India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (20 page)

She started walking, getting drenched in the rain, still burning from her fever. She searched for a phone booth. A man on a cycle crashed into her and groped her breast. She felt violated—violated at home, violated in the street. She said she never cried, but on this occasion she was in tears. She found a phone booth and called her parents. She told them her marriage was over. She asked them never to press her again to try to make it work. She said it was irretrievable.

Soon after that, she asked her husband for a divorce. He refused, but they moved into separate bedrooms. Her parents were also opposed to the idea of a divorce. Her father told her she needed psychiatric help. Her mother came down south to convince her daughter that these things didn’t happen in families like theirs.

By then, Veena was already living with Arvind. Their relationship started as a casual affair, but, to her surprise, had grown into something more serious. When Veena’s husband found a job in another city, Arvind moved in. Her mother was scandalized. At some point during her trip, she took her daughter aside and asked her: “Why are you doing this?”

Veena said: “What’s wrong with what I’m doing? Do you realize that I can sleep with any man I want, and I don’t have to stay with any of them? I want to check things out this time. If I ever marry again, and I’m not at all sure I’m going to marry Arvind, I want to stay with the man this time. You should know that my generation can choose to sleep with a man and not marry him; it’s our choice.”

Her mother wasn’t happy. “I mean, I think she’s only been with one man in her life,” Veena told me. “She gets upset when she thinks I’ve slept with more than one person. We don’t talk about it too much, but she knows in the back of her mind what I’ve been doing. Her feelings are always written on her face.”

“What does she look like?” I asked.

“It’s hard to describe the look. I guess it’s a little bit of disgust and a lot of disbelief.”

It took three years for Veena to get a divorce. At the court hearing, she was accompanied by her brother. She hugged her husband when he arrived. She hadn’t seen him in almost two years. He had shaved his mustache. She told him he looked good.

The judge told Veena to think carefully about what she was doing. He reminded her that in India, divorce still carried a social stigma. He asked if she was sure she wanted to go through with it, and she said yes. She and her husband signed the papers, and he broke down in tears. She patted him on the back. She felt empty.

Veena told me later that she went through a difficult period around the time she was getting divorced. People thought she was crazy; they thought she didn’t know what she was doing. Her family and friends wondered how she would support herself. People questioned her decision to live with Arvind, and then, when they moved to Bangalore, they thought she was making another mistake. They didn’t think she’d be able to make it in the city.

But now, she said, everyone could see she’d come out all right. “I took some risks, and they paid off,” she said. Maybe it was this—this experience of being doubted, of taking chances, of trusting her instincts and seeing them vindicated—that had made her confident. “If you take some risky decisions and you end up okay, then people
realize you’re smart,” she said. “They don’t doubt you anymore. You don’t doubt yourself.”

Recently, her father had called. He said he and his wife had been talking about her. They were discussing the fact that their daughter had been through some difficult times. But they had to acknowledge that she had persevered; she hadn’t just succumbed to the circumstances of her life.

He told her: “You know, we are so proud of all that you’ve achieved. We feel we have something to learn from you.”

Banu and Veena were in Bangalore for similar reasons: they were
drawn by the city’s opportunities, by the jobs and the chance to find a little freedom. But they were different in so many ways. They dressed differently—Veena in jeans and T-shirts, Banu always in a sari—and they talked differently. Veena swore liberally. Banu was much more discreet. It would have been unthinkable for her to speak about sex as freely as Veena did. It would have been unimaginable for her to live openly with a boyfriend.

Veena’s life seemed simpler to me—less burdened by tradition, less encumbered by family and society. She was a little bit younger than Banu, and I thought that maybe she had been born just on the easier—or at any rate more modern—side of a generational divide. She didn’t seem bothered by the same ambivalence and self-doubt that sometimes seemed to haunt Banu. In many ways, she was like a lot of women I had known in New York: just a girl in the city, navigating the shoals of love and career.

Then one day Veena and I took a trip together to the suburb of
Whitefield, an emerging hub of Bangalore’s software industry, and on the way, stuck in traffic, with diesel fumes curling outside our air-conditioned taxi, she told me: “You know, sometimes I feel that it was actually simpler for our parents. I think of my mother. There was no question of her ever working outside the house. In a way, it was all clearer for her. For us, everything’s so mixed up. We have so many options, so many things we can do. Choice is supposed to be good, but sometimes I wonder.”

We had been talking about her relationship with Arvind. One of the wonderful things about living in Bangalore, she said, was the way they were thriving as a couple. Before, she’d always felt they were just sharing an apartment. Now, when they went shopping together, when they cooked meals or did the household chores together, she felt like they were sharing a home.

Recently, inevitably, their families had started putting pressure on them to get married. Arvind’s parents, in particular, were unhappy about the fact that their son was living with a girlfriend. They wanted grandchildren.

I asked Veena if she wanted children. “It’s complicated,” she said. “I’m actually very confused. You see, I have this little problem: I’m not a man, and if I have a kid, I have to have it inside me. I can’t outsource it. So I really don’t know what to do.

“I like my job, I’m still learning, and I still have place to move up. You know, the way the market works is, you get a price if you are in something pricey. I feel like I’m only getting going. If I quit now, before I’m at my full earning potential, then I won’t earn as much when I come back.”

Veena had recently started yet another job, this one at a software company. It was her third job in just over a year and a half;
her salary and level of responsibility kept going up. She said she had so much further to go; she couldn’t really imagine having kids now. But if not now, then when? She wondered when the right moment would come along.

She said various aunts and uncles had been calling, asking when she was going to have a child. Veena didn’t know what to say to them. “See, my whole point of view about motherhood is inspired by my own mother, who I think is the best mother one could ever hope for,” she told me. “She gave up most of her life for us, and I feel we turned out to be decent kids. She worked really hard. I know that being a mother isn’t just a time-pass kind of thing. I’ve seen some time-pass parents, and I’ve found that the kids go very wrong. My mother wasn’t like that—she slogged her butt off.

“But you know, when I was old enough to understand about jobs and careers and so on, I looked at my mother and I saw that there were probably moments in her life where she felt she didn’t do enough with herself. I realized that she actually had a streak of dissatisfaction, which as kids we never understood. I don’t think she ever saw having a job as an option. Maybe that made it simpler for her. But now when I think about her, I think, ‘What a waste, a woman like her just sitting at home.’”

“And so how does that make you feel?” I asked. “Does that make you less likely to have kids?”

“I guess so,” she said. “I can’t think of a situation where I wouldn’t work. My mother sits around in her fifties, with all the elements of a successful working professional, and thinks, ‘Why didn’t I do it? Why didn’t I make it?’ She doesn’t have a very happy existence. But you know, I guess there’s a chance I might get old
and have the opposite problem: ‘Why didn’t I have kids? Why didn’t I do it?’ I guess I’ll have my own not-so-happy existence.”

She said sometimes she just felt resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going to lead the “typical woman’s life”—whatever that meant. She’d always been a bit strange anyway, a bit different. After all, she’d gotten divorced, she’d slept with men while unmarried. For some reason, she hadn’t lived the way a woman in India was expected to.

“Why do you think that is?” I asked her.

“I have no clue,” she said, and she started giggling. “It all came very naturally to me. I mean, sex is the most natural stepping-stone to liking a person. I never got what the big deal was about it. How can I explain this to you? Maybe let me crystallize it into a very simple example. If I’m hungry, I’ll eat, right? I grew up in a traditional family. I never ate pork or beef. The first time I had pork was when I was in Europe and I was dying for something non-vegetarian. I was so sick of cheese and bread. So I said, ‘Just let me put a piece of ham into this bread and see how it tastes.’ It tasted fine. My point is this: If you’re hungry, you will eat. If you want a man, you will sleep. That’s how it works in my mind.”

“So simple?” I asked.

“Yeah, it’s a very basic instinct. Look, this is how my life works. I’ve found that I go in cycles—sometimes I feel very carnal and have spells of maybe what we might call debauchery. And then there are periods of time when I just feel more spiritual, and I live a much more basic life. That’s just the way it is with me. It’s who I am. It may sound weird to others, I know it shocks some people. But to me, it’s very natural.”

In Whitefield, at a restaurant in the basement of the International
Tech Park, Veena and I had a snack. The International Tech Park was a massive building. It was a self-contained world, with laundromats and banks and an attached hotel. It had more than 2 million square feet of built-up space. It dwarfed anything I had seen in Chennai. It was testament to Bangalore’s status as the center of India’s technology industry.

We complained about the ride over. What should have been a half-hour trip from the city had turned into almost an hour and a half. Traffic had been impossible. At the edge of Bangalore, before the roads opened up a bit, gave way to the relative ease of the suburbs, the cars and vans and autorickshaws were packed so tight that even motorcyclists were stuck, unable to squeeze through.

Veena said it was the worst part about living in Bangalore. Sometimes, she said, it took her forty minutes to make the five-kilometer trip from her house to her office. It was maddening. It was impossible to plan anything.

Whitefield was more pleasant. It was still a suburb, green and relatively uncongested. In Whitefield, you felt like you could breathe. Veena said she and Arvind talked occasionally about moving there. It would be a good place to bring up kids, I said, and she sighed. “Kids again,” she said. “Why is it that every conversation I have these days seems to come back to kids?”

I asked her what Arvind felt about having kids. She said he wasn’t putting any pressure on her. He was very relaxed; she was lucky to have found a modern guy. In fact, now that she’d started
her new job, they had agreed to put everything on hold. They tried not to talk about kids anymore.

She told me about the day she found out she had gotten the new job. When she came home and told Arvind, he said he was happy for her. He was proud of her. They talked about how the job would change their lives. They thought maybe they’d get a new apartment, move into a bigger place. Then Arvind, who had had a couple drinks, asked: “What about that other thing? You want to get into it now, or you want to wait, or what?”

She wasn’t sure what he meant at first. Then, when she realized he was talking about kids, she told him she wasn’t sure. She hadn’t expected to get this job, and now she didn’t know what to do. He changed the topic. They didn’t talk about it anymore that night.

A few days later, Arvind brought it up again. He told Veena: “If you don’t want to have kids, it’s fine with me. I’ll just adopt one.”