The woman was naked. From a distance of about two hundred metres, I was able to catch only a glimpse of her. As it happened, I was walking towards her and would, in a few moments, be able to see her clearly.

Even from that distance, I had no doubt about her nudity. She WAS naked, exhibiting her glory right on the divider of the busy Bishtupur road in Jamshedpur, right at quarter to nine in the morning of a weekday, right in the midst of cars, auto-rickshaws, cycle-rickshaws, cycles, and pedestrians.

I started walking faster. The curiosity and excitement of a twenty-five years old unmarried man had taken control of me. My moccasins were not great for walking on the pavement, the briefcase in my left hand had started banging against my left knee, the road was uphill and the effort was negating the effect of the antiperspirant; but these impediments were too minor to dampen my determination to have a good look at the woman before she vanished from the scene.

It was 1982. Or, 1981, perhaps. I was no stranger to public nudity. I had envied the lack of inhibition of the effervescent women bathing with hardly any clothes in the canals of Bargarh in Sambalpur. I had witnessed men do a full Monty near the wells in Bastar. I had seen hordes of bare-breasted women laughing and walking on the hills of Singhbhum. I was aware of the custom of nudity in Nagaland and had interacted with blouse-less women who nonchalantly went about their daily chores in the plains of Bengal, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Orissa. There was no sense of shame, guilt or perversion associated with the public display of nudity. It was natural, a part of the culture in those regions.

The naked woman was hardly twenty meters away from me now. On the pretext of shifting my briefcase from the left hand to the right, I stopped to have a good look at her. Alluring, curvaceous, gorgeous, hedonistic, licentious, voluptuous, young … no, these adjectives don’t do justice to her.

She was paper thin and oak-dark. Pouches of loose skin were all that she had breasts. Her hair was short and thin and wet and white. She was rubbing her eyes and tears were glistening on her sunken cheeks. Her only vestige, a discoloured and torn sari, was hanging on the divider grill for drying up. Till the cloth became wearable again, the freshly-bathed homeless poor woman had no choice but to stand naked and cry in shame.

Somehow, she passed on her shame to me. And more than forty years later, I share it with you. Can we really do something substantive to cover the shame of women? Isn’t it overdue?