May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (2 page)

THIS BOOK IS THE STORY OF AN AMERICAN WOMAN’S JOURNEY INTO WHAT
for her was an unknown world, the lives of the women of India. It lasted almost four years, took me to most states in the country and forced me thousands of years back in history. I met and interviewed hundreds of women, although I am not sure that this number means anything. I learned the most from the handful of Indian women I counted as friends, and from the larger truths that came from the exploration of individual lives. Many of the Indian women I encountered led miserable existences, little better than those of beasts of burden. Others were among the most formidable people I have ever met. Almost all of them were inspiring. The story of Indian women is ancient, but it is also the story of the profound change, and contradictions, of the present day.

My husband and I first landed in New Delhi in the middle of a January night in 1985, and at the time it seemed as if we had flown the nineteen hours from our home in Washington, D.C., to a country
that could not be part of the same planet. One of New Delhi’s sodden winter fogs hung heavy over the runway, obscuring what little there was to see other than scrub and rocky soil. Later, I always thought it fitting that my first view of India should have extended no more than twenty-five feet in front of me.

I was twenty-eight years old and had traveled no farther from the United States than Europe. To prepare myself for India, I had dutifully read the recommended books and talked to numerous old India hands.
The Jewel in the Crown
, the public television series based on Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, was bringing magical scenes of Kashmir’s Dal Lake and the golden desert of Rajasthan into American living rooms at the time; I had been moved by the film
Gandhi
a few years before. None of that seemed to have anything to do with the India I first encountered, and no book or person could have described the physical sensation of simply breathing the air. This was before the completion of the modern Indira Gandhi International Airport, so our arrival was not sanitized by a sealed walkway into a brightly lit terminal. Instead, we stepped out the door of the plane and were instantly assaulted by the overpowering smell of a Delhi winter night—smoky and sweet and overripe and utterly foreign, with a promise of adventures to come. Later I discovered the odor was from the smoke of the cow-dung fires that people built to cook food and keep warm.

I was shaking as I walked down the steps and onto the tarmac, feeling like an innocent unworthy of what was before me. As we waited under the belly of the plane for a rattletrap bus to take us to the terminal, I stared through the mist at the Arabic letters on a parked 747 that had arrived that night from the Gulf. We had flown over Saudi Arabia on our way, and it took me a moment to readjust to my new place in the world; the Middle East was now west. The fog and my fatigue gave everything an amorphous, dreamlike quality, as if India had no edges and no point of penetration. It was the first of many times I would feel as if I were free-falling in space, with nothing to hang on to and no point of reference.

I had come to India because of my husband. I still don’t like to say it that way, but it is one reason, I think, that I wrote this particular book about India instead of another. For the past five and a half years, I had been a reporter for the Style section of
The Washington Post
, and Steve, my husband, had covered the White House for
The New York Times
. We were married in 1983. A little more than a year later, Steve joined the foreign staff of the
Times
and accepted New Delhi as his first assignment.

I knew almost nothing about India. My father had spent three months there in 1956, while making a film about traveling by jeep around the world, and the image I had of the country, to the extent that I even thought about it, had come chiefly from one scene in that film that had stayed with me for years. It was of Hindu worshipers on the bathing ghats, or steps, leading into the waters of the Ganges at Benares, one of the holy cities of India. People swarmed into the river, gulped mouthfuls of fetid brown water, and stood knee-deep in silent meditation as they cupped their hands in prayer toward the sun. The shot had a beautiful amber light, which I now recognize as the color of dawn on the Ganges. But it all looked so inaccessible to my world.

Yet I had always wanted to report from overseas, and once I got used to the idea of India, I developed, along with my nervousness, a lot of romantic notions about the passage ahead. Our first day in Delhi, however, did not distinguish us as intrepid travelers. We were cosseted several centuries away from Benares at Delhi’s Taj Mahal Hotel, a luxury high rise with a white marble lobby filled with the scent of fresh tuberoses and a powerful disinfectant. We had checked in at five in the morning but were awake at eight. Steve, with great trepidation, parted the heavy curtains to peer out at India. Beneath us lay a mist-shrouded expanse of trees and foliage that looked like an ominous South Asian Sherwood Forest. Above it, floating languidly on the morning breeze, were enormous birds reminiscent of pterodactyls. “I’m supposed to cover this country,” Steve said, only half joking, “but I’m afraid to go outside.” I later learned that we had been gazing down on cabinet ministers’ gardens, which make up some of the most expensive real estate in the country.

New Delhi at eye level later the same day presented other surprises. The city had been described to me as a gracious capital of broad streets lined with mango trees and gardens bursting with dahlias in the cooler months. That is true, especially on a clear day in early spring, but what my new eyes first focused on is also true: a rundown metropolis in various stages of urban expansion and decay. The fog gave everything I gray, gritty cast. There had been fifteen different cities built on and ground New Delhi, spanning the eleventh to twentieth centuries, but this last one looked as if it hadn’t been finished. Graceful white-columned “bungalows” sat behind big brick walls, but outside there vere no sidewalks, just rubble and dust. Many of the bungalows were treaked with black water stains from the years of monsoons. A few glass-and-steel skyscrapers rose assertively out of the small business area
of central New Delhi, but everything else was in dire need of maintenance, or at least a fresh coat of paint. And that was the “new” Delhi built by the British. When we drove to the markets of the old city, we were hit by a rock-video kind of intensity: hawkers, jostling crowds, blaring Hindi film music, pigs, cows, goats, chickens, parrots, diseased dogs, bicycle rickshaws, one-armed lepers, legless beggars, ragged children. On the streets surrounding Jama Masjid, the largest mosque in India, the smells of incense, jasmine and sewage mingled with the delicious aroma of Indian bread puffing up in the oil of a frying pan. Photographs and films cannot completely capture the sensory overload. Until then, I had always been slightly disappointed to find the foreign countries I visited in some way shadows of what I had imagined. In India that first day I was incredulous.

Trying to establish a bit of my old Washington routine, I went for a run that first morning in Lodi Garden, a lovely park of well-worn lawns and crumbling fifteenth-century tombs left by one of the city’s invading dynasties. There I came upon one of my first Indian women. She was following a bullock across the grass and collecting the animal’s warm steaming dung with her hands. She put it in a basket and headed home, I later learned, so she could mix it with straw to make little cakes for cooking fuel.

The first week we moved into a house on Prithvi Raj Road, an address that sounds as lyrical to me now as it did then, in the heart of the “forest” we had seen from our hotel room. Among our neighbors were diplomats, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet members and Indian industrialists. Our house, which the
Times
had rented for a dozen years, was an undistinguished one-story white stucco with a pretty garden and four bedrooms. All of the rooms had ceiling fans and most opened onto a central veranda where I later hung a big brass birdcage with two noisy green parrots. I put grass mats and dhurrie rugs on the floors and re-covered the furniture in Indian handloom. The house came with a cook and a housekeeper and a part-time gardener and laundryman, an absurd infrastructure for two people to inherit, but standard help for affluent Indian families. Toheed, the cook, had worked for the
Times
for more than a dozen years. Mohinder, the driver at the
Times
office, had been there for twenty.

As the days passed, a pattern of relative normalcy began to assert itself. I took Hindi lessons in the mornings, then settled in to work.
The Washington Post
already had a Delhi correspondent, but I had made arrangements with my editors to write longer feature stories
about social issues and culture. I also thought I would try to write a book, although I was not sure about what. Several people had suggested it should be about Indian women, but I resisted the idea because it seemed a marginal concern compared with the more important problems—poverty, overpopulation, threats to national unity and religious violence—facing India. Besides that, I was already sensitive about my status as “the wife” who had followed her husband halfway around the world. I certainly didn’t want to write the predictable “woman’s book.”

This is not to say that I didn’t consider myself a feminist, but my feminism, such as it was, consisted of an unformed, conventional belief in equal rights and the self-absorbed determination to have a career. I was born in 1956 in Denmark—my mother is Danish and my father, an American, met her on a ferry to Copenhagen during his round-the-world jeep trip—but I came of age in Cincinnati in the mid-1970s. The women’s movement had fought many of my battles for me, and to a large extent I reaped the benefits. My family naturally assumed I would have a profession. I went to Northwestern University’s journalism school, then to the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, and at neither place did I encounter any overt discrimination. My first year at Northwestern I had taken a course in women’s history that included Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
and Simone de Beauvoir’s
The Second Sex
, but I had never joined a women’s organization or written exclusively about women’s issues. Washington is a town run and dominated by men, but there my most impassioned feminist emotions centered on the kitchen, in arguments with my husband over who should cook dinner and clear the table.

Before moving to India I had had little exposure to poor people. I had written stories about migrant farm workers on the Gulf Coast of Florida when I worked for
The Miami Herald
for one year in the late seventies, and I had delivered meals to the homeless every other week the last two years that we lived in Washington. These activities served chiefly to relieve my conscience. I was a registered Democrat with vague concerns about the poor and the homeless, but I had never confronted poverty on a massive scale and had never been forced to think about the system that creates it. In truth I had spent considerably more time writing about the rich than about the poor. When I started at the
Post
, I covered Washington parties—political fund-raisers, art openings and the occasional White House state dinner—and also interviewed such swells as Cornelia Guest, the debutante turned aspiring
actress. When Ronald Reagan became president I graduated to writing profiles of a number of the staff people who ran his administration and chronicling some of the first-term excesses of Nancy Reagan and the new California money that had arrived in town. The truth is, I was hesitant to write a book about Indian women because I was intimidated by the subject.

So for my first two years in India, I did not pursue “women’s issues” in particular. I wrote instead about Calcutta’s writers, painters and filmmakers, and how their work reflected one of the most ruinous but creative cities on earth. I wrote about the legacy of the British Raj, focusing on a group of Indians who belonged to a curious anachronism, the Royal Bombay Yacht Club. Later that year, I went to the fiftieth anniversary of Rajiv Gandhi’s prep school in the foothills of the Himalayas, using the event to explore the sensibilities of Rajiv’s affluent school chums, the “computer boys” who had joined his government and were advising him how to haul India into the next century.

And yet, it was the stories I wrote about women that touched me the deepest. At the beginning of my second year I met a bride, the wife of a scooter-cab driver, who said her husband had set her on fire because she had not brought enough dowry to the marriage. She had spent three months in a hospital and had been discharged with scars over 60 percent of her body. Rippled, splotched skin was still visible on her hands and neck, and later she showed me the horrible scars on her stomach and calves. She was one of the lucky ones. There are more than 600 bride burnings, as these attempted murders for dowry are called, in New Delhi each year. Most of the women die.

I had also spent the previous summer listening in amazement as college girls informed me they would be happy to marry a stranger of their parents’ choice. I remember asking a twenty-year-old student in economics at Delhi University, Meeta Sawhney, if she loved the childhood friend her parents had decided she should marry. “That’s a very difficult question,” she answered. “I don’t know. This whole concept of love is very alien to us. We’re more practical. I don’t see stars, I don’t hear little bells. But he’s a very nice guy, and I think I’m going to enjoy spending my life with him. Is that love?” She shrugged.

Women, I was beginning to realize, were my window into the Indian interior world, and into the issues of family, culture, history, religion, poverty, overpopulation, national unity—indeed, the very problems I had earlier thought were unrelated to the concerns of
women. By this time, too, I had begun to make friends with several Indian women. One was an academic, working on her doctorate. Another was a journalist, and a third designed Indian clothes. They had seemed, at first, so much like me. I soon learned that they were but they weren’t, and the differences opened the window a little bit more. There are many ways “in” for an outsider in India, of course. I knew Americans who studied Moghul water gardens, classical Indian dance or the cult of the god Krishna. I knew other Americans who wrote reports on the government’s health care system or raised chickens. I knew reporters who covered political developments in Delhi and terrorist attacks in Punjab. All are ways of illuminating at least a pocket of a seemingly unfathomable civilization, and I am not sure that raising chickens is much less revealing than an interview with a member of Rajiv Gandhi’s opposition. Women were my way “in,” in part because they were the most natural, familiar path.