The new house, comprising a single room, was twelve feet long and twelve feet wide. They couldn’t make a larger house. The government had given them ten thousand rupees after Aila to rebuild their home. It was impossible to build a house with that kind of money. Many of the people in the village had spent it on food. Taramoni had kept the money safe, without letting anyone use it to buy anything else.
‘If you did build a house, why couldn’t you have made it a little sturdier, Taramoni?’ I asked her gently.
‘What kind of sturdy house are you talking about? The paddy harvest was ruined completely – the rice fields were under salt water for a month. The plants just stood there and died. It’s Durga Pujo time, and we have neither rice nor hay at home. What am I supposed to make the roof with? We cannot wedge in wooden planks – this is the Sundarbans. The police will despatch us to Alipur Jail if we so much as touch the trees. So all we were left with was bamboo, and these polythene sheets the government gave us.’
It wasn’t just the makeshift house and the daily task of transporting water that Taramoni had to worry about. No plants were growing in Mohanpur. The plants and trees around most people’s houses had been killed by the salt water. Winter crops had been sown on more than half the land, but the crops, too, had been spoilt by the salt water standing in the fields after breaking through the embankment. The rural economy had collapsed in the absence of a harvest. There was no hay, no work on winnowing. The self-reliant team of women who used to trade in rice had no work either. Most worryingly, farmers had no seeds to plant for the next season.
Wives and daughters like Taramoni were carrying the burden of the entire family. Now they had to buy all their vegetables, which posed a new crisis. Earlier, small farmers used to get rice for their families every year while their kitchen gardens yielded vegetables like drumsticks, eggplant, gourd, pumpkins and tomatoes. They spent money only on oil, salt, sugar and clothes. But now they had to buy everything they ate, which meant they needed cash.
The village of Mohanpur had been emptied of its men. Only the women and old people incapable of physical work had stayed behind.
Even Taramoni’s husband, a talented musician, had been forced to leave in search of a living. There was simply no work to be had in the village, not even as a labourer. And Satyen Sardar’s harmonium and musical instruments had fallen silent, ruined by the water and the mud.
Labour contractors had come scouring all of the Sundarbans. There were two or three of them for each village, finding work elsewhere for the residents. And so the people from the Sundarbans went to work at brick kilns and cotton mills in other states, sometimes at cold storages in other districts of West Bengal. Those who went to work as masons got work in Chennai, Hyderabad or Bangalore at 300 rupees a day or more. The company also made living arrangements for them on the site. The village people sent their earnings home every month.
But this life was associated with unknown dangers. Sometimes the men returned to the village seriously ill or injured, without money. This being an unorganised sector, the contractors did not look after the workers’ interests: for example, the owners of the brick kilns seldom paid properly, and fate often held physical torture for workers; there was frequent news of brick-kiln workers, who had left their homes and families behind, being rescued by the police or by voluntary organisations. They had to return home without insurance or compensation.
Taramoni had two sons. One was twenty and the other eighteen. They too had left the village after Aila.
I asked her where her sons had gone.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘The contractor who gave them work had said he would let us know, but he hasn’t been to the village since then. I don’t know their address either. Nor did they say when they would return.’
‘Have they sent any money through money orders?’
‘No.’ Taramoni shook her head. ‘They are young, they haven’t learned any trade. They will ruin their health if they’re working at a brick kiln. And if …’ Taramoni fell silent. I knew the apprehension that had cast a shadow over her – the fear that her boys would come back with diseases or disabilities. As their mother she couldn’t express her inner fears.
Traditionally, when the farming season ended, the men had taken their boats into the jungle to fetch honey and wood fragments, and to catch fish and crabs. The water was infested with crocodiles and snakes.
The women did not go into the forest alone in boats. But by way of work now, they had just one option: trapping shrimp prawns in the river below the embankment with homespun towels. It wasn’t just shrimp that got trapped but also other small fry. They caught the fish while wrapped in drenched clothes on winter evenings, averting crocodile attacks. The owners of hatcheries bought the shrimp. Some people sold the rest of the catch, while others cooked it with a little oil. But catching the small fish meant destroying biodiversity, and the number of fish wasn’t increasing. The women said they were helpless. They only caught the fish because they had no other choice.
No woman who had to guard her house in a village of no men could sleep well, and the deep dark circles under Taramoni’s eyes indicated that she had not slept peacefully for many nights.
‘Didi, do you have sleeping pills? Will you give me some?’ Taramoni held out her hand to me.
Tigers were partly to blame for her insomnia. Royal Bengal Tigers. There were dense forests to the south of Gosaba Block. The distance between the two banks of the Gomar was not far at Mohanpur. Wire fences had been erected along the riverbank, but there were gaps in it for people to pass. This was the route tigers took into the river. And then they swam up to the villages. They took away calves or goats or anything they could find. Ancient occupants of the forests that they were, the tigers’ sanctuary had been destroyed by human habitation. Their sources of food had been reduced. The tigers had not forgiven humans.
‘I can’t sleep nights,’ Taramoni said. ‘I live in this large desolate room protected by bamboo. I stay awake worrying, what if a tiger attacks me? I keep jute stalks and matches close by. Only when the breeze at dawn makes me drowsy do I go to sleep.’
The day was declining. The colour of the sunlight had changed. Daytime yellow had acquired a hue of saffron. The water of the Gomar splashed louder in the restless afternoon wind.
Pointing to the south-east, Taramoni said, ‘Midnapore district lies that way. That’s where my parents lived, in Rangini village in Ghatal. I got married at fifteen and came to Mohanpur. I came to Satyen’s house. My father was swept away with joy by my husband’s singing. My husband never owned much land or anything, but we were happy. Both our sons were born in that house you saw destroyed by the flood. That was where they crawled, played, grew up. On full-moon nights my husband would take his harmonium down to the river and sing, with someone playing the drums. I played the cymbals. We were happy …’
My motorboat left Mohanpur for Rangabelia before the darkness turned dense. Taramoni stood on the bank. Her figure grew smaller and dimmer, while the line of the bank vanished. A torrent of water at the confluence of the Gomar and the Vidya made the boat sway on the waves of the high tide.
Taramoni Sardar had told me, ‘Write about me, didi. Publish it. People will read.’ Here, I have written Taramoni’s story. Along with the stories of hundreds of solitary women like her who stayed awake nights.
I still regret that I couldn’t give her sleeping pills.
* * *
1. Landowners who leased their land to tenant farmers
TICK TOCK
TISHANI DOSHI
In 2022, India will be the most populous country in the world. It would not be an exaggeration to say that we are a fecund people. And that at least part of our fecundity is thanks to our mothers.
As a nation, we are extreme in our obsession with the Mother. Mothers are goddesses – deified (if they’re lucky), vilified (if they’re not). May you be the mother of a hundred sons (and 91.4 daughters), and so forth.
Mother’s milk, mo
ther tongue, Mother India, motherfucker. No other country will offer you such dazzling and diverse epithets as we have for mother. Entire philosophies rest on the idea of a divine female principle: Shakambari – Bearer of Greens, Shakti – The Powerful, Sita – Paragon of Woman. Even the holy cow is a personification of motherhood: Kamadhenu – divine bovine goddess!
We have Great Mothers in the shape of wide-hipped Harappan terracottas. Warrior Mothers like the goddess Kali, who offers her breasts to her husband Shiva, so her milk can negate the poisons of the world. And should you imagine that our mothering is restricted to the mere heavens and mythology, fear not! We have mothers of the earthly realm too. Mothers-in-law, mummy-jis and MILFs. Single mothers, working mothers, surrogate mothers, unwed mothers, burning mothers.
And then we have the most powerful mothers of all. The mothers who are childless. Divine Mothers like the ‘Hugging Amma’, who dispenses her benediction by enfolding you. Political Mothers like the chief minister of my state, Ms Jayalalithaa, former film star, now mother, or ‘Amma’, to her entire electorate. These women are chaste, desexualised, scrubbed free of even the most molecular immoral thought. They are powerful precisely because they have relinquished their reproductive rights in order to be mother to millions.
But what of a woman who doesn’t lean towards a career in the divine or political? Can she opt for a life without babies? The 32 million Indian women who have no access to modern contraception must keep banging them out, or hope to be part of the 4.6 million who are sterilised each year. And the ‘modern’ Indian woman – she who has the world at her manicured fingertips? The answer is yes and no. There will be resounding cries of ‘Get thee to a fertility clinic!’ should she decide to remain childless. But if she approaches her resolve with humour and the hide of a buffalo, she may proceed with caution.
Many years ago, in the genial hubbub of a hotel lobby, I had an epiphany about children. There was a family checking in at reception ahead of me, an ordinary kind of family: Mama, Papa and two ungainly, surly teenagers. I remember watching them – the vast space between Mama and Papa, the complete boredom and disdain their bodies held towards one another. And I remember thinking, ‘That’s funny! At some point, long ago, these two people must have had sex at least twice in order to produce those two skulking creatures.’
Once this idea took root in me I found myself leering at families unabashedly. Families at the beach, families at dinner, families on aeroplanes (the worst). It intrigued me to see how genetic codes survived the generations. And if there happened to be grannies and grandpas on hand, greater joy still to see who inherited the crinkly hair, the propensity for freckles, the large, lumbering bottoms. Always there was the inescapable fact of it: children are a by-product of sex.
Of course, I’ve known this since I was twelve. One of my friends at school, whose mother was a doctor, had shown us a book which explained what happened when a boy’s thing went into a girl’s thing. We sat on the school wall – a line of us girls in blue uniforms, peering at lacklustre diagrams of appendages and labia majora, which sadly didn’t stir the requisite shivering in the loins we’d hoped for. Sex was as distant as the moon, and as incomprehensible as the gonadotropins coursing through our bodies. But we were children, and believed as all children do, that the universe existed for our benefit. Our narcissistic egos would never allow us to see ourselves as by-products. If anything, it was our parents who were utterly by the by – present in relation only to our own exalted beings.
Long after you’ve come of age, though, and begun actually engaging in sex, you start to forget about this interwoven destiny between sex and babies. At least, those of us with access to birth control do. We confidently go about our mammalian task of coitus without worrying about side effects. But gawking at families in their natural habitat remains a vital hobby for me because it reinforces a primeval link. It also highlights a condition I have so long angsted over: should I or shouldn’t I have children?
I should say here that I like kids. There are women who’ve always known they wouldn’t have children, but I’m not one of them. I grew up in a happy family (sorry, Tolstoy) and, despite the difficulties of growing up with a brother with disabilities, the family was reinforced as the exemplary model for living. In fact, until my mid-twenties, children seemed inevitable – a distant and somewhat terrifying prospect, reserved for a phase in my life which always seemed to be moving further and further away.
In my mid-twenties, though, I met someone who would challenge those ideas and offer me a periscopic view of an alternative lifestyle. Her name was Chandralekha. She was a choreographer who transformed me into a dancer, and she lived in a house by the sea, ten minutes from my parents’ home in the conservative coastal city of Madras, now Chennai.
Chandralekha was a rebel. Born in 1928, she had declared precociously at the age of fourteen that marriage was a form of slavery for men and women. When I met her, half a century separated us. She was a beauty, with astonishing silver-white hair and piercing dark eyes, and she delighted in calling children ‘little terrorists’, with their demands of ‘goo-goo ga-ga’.
Deeply involved with India’s earliest feminist movement, she routinely worked with women in workshops, trying to get them to use their bodies differently from the usual washing, scrubbing, cooking, sweeping. For Chandra, the body was a repository of energies, and the spine a metaphor for freedom.
In her choreographies she relentlessly explored the idea of femininity in the bodies of women and men. This reclamation of the female principle was integral to all her work, because she saw Shakti as the source of all creation. ‘When I say creation I don’t mean procreation,’ she once quipped. ‘I mean all of creation.’ She was recalling those other kinds of mothers, who stood with their spines erect, who spread their terracotta thighs and gave birth to all the vegetation of the world.
To have met Chandra at that particular juncture of my life was, in a way, to begin again. Not just with my body, which was changing and transforming through dance, but in my ideas. We don’t necessarily have to inherit the life offered to us by society. It seems an obvious point, but to arrive at this emancipation requires instinct, or, at the very least, epiphany. And I had it through Chandra. I saw what it meant to choose the life of an artist. And more: what it meant to be an artist and a woman in India.
I did not, however, share the militant views of my mentor when it came to children. I always believed I had the right to change my mind if ever the mythical ‘tick tock’ should return from walkabout. I made a pact with myself: if ever I met a man who made me think, ‘Ooh, I’ve just got to have me some of your babies’, then I would reconsider.
People say they just know when they want to have kids. They walk past Baby Gap and their hearts turn to mashed bananas. They call it baby fever. Scientists have recently confirmed that these urges are not grounded in a primordial clock ticking inside our wombs, but are in fact a result of social conditioning. Evolution does not give us the desire to procreate, merely the desire for sex, and the physical means to bear children. Until recently, though, if you were going to spend any amount of time rolling around in the hay, babies were inevitable. My generation is part of a fledgling generation of women who can opt out of species continuity if we want. Culturally, though, the pressure to procreate remains a powerful force. Particularly if you live in India, as I do, where no matter how liberal the society you keep, the possibility of having to answer for your childlessness is high.
You could be at the gym, and someone you barely know will engage you at the water filter and ask, ‘Any good news?’ (A colloquial way of saying, is there a bun in the oven?) You could be sitting with family, when a gaggle of aunts gang up on you and try to convince you that being a writer doesn’t mean you can’t be a mother. You could even think you’re in safe territory with friends, and one of them will say, ‘You’re really not going to have children?’ Because while sex in India is like tuberculosis – behind every curtain and down every alleyway,
ubiquitous but invisible – motherhood, by contrast, is a never-ending road show. And even though India ranks 140th in the global motherhood index, which means there are only thirty-nine countries where it’s worse to be a mother, any rejection of motherhood requires some major upholding.
Picture this: I’m at a friend’s wedding in Bangalore. The scene is lavish: Monsoon Wedding to the power of twenty. Marigolds, roses and jasmine bedeck every conceivable surface. I feel I’m knocking about inside of a perfume bottle. Women in bright saris totter on heels. Men in turbans slap one another on the back. The bride and groom sit around a fire. Indian drums and pipes waft up from the stereo, food in giant vats is being carted out, colourful glasses of non-alcoholic beverages sail by on trays (the champagne is for after the religious ceremony). In the midst of all this celebration, I find myself cornered, somewhere between the rasgullas and the black forest cake, by a former classmate – a man who decides this is a good time to get into a discussion about parenthood. He tells me it’s the best thing that ever happened to him. That it took him out of himself like nothing else, that it diminished his ego, expanded his capacity for love. And when I merely nod noncommittally, he signals the end of the discussion by saying, ‘You know, you should really think about it. It would do you good.’ As if having a child is like taking up transcendental meditation or trying an Ayurvedic diet.
One of the drawbacks of choosing not to have kids is that people who have gone into the Mini-Me-making venture feel they can casually quiz those of us who haven’t about our decision not to breed. Worse, in the fashion of many religious born-agains who have ‘seen the light’, they feel they must convince us of the error of our ways. And this is not an activity that’s restricted to India. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been cornered at a party by a stranger who launches in with a personal question about the state of my ovaries, and when I patiently outline my reasons – that I can’t afford kids, that I love the coupledom I have with my husband, that growing up with a brother with Down’s Syndrome I know that children are a responsibility for life, and that I’m actually happy with the life I have right now, thank you very much – they cast their big saucer eyes at me and say, ‘Oh, that’s so sad!’ Then, I start flailing like a drowning woman, talking of the body, and how I’m a dancer, and that if my body were screaming ‘give me a baby’, I would definitely hear it screaming, and I would give it a baby, consequences be damned. But it’s too late for all that. They’ve judged me, and I have certainly judged them.
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 14