Missing Women

 

 

I stopped by an old building I lived in 15 years ago. It looked tired and dusty as ever. I climbed the stairs to look at the door of the apartment I used to live in with my husband and toddler when we first moved to Delhi from the United States. My little boy had gripped the same stair rail as he climbed down, one step at a time, till he reached the last step and launched off into a hands-free final jump while I lugged his tricyle alongside. The stairs also reminded me of Kamlesh.

 

Each morning, Kamlesh would sweep the stairs and stairwells from the top floor, down to the driveway and the front gate. If this wasn’t evident because the dust still lay thick, the proof of Kamlesh’s daily attendance was the uninterrupted stream of commentary and curses that hovered in the stairs. It blustered in the distance like an approaching storm, and then grew louder as she whacked our landing with her broom. It returned again when she slapped a dirty rag to mop our landing with invective rather than the half-bucket of water I foolishly insisted on.

 

The building was constructed where a single-family home had stood. The builder had given the ground floor to the two warring brothers who had inherited the home. They now occupied the front and the rear apartments with their families, without looking at or talking to each other. My neighbors told me that Kamlesh’s father used to be the sweeper until he died. Then, Kamlesh took over.

 

She was small-framed and her chocolate skin was loaded with jewelry. She would show up around 8 o’ clock each morning loaded with bangles, necklaces, nose-ring, a fresh line of vermilion in the parting of her curly hair, and anklets banging as she marched up and down the stairs.

 

She looked like she could be anything between 15 and 30 years old It was hard to tell how old she was or to keep straight how many children she had. It became evident over a few months that she had a shiftless husband who had a government job that entitled them to squalid quarters a few kilometers away. And her miseries were compounded by a string of girl children who were constantly sick and prone to every accident possible, requiring them to get shots or be admitted to hospital wards, which kept Kamlesh’s attendance at work spotty, but her demands for tips and hundred rupee notes unending. In a space of a few months, an assortment of betis got scalded, hit by cars, erupted in sores or were struck by mystery illnesses.

 

“It’s my bastard fate, madam, I’ll have to spend, spend, spend on these girls to get them married off, and I have to spend, spend, spend on them now.” Kamlesh had brought a dowry for the privilege of tying her fortunes to those of her laggard husband, and she would see that and all her savings flow out into the dowries of her daughters. She had reason to curse the world and collect every rupee she could in the meantime.

 

One day, the doorbell rang without stopping, I knew it was Kamlesh. She had to take one of her girls to the hospital, she said. “Everybody has given me one hundred, and Biwiji upstairs has given me two hundred, so give me at least that much.’’

 

I was skeptical, but gave her a hundred and asked her to show me the hospital’s receipt the next day. “You don’t trust me!” her eyes narrowed. “Arre, I’ve been in this building longer than you. People have even given me a thousand rupees in a flash and never asked for a receipt. You people have come from phoren. What is 100 rupees to you?”

 

I hardly wore jewelry, and our family car was a boxy Maruti 800 that my husband or I took turns cleaning, to the amusement of our neighbors and their servants. We had one maid to help with housework and babysitting, compared to the three or four my neighbours averaged. We drove ourselves and stood in lines to pay our own utility bills because we didn’t have a minion to dispatch on our behalf as most people did. I cooked most of our meals and took my son to the park myself instead of sending him with a servant. The one maid who worked for us was free to go to her quarters by 8 pm at night, while other servants in the building usually worked until close to midnight because their families ate late dinners.

 

Still, Kamlesh was convinced I was supremely wealthy because I had just moved back to India from America and had a husband who was white.

 

She was flattered that my husband let her sweep and mop all the floors of our apartment before he moved in. Other families allowed Kamlesh to only tiptoe to their bathrooms the designated territory of the untouchable, but wouldn’t let her sully the rest of their home, which was cleaned by other servants who also turned up their noses at picking up a mop or brush in that space.

 

But when I moved in a few weeks later and insisted on cleaning my own bathrooms, Kamlesh was outraged. She saw no Gandhian self-sufficiency, no moral vindication, no sisterly solidarity in my decision to wield a toilet brush in my own bathrooms.  I was a threat to her livelihood. And my addled and fancy ideas from abroad could turn her world upside down: Really, what would happen to people like her if everyone else in my building also began cleaning their own bathrooms?

 

Kamlesh cleaned all the bathrooms in her buildings except ours. Everyday, after my neighbors had showered, she would spend a half hour throwing plastic mugs of water at their bathroom tiles and toilet and pushing the mess into the drain with a jhadu. She suspected that I had quietly hired someone else to do the job she had inherited, and would periodically lean on my doorbell demanding to know who the shameless encroacher was. She refused to believe that I cleaned and dried our bathrooms.

 

I thought about the injustice of denying her the opportunity to earn those 300 rupees. But I decided not to change my mind. I could bend my principles to help her out a bit, but the thought of letting this shrew invade my home every day with her shrill rants about all the people who crossed her and her and her constant complaints about her hard life didn’t appeal to me. Her life was clearly rough, and there was something commendable about the inextinguishable spirit that moved her to profanely and publicly question every nasty card fate dealt her all these years. She was a warrior, not a whiner, but I didn’t want to participate in her fights or be a spectator. I had just come back to India after a dozen years abroad. I wanted to arrange my life as a new mother simply and live it quietly.

 

Kamlesh was determined to punish me. She left the stairs leading to our floor unswept. She left the mounds of dirt collected from the rest of the building on our landing. Her protests didn’t get a rise out of me. I swept the dirt she left. I quietly hired her sister-in-law, who swept the building next door, to clean my stairs. Kamlesh declared war. What if the rest of the building liked her soft-spoken and hard-working rival and replaced her floor by floor? Her angry finger rang reveilles of displeasure on my much-abused doorbell. She demanded I sack the encroacher. She swore she would teach me a lesson for messing with her. I ignored her, until one day she threatened she would have my son kidnapped. Now I was frightened. I submitted a hand-written complaint to the local police station. Her sister in law stopped sweeping my stairs. “I will have to stop, madam, she said. “She has made my life hell. I cannot listen to this abuse every day. I only want to earn my two chapattis quietly.” My neighbors did not like Kamlesh’s work either. But they endured her. “This class of people are all like that,” one neighbor, a college professor advised. “You don’t understand. This is not America.”

 

Kamlesh did not ring our doorbell again, although I would hear her swatting the stairs and berating the world and everyone who crossed her. Then, some months later, her sister-in-law began to sweep the building again, every floor of it. Kamlesh was not well, she said. I went to the United States for a few months. Kamlesh was still not back.

 

“Don’t you know, madam,” her sister in law said. “She’s gone mad.” Kamlesh had found out she was pregnant. With another daughter.

 

It is illegal for doctors to conduct tests to determine the sex of a fetus or to pass this information to expectant parents, but as with many laws in India, this one gets passed over because many couples want to have sons and would rather abort a female fetus. Kamlesh had decided to get an abortion because she could not afford to raise and marry off another daughter. Ultra-sound clinics dot Delhi and its neighboring towns, where the sex ratio of girls to boys is dramatically lower than the already low 933 boys to girls nationally. By law, these clinics have posters declaring they do not do perform gender-determination tests. There are other, coded ways of letting a pregnant woman and her family know if it’s a boy or a girl. “You have a healthy child. Go distribute laddoos,” the technician shouts if it’s a boy. “Congratulations. Go buy jalebis,” they say if it’s a girl.

 

Women like Kamlesh, whose families never took them for prenatal check-ups, sprang money for these gender tests. Sometimes, the test results were wrong.

 

“When they ‘dropped the baby’ (aborted it), they told her it was a boy, not a girl.” Kamlesh was inconsolable. That boy could have been her chance to be finally respected by her husband’s family, to earn back in dowry some of the wealth that would leak out with her daughters’ weddings and dowries, to have someone to support her when she was old. “She’s gone mad,” her sister-in-law said. “She’s not coming to work any more.”

 

I never saw Kamlesh again. We moved back to America some months later.

 

 The sex ratio of girls to boys has since plunged in south Delhi, to 762 girls for every 1000 boys.

 

Since I last saw Kamlesh, there would be approximately 36-million more women in India if those pregnancies were not aborted selectively to weed out girls.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Gori Truth About Miss India

 





The "Miss India" crown always goes to a woman who fulfills the Indian ideal of beauty, which actually means just one thing: fairness.



Navneet Kaur Dhillon, Miss India 2013

Not a single finalist is ever dark-skinned. The contest is co-sponsored by Ponds, which competes to sell fairness creams (a $432-million market in 2010, according to A.C. Nielsen, and growing by 18 percent annually). The minimum height required for a "girl" (as contest rules describe its 18- to 23-year-old applicants) to even be considered for the pink crown is 5 feet 6 inches, while the average height of an Indian woman is 5 feet.

In India, women who are considered beautiful commonly get described as milk-skinned or chanda si gori (white as the moon). You may not be too bad looking if your complexion can pass as being wheat-skinned.

 Give me a beauty contest where along with the milky and wheaten bodies on parade are women that are coffee-skinned, tea-skinned, clove-skinned, pepper-skinned, coal-skinned, women who can haul bricks on their head yet walk divinely straight-necked. These are the strong, beautiful women you see on the streets of India.

We know that an Indian citizen as dark as Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2013, might just make the Miss India contest criteria for being an inch taller than the minimum, but would never breach its color preference.

Nina Davuluri, Miss America 2013

 What would happen, now, if Miss India Navneet Kaur Dhillon were to face off against the darker Ms. Davuluri in an international contest?

A Teacher's Day Lesson

 

 

 

A Delhi mall has a themed display for Teacher’s Day that pays tribute to this very Indian and non-commercial celebration. Circled by shops selling La Senza lingerie, Mac makeup  and Starbucks coffee is a saffron-draped sage holding forth wisely under a tree while his disciples listen with folded hands. These men sit in on a little plaster island, primly turned away from the saucy blondes modeling underwear in the distance and cordoned off by protective tape from the masses that stroll by.

 

I should be touched to see the wisdom of ancient India given a welcome spot amid the footfalls of all the pilgrims making calls on their retail shrines with offerings of plastic and cash. Instead, I’m engaged in a silent and pointless -- yet still entertaining --quarrel with this tableau assembled of Styrofoam and plaster. Exactly what is being celebrated?

 

Where are the women? Any women? Girls?

 

Oh, yeah, they’re missing because back then, only men, a handful of them, from higher castes, were allowed the luxury of seeking knowledge. Most men, and even more women, did not have access to learning unless they were exceptionally wealthy, fortunate or dedicated enough to find a way around this limitation.

 

I am not trashing the guru-disciple tradition. I just want to take it off its hallowed pedestal.

 

Do we really yearn for the days when the rules that governed society were created, recorded, hoarded and interpreted by a monopoly of misogynistic, upper class men whose legacy of exclusion still infects our country?

 

Is this the style of learning we still want to revere, with worshipful students parroting their teacher’s words unquestioningly?  Our education system processes students thus every year, churning out graduates with little knowledge and no real education.

 

Today on Teacher’s Day, I want to celebrate all the wonderful teachers we grew up with and all the good teachers out there, and not with some sentiment-encrusted slice of fake history, but with a new, improved, and far more real classroom scenario. That tableau would show a female teacher (since teaching in schools is a highly feminized profession) surrounded by boys and girls. And while more girls go to school than ever before, India’s schools need more girls. Only 6 out of 10 women are literate, compared to 8 out of 10 men.

 

I want to celebrate the blessing of living in an era where we have the technology to help us become aware, connected seekers of our own learning. I want to celebrate that so many of our sons and daughters can feel welcome to learn together in the same classroom. I want to celebrate that I live in a world where the right to ask questions and the means to seek answers belong to more people than ever before.

 

And, since wishing is cheap and free, I wish the money this very swanky mall allocated for this feel-good display and the education taxes the government collects from all of us were spent to ensure there was clean drinking water and functioning toilets in more schools so that fewer children would drop out.

Coming Soon: Bra-One (Can't wait not to see it!)

Shahrukh Khan’s poster for Ra-One. Nice, photoshopped tits, Shahrukh. You should have called your movie “Bra-One.” And the poster’s shamelessly copied from Gone With The Wind, or shall we say, “Hava Mein Ud Gaya tu Shahrukh. But frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.”

I can’t stand Shahrukh Khan. I also can’t understand his success as an actor. After all, he plays the same character in practically every movie he's in ... himself.

Shahrukh played a charmingly stammering drunk (in Devdas). A charmingly stuttering suitor in Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge. More of the same in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. A charmingly stuttering don in … Don. A charmingly stuttering and mildly tolerable coach in Chakhle India. A stuttering, inspirational friend in Kal Ho Na Ho. An annoyingly stuttering dope in My Name is Khan. I just c-c-c-can’t understand it.

B-b-b-but maybe that somewhat explains why he named his lackluster IPL cricket team the Kolkata K-K-K-K-Knight Riders.

Mysterious Gazillionaire; Barefoot, Horny Cleaninglady

“Mysterious Gazillionaire, Barefoot, Horny Cleaning lady.”

That’s the title of the best-selling romance I need to write when I stop laughing.

I was browsing through the magazines hanging from clothespins at my local newsstand when my eyes roved through a stack of book titles and then roved right back and stayed there.

“Reprobate Lord, Runaway Lady.”

“Billionaire M.D.”

“Brooding Billionaire, Impoverished Princess.”

And, besting even that for riches and fantasy, “The Billionaire’s Housekeeper Mistress.”

I scanned the blurbs. They haven’t changed since I got turned on to piles of this pitifully throbbing genre shortly after I started menstruating. The Mills and Boon romances my friends slipped to me were validation that I had arrived into adulthood.

Since my parents never allowed me to date and even talking to boys was direly forbidden, these bodice-rippers were a window to world where there was hope for every girl and the marms eventually fared better than the tarts.

I tore through these books, some time between lunch and starting on my homework. You could go through them fast as through a Cadbury’s chocolate éclair. You started slow, skimmed through, lingered through the erotic parts (which were eagerly shared the next morning at school and tittered over) and, faith in mankind and hope for my own romance some day kindled by the last starlit kiss, settled down to tackle algebra.

In that virginal, pre-Google era, Mills and Boon books gave me the answers no one else could. I wanted to know what a woman kissed and ravaged by tall dark and handsome tycoons felt. Yup, she still gazes into his glacial blue eyes and somehow ends up melting on the silken sheets of the king size bed in his yacht/ranch/chateau. The only difference is that the heroes in my youth were English, Latin or Greek millionaires. Now, the hero is a billionaire and the book titles sound downright smutty. “The Billionaire’s Housekeeper Mistress.” You could imagine a porn film having the same desperate title.

I read loads of these books. They were all the same: wide-eyed virgin collides with highly tanned mysterious and wealthy man. Misunderstandings and sly mistresses thwart the romance. But love (and marriage) win.

Mercifully, I read lots of other books and moved up the literary food chain very quickly. I read lots of non-romantic novels, but a girl must have her romances, just as she should always have chocolate within reach. I found Barbara Cartland books vile: the heroines were infantile, the dialogue asthmatic (“I … love … you... too… she… murmured….”) and then there were the covers, with Dame Barbara with her hideous, mascara-encrusted eyes and her pearl-encrusted digits clawed around a fluffy lapdog.

I tore through Georgette Heyer, Victoria Holt, the Bronte sisters. I read “Gone With the Wind,” a book for which I suffered a stinging slap on the cheek from my mother because she was convinced it had to be dirty. After all, there on the cover was Vivien Leigh, all passed out and boobs pushed up, held by a brooding Clark Gable, with flames raging in the background. I read the book again and again.

My all-time favourite romantic book? “Pride and Prejudice.”A beautiful gem of a book that actually has the rich hero/unassuming virgin theme pulp romances untiringly replicate.

I have yet to find a great Indian love story, the kind that brings a lump to your throat that’s hard to dislodge. I don’t attribute this to the lack of love stories, but to my own ignorance. I ask around and the answers are always Devdas, Laila-Majnu, Heer-Ranjha. Unfulfilled lovers choosing death over separation. Boo hoo.

Devdas doesn’t have the gonads to acknowledge to his childhood sweetheart Paro that he loves her, or to stand up to his zamindar father and walk out on his family’s wealth. We are supposed to feel sorry for Devdas through his entire gutless life, and in the end, there he is, a wandering drunk, coughing up blood because he is dying of tuberculosis. Yet, somehow, he has not just his first love, but the most famous courtesan of his time, Chandramukhi, both pining over him. And this utterly patriarchal male fantasy is fobbed off as a great love story?

I would bet that most women would want to wash their hands off a loser like Devdas instead of wasting their lives on him. I’ll take an honest bodice-ripper any day. I’ll … even … take … Barbara … Cartland.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist Playdate

The doorbell rang, and my daughter’s face lit up. Newly moved to New Delhi, this was her first play date and her guest was another American she had found in the sea of nationalities at school. I turned the kettle off and went to the door to invite my daughter’s new friend and her mother in.

The girls hugged each other and flew up the stairs. The girl’s mother stood outside the door. She was veiled from head to toe in a black robe with two little chinks for her eyes.

No, she couldn’t come in for a cup of tea. She was going to the mall nearby. And was it okay for her daughter to stay for 2-3 hours because that’s how long she thought she needed at the mall?

I caught myself trying not to stare. There was nothing to look at but a stolid black matryoshka with eye slits. Was I supposed to look into those slits and keep looking, or would it be more polite to look at another part of that black expanse. Did she have gray roots under her hair color and pluck her brows thin? Was she wearing dangly earrings? Did her fingertips caress the necklace of macaroni made by her daughter, the way a pregnant woman’s hand rests on her belly? Was her hair short like her daughter’s?

There was no way to tell. She was just a monochromatic blob with a voice that I hadn’t yet memorized, and a phone number in my mobile. And now she was turning and walking away.

“Wait!” I wanted to shout. “How will I know it’s you?” I had a vision of her ringing the doorbell later, and me telling her with absurd satisfaction that a robed woman had already picked up her daughter: “Oh… she just left half an hour ago. I thought it was you she left with. What did she look like? About your height … wearing a black robe.”

I had guessed correctly upon first hearing her name that our little guest was most likely Muslim. From where, I was curious to know. For my daughter, it didn’t matter. “She’s American, mom. From California.” What stood at my door later was an unexpected visual shock. I had never imagined that in India, a country where the majority of Muslim women go about unveiled, most certainly with open faces, that an American mom would show up in a version of the ghost costume one sees on kids during Halloween.

Later that afternoon, the woman returned. Still fully veiled. Still declined to come in for a bit. “Can’t I stay a little longer?” her daughter whined. I figured that was enough evidence for me to release her to this stranger. Besides, it’s not like the woman gave me any more information. I resented her. I resented her throwing at me the responsibility of watching over her daughter while choosing to withhold the courtesy of some familiarity: A handshake. Or a smile that I could actually see. Some measure of warmth that would have separated her from any other person on the street.

She did say that I should send my daughter over some time to their house next time. And I heard myself thank her, even though what I wanted to say was, “You must be kidding!”

“But you said I could go once you met her,” my daughter argued later. “Why can’t I go next week? Her mom said I could.”

“Because I haven’t really met her,” I argued back. “I don’t even know what she looks like. I would never leave you with a stranger, and she’s a stranger.”

“Not fair,” my daughter pronounced. And I thought about that, and somewhat agreed with her. It wasn’t completely fair. I’d let her play at homes of friends whose parents I’d only just met, briefly. But I had some crumbs of friendliness and reassurance that I’d gone back home with. Now, if any of those moms had chosen to stay hidden behind a locked door and talked through the keyhole, I sure wouldn’t have left my child in their company.

That was the problem with this Muslim mother’s veil. She chose to keep me outside the boundary that separates the unfamiliar from the familiar, the trusted from the stranger. And I resented her for expecting me to keep up her pretence that everything was just normal, that we were two parents who had now initiated a friendship that could open the way for our girls to slip between each others’ homes. Would she have left her daughter with me if I’d been standing before her shrouded from head to toe? I hope not.

It became clear, through remarks from my daughter, that her little Muslim friend was also uncomfortable and at least embarrassed about her mother’s fortress of clothing. “M says she’s not Muslim. She’s American.” (Yeah!) And, “She said her mother has to cover herself like that because it’s so dusty in Delhi.” (Pitiful!)

My husband and I are a couple of liberals, both raised in different continents, with different religions. Our family celebrates itself by celebrating our different faiths, and through the trajectory of our travels as expats, have learned to respect belief systems that are different from ours. I believe a woman has a right to choose whether she wears a G-string or a veil. In a place like New Delhi, where men unabashedly leer at and grope females of any age, a veil can provide some measure of safety and relief. But I also belong to that league of moms who believe that we must empower our daughters by kicking out at gropers and glaring back fearlessly at oglers.

The subcontinent is a place where women are expected to walk around with fear and shame because too many women have looked away and cowered for too long. It is up to mothers like me and daughters like mine to tear away at the veils that give generations of Y chromosomes the prerogative to impose virtue on or strip it away from women. So if a woman in a veil expects me to pretend that her hooded face is a naked, smiling, fearless one, I refuse to become her accomplice. I refuse to save her face. My daughter will just have to learn that sometimes people can meet and talk and have their daughters play and laugh, and still be strangers to each other.