I have a strange feeling these days when I visit a mall. Especially a huge mall. I am shaken to the core. Literally.

As soon as I enter the mall and look up at its high-vaulted ceiling, it seems to be caving in on me. Then I realize that it’s my knees. They are caving in. I steady myself holding on to the nearest cutout.

Here I need to come clean.

I am a closet shopper. This is not something I can speak about easily. When I am not in a mall, my politics is left-of-centre, or liberal, or at the worst, left-of-centre-liberal-conservative, and I hold the right, that is to say leftish, positions on gender, religion, class, caste and labour. I am pro-environment, against the market dictating my personal choices and anti-consumerist. I passionately believe that consumerism reduces the intrinsic value of things by offering an endless but meaningless choice of products. I try to follow the movement of the capital around the world and even in my neighbourhood with a sharp, critical gaze. For example, I keep a watch on for the ratio between trees felled in our neighbourhood and the number of multi-storeyeds coming up. If the ratio is about 3:1, I think we are doing well for a Calcutta neighbourhood, for some things will always fall, whatever you do.

So basically I am quite all right. That is to say left.

But give me a mall and oh boy! Wild horses can’t drag me away from it. For me, the Sirens live inside a city mall. The brands are their frozen music. They sing to me. I give in. I get drawn in, sucked in and drowning in the brands, I die.

Of course there is a pathology to it. Call this Mall-aria.

Call me a Mall-lingerer, or Mrs Mall-appropriate, or Mall-functioning, or Mall-eable, but this generally has been the state of things for me for more than a decade. I have been doing it and loving it, with all the pleasure and guilt of conducting a clandestine affair.

But, of late, things have changed. As I said before, as soon as I enter a mall, my knees tend to give out. I may have developed vertigo, or a fear of my expanding waistline, or a fear of my contracting purse, for all these can and do happen in a mall, but I think it is really something else, indicated by the increasing strangeness of my experiences at the mall. In the run-up to the festive season alone, I was witness to some such incidents.

First, I saw a well-dressed woman urging her little boy to relieve himself in front of the men’s toilet. When asked why she was doing that, she answered that the boy could hardly control himself. Hence. When it was pointed out to her that there were many children in the mall who were obviously able to control themselves, she said that all of them were girls. Boys could not control themselves because they were made in a certain way.

If this is not the mother of sexual harassment, what is?

A few days later, I witnessed another disturbing event. A woman was shouting at the top of her voice in front of a store, with her companion, another woman, joining in. They were very agitated. I thought they were in trouble. I had been looking at them, wondering if I should ask if they were all right. The woman noticed me and charged towards me. “How dare you stare at me like that?” she screamed. “We are having a private conversation. Don’t you know how to mind your own business?”

I walked away. But I think the walls of the mall are not built to absorb such violence. They are caving in. And so are my knees.

The rest of West Bengal is another matter.