Comparing the two of us, Biji would say, ‘When I found Devi a bit slow at completing tasks or making decisions, I would wish for a daughter who was a fast mover, but little did I know that she would be too fast!’ I dared to do all that Devi had not done by way of taking risks, making quick decisions, speaking my mind, and generally rejecting a victim identity dictated by my gender. Unlike Devi, who put her faith in patriarchy and took great pride in saying that she always did what her father and brothers expected of her, I took pleasure in challenging my brothers and doing what I wanted.
I became a professional writer and this brought me a clear sense of identity. But I suffered in my personal life: I fell in love not once but twice and was terribly hurt, and after these two failed romances, I made the decision to be single. I disdained the idea of an arranged marriage, common enough even then in my country. Also, I had started enjoying the independence that my single status gave me.
It really did not bother me what others thought. However, by deciding not to marry, I missed out on having a child. To remedy this, after some time, I decided I wanted to adopt a child. When I first started talking about this, my friends and family just thought of it as another whim. But I persisted, and then Biji started supporting the idea.
By this time, a cousin and her husband had helped Devi find a job at a children’s home. This had made her active once again, and she nurtured the children with great love, but was upset when those she had reared were adopted. When I spoke to her of my desire to adopt, Devi confessed: ‘Mine was a disrupted education, but had I been financially independent, I would never have married. I would have adopted a child and lived with her.’
Devi wanted me to adopt a baby boy, but I was adamant that it had to be a baby girl. I had received so much love from two mothers, Biji and Devi, and I wanted to pass it on to another uncertain girl child. My little girl came to me from the children’s home where my sister worked.
I did not choose the baby, because the idea of doing so was unpleasant. I just asked for the youngest girl child, and was given the second-youngest because the youngest was frail and ill. Devi had already given my daughter the name of Upasna. She was ten months old when I got her.
I always took Upasna to be a gift to me from Devi.
Devi’s greatest loss came when our father died, less than two years after she had moved away. ‘God knows how many other heart attacks he suffered, bearing the burden of so large a family,’ Devi wailed. ‘We just made demands on him, but never thought of his anguish.’
I think often of Devi’s own anguish, to this day. Devi’s was one of the most painful and unhappy lives of the girls in our extended family. The other girls learned a lesson from Devi’s misfortune: there was no way they were going into marriage without being educated and economically independent. Partition and displacement played a role too: there came a growing awareness of education and employment opportunities for women. Women were studying, working and achieving, they were marrying, yes, and some stayed on in the institution of marriage holding on to their own identities, while others walked out of it with few regrets.
I include myself here, along with the other women in my extended family. Because of the life Devi lived and what I learned from her, I achieved economic independence, and I made my own choices – even that of staying single and adopting a girl child.
One day, when Devi caught me alone in the living room she walked up to me and said, ‘She would have been fifty-four now.’
‘Who?’ I asked.
‘My daughter,’ she said.
I was silent, for I knew my sister must be feeling very alone. She rarely mentioned her lost child. ‘You know she died of pneumonia, the third day after she was placed under the running tap in the cold of November,’ said Devi, though of course I knew this story well. ‘Had she lived, she would have been fifty-four.’
In her last exchange with me, during the illness that would lead to her passing, Devi said, ‘Remember, you have to write my story.’ Devi, dear sister of mine, your story is so poignantly alive in my heart as I put it to paper, but tell me: where does your story end, and where does mine begin?
THE SCIMITAR OF WORDS
CHITRA BANERJEE DIVAKARUNI
I stood on the corner of the dusty street, next to a couple of goats that were busily foraging for food in a pile of garbage. The sun glared down on me and my heart beat unevenly, a mix of nervousness and anticipation. I was waiting for my guide, a woman I did not know. All I had was her name: Nafisa. I would travel with her into the heart of the Baiganwadi slums of Mumbai, and visit one of the Pratham balwadis (preschools), a library and a vocational centre that taught computer usage to teenagers. For the last six years, halfway across the world in America, I had worked with a group of Pratham volunteers, raising money to support the organisation’s endeavours to fund such programs for underprivileged children and youth. I had created many stories in my head, pieced together from photographs the Pratham India team had sent us, at once heartwarming and heartbreaking; I had imagined what it would feel like to step into a school or centre, and who might people them. Finally, my dreams were about to collide with reality. Would I be pleased? Disappointed? Amazed? I did not know.
A cheery ‘Salaamalaikum’ pulled me back to the present. A diminutive young woman stood in front of me, clad in the burqa that traditional Muslim women of the area wore but, unlike them, she was not the least bit shy. She gave me a dazzling smile, informed me that there was no time to lose because there was so much to see, and took me firmly by the hand and led me down a narrow path bordered by open drains. Such was her enthusiasm as she pointed out the local landmarks and said a friendly hello to the shopkeepers that within a few minutes I began to view the place differently. Behind the squalor there were people who were working hard to get by from day to day, who hadn’t given up, and who were able to preserve a unique dignity in the midst of dirt. Already my journey was beginning to transform me, just as Pratham had transformed the lives of over 7.7 million children in the last twenty years.
‘So what got you interested in Pratham?’ Nafisa asked as she dexterously manoeuvred us around a man carrying an enormous basket of vegetables on his head.
It wasn’t an unexpected question. I already had an answer prepared. ‘I’m a writer, so I’m particularly aware of the power of reading and writing, and how much you need them to get ahead in life,’ I said. ‘I wanted to help children who might not have access to them otherwise.’
But the true genesis of my passion for literacy, especially for girls – my obsession, almost, with this – is far more complicated. It goes way back into my childhood, and it involves a woman named Sarita.
Sarita worked for my family for about six months when I was five years old. My father had been recently transferred to Kolkata, and my mother needed a live-in maid. Somehow word travelled, as it does in India, and one day Sarita knocked on our door. At first my mother was reluctant to hire her because she did not have any references. But after speaking with her and looking into her large, unblinking eyes and her earnest face, she agreed to try her out for a month.
Sarita was a diligent worker. She would finish all her household tasks quickly and efficiently. After that, all she needed to do was to keep an eye on my younger brother, and on me when I returned from kindergarten. She was fascinated by our toys. We were not rich, and the toys were fairly rudimentary. Wooden tops, stuffed cloth dolls, alphabet blocks. But even I, young as I was, could tell that they were a great novelty to her. She was fascinated even more by our books – they were simple picture books in Bengali – and would often ask me to read some of them to her. I myself was not a great reader yet, but I had memorised all the books, so I would pretend to read them.
‘What a smart girl,’ she would say in wonder.
‘Can’t you read?’ I asked Sarita once.
She shook her head, and a look of shame flashed across her face. My existence had been fairly sheltered, and I had not yet come in close contact with any adul
ts who could not read. I remembered staring at her in surprise.
‘Will you teach me?’ Sarita asked.
I agreed. I thought it a great entertainment, teaching an adult. I’m afraid I was not a very good teacher. I got impatient and raised my voice if Sarita was unable to recognise a letter, or to read the simple three-letter words I wrote for her. When my mother found out what was going on, she rescued Sarita from me and began to teach her herself. Under proper guidance, Sarita blossomed. Soon she was reading as well as I was – perhaps even better because she began to read some of our books to my brother and me. At first I was jealous, but then I accepted it in the way children do. Sarita stayed up late at night after all her work was done, writing in a notebook with a pencil and eraser my mother had given her. She treasured these items dearly, and when she was done with them, she put them carefully away in the small box that held her few belongings. Seeing her enthusiasm, my mother bought more difficult books and continued teaching her. Soon Sarita could read enough of our daily newspaper to understand the gist of news articles. My mother, as delighted as any Pygmalion, began to talk of sending her to adult school in the evenings. And although my father warned her not to go overboard with educating a servant, she was determined.
It was only as an adult that I wondered how smart this young woman, deprived in her youth of all educational opportunities, must have been. And how far she might have gone if her education had been allowed to continue. But that was not to be.
One weekend morning we were awakened by a commotion at our door, someone banging on it and shouting. It was a man, and he sounded furious. Luckily, my father was home. He opened the door to see who it was. All of us clustered behind him to see what was going on. The man was burly and his face was dark with anger, particularly when his eyes fell on Sarita. She flinched and backed away into the kitchen when she saw him. He shouted obscenities at her and insisted that she go home with him. When my father asked what he meant, he said that she was his wife and that she had run away.
My father was very annoyed by all of this. His job as a tax auditor was a stressful one, and he liked his weekends to be calm and peaceful.
‘Find out if this man’s accusations are true,’ he ordered my mother.
My mother found Sarita squeezed into a corner behind the meat safe. There was a look of terror on her face. She told my mother that yes, she was married to this man. ‘I ran away because he beat me,’ she whispered. ‘Sometimes he brought other men home and tried to make me do bad things with them.’
What kinds of bad things? I wanted to know. But my mother shooed me away, her face grim. She went to my father and whispered in his ear, and his face, too, changed. ‘Get out,’ he said to the man, his voice soft but chilling. ‘Otherwise I’ll call the police.’ The man blustered and shook his fist, saying that he had a legal right over his wife, but my father slammed the door in his face. The man shouted threats for a while, but finally he left.
That night, my parents had a huge fight. I tried to eavesdrop, but I could not make out much, except that my father thought Sarita would bring them more trouble and should be let go, while my mother thought we needed to protect the maid. In the morning, they did not speak to each other, and for the first time since I was old enough to be aware of such things, my father did not say goodbye to my mother when he left for work. Later, I found my mother crying in the bedroom.
I don’t know how the matter would have ended, but Sarita took things into her own hands. She was very quiet all day. The next morning, she was gone.
My mother was worried, but my father was visibly relieved. ‘That’s one less worry for us to deal with,’ he said. ‘Make sure she hasn’t stolen anything.’
My mother was very upset. ‘Sarita would never steal from me,’ she said.
She was right. When we looked through the house we found that not only did Sarita not take anything that did not belong to her, but she had left behind her treasured notebook, along with the eraser and pencil. It was as though she had given up on her hopes of education, of ever being able to change her life in that way.
We did not know what happened to Sarita after she left us. We never heard from her. But as a teenager and then an adult, I could not forget her. I often tried to imagine her life. I pictured her fleeing by night train to another city far away. I hoped she was working in a home where her employers were kind to her. But sometimes when I was feeling low, I was afraid her husband had found her and dragged her back to a horrifying life in the slums. In any case, I doubted that she would have been able to continue studying, and without an education what choices did she have? Though I knew that as a child I hadn’t had the power to help her, I still felt guilty about it. And I promised myself that when I could, I would do something so that children, especially girls, would not end up in a position like hers.
My own growing up, though I was well educated, was fraught with different challenges. They had to do with the fact that mine was a traditional Indian home, and that I was a girl.
I still remember the first time the unfairness of my situation struck me.
It was a delicious monsoon day in Kolkata, dramatically wet and windy. I was about to run out to the flooded street and float the paper boats that I was an expert at making and get soaked in the warm rain with the other children as I always had. But my mother said I couldn’t. I was too old now and it wasn’t proper.
I didn’t understand. ‘But brother’s doing it,’ I pointed out, ‘and he’s older.’
‘That’s different,’ my mother said, her eyes sad but firm. ‘You’re a girl.’
I couldn’t believe my ears. My mother, who always encouraged me to try harder in school, who told me I had the brains to win the first-place prize, was telling me this? It was my first experience of the prison the world constructs around women and their bodies, the prison that even my mother, whom I’d believed to be all powerful, could not break through.
I moped around for months, not knowing what to do with my newly restricted, dwindling life. I began to notice how young women from families like mine were not allowed to stay out late, even to study. The way they had to be chaperoned when they went to the houses of their girlfriends. The way they were married off halfway through college and then dropped out to have babies. I could feel the net of propriety descending upon me.
But literacy came to my rescue.
One day I found my brother’s Indian history textbook lying on his desk. I flipped desultorily through the pages. It was a boring book with lots of small print and few illustrations. Then a picture stopped me.
In this picture a woman sat on a tiger skin while a man knelt nearby, offering her his scimitar. Instead of flowing veils, she wore the male attire of the time: baggy pants and a vest. Instead of daintily sniffing at a rose, like the women in my father’s book of Mughal paintings, she leaned forward boldly to grasp the weapon offered to her. The caption below the picture read ‘Sultana Raziyya’.
Amazed, I read and re-read the pages avidly. The Sultana was the first woman to sit on the throne of Delhi. (Later I would discover that she was the only woman to do so until Indira Gandhi came to power in the twentieth century.) In 1236 she was nominated by her father, Iltutmish, to succeed him and overcame her weak brothers to rule the volatile kingdom for a brief time.
Raziyya shocked her Muslim court by promptly dispensing with her veil and presiding over them barefaced. She passed laws on racial and religious tolerance and levied taxes to build schools and wells. She could recite the Koran but preferred to write poetry, and she made friends with a number of writers and artists.
The noblemen of the court soon revolted against Raziyya, who fought valiantly but was captured and thrown into prison. But she didn’t give up. She talked her jailer, one of the nobles who had been part of the opposition, into marrying her and helping her escape. She died heroically while leading one last, superbly scandalous charge from atop a huge elephant.
Here was someone who had refused to stop when people sai
d to her ‘You can’t do that! You’re a girl!’
Something happened to me as I read and re-read Raziyya’s story, a strange sea change. I didn’t know how I would manage it, but I promised myself that, like Raziyya, I wouldn’t give up. I’d do my best to slash through the taboos that bound us as tightly as mummy wrappings to show the world what a girl could do, no matter how many people stood in her way.
It was the beginning of decades of battle, much of it painful. But ultimately – thanks to the power of education, and to a mother who would not compromise on my schooling, no matter how much people pressured her – I did it. Words became my scimitar, and with them I began to help others – especially girls and women – break out of darkness into light. I wrote my books – for children as well as for adults, and I spoke up for literacy and the work Pratham was doing.
Now, here I was in Baiganwadi, to look at some of the results.
The balwadi was a single-room preschool, its grey concrete floor scrubbed scrupulously clean. I could see that it was a home – the teacher’s home, Nafisa told me. To accommodate the children, the young woman who was the teacher had pushed her meagre furnishings – a dining table and a bed – against the wall. In one corner were a stove and a sink, a few neatly stacked pots. Folded saris and pyjamas hung from a clothesline that was strung up between nails that had been hammered into the far wall. Fourteen children sat cross-legged on the floor, reading out words as the teacher pointed to a large poster that she had pinned to the windowsill. There was much excitement as we entered, and the children vied with each other to answer the math and vocabulary questions that Nafisa, who was clearly familiar with the curriculum, asked. There was even greater excitement when the teacher pointed to America on a world map that hung from another wall and told the children that I had come all the way from U.S.A. to see them – on an aeroplane!
Walking Towards Ourselves Page 24