Walking Towards Ourselves

by Catriona Mitchell

  As he comes up to her, grinning, an hour later, dressed in stylish jeans and a shiny t-shirt she hasn’t seen before, holding out a strip of the tablets she had asked for to ease the headache she feels coming on from the rattling bus, Manjula thinks again about how young he is. She’s two years older and is sometimes convinced he’s a child. She gives him the magazines, and he asks why she’d been crying. She hadn’t told him about the baby being sent away; he guessed from her voice on the phone. They chat till the next bus takes off; she waves from the dirt-clouded window.

  Soon enough, Manjula passes the landmarks that signal she is nearing home. The bus speeds past the unpaved lane leading to the village she was sent to at the age of five, to live with a maternal aunt and her family so she could be near the Anganwadi playschool1 and then the free government school. Sidamma paid for her daughter’s requirements with the meagre money she made from her fields and from raising pigs to sell for meat. Ten minutes later the bus is at her former high school; its large playground and immaculately painted buildings were a wonderful contrast to the dismal structures she’d known as school till then. She was an average but always interested student at school and then through junior college in another nearby town. Back home after this, she was roped in by a local N.G.O. to tutor village girls who’d stopped going to school. The dropout rate was high among tribals, and the N.G.O. staff felt that achievers such as Manjula could inspire the girls to go back. She and a friend set up classes at the offices of the N.G.O. for a few months. Noticing the girls’ motivation, the friendly head of the organisation offered to fund their further education, advising them on suitable courses of study and helping with admissions. Both girls then went off to the port city of Mangalore, the furthest from home they had been till then. Manjula joined an undergraduate course in social work.

  Mangalore was a make-or-break experience for the twenty-year-old. English as a medium of instruction baffled her; the food at the hostel was never enough; she got malaria thrice; she was failing exams; and for each of these crises she had no one to turn to but friends grappling with similar problems. But by the time she enrolled for a Master’s in social work the experience had toughened her. She passed with distinction.

  It was not at college that she really learned to speak English, though. That happened when she interned one summer at another N.G.O., run by Tamil Christian brothers, based in the state capital, Bangalore. Many of the country’s tribals lived off the land, either on forest produce or cultivation, and had done so traditionally, but they did not have legal rights, nor were they familiar with this newfangled concept of ownership, which made them highly vulnerable to exploitation. To remedy this, the Indian Parliament passed the Forest Rights Act 2006. The N.G.O. put their weight behind raising awareness about the Act and helping tribal families cut a swathe through the bureaucracy to get title deeds to their land. Manjula got absorbed in the cause as well, and among the people she met in Bangalore was a visiting resource person who’d speak to her only in English. She was soon answering in the language. Later, after finishing her Master’s, she returned to work at the N.G.O. for a couple of years at what became her first job.

  Manjula gets off the bus, and flags down a rickshaw for the four-kilometre ride to the turn-off for her village. The day is ending by the time she pays the driver, and the way home is a kilometre and a half of dirt path through paddy fields. Months of rain have rendered it a chocolatey mud slick but Manjula, one hand lifting her salwar to keep the ends dry, the other clutching her bags of gifts, makes her way with élan. She stops briefly to consider the enormous, fresh footprints of a wild elephant in the mushy grass. Her village and the surrounding ones happen to be within the confines of a government-designated national park. Across one field she can see a tree house that village men have built to stay nights and watch for hostile animals, sounding an alarm if they spot any. She knows people who have been mauled by elephants; her mother once had one staring her down in her backyard. Recently, workers from the forest department dug a deep trench behind the house to prevent future encounters.

  Just as the final dregs of watery light in the wide open sky are extinguished, Manjula walks through a brood of chickens and one shrieking turkey to a mud hut with a sloping roof, where two women are waiting on the verandah. She is home.

  The nights are extraordinarily silent and black here, punctuated only by the distant explosions of firecrackers meant to scare off elephants and, nearer, the sudden, frightened bleating of the goats her mother rears. As for light, the forest department is opposed to putting in electricity lines out of consideration for the wildlife. A few years ago, a government scheme allowed for the installation of solar-charged lampposts in some houses. Manjula’s family has one in the backyard now, lighting up their small patch of coffee bushes, the cane ramp on which the chickens have gone to sleep, the guava, passion fruit and coconut trees and the exterior of her sister’s house, which is next door. Inside, they move around with the help of small kerosene oil tapers. Manjula is relaxed after a bath; the hot water is always simmering on the wood fire in their little bathroom. There is no toilet, though; they head to the fields for that.

  After a dinner of rice and sambar – pulses, soy flakes and potatoes thick in a spicy stew – eaten sitting cross-legged on the bare floor, Manjula, her mother Sidamma, her older sister, whom she calls Akka, and her nephew Tilaka, are sitting on the verandah trying to catch, on a patchy FM signal coming through Tilaka’s mobile phone, the sermon of a guru Sidamma visited in town that afternoon, being broadcast now.

  ‘What did he talk about?’ Manjula asks her mother.

  ‘If you’re thinking the wrong thoughts,’ Sidamma answers, ‘he’ll set them right.’

  She listens intently to the crackle from the mobile phone. She is a dignified woman of fifty-six, with a grave, lined, beautiful face, who has studied till class five and can read and write, has spent most of her adult life working the land and providing for her children, and who does not brood despite her various tragedies. Husband dead when she was not yet thirty; five of her seven children dead of various illnesses, mostly unidentified.

  Manjula goes in and brings out the new cardigan to show off again, and her family looks at it in the near-dark with wordless approbation. Sidamma says she’d like to go listen to the guru again, he’s a good one. The paddy transplanting is done, so she’s a little freer, but getting into town and back before nightfall is always hard.

  ‘There’s no road, that’s the problem,’ she says, in the same level voice in which she has expressed this woe so many times before.

  ‘A road will make you lazy,’ Manjula teases her mother. ‘Just as the provisions you’re getting from the I.T.D.P. will.’

  Manjula worries about laziness just as much as she knows that they need both a road and, for six lean monsoon months each year, the limited amounts of free rice, sugar, cooking oil, eggs, soy flakes and so on that tribal families get, thanks to recent government largesse in the form of the Integrated Tribal Development Programme. She is glad about the lamppost, however, and especially grateful for the battery box at its base. They charge their phones here, as do their neighbours. Earlier they’d have to walk through fields and mud to the main road where a little grocery store did it for them at ten rupees a shot.

  She passes around the box of sweets, while Tilaka dispenses with the packet of biscuits. He is studying for a B.A. in business administration and hopes to do an M.B.A. after that; Manjula asks him how his English is progressing and he says it’s awful, too shy to try it on his fluent aunt.

  They turn in early, as everyone in the village does. Manjula shares her mother’s bed and Sidamma is snoring richly in seconds while she herself does not take long to arrive at the border of sleep. If there are things that cut into her as her mind roves over the day – the raped child’s clouded future, the rejected baby growing up unloved – there is also much to cherish: the tender shoots of bamboo her sister has gathered from the forest, which she will carry back with
her to cook in a curry; the delicious raw guavas she’ll bite into tomorrow; her mother’s imperious turkey, which will follow her everywhere as she helps with tasks around the house; and most of all just this – a roof over her head, a warm blanket, the life she and her family have built, which is very precious and very hard-won.

  * * *

  1. Anganwadis are government-sponsored childcare centres.

  BEYOND MEMORIES

  SALMA

  Translated from Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman

  Unfettered

  The monkey,

  sitting placidly

  on the tiled overhang

  with her sagging, distended

  belly and scratching

  her head, isn’t at all

  nervous about having

  to find her own food,

  about the safety

  of the burden in her womb,

  or even about

  whose child it might be.

  1. My father

  My father’s first wife had three girl children. Every time she gave birth to a girl, my father would rage at her for increasing his burden, for not giving him a male heir.

  They were illiterate people from a small village who did not understand the scientific truth that it was the X or Y chromosome in the father’s sperm that determined the sex of a child. That simple village girl was now carrying her fourth pregnancy with a sense of dread.

  During the pregnancy, her husband frequently threatened to divorce her by talaq1 if this one also turned out to be a girl. When she went into labour, she was gripped by anxiety. On her journey to the hospital, she moaned to the female relative who was accompanying her, ‘This one has to be a boy.’ Minutes later, she delivered the child – right there, inside the car on the way to the hospital.

  She eagerly asked the relative about the sex of the baby. This one, too, was a girl. Still dazed by the pain of childbirth, the poor woman fainted, and she expired soon after. A few minutes after the mother’s death, the fourth girl child, too, breathed her last.

  My father never experienced a moment’s guilt that his threats had ended his wife’s life. He got married again – to my mother this time.

  When my mother became pregnant for the first time, she too faced the same pressure. Throughout her pregnancy, he told her this one had to be a boy, or else she would be packed off to her parents’ house.

  I was the child she delivered: a girl. My father refused to visit his wife and her newborn child, and made the following demand: the wife must come back alone. The girl child was not wanted.

  My mother took me to her mother’s village and, after leaving me in her parents’ care, returned to her husband’s village.

  2. Preparing for marriage

  While I was away, my mother delivered a son, my younger brother. My father was so pleased at finally having a male heir that he agreed to have me back at his house. So, when I was five years old, I was snatched from the narrow, dusty streets of that tiny village and taken by my uncles to my father’s village in order to start school.

  I would be going to school until ninth standard. This was the maximum educational level of most Muslim girls in our village, for it was during ninth standard, at the age of thirteen, that girls got their first period.

  At that point, a girl’s life changed instantly. She had to adopt an absurd way of life, in which she never saw the face of any man or learned about events in the outside world. She would be confined to her house, huddling inside the inner rooms to avoid even the smallest ray of light from outside, preserving her beauty for a faceless stranger whom she would marry someday. During this time, she was taught all of the skills necessary for married life and for looking after a family, such as how to cook and clean. Depending on the girl’s family background and economic status, she may have to wait only a couple of years before being married off; others waited for many years.

  With great trepidation in my heart, I watched my sisters and other girls in my village go through this ritual, wondering how they were able to accept married life without protest. And I wondered when my turn was going to arrive, realising at the same time that I couldn’t reject the system myself.

  3. The library and the cinema

  A few weeks before I turned twelve, a small library opened on the way to my school. I was thrilled; I saw it as the greatest blessing I had received in my life thus far. Situated halfway between my home and the school, the library became a refuge in the hours after school. I spent all of my leisure hours there, indulging my passion for reading.

  One Saturday morning, during the school holidays after our half-yearly exams in the ninth standard, I was sitting in the library with a few other girls, immersed in books. Music from the cinema, just ten feet away from the library, signalled that the matinee film was about to begin. We saw the crowd swarming outside the theatre and all of a sudden, we were struck by a foolhardy impulse. Could we go to the cinema without seeking permission from our mothers? Even if we asked, would permission be granted? We decided to do it, without telling our mothers or anyone at home.

  Once the movie started, the doors closed and our group of four was stranded in a theatre full of men, with no other female members in the audience. We sat through the entire film with our heads in our laps, our eyes closed, and our bodies shrivelling from shame. When I timidly returned home that evening, I was ordered to stop going to school, from the next day. In fact, from then on, I wasn’t allowed to leave the house at all. That day, I learned that a girl who watched a forbidden film brought ignominy upon her whole family. It was a rule reserved solely for women. No such restrictions were placed on my brother, who had watched the same film with us.

  4. A poet is born

  It was during that phase of my life, when I was engulfed by solitude, that I began to write poems to transcribe my feelings.

  My poems were full of questions and critiques about how the lone difference of gender was used to strangle women. Rather than expressing a young woman’s typical feelings of joy and celebration, my poems spoke of grief and loneliness. I started writing them on postcards and, with the help of a male cousin, sending them to publishers whose addresses I found in the magazines I had read. Eventually Little Magazine published my poem En Swasam (Breathing).

  When the postman delivered the magazine to my home, it created a furore within my family and my village.

  My work was condemned for two reasons. First, a Muslim woman who had to keep her identity hidden and lead a cloistered life inside her home was expressing herself through poetry. Second, the poems were critical of our narrow, closed society.

  Instead of feeling anger or sadness about the savage comments people made about me, I felt a profound joy from knowing that my poems could shake up my society, at least to a small extent.

  Breathing

  Everything happens so quickly

  before I can feel it.

  I keep trying to feel something

  before it’s too late.

  It all happens in my name

  without me being there.

  Flowers, people,

  the world is so much bigger than me.

  Should I carry on breathing

  If I’m not really here?

  (Translated from Tamil by Hari Rajaledchumy)

  5. Betrothal

  During this time, I was betrothed to a boy from my village. My future in-laws stood before me and demanded that I promise to never write again. It was only then that I realised that just as a woman was denied the outside world, she was also denied the activities that could give her freedom, recognition and an identity.

  I suggested that we call off the wedding.

  The anger and scorn of my in-laws made me realise that they were not used to a girl talking back to them.

  My opposition to the marriage plunged my parents into profound anguish and sorrow, but I didn’t want other people to interfere with my journey towards making a place for myself in the world. I believed that the survival of my individuality and
identity, at least as a speck in this vast world, was far more important than anything else – and it is this belief alone that brought me to where I am today.

  The following year, I was made to go ahead with the wedding. After hiding within the lime-coated walls of my parents’ home for several years, I moved to my husband’s family house on a neighbouring street and was enclosed by brand new walls, freshly coated with paint.

  A marital relationship is more than just migration to a new home; it is a site where the man and his family can wield maximum authority over a woman. It was then that I began to feel and experience the full force of that authority, which far exceeded what had been my understanding until then.