There is a board near the elevator door on the ground level at the building which houses Gulmohar restaurant in the campus. In white letters against a deep blue background, it says ‘This lift is for use only to the second, third, and fourth floors.’

This means that you cannot get in the elevator and press ‘1’ to go to the first floor from the ground floor. Although the panel in the elevator has a button with ‘1’ embossed on it, the rule prevents people from using it to get to the first floor. I wonder why. Behind my wonderment is the fact that elevators are typically installed in buildings in India, especially in academic institutions, to make the buildings accessible for people; the buildings were usually built during a time accessibility or inclusivity were in common use. The elevators are an afterthought compelled by the present times. The board on the ground floor seems to have no regard for this aspect of the elevators. Whether you have a disability or not, the elevator cannot be used for access to the first floor IF you are getting on at the ground floor. It must be something else that has provoked the administration into thinking about such a board, getting it made, and putting it up.

In light of the recent events in the campus that has fully revealed the misogynistic and casteist majority of the student body, and in light of experiences that women married to upper caste men—businessmen and civil servants—in Bihar and UP have expressed directly to me and through friends, I think I have a more interesting and highly imagined explanation for this elevator rule.

Upper caste men, especially those who grind for and reach government jobs in UP and Bihar, do it for two reason: one is the extra and unimaginable dowry that such a man—a salaried government servant—fetches, and the second is the bribery that runs in governmental institutions across all levels. Women from metropolitan cities gets married to such men at a young age, before they have had a chance to educate themselves and become financially and mentally independent. At the in-law’s place, domestic violence becomes a daily experience, and the women are not allowed by their own family to return to a safe place where they can escape the husband’s domestic abuse. The world, to the men who marry these women so that they have someone to cook their meals and bear their children, is a place where people are trying their best to cheat, extort, and try as much trickery as they can to gain the maximum benefit from their place of power. I know someone of this type from my life: got into doing a PhD, worked hard during the PhD life to get into a government service, was unhappy because he was not finding someone to get married to; then he cracks a government exam, gets a job in the government service, quits PhD, marries someone his family found—with some education but no job—has a kid, and is now happy.

To such men, who ends up running institutions either in a major capacity or as pen-pushers who sign on insignificant forms and official letters to help the institutions run, anyone who takes the elevator from the ground floor to the first floor is automatically trying to extract as much as they can from a service. They are, to the babu types, trying to eke out as much as possible from the facilities that the babus have pushed pen and paper to establish. This cannot be tolerated. Anyone who takes the elevator to go one level up from the ground floor are by the very act trying to cut corners, using facilities unduly and unnecessarily, a cheater and thus a competing person in the world of bribe-extortion-hypermasculinity. How dare this chap take the elevator to go ONE floor up instead of taking the stairs like a proper government-obeying-rule-stickler? How dare this person use a public facility to make their own life easier? This cannot be allowed. A board is placed: Only for second and higher floors, not for the first floor. I assume on the first floor a similar board would read: Do not use for the second floor. Use only for third and fourth floor.

Now, this is admittedly a work of imagination. But, a few years ago, someone who was residing in my building got into the elevator with me and pressed the button to take him one floor up, and, as if he had committed some sin, asked me whether I mind him using the elevator to go one floor up. I told him that this is a public elevator, for the use of everyone in the building, and not my personal property, and he was free to use it to go one, or ten, floors up. From that memory, I wonder whether it might not be too far fetched to think that this no-one-floor-up business runs on an economy of shame and extortion.