of places in the city, where you don’t think there are parks, there are small, deserted parks,’ she tells me. And if there are five benches, four of them will be occupied by couples. ‘The lovers,‘ she laughingly suggests, know ‘the spots.‘
Both Rene and Debbie tell us that public spots are the safest places to meet someone new, especially if you’ve matched with them on an online dating app. Being around people, instead of a closed space, is less anxiety-inducing. And it is not just about safety, they insist. It is genuinely fun to experience the city’s geography with someone.
Yet, even as women manufacture a sense of safety by choosing not to be alone with their dates, the public space brings up new kinds of dangers for them.
Yet, even as women manufacture a sense of safety by choosing not to be alone with their dates, the public space brings up new kinds of dangers for them. Women worry about their safety from both potential partners, as well as from people who might object to them engaging in romance. This makes it significantly tougher for them to be intimate outdoors.
Rene tells us about an incident when she was hanging out with a man she’d just met. It was 10 PM, and he offered to take her to the greenest spot in Goregaon—a small cliff overlooking the Aarey forest. It was a sweet place, she recalls, one that she’d been to before, but never during the night. ‘There was a string of Volvo buses that had parked there, and there were some people in them, maybe just hanging out‘. Once she started making out with her date in the dark, she suddenly got paranoid about the people in the buses and being watched. ‘I just wanted to leave,‘ she said, ‘In that moment, I thought anything could happen to me, and that just killed the whole vibe of the place.’
Debbie, too, is cautious. Once, she gave her girlfriend a small goodbye kiss on the railway bridge; a few aunties raised eyebrows, making her awkward as she walked away. She adds, ‘I’ve never really seen lesbians make out in public.‘ Moreover, there are lots of people clicking selfies on the seafronts, and she’s sometimes paranoid that they might click her kissing another girl.
“Kabab me haddi“
Rene’s sudden fear at the cliff was triggered by thinking of the 2012 Delhi gangrape case. A young woman spotted with a man, making out with him no less, instantly sends the keepers of morality into a frenzy. In 2015, the Mumbai Police dragged out around 40 couples who had checked into various hotels at Madh Island and Aksa for ‘public indecency.‘ These actions have political sanction. In Mumbai, the Shiv Sena has historically indulged in the moral policing of love through vandalism and violence. They’re rationale for this—to oppose “indecency”—is an inherently patriarchal and casteist idea, one that is invested in the chastity of women.
Yet, political parties are not the only keepers of morality. Rene says, conservative families are sometimes a bigger threat than the political parties.
She’s not wrong. There had been an instance of a man yelling at a couple who were about to kiss against a tree. It’s a ‘family area,’ he had threatened them. In hindsight, his actions put into context the position that the middle class currently occupy in the city.
A significant moment in Mumbai’s history is the shutting down of the cotton mills, which were once central to the city’s economy. The 1982, the mill workers’ strike led by union leader Datta Samanth demanding bonus payouts, wage increases and better leave structures became a pivotal moment for the city—shifting its class dynamics forever. This ‘seemingly never-ending standoff‘ between workers and the state authorities resulted in almost 75,000 labourers losing their jobs. The authorities refused to budge, and several mills shut down during the six-month-long strike.
The vanishing of the mills, thus, handed financial, social and moral authority to Mumbai’s middle class.
The mill lands became battlegrounds, with many of them being sold to build malls and commercial spaces that catered to the middle class. The vanishing of the mills, thus, handed financial, social and moral authority to Mumbai’s middle class. Spatially and symbolically, the city became gentrified. And the middle-class aunties and uncles, like in Debbie’s case, were quick to assume the role of moral police. They’re no less than an annoyance for lovers, a kabab me haddi.
Lovers are unstoppable
When we ask Anshu, 26, who grew up in Dadar, about the lovers’ spots at Dadar Chowpatti, she chuckles, echoes the Reddit community and says: ‘Ask anyone in Kirti College, that’s the adda.‘ She then elaborates on the lore with a dramatic passion. Couples have always gone there to make out, and even when the authorities tried to put streetlights in that patch, the couples resisted. As per Anshu, someone famously threw a stone at the light, claiming the dark patch back, in the name of love.
The joy of experiencing a city with a partner or lover is timeless. ‘Sometimes just looking at the sea with someone can be beautiful,‘ Rene says. And this is not a joy most women are willing to give up on. Romance in the city, for women, comes with strategies and negotiation. And their support system in these strategies comes, like in the Reddit thread, from other lovers.
Anshu, for instance, doesn’t go to Dadar Chowpatty much herself—it’s too close to her own house. But she’s found other spots in the city. ‘If you take the first entrance to the Versova beach, towards Aaram Nagar, to the left, there’s a secluded spot with no street lamps,‘ she says. This is corroborated information, she tells me with a wink. In that dark patch, there are cane mats and mattresses that have just been left by people. Anybody can pick up one of the mattresses and find their privacy in the darkness.
‘It’s the goodwill of lovers leaving things behind for others,’ she says.
*Name of interviewee has been changed to protect their privacy.
