Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  This sounded terrible, but I tried to keep my face neutral.

  “What do you want for your daughter?” I asked. “How do you imagine her adulthood?”

  Xiao Li didn’t miss a beat.

  “I want her to go to university,” she said. “I didn’t get to go, and it’s important for me that she should. I don’t really think about the far future, what job she’ll do or where she’ll live. I just want her to go to college.

  “And to stay in the big cities,” she added emphatically, and fleetingly I thought about the graphs I’d seen, the global migration en masse into cities that could hardly hold us.

  “In big cities there are more jobs,” Xiao Li continued. “The quality of life is better. I want her to be in cities.”

  Rui Jie. The girl who was forever elsewhere. The girl who didn’t fit into Xiao Li’s work ambitions or my domestic demands. The girl whose rightful allotment of nurturing care I had rented and whose brush with death had been a household inconvenience. The girl who’d been ill and left behind and shunted from place to place. Now she’d vanished back out into the countryside, locked inside a school at the age of ten.

  I couldn’t ask but, as usual, Xiao Li guessed what I was thinking. She answered with the same phrase she kept using for Rui Jie.

  “I feel that I owe her a lot.” She paused, and then said it again: “I owe her a lot.”

  And in my mind, I repeated: I owe her a lot.

  * * *

  ————

  I wanted to see Xiao Li’s village and meet her parents. I wanted to visit her daughter at the boarding school, which I imagined—informed by cursory brushes with institutional China—as a dreary place of cement slabs and barbed wire.

  We’d been talking on soft furniture with spring sun pouring in the window. Now I had a mouth full of nerves. I asked her to take me to visit her daughter.

  She blinked. The muscles in her jaw twitched.

  “Think about it.” I couldn’t stand the air of suppressed anxiety.

  “Okay.” Her posture slackened. Right away she said she had to go, and I was glad. My mind was crammed with the things she’d said. Our parting was dry and quick; she slipped out the door with dimples and nods. It was easiest to pretend we’d meet again.

  I called her later.

  “I really want to come,” I said. “It will help me to write this book.”

  “But I’m going Saturday morning,” she said. “You’re leaving on Saturday.”

  I was surprised she’d remembered. Maybe her husband had reminded her.

  “That’s okay. I’ll change my flight.”

  There was a long pause.

  “I’ll call you back.”

  I called the translator. I needed an answer. Xiao Li and I had nuance, but no precision.

  “Please try to convince her to let me come,” I said. “Either way, find out for sure. She’s not giving me a direct response.”

  The translator called back a few minutes later.

  “She doesn’t want you to come. She says her uncle died, so it would be weird to come with a foreigner.”

  “Oh.”

  “She said you could come back another time and she’ll take you.”

  “Do you think she means it?” I asked. “Or do you think there would be another excuse?”

  “To tell you the truth,” said the translator slowly. “I’m not sure.”

  * * *

  ————

  So that was it: I wasn’t going to see Xiao Li’s village. I wasn’t even going to see her room in Beijing. She consented to meet me in spaces she associated with my social position, but only she could pass through those portals. She wouldn’t take me back. She’d tell me stories and show me pictures, but she wouldn’t let me see for myself. I could assume only that her shame and pride were too potent for her to relinquish that power.

  Her avoidance activated old impulses. As a journalist, I’d never taken no as anything but a cue for negotiation. My relationship to Xiao Li, and her shy courtesy, could work to my advantage. I could blunder forward, asking and pestering until she agreed. Otherwise, I could simply show up. She didn’t want me there, but she probably wouldn’t turn me back.

  These thoughts and habits belonged to my past life. I hadn’t used them in a long time, and now I was uneasily distracted by their obvious nastiness. My nerves jumped under my skin—I was itching to go, just go, get there and bullshit and figure it out somehow.

  But I couldn’t do it. I had loved Xiao Li, and she had loved my baby. To write about her was to walk an uncertain line between exploitation and truth. If I bullied my way into the village and pushed through to her daughter, Xiao Li would hate the book. Instead of feeling honored, she’d feel humiliated.

  I couldn’t do it, and so it was over. I said good-bye.

  Chapter 28

  I came back to India eager to see Pooja again. China was full of walls and evasions, but Pooja could explain things and wasn’t too proud to let herself be seen. I called her up and arranged to meet her in a market near our neighborhood. Thick summer afternoon, drab sky, listless city. Telling Mary, vaguely, that I had a meeting; wondering if she’d hear through their mutual friends that I was seeing Pooja.

  I didn’t recognize Pooja. I walked right past her in the crowd, even though I was looking for her. She ducked her head, taunting and giggling, into my field of vision, and I stopped and said, “Oh!” and laughed. She was shorter than I’d remembered, and she’d gotten thinner. She’d changed her glasses, again, and gotten a new haircut, again, and a new lipstick color, again. That day she was all swing. Her shirt swung in the wind. Her hair swung as she teased me. She’d pinned a political button to her shirt—raised fist, a slogan for Gorkhaland. She was coming from a street demonstration, and she was weak from hunger strikes.

  Pooja always said, I go from one thing to the next or This thing will finish and another will come. I didn’t understand what she meant until I studied how she moved through the world: Pooja immersed herself wholly in one relationship, one interest, one job, and then she ripped the whole thing apart and started something new. Now she’d gone into politics, and politics had changed her. The excitement of a cause had pulled her spine straight and livened her face.

  “We’ll go to the very end,” she said earnestly. “This time we won’t stop.”

  Because of Pooja, I’d been reading about the Gorkhaland movement. The Nepali-speaking people of Darjeeling have tried for more than a century to gain administrative control over their affairs, with little success. India has thirty-six states and union territories, many organized around language, but there is no state for Nepali speakers. Thick with tea plantations and popular with tourists, Darjeeling is run by the Bengali-dominated capital of Calcutta. Still, the dream persists. There have been strikes, assassinations, and low-level militia violence interspersed with periods of calm.

  That summer it was all boiling. The government had mandated the Bengali language in the schools of Darjeeling, setting off a fresh round of resistance. Banks, schools, and markets were indefinitely shuttered by a general strike; foreign students were evacuated from Darjeeling’s famed boarding schools; street clashes flared; tea leaves rotted on the bushes. In Delhi, Pooja and her friends starved and marched and shouted slogans in protests.

  “Why does it matter, whether or not you have a state?” I was trying to understand whether statehood offered concrete benefits or if this was an abstract communal desire.

  “Because then we’ll have someone who is taking care of us. We’ll have our own government,” Pooja said. “You see how we’re treated.”

  I thought I knew what she meant: Pooja often complained that Nepalis were mocked by other Indians as “chinky” and dismissed as drunks and prostitutes. I couldn’t see how a new administration would undo ugly ethnic stereotypes, but Pooja was convinced that statehood would boos
t her community’s status. She also believed a state would have changed her personal trajectory.

  “There would have been so many jobs and opportunities,” she said. “I wouldn’t have had to leave my son like that. I would have stayed with my family.”

  The strange thing was that, in spite of her conviction, she was hopeless. She was sure the strike would fail, and that statehood would not be granted. The hunger, the inconvenience, the shuttered schools, the violence—it was all in vain. And yet she did it; she wanted to do it. Eagerly she gave her summer over to a lost cause.

  “They go into hiding,” she grumbled about the party leadership. “How many times did Gandhi and Mandela go to prison? You have to face your fate. Hiding, you don’t get anything.”

  “You should be the leader.” I meant it.

  “If I talk like this, they’ll kill me.” She shrugged. “Everybody worships those party leaders.”

  That was the same day I asked to include her in my book. She accepted smoothly and naturally, like she’d scooped up a fallen apple without breaking stride. We were sitting in a bar that smelled of sour beer and peanut shells. A soccer game bleated on television. Nothing shifted between us with the revelation that she would be a character in my book. Only knowledge slid, smooth and thin as water.

  “How’s Aryan?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. That’s the problem. With this strike, they shut down the networks in Darjeeling.”

  “The government?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I can’t reach my father or my son. I don’t know if they’re all right. It’s making me crazy.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’m going,” she said, as if it were nothing.

  “What? What about your job?”

  “Ricky will do it.”

  “Your bosses don’t mind?”

  “They don’t mind.”

  “She’s not working now?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “When?”

  “I have to see the tickets. Maybe Wednesday, Thursday…”

  “Can I go with you?”

  “I don’t mind, ma’am, but for you it might be uncomfortable.”

  “Why?”

  “Like, I’ll take the train to Siliguri, but you should go to Darjeeling. You want to see my house, right? You want to see the village and my family?”

  Pooja knew exactly what I needed. Of course she did. A hop of happiness in my ribs.

  “Right. Yes.”

  “But to Darjeeling the transport is closed. So maybe my aunt can help me go in an ambulance. Or maybe I have to walk at night. It’s like that—”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t know if it’s safe.”

  “I don’t mind. I mean—unless it makes it more dangerous for you—”

  “It’s not like that, for me I don’t care—”

  Back and forth, polite and deferential. Eventually we agreed that Pooja would go alone. Maybe the strike would end, or maybe she’d find a way for us to travel together. Otherwise we’d hike together into the mountains. We had the beginnings of a plan.

  She’d leave in a few days. I drove out to Gurgaon to interview her before she left. Darkness was clotting the sky as I rode south over roads buried by monsoon floods, past buildings dark with blackouts. People stood up to their ankles in the brooks of the roadsides, not bothering to hide from the rain. I was headed to Gurgaon, the urban appendage where the daydreams of India’s elite harden into steel and concrete and corporate logos. Delhi is low to earth and falling apart. Gurgaon is ambitious unto the heavens.

  Pooja and her sister were waiting for me outside the compound where Pooja worked. I was apprehensive about Ricky, but she grinned and called, “Hi, ma’am,” as she climbed into the front seat. All was forgiven, then. We drove to the mall while the sky spat down.

  In a dim brewpub the sisters ordered beer and jostled to tell their story, interrupting and passing looks. They were obviously pleased to have a chance to discuss their quarrelsome, boisterous, love-soaked, unlucky family. Typing notes on my laptop, I made no effort to organize the conversation. I wanted to see where they’d go on their own; to notice what they’d repeat and avoid.

  The first thing Pooja said: “My dad and my mom were in love.”

  They were about to reveal the desperate cash poverty that had stalked their family for decades, but they wanted me first to understand that their mother had accepted these material deprivations in the service of her love. Their mother had grown up rich and their father was poor, and she’d married him although her parents cast her out and moved away from the village in shame. She raised her daughters to believe she never regretted this choice for a moment, and that theirs was a dignified poverty because it was freely chosen over a birthright of privilege.

  “She was always happy with my dad,” Pooja said. “She said, ‘Whatever I did, I loved him.’ ”

  The daughters thrilled to this story. Love was their first point of pride. My dad and my mom were in love.

  Next, they boasted about their father. He fought in the war with Bangladesh. He broke his nose boxing. He was a driver for the Soviet consulate in Calcutta.

  “Our dad got medals,” Pooja said. “When he drinks, he tells stories about the war and how he survived.”

  “Our father will never tell his age,” Ricky interjected. “He’s been saying he’s sixty-five for ten years.” The sisters fell together, helpless with laughter.

  I still remembered the explanation Pooja had given from the start: She’d run away with a man when she was still a girl. Everything else flowed from this original flight.

  “Tell me about that,” I said.

  Ricky shut up and watched Pooja, startled eyes spiked with mascara. At the time of Pooja’s undoing, Ricky was still a child. Now Pooja talked alone: She was a schoolgirl when she caught the attention of a village man named Babin. He wrote her a love letter, which she ignored. One day the man’s sister waylaid Pooja as she walked home from a school picnic. Babin is waiting for you, the sister said. And so Pooja went to the man’s house. She was fifteen years old.

  “For two hours we sat. He didn’t talk and I didn’t talk,” said Pooja. “There was some connection.”

  The randomness of this story made it familiar to me. Happenings slip and snarl illogically in this world; we do things we can’t explain. I could imagine Pooja sitting with a strange man in the gathering darkness, speechless and thrumming with hormones. Night came too quickly, and Pooja wanted to go home. Babin offered to walk her, but instead he took her to a relative’s house and raped her.

  That she was raped is a legal and objective truth, but Pooja doesn’t see it that way. In her mind, she ran away with Babin. For Pooja it was not a question of consent—which, in her mind, she gave—but of permanence. In the hills, sex was marriage, and marriage was eternal. But she was so naive she didn’t understand, at first, that the intercourse she’d experienced was the act that made you married.

  “We were together three days. At first I didn’t even know that I was married. Then I understood that ‘Okay, now he’s going to be my husband,’ ” Pooja said. “Now there was no point in going back.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Ricky chortled.

  “You know, everyone in the village would talk,” Pooja said.

  “Were you scared?”

  “I was a little bit scared and shy. I wasn’t crying, but I was scared. ‘I can’t go back home.’ That feeling was there.”

  “Mommy was crying so much,” Ricky said suddenly.

  “You remember?”

  “I remember. Dad came, and he was crying, too.”

  “My father came home from Calcutta,” Pooja explained.

  “Why?”

  “Because I was an underage minor,” Pooja said. “He called the
police.”

  The more I heard about Pooja’s father, the more I liked him.

  “Did they find you?”

  “The police didn’t, no,” Pooja said. “But my father did.”

  “How?”

  “Through some sources. You know, people are related. People talk.”

  “Were you still in the village?”

  “No, by then we were at the border. We were about to go to Nepal so nobody would find us. His brother gave us money. And then my dad showed up.”

  “Oh God. What happened?”

  “My dad gave me one tight slap and said, ‘Will you come?’ He said, ‘Are you coming home?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ ”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “What was in your mind?”

  “I don’t know if I really understood what was happening.”

  I tried to remember being fifteen. The memories were woolly, as if years passed when I was half asleep or too cold to think straight. Adolescence was a fever pressure that thinned the lights and watered down thought. Feeling took over, unfamiliar emotions that blew plum dark over the sky like storm clouds. The moods and sensations, tumbling and flowing, making everything wild. To get married in that state—my God!

  Pooja’s father took her to Calcutta for a month, hoping she’d forget Babin. Finally he brought her back to the village with a stern warning: “He said, ‘You have to study, study, study. That’s your job. You don’t have to look here, there, or anywhere.’ ”

  Pooja tried, and her parents tried, but the extended family took no pity on her. Her grandmother led the charge, insisting noisily and publicly that Pooja was married and had therefore lost her place in the family. On the festival of Dussehra, Pooja approached the matriarch with the rest of her cousins, hoping for the blessing of a daub of rice paste on her forehead. “No,” her grandmother said, rebuffing her in front of everybody. “She no longer belongs to our family.”

  “I was a shame on the family. I was the only one who ran away like that,” Pooja said. “My cousins never used to speak to me nicely.”