Old sexism dies hard

I’m still trying to wrap my head around the place of the woman in India. Walking miles to fetch water, carrying large rocks and branches on their heads, bending double for hours to pick in the fields, village women are strong as oxen – yet they say they understand when their husbands beat them. Even Gandhi abused his wife. He always resented being forced into marriage at a young age, as many Indian men and women still are today.

If not from this burden, marital estrangement comes from the unfamiliarity bred by a lifetime of forced abstinence and division from the opposite sex. In order to live together before marriage, a friend of mine and her boyfriend had to tell everyone in their apartment complex that they were siblings. They had to hide their love for each other the way one turns down music to avoid disrupting the neighbors. So when they got married they had to move.

From their very births many women in India are endangered. I’ll never forget the story a village woman named Lata told me about the baby girl she tried to save. The parents already had two daughters, and the man swore that if a third came he would leave. Indeed the third baby was a girl, and the mother planned to kill her. “Please give me the girl,” Lata begged them. “Why should we give her to you?” they said. The next day Lata returned to find the baby dead, fed tobacco and smothered. A full life snuffed away at the dawn of consciousness.

I asked my flat mate Parul how, considering all the work village women do, they could be so cheapened. Besides the high cost of dowries, she said, “a woman is always seen as a liability, something that you have to look after. She’s not going to be part of the family for a very long time; she’ll have to be married off to another family soon. You’re investing in her, giving her an education and all, but it’s not going to reap you any benefits. That’s the sad theory behind it.”

While infanticide is not uncommon in the villages, feticide has become tragically frequent in many cities, as more and more people can afford sonograms and abortions. A 2001 law banned “sex determination” tests, but like many Indian laws the idea is far from the reality – you can’t outlaw sonograms in a democracy. India’s gender ratio is dangerously unbalanced: just over 900 girls are born for every 1000 boys, and that number is trending down; in the West the ratio is 1050 to 1000. In some of the worst areas, such as Punjab and Gujarat, it’s lower than 800 to 1000. According to Edward Luce’s In Spite of the Gods, families in the most extreme areas will sometimes import women from elsewhere in India to serve – and I do mean serve – as a wife for several men at the same time.

Most of my experiences in villages have confirmed the imbalance of power between the genders. The few times I’ve seen men gather to debate village-wide issues, I’ve seen the women on the periphery, wielding about as much influence as me, an outsider who can’t understand the language. When I had lunch there, we men would fraternize together in the living room while she emerged from the kitchen only to refill our plates, waiting to eat until we had finished.

In the villages it seems women are so often in the shadows that they fear being noticed. One hot afternoon I found myself surrounded by village schoolchildren and an insurmountable language barrier. I pulled out my digital camera, and eyes bulged. It was as if I had just shot flames from my hand. When I pointed it at the boys, they would crowd towards it, even shoving each other to get in the frame. But when I pointed toward the girls they scattered, even hiding their faces – except for the very youngest, the five year olds, who were perhaps too young to understand their place in society.

After India beat Sri Lanka to win the Cricket World Cup for the first time since 1983, the city was pandemonium. My friends and I spilled out into the streets with what must have been hundreds of thousands of others, flowing deliriously down Mahatma Gandhi Road, one of the main roads in Pune, for hours. I lost myself in the drums, in the dancing, in the innumerable Indian smiles inspired by the sight of a Westerner celebrating their country. All down the line, men took pictures and videos of me, hoisted me up on their cars, handed me huge Indian flags to wave. I might never have felt so joyous and free in my life.

But for our white female friends it was a different story. One was relatively comfortable, dancing with little boys along the way. Another was fine until someone grabbed her ass; she shoved him against a car, but her night was over. Another friend could never get into the festivities – she felt the stares around her and walked nervously alongside us, relieved when it was all over. It was only part way through the impromptu populist parade that I realized all the Indian women were standing firmly on the sidewalks, arms crossed or holding their young daughters’ hand, watching.

A few weeks ago some friends and I went to Goa and rented huts on an isolated beach. At night we sat on the beach, drinking beers and listening to our friend Kristie play the most enchanting music. It was the one thing we didn’t pay for those nights, and it was the most memorable. One woman strumming a guitar; another holding up sheet music and a light; all three women harmonizing together. Three men sipping beers, occasionally joining in song but mostly just letting the chills run down our spines. Women bringing their social group together through music, uninterrupted by men – it seemed like a scene that could only happen in the most modern of Indian circles. And it wasn’t that they were playing for us, more that we were lucky enough to be there listening to them.

You lose something, I thought to myself, when you take women out of a culture.

*After talking about this post with some Indian women at work I realized I painted this piece with very broad strokes. As they said, “There is no one Indian woman” – the female experience varies among the incredibly diverse regions, cultures, classes, castes, religions, races, languages, and urban vs rural spaces of India. A middle class woman in Pune will generally be afforded more respect than one in Delhi. Muslim and Hindu families may have very different ideas of what to do with their daughters; those decisions will take on new forms between city and village. At the same time, my colleagues suggested that domestic abuse is universal, even outside of India. My sense is that it’s much more pervasive in the Indian middle class than in the American middle class (the only one I’m familiar with); whether or not that’s true their opinion may give some insight into Indian perspectives on gender relations. In my piece “Every little thing” I report back with a further developed understanding.

Lives lived, love lost

In the West we take love for granted – if you’re married, or even going out for a year or two, you must be in love. For the average Indian it’s not so simple.

I find Ajay, my one Indian friend, smoking by himself, in retreat from the party inside. “I talk about what I know,” he says, taking a drag, “I can’t keep up with the conversations you city people have.” Whenever Ajay and I get dinner together we talk about what he knows – his life growing up in a northern Indian village – which always leads to religion, philosophy, politics, history, love. I like returning to these conversations; his mild manner belies a life story that is simply alien to me.

Ajay’s parents arranged his marriage eleven years ago, when he was sixteen. Now he has three kids with a woman he met on the day before the wedding. “Imagine you at sixteen, getting married. Imagine you, at age nineteen, one child. I didn’t even want to have children; my mother knew before I did.” I can’t imagine; all I can do is nod in disbelief.

This imposition on Ajay’s youth has informed his entire worldview. He comes from a devout Hindu family and the traditionally educated Brahmin caste; one of the first things he ever told me about himself was that he hates religion and he hates the caste system. Hinduism wed him to a woman he can’t love, in fact, has stripped his ability to even understand the concept. (When my friend Jenn told him he needed to find a woman to love, he said he does love – he loves his parents, his children, his friends.) Hinduism – specifically the Brahmin caste he belongs to – would forbid him from drinking the beer in his hand. Hinduism would make it nearly impossible for him to leave his wife and marry a new one – hundreds of the bride’s family members would have to approve of her marrying a divorcee – which is why he says he only thinks of marrying a foreigner.

Ajay doesn’t like to be at home – he’s here in the big city studying German, a language he could use to escape his country, one for which classes could easily be found much closer to home. At home he insists he knows “99.9 percent of the people – and the other .1 percent are the truck drivers, the people not staying very long.” He once spent two and a half years living in Delhi, only coming back occasionally to see his children. He talks to his wife on the phone every day, but what really interests him is talking to his children. “She is not educated,” he says to me with a mix of sadness and disdain in his voice, “all she knows is how much money I bring home, what to cook for dinner. But my oldest son is very clever, he tricks her all the time – he will say, ‘Oh I have a stomach ache, I need to stay home from school.’ ‘I didn’t do my homework today, my teacher will beat me; I need to stay home from school.’ And she will believe him.”

It occurs to me that Ajay’s wife might be one of the 45 percent of Indian women who are illiterate. “She can write her name,” he says, “I taught her.” Since her lack of education seems to be at the crux of his disappointment with her, I ask him why he doesn’t give her an ultimatum – get educated or I’ll leave you. “I have tried,” he says. “I have tried to teach her. When I want to go out to dinner or a movie, I ask her ‘Do you want to go to dinner with the kids?’ – I have begun to ask it like this – but she will not. She doesn’t want people to see her sitting in a restaurant. So I go to dinner with my three children.”

He lets slip something about a potential girlfriend, and I pry. It comes out that he’s had a few hookups with other women. “My wife knows everything. I tell her everything. I tell her she is also free to do that. But she will not. I blame her parents – they taught her from age five that you are a woman, you must follow your husband, do everything for your husband. But what if your husband is an abuser? Why should you follow him then?”

I’m still stuck on Ajay’s completely open infidelity. “I don’t know how long I’d be able to handle that with my girlfriend,” I tell him.

“There is a difference,” he says, “you are in love with her. My wife knows I don’t love her.”

Ajay tells me that the Hindi word for relationship comes from the word bend. In every relationship the two must bend and adjust for each other. Sometimes it’s painful, other times it makes them fit more perfectly. Sometimes no amount of bending will do, and they break. Just look at the United States’ 50 percent divorce rate. Estimates of the divorce rate in India range from .1 percent to two percent. Of course it’s hard to say which is better. How many Indian women suffer through a lifelong marriage they can’t escape?

Yesterday at work the office custodian threw a samosa party and announced he was getting married. He speaks no English, so I figured he was from a village, where arranged marriages are quite common. “Is it a love marriage or arranged marriage?” I ask him with the help of some colleagues. He responds in Hindi and laughs. A colleague translates, “He says it’s an arranged marriage that will become a love marriage.”

That’s the hope.

go go Goa, thoughts on karma

Few four day trips are worth two 12-hour nightmarish bus rides, but Goa may be the exception.

The two harrowing journeys bookended my trip to the beach, and were everything it was not. Especially on the way to Goa, I’m pretty sure the driver was a legitimate adrenaline junkie. It’s a night bus, or really, a high stakes mountain roller coaster. But I quickly forgot about the violent sloshing of my stomach, as my teeth stayed clenched for hours in anxiety of the driver’s every move – unable to wait behind vehicles driving at normal speeds, he would push ahead in the opposite lane, often slowly uphill, almost always around blind corners.

My digestive system, too, had reason to clench. At our first stop I went to pee in the bathroom and discovered that I was already standing in it. While it was superfluous to go to the urinal, I did so anyway, and unloaded in the open trough, adding my stream to the rushing torrent. Contemplating the rank environs and traditional Indian lack of toilet paper, I resolved to hold my bowels until Goa. At all costs.

So at the second stop, after exiting the bus and nearly tripping over a dead dog, I had a simple chai (traditional Indian tea, sweet and creamy) and no food. I had struck up a conversation with a tall Dane seated next to me on the bus – the only other white person – and we now sat together sipping our tea.

“This ride is absolutely insane,” I said, feeling genuinely lucky to be alive.

“Yeah man,” he said. “Did you hear about the bus that went off the edge a few weeks ago? Yeah. Everyone died.”

“Good to know.”

“By the way man, did you notice the girl next to you puking?”

For the rest of the night I did.

As terrible as that ride was – and the one back, too – Goa was totally worth it. It’s hard to beat four days on the coast – the warm water, laid back atmosphere and gorgeous scenery were a glorious respite from my nine to five in the city. Among the highlights:

• Rode a moped for the first time. I can’t say “I learned how to ride a moped” because it’s just so damn easy. If you’ve ever ridden a bike, well, you’re overqualified for the task. It’s the most exhilarating feeling. You sit your ass on the back of that padded stallion, turn the key, give a flick of the wrist, and you’re off! Take a deep breath and the purest of air flows through your being. Throw on a pair of shades for extra cool points.

• Climbed a hill from the beach to the ruins of an old Portuguese fort, surrounded by vibrant flags. Felt very small upon looking out on the horizon.

• Went to a big open-air night market. Food, drinks, and a chess set I bargained down from 800 to 400 rupees ($20 -> $10). Then chess and drinks at the open air dance club. Bumping house music + chess = genius.

• Hung out for four days with four guys I met through total serendipity. A Swiss named Johann whom I met at a WOTR climate change conference. The Dane from the bus, Adam. And a Brit named Daniel whom the three of us met while taking a back path to the beach on day one. The beauty of travel.

I’ve always wanted to believe in karma, and in Goa, for at least one night, I found reason to do so. When I lost my cell phone at the night market dance club I thought all was lost – getting a SIM card here is about as simple as walking through airport security in a trench coat. Eventually I went and asked at the bar; someone had turned it in. Huge sigh of relief. Later that night, as we walked back to our mopeds, we passed a couple sitting on one who had dropped their bag and were awkwardly straining to pick it up. I went over, picked it up, and handed it to them.

“Right thing to do man,” Johann said to me.

“Well they just looked too pathetic.”

“Hey, you’ll have good karma.”

I chewed on that for a few minutes. Then I realized – I did something kind, but someone had already done so for me. I didn’t get my phone back because I helped someone out of an awkward situation, just as the next good fortune that befalls me won’t be because of that help I gave. Karma isn’t a linear tit-for-tat, like an investment of good will that you put in the bank and withdraw from later. Because it’s not strictly about self-interest. It’s a cycle, a wheel, a way of being.

If you believe in it of course.

 

One city, two worlds

originally written on Feb 20, 2011

There’s so much pain in the world.

Just outside my building tonight, a stray dog’s yelp caught my attention. A man had stepped on its foot, apparently with some amount of pressure. The dog was now crumpling to the ground, finding that its front right foot now folded instead of stood. The man was gone.

What could I have done to help? I don’t know. How could I just keep walking? Don’t know that either.

Head down between its handicapped front paws, the poor mongrel looked like it was praying, or crying, or wondering if it should just give up and die.

In a strange neighborhood far from any other Westerners, I too felt vulnerable. Turning back one last time, I met eyes with a woman who had also taken pity on the dog. And I just kept walking.

Today some new friends took me to a pool party. Two American women and a Brazilian guy my age – they’d spent good time here together already. I was looking forward to being social with them, to getting drunk and dancing and maybe acting a fool. But when we got to the roof and walked out to the shimmering pool and canopied bar and lavish buffet overlooking the smoggy brown city, my heart felt overwhelmed by despair.

You have to understand where I was coming from. On the corner outside the hotel entrance, beggar women roam with babies in their arms, searching, pleading always in vain for a generous Westerner. Also outside the building sits a woman who holds up her hands to all who walk by. Why? Because they have no fingers.

Meanwhile, a crowd of wealthy, Western-looking Indian teenagers is blowing up the party. Diving into the pool, dancing to nonstop American jams, smoking and drinking like there’s no tomorrow. Laughing, high-fiving, pushing each other in the pool.

But what is there to party about? Did they not see the women right outside the building? Did they not make the inconvenient connection that those women begging on the street are human beings too?

I can’t say much for myself. I still haven’t given money to a homeless person here. I’m just about through giving myself excuses. These people are the very poorest in the world. Just because their parents may have handicapped them at young ages or they may be enslaved into begging by gang overlords doesn’t mean I should ignore their plight.

A doe-eyed, dirty little boy scores a five rupee coin from a stranger – about 20 US cents – and kisses it like I would a $100 bill. A man whose arms end abruptly at his elbows wanders through the loudest, smelliest traffic in the world, stopping at windows and nodding to his chest pocket, which sags with the weight of his day’s earnings. And I sit here in bed, typing away, wondering where they came from and where we’re all going.

Driving insane

The first two times I experienced Indian traffic (in Pune, specifically), I came away at a total loss to describe it. Words beyond “crazy,” “awesome” and “exhilarating” failed me. It was like stepping off a roller coaster and trying to explain what the ride was like.

For one thing, lanes are at best vague approximations – theories, in the way people say “well, that’s just a theory.” Motor scooters are everywhere, squeezing into any crevice between vehicles that might allow them to get ahead. Red light stops, few and far between, look like the starting line at a motocross rally – and sound like it too. The cacophony of horns is absolutely relentless – it’s as if each driver has a tick telling him to beep every five seconds, regardless of the situation. The whole thing is a blaring, fuming, constantly recalculating jigsaw puzzle of steel, a raucous liquid of commuters pumping through the streets.

Some highlights of my moto-rickshaw ride from the train station to my flat, at 7:30pm rush hour – my very first exposure to Pune:

• An elephant tries to merge into our stream of chaos. A quick calculation by the driver shows the beast to be influentially large, but not quick enough to threaten our momentum. We speed ahead, leaving behind a beep for good measure.
• Our blaring flow of vehicles slows near a group of loitering rickshaw drivers. Five of them swarm my rickshaw, hastily offering me their services – except I’m already sitting in a rickshaw.
• This one was really fun – the driver cuts around one lane of oncoming traffic, briefly speeding ahead in the second oncoming lane in order to weave back into our stream. He saved some important seconds with that one.

I’ve tried to decipher what makes drivers here beep so much. The obvious answer is that in a congested, highly improvisational flow of traffic it’s the best way to get your point across: either “move out of my way” or “okay, now if you don’t move I’m just going to hit you.” I think the constant beeping acts as a kind of sonar. Drivers know who’s coming based on the strength of the blast, and from where. But sometimes the beeping just makes no sense. I’ll often see bikers speeding down the street with meters of free space around them, blaring their horns. Meanwhile others will dodge and weave, vroom and put, flirting with disaster in total silence.

Street signs and maps barely exist, making it difficult to navigate on one’s own. I pretty much take a rickshaw everywhere I can’t go by foot, which is most places in this city. They’re cheap, only about 25 cents a kilometer. Soon I think I’ll brave the haphazard bus system.

Riding in traffic doesn’t really faze me anymore, but crossing the street is still pretty terrifying. The best thing to compare it to is the game Frogger, except at a faster pace and with many more vehicles. But despite the chaos of it all, I have yet to see an accident of any kind. Somehow it all comes together.

First thoughts in India

Feb 14, 2011

What am I feeling right now?

Fear. That’s the first thing. They can smell it emanating from my white Western pores. Venturing out of my hotel into the muggy dust I can’t help but be stopped by taxi drivers every ten feet: “Where are you going? I take you to market I take you to shopping mall I take you to beach.”

They follow me several paces until I’ve made it absolutely clear that I’m just going for a walk. I turn the corner and press on, standing taller and continuing to see nothing but Indians around me, staring at me. My system cherishes the dusty fresh slightly urine-stained air, and I realize I’ve been breathing exclusively recycled colorless airport-airplane-hotel air for the last 30 hours.

“You okay?” an official asks me as I strain, in the middle of the dusty road, to pull away from a persistent taxi driver.

“What? Oh yeah, thanks.”

One particularly pesky driver finds me sitting outside the hotel after my adventurous two block jaunt. I want to hear his story; he wants to sell me a ride. Holding close to the vest, neither of us get what we’re after.