REFLECTIONS
Whither women's emancipation?
VRINDA PISHARODY
MY friend from Jorhat called me up last week. "Bad news," she said. "Matu is in hospital." I stared at the phone. "She was burnt by her husband because she came back to the colony looking for a job ... She talked about you time and again," she added hesitantly, not sure if that helped or hurt. I sat down stunned, recollecting the days that I had spent in the East not too long ago. Days that had been made delightful, thanks to Matu.
My association with Matu began two years ago when she first knocked on my door hesitantly asking for a job. This was in Jorhat, Assam, in North-eastern India. My husband had been posted to the Air Force Hospital there and we had just moved in to the new house that was to be our home for the next two years.
Matu enters
My four-year-old daughter and I were taking in the place when the voice at the door squeaked again, "Will you take me as your maid?" Shelving my thoughts on the new place for a later time, I turned to the slip of a woman standing at the door. She didn't look more than 22 or so and had two grubby kids holding her hands. I did a memsahib number and asked her for her credentials and expected salary. She gave me a cheerful grin and rattled off her past employers, accompanied by a brief biodata, both seemingly satisfying. Thus with no reason to refuse her, I hired Matu in two days of moving to Jorhat.
Like all relationships, ours too grew very cautiously. Matu cooked, cleaned, washed and scrubbed while I spent my mornings in front of the laptop presumably "working" online for my software company, 3000 miles away. It took Matu some time and explanations to understand how my work was "work", but she finally gave an understanding nod and left it at that. I would catch her sometimes wistfully staring at me keying in or working on a Photoshop image. When I smiled and looked at her questioningly, she'd grin sheepishly and say, "You must be very intelligent to do all this?" I would laugh and tell her that there were any number of morons who could easily do what I was doing! She would grin back at me and, as though satisfied, would get back to watching her favourite screen — the idiot box.
The television was one of Matu's greatest weaknesses and she would finish her household chores and mine to catch a movie every morning on our TV. Would DJ for me early in the mornings and, after having exhausted my limited "new Hindi movie" cassettes, started playing (much to my amusement) Alannah Myles and Floyd proving the "good music is global" logic.
In my vague way, I would try drilling into her the importance of education and insist that her kids continue their schooling at any cost. (Quite surprisingly both kids did attend some local school.) She would nod wisely and agree to do so. When battered by her lunatic husband, she'd tearfully ask me, "You are so fortunate to be educated... Is that why Saab never yells at you or hits you?'
Matu's husband was a drunken vagabond, a parasite who suspected her every move. He lived off her, bashed her and impregnated her regularly. He had been thrown out of the quarters at least half a dozen times and had been almost physically beaten up by me a couple of times. "Why don't you just leave him?" I would yell at Matu. "You are not dependent on him financially." She would nod vehemently and throw him out of the servant quarters (hers by virtue of working for us) only to reinstate him after a couple of days ensuring that I discovered him only after I had cooled off. "What can I do, memsahib? He's promised never to drink and never abuse me again," she'd say. And as an afterthought would sagely add, "And one does need to have a male around in this world."
Yes, one does need a man around. To be beaten up by, to be abused by and in an alarmingly growing number of cases, to be burnt by.
Women power?
In March, we celebrated the International Women's Day. My company launched a woman's forum, newspapers gloated over successful women and hotels and boutiques offered discounts to lady patrons. There was enough good happening to women as a gender giving us reason enough to celebrate the day, screamed the newspapers. I wondered then and I wonder now.
The phone rang again. It's over, mumbled my friend, from 3,000 km away. Matu died an hour ago succumbing to her 65 per cent burns. I hung up, unable to react. It was barely three months since I had bid her farewell upon our sudden posting out. She had no need to die; I tried telling myself through tears. And probably would have been alive today had I not moved out of Jorhat. Maybe if my husband hadn't been sent on a foreign posting, maybe if I had decided to stay on and not move to civilisation, maybe if I had convinced her to leave her good-for-nothing husband every time they had fought... Too many "maybes" and just one hard fact: Matu was dead.
Just another insignificant statistic as the world went ahead and honoured womanhood.
The phone rang again. An invite to attend the celebration of the "Emancipation of the Indian woman." I mumbled a no, wanting to stay back with reality. If only I had stayed back in Jorhat instead.
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