Girl Power in the Land of the Maharajahs
Travel Stories: Terry Ward took heat from her American friends when she strayed from convention to travel the world. In an Indian guesthouse, she learned that some struggles are universal.
The pressures they talked about made me think about my life—easy by comparison—and the demons I battled as a 29-year-old woman notorious among my own clan for straying from society’s most-accepted path: getting married, securing a stable job and having children. The pressures we faced from our individual cultures seemed at once similar and different.
I recalled the strange looks I had received from friends and family when I announced I was off to India alone, thankful that those few perplexed glances had been the sole obstacle to my journey.
The next day, Arachana took me to Bundi’s bazaar.
We dodged roaming livestock as we wound past stalls. Clouds of steam rose from iron vats where men stirred boiling milk and sugar into an Indian sweet called barfi. Wearing nose rings that hung from their nostrils to their chins, women in red and yellow saris admired sparkling bangles under the shade of a thatched umbrella.
Arachana smiled at an acquaintance in the crowd.
“If I am walking with you, it is no problem,” she said, “but when I am walking with foreign boy, then people are talking too much. Life is too much difficult for the woman in India. In your country there are so many freedoms for the women and the girls.”
I didn’t doubt our freedoms, but she didn’t know what she was teaching me: that society pressures you no matter where you are.
From a rampart high above the city in Taragarh Fort, we watched dusk fall on Bundi. As shades of gray slowly diluted the blues of the Brahman homes until they faded and twinkled with lights, Arachana told me a heart-wrenching story about her neighbor, a girl who had been in an arranged marriage just five days when her husband killed himself.
“It is big tragedy for this girl,” Arachana said, explaining how the 16-year-old would never be allowed to remarry. Her status as a widow had relegated her to the fringes of society before she had reached a woman’s age.
“Mama is feeling very sad for this girl, so she offered to adopt her. Then the girl can get married again, and Mama is taking the shame,” Arachana said.
It must have taken a lot of courage for Kamla to make such a proposal.
“But the family, they are Rajputs,” she continued, referring to Rajasthan’s proud warriors, “and they say no.” Now the young widow would suffer the consequences for the rest of her life.
Arachana watched my eyes widen as my Western mind scrambled for a solution. But in the closed ranks of Rajasthani society, the door had long since slammed shut. I felt a flash of the nameless girl’s pain. The thought of such external forces controlling my destiny was beyond my comprehension.
On my last night in Bundi, I joined Kamla and her daughters in their small kitchen for a cooking lesson.
Kamla wielded her spice tray like a painter’s palette, demonstrating the various proportions of chili and turmeric to add to the lentils to make the perfect daal. Many Brahmans are strict vegetarians and even eggs are prohibited. Rachana showed me how to make chapati, rhythmically kneading a ball of dough made from flour and water before slapping it between her palms-thwack, thwack, thwack-and tossing it into a scorching cast-iron pan. Arachana sat on the floor to slice okra, and Rachana teased her, saying she looked like a village girl.
“Do you have a stone floor like this in your kitchen too?” Arachana asked. “And when you have no ice, can you go ask a neighbor?”
“Ice ice baby,” sang Rachana with a giggle, echoing the lyrics of a popular Western hip-hop song. We three women could share so much and so little.
After dinner, we sat in the backyard watching white-faced monkeys swing through a banyan tree. A neighbor appeared at the fence to ask a favor of Kamla, who was thumbing through the pages of a thick white book, a collection of short biographies and photos of boys from her sub-caste. She was looking for a husband for Arachana. “Not for now,” Kamla said, “for someday.”
I asked Arachana if she wanted to get married.
“Yes, someday, maybe when I am almost 30, then I am getting married,” she said with a smile, and her mother nodded her approval. “For now, running this guesthouse is my big dream.”
I asked her how she felt about her mother choosing her husband.
“I think your system is the best,” Arachana began. “Here parents try. Better to self try. But Mama knows me, and she knows what kind of boy I am liking.”
“What if you fall in love?” I prodded, too curious to resist a typically Western question.
Arachana cocked her head, a gesture I’d seen many times in India, a slight dip of the forehead with a piercing look that said neither yes nor no. I never knew how to interpret it; this time I figured she didn’t understand the concept. Then she said something that told me she did.
“One time there is a boy staying here, a photographer from Italy. He is taking many photographs of me and Rachana. He is a nice boy,” she said. “But Mama is saying to me, ‘He is not from your caste.’ ” She cocked her head again, and her eyes said it all: Her world was hers and my world was mine.
But there was one thing I knew we shared: Our diverse gods shower us all with struggles and rewards.
You needn’t travel halfway around the world to figure that out, someone might say. But I’m glad I did.
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Terry Ward is a Florida-based writer and a long-time contributor to World Hum.