May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (15 page)

Susheela Bajpai was one of the first women I met. She was the wife of a Brahmin landowner, plump from prosperity, with a round, soft face that had been spared the effects of the sun and worries about feeding her two children. She left her house only about once a month, usually for shopping or to see friends in Lucknow. She covered her face with her sari until she was beyond the limits of Khajuron and the neighboring village down the road. Only outside this limit was she freed by her anonymity. The rest of the time, Susheela stayed inside, confined to several small rooms and a central courtyard. Admittedly, it was one of the best houses in Khajuron, with a courtyard made of brick instead of the usual mud and a television set that kept her caught up with the programs from Delhi. On Sunday mornings, she and her husband invited in about thirty people, all from the upper castes, to watch the exploits of Ram and the anguish of Sita in the
Ramayana
,
a popular television series based on the great Hindu epic. The first time I went to see Susheela, she gave me tea and cookies under her ceiling fan and assured me she was happy with her life. “I don’t want to go out any more than I do,” she said. Her husband, who had insisted on listening, then spoke up. “I am a social person,” he said. “I am a man. She is a woman. So she cannot go anywhere. This is my rule.”

At the other extreme was Sudevi, a fifty-year-old widow from one of the lowest castes. She worked in the fields whenever one of the big landowners would hire her and on other days received a few rupees from the rich families for pulling water out of their wells. She never made more than fifty cents a day and was lucky if she could find work fifteen days a month. Her husband had died fifteen years earlier from tuberculosis, leaving her nothing. Many days she was forced to beg at the big landowners’ houses. When I first went to see her, in her mud hut with a caved-in wall, she was embarrassed that she was wearing no blouse underneath her rough cotton sari. She had only one, and she had just washed it; I could see it hanging to dry in the sun. She was bony and leather-skinned and told me she was living on flat bread and salt. She owned no land and said that as a widow she was sometimes called bad names. Her twenty-three-year-old son was living with her, but he had no work either, and his wife was eight months pregnant. “My boy doesn’t have enough food,” said Sudevi. “When I feel hungry, I drink water.”

Between these two extremes was Asha Devi, the twenty-year-old wife of a son in a prosperous middle-caste farming family. She neither enjoyed the status of Susheela Bajpai, the Brahmin landowner’s wife, nor suffered the widow’s miseries of Sudevi. Yet in some ways, her life combined the worst of both worlds. She had married into a hardworking family that was on its way up, and its members kept her in purdah to further enhance their position in the community. Keeping women off the land had always been a mark of distinction; in Khajuron, as soon as a family could afford it, the women were brought indoors. Predictably, it was often these striving middle-caste families, the ones with the most to lose and the most to gain in their precarious new positions within the village hierarchy, who secluded their women the most rigidly. Asha Devi led an even more cloistered life than Susheela Bajpai, and with none of Susheela’s relative luxuries as compensation. Asha Devi left the house only two or three times a year, to see her mother. The rest of the time she lived as a virtual servant in her in-laws’ home. At the age of sixteen, she had been married to
a man she had never seen before, and since then she had been cooking and cleaning for his parents, his three older brothers and their wives. She was up at six, in bed at midnight, and ate only after everyone else in the family had finished. I spoke to her on the top floor of the house but during the entire conversation never even saw her face; she had pulled her sari completely over her head, as a sign of deference, and probably of terror. I asked her what would happen if she walked out into the village. “My mother- and father-in-law would scold me,” she said, “and my husband would also scold me.” I turned to her mother-in-law, who was listening to every word, and asked the same question.

“If she went out,” decreed the mother-in-law, “we would not get respect.”

I FOUND KHAJURON BY MAKING CAREFUL PLANS THAT DISINTEGRATED, AS
they always did in India, into fate and serendipity. Since our first year in Delhi, Steve and I had been thinking about living and working in a village together. I wanted to use the material for this book, and he wanted to write a series of articles for
The New York Times
about life in one village in India. We talked about it on and off, finally deciding that no village in India was big enough for the two of us. We had covered the same story a few times in India in the past, and predictably
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
had squabbled over turf and quotes. This time I wouldn’t be writing for the
Post
, but nonetheless I wasn’t in the mood to turn up at the door of a woman’s mud hut and discover that the most interesting event of her week was that the
New York Times
reporter had been there the day before. And yet I did not want to go alone. Finally, Steve and I decided that a pair of villages within walking distance of each other might work.

We then settled on Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, as a base. Lucknow had once been the center of a brilliant and then decadent Moghul court, but more important for us, it was in the heart of a vital northern farming belt and only a fifty-minute flight from Delhi. The people there spoke a Hindi that was similar to what we were learning in Delhi. We surmised, incorrectly, as it turned out, that therefore the Hindi spoken in the villages around Lucknow would be like our own.

One morning in May I landed in Lucknow as a one-woman advance team in search of two villages. My only contact there was a friend of a friend, who directed me to Lucknow University, where I was eventually sent to the office of Dr. Surendra Singh, a professor in the school
of social work, who had done extensive research in the state’s rural areas. (Readers may at this point be wondering why so many people in India are named Singh.
Singh
means “lion,” and it is helpful to remember that all Sikhs use the name Singh, but not all Singhs are Sikhs. Dr. Surendra Singh was a Kshatriya, a member of the Hindu warrior caste, which had traditionally owned large tracts of land in Uttar Pradesh and frequently used Singh as a last name. In Rajasthan, many Rajputs also used Singh as a last name.)

I found Dr. Singh behind a large desk, surrounded on three sides by the usual gaggle of tea-drinking colleagues, students and hangers-on. I told him what I wanted: two predominantly Hindu villages, with a range of castes, each with a population of about one thousand, both of them a one-to-two-hour drive from Lucknow and a short walk apart. Dr. Singh, a round but compact man in his mid-forties with a cherubic face, thin mustache and courtly manner, was amused. Even then, I was aware that I was rattling off my specifications as if he were a short-order cook, but Dr. Singh made some notes and said he would consult the census. The next day he presented me with a list of a half dozen villages that met my requirements, but before I had a chance to be elated, Dr. Singh politely informed me that working in any of them would be nearly impossible.

“You are not known in these places,” he said. “No one will trust you or tell you the truth. It would be better to live in my brother’s village, where I could properly introduce you.” Dr. Singh’s elder brother, Sheo Singh, the husband of Bhabhiji, had stayed back in the village, to manage what remained of the family land. Dr. Singh had left years before. It was the story of independent India, an illustration of how land reform had shrunk the once-large holdings of feudal landlords in rural India and compelled their sons to seek education and make their living in the burgeoning cities. Dr. Singh’s story was also proof of the close ties to the land retained by the first generation of urban Indians, and why so many had kept to the ways of the village—arranged marriages, for example. Dr. Singh had distinguished himself from the millions of others by the remarkable success he had made of his life. Educated in village schools, he had gone on to Lucknow University, where he now was in line to become head of his department.

Dr. Singh’s village turned out to be Khajuron, of course, an hour’s drive from Lucknow. A twenty-minute walk from Khajuron was Gurha, a larger village, where Steve could work. I went with Dr.
Singh’s wife, Reena, and his eldest daughter, Anu, to take a look at both the next day. As we headed south from Lucknow on one of the major arteries of central U.P., a two-lane paved road that led across fertile plains of wheat and under shady groves of enormous gnarled mango trees, Anu, a nineteen-year-old college student, quizzed me about America. She had been up all night studying for an English exam on Shakespeare, Browning and Auden, which she had taken early that morning. (One of the questions was “How much was Lady Macbeth responsible for her husband’s death?”) But now Anu wanted to know if we had a caste system in the United States and whether everyone was rich. Her state was one of the poorest in India, but the soil in that particular area was fed by canals, the land was benevolent, and the poverty not too wretched. We passed people on motor scooters, bicycles and horsecarts. Most of them seemed to have things to do and places to go.

At the town of Bachharawan, chiefly distinguished by dust and a chaotic roadside bazaar where bananas and tin pails were for sale, we turned east, onto a smaller paved highway, and came to the edge of Gurha. From there we turned right onto a bumpy dirt road that crossed marshy land and more fields. This road was only a mile long, and toward the end I could see Khajuron rising up as a little mound, surrounded on all sides by the plains. Within minutes we reached the outskirts—mud huts with thatched roofs, barefoot children, women breast-feeding babies on string cots, cows tethered near piles of long grasses. The car lumbered its way through, climbed up a small hill and came to a stop under the neem tree in Bhabhiji’s front yard. To the right was the low-lying brick-and-mud shed where Steve and I would later sleep; in front of me was the main house, a large, weathered two-story brick structure with an open central courtyard and enormous double doors of heavy, rough wood that you opened and closed by pulling on brass rings. To me, the house looked like that of a prosperous farmer from Saxon times in England. I later learned that it was 150 years old and had changed little from the day it was built.

Bhabhiji and Dr. Singh’s brother came out of the house to greet us, Bhabhiji smiling shyly, Sheo Singh talking nonstop. He was, in fact, the exact opposite of his brother—a tall, large, loud, boisterous man with a white mustache and skin darkened by the sun, who liked to smoke a hookah. Bhabhiji, slender and barefoot, was wearing a simple cotton print sari, red glass bangles, a nose stud and toe rings. She had gray hair, lovely dark eyes, workworn hands and a kind, comforting
face. She gave us tea, and then Anu took me on a tour of Khajuron.

By this time I had been in enough villages in India to know that they are generally not quaint places brimming with interesting mud architecture and picturesque women in colorful saris. Most are depressing little collections of uncharming shacks, plagued by dust, heat, flies, open sewage and disease. Khajuron had all of that, too, but the upper- and middle-caste parts had meandering lanes, old brick houses with carved wooden doors, and pretty views looking out toward the green fields of young wheat. By Indian standards, Khajuron was poor but not desperate. It lay in the political district that had been represented for years by the Nehru dynasty, including Indira Gandhi when she was prime minister. Unlike other villages, Khajuron did not suffer from lack of water. In fact, the village had such access to irrigation canals that its surrounding fields suffered from the opposite problem: a poor drainage system, flooding and excessive salt deposits caused by water-logging. There were hand pumps, and one tube well which pumped water from below the ground. Electricity had come five years earlier, and three of the 250 families now had television sets. Three farmers had tractors, and two had licenses to grow poppies for opium, which they sold at enormous profit to the government for medicine. People assumed they made even larger profits on the black market. On the edge of the fields there was a tall, narrow temple to the god Shiva, and a two-room brick schoolhouse stood nearby. On the Gurha side of the village lay a large pond, covered during parts of the year with white flowers. The bathing pool where I walked in the evenings had been built of brick by a Brahmin landowner more than a century before, but its two pavilions still stood and were reflected in the cool water below. I don’t want to romanticize, but in truth, especially during the few temperate months of the year, Khajuron, for me, was a pleasant place to live.

The physical plan of the village was an indication of the complex social structure that lay underneath. The most powerful landlord, a mild-mannered college-educated Kshatriya farmer named Shardul Singh, lived in a large brick house on the highest spot in the village; around him were clustered tiny communities of houses belonging to the different castes and subcastes. There are four main castes in India, the highest being the Brahmins, who were traditionally teachers and priests. Next are the Kshatriyas, the warriors. Below them are the Vaisyas, who were traders and merchants, and after them come the Sudras, the farmers. The Harijans have no caste at all—hence they are
considered outcastes. For thousands of years they were called Untouchables, but during the independence struggle Mahatma Gandhi gave them the name Harijans—“Children of God”—which paved the way for reform, including affirmative action quotas for Harijans and other low castes in jobs and education. Harijans, however, are still among the most impoverished and degraded people in India.