Charu and friends

I met Charu when she was completing a Ph.D in Linguistics at Delhi University. She was at that time almost finished; she only needed to defend her final dissertation. I would walk into her room sometimes when mine got too sunny; she lived on the north side and her room hardly got any sunlight. The floor was piled with journals and hardbacks for her dissertation. Charu was very keen on her subject; tribal languages of Orissa - she wanted to write a book on the subject. She wrote to Professors in North America about her interests; they answered; sometimes they came to see her when they were in Delhi. Charu planned to take up teaching at the university; her prospects seemed good. She was already teaching part-time.

Charu was older than I was by a few years, so I suppose by Indian standards the time was ripe for her marriage. I knew that was what it must be when she mysteriously disappeared back home, to the seatown of Puri. These mysterious disappearances of female friends had begun as far back as the first year of my Bachelor's degree. They would go home at odd times, sometimes during semester, and return with flushed and beaming faces, and a streak of sindoor reaching down to the middle of their foreheads. They would walk with grace and poise; they had a place in the world, a future. They got phone calls at night, and had long whispered conversations. Unknown truths seemed revealed to them.

Here then was Charu too, bound for the same destination. Chetan, it appeared, had an M.B.A. and a job in marketing in Bombay, two things that made him hot property in the marriage market. I met them for lunch at a restaurant near the University, and he seemed affable enough. But later Charu told me that his parents had demanded a dowry of one lakh rupees. But you can't pay someone to marry you, I said, a little tactlessly. That's just absurd. Charu said well, it isn't Chetan who's asking for it you know. It's his parents and he does not want to offend them. Chetan was an obedient young man who was very careful not to hurt his parents' feelings. Besides, Charu said, it's not that much. Do you know what the going rate for an M.B.A. is?

So Charu got married, and now it's been ten years. She had a son within the first year of her marriage. In the second year, Chetan hit her; in the third he slept with another woman; the following year he asked her to stop working. Or perhaps he did all these things in a different order, and it was all more confusing than I am making it sound. They lived here in the U.S. for a while, then returned to India because Chetan's contract expired. Charu told me she had learned to drive, but never actually got around to getting a license; she was always a little nervous picking her son up from school lest a policeman question her. She even got a tentative job offer from Delaware, but Chetan said she needed to adjust her priorities.

After Charu returned to India, her condition deteriorated somewhat. At first she tried Prozac, but it didn't help, she said, to ignore what was happening to her. So she tried part-time jobs, some in Puri, some out. Chetan and she now led almost entirely separate lives. Chetan wanted a divorce, Charu told me, so he could devote more time to a mistress he had in the more affluent quarter of town. She was just managing to stay in his home by keeping out of his way and avoiding confrontation. She told me she was looking for work in training business professionals in "personality development," she seemed to be moving away from her linguistics background. She spoke of American visitors who wanted to open business schools in Puri. If she waited her time, she would be a Professor in a Business Studies Department. She said once she had a permanent job, she would move out on her own.

When I next spoke to Charu she sounded upset. She said there was a conspiracy against her at her workplace; several people had demanded that she sleep with them and been vindictive when she declined. An I.A.S. officer, someone high-up in the administration, had also been pursuing her and on being rebuffed had spread rumours about her. Charu said she was feeling stressed; later she said she thought that there might be a plot to kill her. Her son was being sexually abused. She spoke to a psychiatrist who said the stress was affecting her sense of reality. He wanted her to take medication for schizophrenia or depression, she wasn't sure which, and she had not returned to him. She could not leave; children needed both parents. She would leave when she got a full-time job, but she could not bring herself to accept any because what about Rahul's future, and how could she move to a different town with her son all by herself?

But you know Delhi so well, I said. I mean, we did do our Masters there.
Yes, but it will mean burning all my bridges, she replied. I bought a rope the other day and kept it in my handbag all day. In the evening I washed and folded my saris and put them away, and packed all my books and papers in a trunk. But then I decided to go walking on the beach and when I returned it was almost dawn; the stars were still there but the newspaperman was already cycling down the drive with the papers. And I had to teach a class.

I lost touch with Charu over time, and apart from an occasional email at Christmas we have not corresponded. But I have met other old friends; Deba, whose science experiments always turned out successful while I had to cheat to get my results to match, is now living with her in-laws and says they don't really like her all that much, and that no-one is really pleased that her only child has been a daughter. And Alka, who says her husband would be fine with her if it wasn't for his parents, who are devils and have total influence over Girish. Like Charu, she believes that children need both parents and that children of broken families end up psychologically scarred. Girish goes away to his parents' home whenever they fight, and seems to agree with his mother that Alka is mentally unstable, and that her parents hid the fact at the time of the negotiations. Alka still gets panic attacks; they started after her first pregnancy, but she knows to hide in her kitchen or bathroom when she feels them coming on. But she says she will wait it out; eventually the in-laws will die, and then her husband will have no-one to turn to to but herself and the kids, and things will shape up.

I might have more to write eventually about Charu or Deba or Alka, but the events in their lives follow a pattern, so none of it is likely to be surprising. Somehow when I was at school I became imbued with the idea that all my classmates were going to have jobs and careers; that only women in my mother's generation had no choice but to become housewives. Indian law does not really protect women; neither does the society as a whole. A woman on her own is a joke, a spectacle for amusement and contempt, like a monkey in tights. Women with very stable sources of income are less vulnerable, but still subject to some censure, though they may be able to ignore it with impunity. Women with lesser means have no such choices. Still, parents in India continue to cripple their daughters, denying them access to education, to property, and most of all, to independent thought. In this they only continue the natural order of things, because to be female is itself a defect, a malformation which can never be corrected. Girls in India are still a cursed, blighted tribe who straggle along as society's afterthoughts. Even when grown, they still remain prisoners of the mindset their parents and their society instill into them; they stay captive with hypnotized single-mindedness, like a fowl with beak bent over a chalk line, thinking it to be a rope to which she is forever fastened.