by Jo Piazza
When the British first came to Meghalaya in the early nineteenth century, they nicknamed the area the Scotland of the East for its heavy rainfall, stately pines, gurgling brooks, and lush green rolling hills. While most of India has remained Hindi and the nearby Bangladeshi villages are Muslim, during the British colonization of the country, many members of the Meghalayan tribes converted to Christianity.
Today, statues of Jesus and Mary dot the undulating hills. Brightly colored homes painted yellow, orange, red, green, and robin’s egg blue are terraced along the palm trees, bamboo, lush green jackfruit, and red hyacinth bushes. Sal trees, which produce some of the hardest wood in the world, so tough you can’t put a nail through it, stretch their branches high into the sky. These hardy trees reminded me of the women who lived here—tough as nails.
I drove into the bustling capital, where I was supposed to meet up with a translator named Sukher, a petite, soft-spoken, and meek man in his twenties. His shoulders curled into his body in a way that made him take up even less space.
“Of course the men just accept that the women have power here. That’s just the way it is,” he told me very matter-of-factly in a voice as low as a whisper. “It’s important to listen to my wife. She makes good decisions.” His wife is the second daughter in the family, but not the youngest. This means that she doesn’t stand to inherit any of the family’s property. I kept asking why it was the youngest and not the eldest daughter who inherited. The answer makes a lot of sense. The youngest daughter will be around the longest, so she’ll be able to use the family property and money to take care of her parents and then the older siblings as they age.
Sukher had recently moved into his wife’s ancestral home in a neighboring village called Mawlynnong and he commuted into Shillong each day to work as a translator and tour guide. He and his wife had been arguing because Sukher wanted to move closer to the city to make his commute for work easier, but his wife was adamant about not leaving their village. In the end, she won.
Sukher dutifully led me into Shillong’s Khasi market, which was tucked down a dank, narrow alleyway, past a series of winding side streets, dark tea shops, and counters for placing bets on professional archery. They love professional archery in Shillong, and skilled archers are the equivalent of NFL football players in the United States or soccer stars in Europe. The Khasi market is a series of never-ending stalls where the women sell everything from betel nuts and banana leaves to tobacco and fancy dresses for less than five American dollars. Elsewhere in India the men control the markets, but here the women do the buying and the selling. The only men I saw sat quietly in the backs of the shops, sometimes making change, feeding a baby, or running an errand for their female boss.
I struck up a conversation with a young woman from the Jaintia tribe named Daphi, the proprietor of a small dress shop. The shop had been passed down through the women of her family for three generations. A photograph of her deceased mother hung above the counter, gazing down at her daughter with pride. Her mother’s younger sister owned the dress shop across the way, and they teased one another about which stall had the prettier dresses and better deals.
“My mother made all of the decisions for our family herself,” Daphi told me. “When I get married, I will be the one to make the big decisions. This is just the way our culture is.” Daphi was the youngest daughter in a family of two girls, which meant that ownership of the store went to her when her mother passed. “It’s a lot of responsibility,” she explained. “But I hope to find a husband to share it with me.”
“To share it with me” was an interesting choice of words. I asked Daphi if she thought that being the owner of her shop would present problems in her future relationship.
“I don’t think so. I think that I will always consult my husband and we will have discussions about all of our decisions. I saw my mother do that and my female relatives do that. We involve the men. Why wouldn’t we?”
I thanked Daphi for being so honest and bought two colorful Indian nightgowns from her and one fancy child’s dress from her aunt across the street.
Down the alleyway I ran into a woman named Diana standing barefoot in front of tall bins of betel nuts, wearing the traditional Khasi checked kyrshah, or apron. Her hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail revealing a high, regal forehead.
She told me she was forty-two years old and that she’d been married for more than twenty years. She and her husband had three boys. She’d love to have a girl who could inherit, but she was too tired to keep trying. Instead, her sons would be the heirs when she and her husband passed away.
Diana laughed when I asked about the merits of living in a matrilineal society.
“This is the best place in the world to live. In other places it is hard to be a woman,” she told me, her positive pride in her culture evident in her thrown-back shoulders and expanded chest. “We are a very special people, you know.” Her eyes danced with mischief. “Obviously it’s the women who have the power. Doesn’t that make sense?” she said and smiled, flecks of betel nut caught in her teeth. “I never do anything at home. My husband does the cooking, the cleaning, everything. But he does that because he likes to do that. You have to have an understanding in marriage. Marriage is a compromise. If he needs help, then I help him.” She leaned in close to me. “You have to give the men some understanding. You work hard to understand each other, but the men, they need it more.”
The Khasi and Jaintia women control the money and the property, and yet every woman I met talked about understanding and compromise. They told me it wasn’t their place to force their husband to do things. They stressed that no matter who controls a family’s wealth, the most important thing in a marriage is an understanding of equality between the two partners, compromise.
Of course, this matrilineal world wasn’t a utopia. The women of Meghalaya had their own special breed of marital woes.
I soon learned that many in the younger generation of both men and women no longer consider their matrilineal customs to be as sacrosanct as they’ve been for centuries.
Even my guide, Sukher, wasn’t sure if he would carry on the traditions of inheritance. “I hope that we have one girl and one boy child and we will split their inheritance between them equally,” he told me. He did add: “As long as that’s what my wife wants to do.”
There are other, more serious, downsides.
“Can you imagine the shock of leaving your family home and suddenly becoming a nobody in your mother-in-law’s house?” Kaith Pariat, a Khasi male suffragist, said in an interview with the Guardian in 2011. “She gives the orders and you become a good-for-nothing servant. Men are not even entitled to take part in family gatherings. The husband is up against a whole clan of people: his wife, his mother-in-law, and his children.” Pariat may have been exaggerating to prove his point, or maybe conditions for men have improved in the five years since he spoke to the newspaper. During my time in Shillong, I didn’t meet any men who were particularly abused or women who treated them like dogs. The men I met had jobs outside of the home, and their wives seemed to treat them with kindness and fairness. Even Diana, who told me that her husband did all of the housework, claimed he did it only because he liked doing it.
One of the biggest problems for the Khasi and Jaintia matrilineal tradition is modern mass communication. Exposure to the Internet and satellite television has shown the Khasi and Jaintian men that in other parts of the world the men are not considered second-class citizens, in fact just the opposite. They’ve realized that men rule most of the world. Why should they stay in the one place where women are valued more highly than men?
“The men have stopped sticking around,” Patricia Mukhim, one of the top editors at the daily newspaper the Shillong Times and an outspoken researcher of matrilineal societies, explained when I visited her in her busy office high in the hills. Patricia has three children from three different men.
“They say they feel like they are just breeding bulls with no claim on t
heir own children, and it makes it easier for them to leave. They leave their wives and their children and they never come back.”
Nick was right, as usual. This matrilineal society was not as idyllic as I’d imagined. But if I’d learned anything from talking about marriage around the world, from experiencing the ups and downs of my own first year of matrimony, it was that no one system for long-term partnership offers all of the answers.
Yet even though the matrilineal tribes of Meghalaya had their problems, it was the women’s insistence on the importance of fairness and understanding in a marriage that stuck with me on my long journey back to California. Women in America have been fighting for equality for more than a century. We’ve come a long way from the housewives of my grandma’s generation. But here was a society where women were born not only equal but with more privileges than men, and the system was still flawed. The women wanted to involve their husbands in the decision making. They seemed to crave compromise and fairness, and yet some of the men still wanted out.
My biggest takeaway from Meghalaya was that my issues with money and control were exactly that—my issues. Nick never made me feel less important because I stopped making as much money. I did that to myself, and it was time to get over it.
We were partners in this marriage and money was going to come and go. How we handled that together would be the only constant.
I placed a betel nut in my mouth. I’d bought a sack of them from Diana, and I still wasn’t used to the way the nut’s bitterness clung to the sides of my tongue, but I liked the way it stained my lips a reddish orange. As I rolled it between my lips, trying to soften the tough meat in my mouth, I mulled this one question over in my mind: Was a true marriage of equals, a sharing of both power and responsibility, a possibility anywhere in the world?
We’ve begun to raise daughters more like sons…but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.
—GLORIA STEINEM
“Excuse me. Pardon me. Excuse me. Pardon me.” I maintained an unfailingly polite tone as I searched for Nick in a coed Scandinavian sauna filled with old naked Swedish men.
“So sorry. Didn’t mean to touch you. Oh, thank you for clearing a space for me.” Once seated on the end of a warm cedar bench, I searched the crowd for my husband’s face without focusing too hard on any one part of any body in particular.
Meeting in a coed sauna seemed like such a good idea twenty minutes earlier, when Nick and I parted ways at the entrance of the Ribersborgs bathhouse in Malmö, a vibrant city on the southern coast of Sweden. The plan was to take separate swims in the freezing near-arctic waters of the Øresund, the strait in between the Baltic and North Seas, then meet here in the sauna, the one place in the bathhouse where men and women were allowed to hang out together.
On the women’s side the bathing decks had been filled with naked women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, reading, laughing, solving sudoku puzzles. One woman sloppily ate an ice cream sandwich, the vanilla dribbling down her fleshy belly. I couldn’t help but stare. How often do Americans see normal women’s naked bodies out in the open? There were giant breasts and tiny breasts, gumdrop nipples and flat nipples with the circumference of ripe plums. There were taut bellies and big bellies and bellies that could balance a martini (yes, I saw a woman with a martini on her belly).
I’d forced myself to dive into the icy sea, howling as I hit the water. It poured into my mouth and tasted like rusted pennies.
Be a polar bear. You’re a fucking polar bear, I’d lied to myself as I lost feeling all along the left side of my body.
I fled the sea for the warmth of the sauna, assuming Nick would do the same. But each time the door on the men’s side opened, another naked human who was not my husband strode into the room, forcing the bathers seated on the sauna’s narrow blond-wood benches to grow even more familiar.
The Swedes could tell I was American, not by my accent or lack of pubic hair but because of how I strategically covered my body with my towel as I walked around the bathhouse and from the way I curled my elbows inward to protect my breasts and nipples. I struck up a conversation with the only other women in the sauna, two Swedes about my age who giggled at my shyness. I told them I was meeting my husband in the sauna. They informed me, with no small amount of glee, that they’d left their husbands at home with their babies.
“It’s nice of them to babysit,” I said. The pair gave me a strange look. I repeated it more slowly and apologized that I tended to speak English too quickly, but they shook their heads.
“Babysit?” the first one said. “He isn’t babysitting. He’s just…How do I say it in English? Being a father. Parenting.”
The second chimed in. “My husband is used to it. He’s the one who stays home with our kids. I went back to work right away.” The two women proceeded to explain their country’s parental leave policies to me. In Sweden the government pays for both men and women to take parental leave after having a child. Men are even applauded for taking time off in lieu of their wives.
Before I could ask too many questions, Nick strode into the sauna, towel-less, confident, invigorated. He was keenly self-assured as he cut through the scrum of pasty flesh.
“Where were you?” I whispered. “I’ve been in here for half an hour. I’m quite pruney.”
“Didn’t you jump in the water?” he said, confused about why I’d been there so long.
I nodded. “Of course I did. As quickly as possible.”
“Didn’t you swim all the way to the buoy?” he asked. “It gets really choppy out there but it feels incredible. How freeing is this? No one cares that you’re naked. No one even looks at you. I could do this every day. Maybe we could live here.”
This was the fifth country Nick had thought we could happily settle in. “Not the worst idea. It would be a damn good place to have a baby, that’s for sure,” I said, still shivering, disappointed with myself for not being more polar bear–like.
Nick surveyed the crowd in the sauna, which was mainly composed of my new girlfriends and very old men talking about the weather. He lowered his voice.
“I don’t think this is that kind of bathhouse.”
What I was trying to say in the sauna is that Sweden is a great place to raise a baby, for both men and women, in stark contrast to the States, where it is becoming more and more difficult and expensive for most couples to raise children.
Nick and I had been going back and forth with my team of doctors about our options for having kids. None of them saw any reason we shouldn’t try to have kids naturally. They assured us that if the child carried the muscular dystrophy gene (and there was a 50 percent chance of that), he or she wouldn’t show symptoms until midlife. Like me. There was no chance of childhood muscular dystrophy or any other complications associated with muscular dystrophy.
Still, as a mother you want your child to come into the world with every possible advantage. Why would you choose to start their life at a disadvantage? But how do you stack the odds in your kid’s favor? We could use a donor egg. We could adopt. None of these options came without their own risks. There are so many things that can go wrong when you decide to have a child. In our case, we just happened to know one possibility.
I loved everything about my life, even the shitty parts of it. I’d lived an incredible thirty-five years with my messed-up genes. Yes, the future was scary, but it was also promising and filled with the possibility of medical advances that could halt the progress of my own disease and eradicate it in a child.
Toward the end of my trip in India I’d visited an ayurvedic doctor at the Ananda wellness center in the foothills of the Himalayas.
I told him about the muscular dystrophy and he laughed.
“There are no genetic conditions until they appear. Live your life, girl,” he counseled in the same breath in which he told me to stop eating spicy foods, dairy and to try to get more sleep. All I could do was nod and ignore the fact that he was talking to me like he was Beyoncé.
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But it wasn’t just my genetics that had me worried about having a baby. There was everything else—the tumultuous world we live in, one plagued by terror attacks, overpopulation, economic uncertainty, and reality television.
There was also the fact that having a baby would effectively end our marriage as we knew it.
I’d recently read in the Wall Street Journal that “a couple’s satisfaction with their marriage takes a nose dive after the first child is born. Sleepless nights and fights over whose turn it is to change diapers can leach the fun out of a relationship….About two-thirds of couples see the quality of their relationship drop within three years of the birth of a child, according to data from the Relationship Research Institute in Seattle….A key source of conflict among new parents is dividing up—and keeping score of—who does what for the baby and the household.”
A few weeks earlier, back in the States, I’d had this conversation with a girlfriend who recently went on maternity leave:
“Want to blow up your life? Do you want to throw a grenade into your marriage and fucking blow it up?” I briefly wondered if she knew this was a reference to a line from Nora Ephron’s Heartburn or if every new mother likened procreation to armed conflict.
“No. I don’t.” I was afraid of her at this point. It didn’t matter. She was going to tell me.
“Have kids,” she said and took a slug of wine that was actually more of a gulp that finished the glass.
“I don’t care how good your marriage is. Having a kid will change everything,” she cackled and motioned for the waiter to bring one more glass of wine and the check at the same time so she could get back to her husband who insisted both that his time with their children be called babysitting and that he receive a blow job in return for his sacrifice.
I’ve always considered Nick and myself equal partners in our marriage. He does laundry better than I do and sweeps the floors every single day. He doesn’t mind running errands and even loves visiting Target, where he’s wildly amused by the contraption that wheels the shopping carts up the escalator.