The Seductive Allure of "Choice"

For the last 35 years I have firmly held onto a rather common notion among women in modern America. Each and every major decision involving my adult life has been made by me. I chose to go to college at the University of New Orleans. I chose to stay in New Orleans, the city of my birth, after college and work a variety of jobs until I chose to leave New Orleans and move to New York City. I chose to passively pursue a career in stand up comedy. I just as passively chose to forsake ambitions as an entertainer and continue to develop as a writer. I, then, chose to go to graduate school. Somewhere around this time, I decided I needed to see more of the world. So, I chose to spend any large amounts of extra money I had on plane tickets. To Mexico. To Morocco. To Europe. To India. Eventually, I chose to be an "adult," taking on the rather traditional female profession of school teacher and buying an apartment. Yes, I even chose to acquire a mortgage. My belief has always been that I am satisifed with my life as a direct result of having CHOSEN my life. It has been an ideal fit for me. The setting of my life. The characters involved in the plot of my life. The narrative arcs, the conflicts all have been chosen by me. And this is the sole reason why I am so at peace with my life. Because I chose it, right?

I did not realize how much I assumed the ability to chose one's life circumstances played a key role in how well one accepted or even felt satisifed with one's life. If the conversations I had with the women here in Delhi taught me one thing, it is this: Western women such as myself place too much value on this notion of choice.

None of the women I talked to chose the circumstances of their lives. No, their families did not forbid them to go to school, bringing some random fellow to the house and forcing them to marry him. The families didn't have to do that. The women I talked to knew they would reach a certain point in their schooling before their parents began taking proposals for their marriage among worthy boys. Eventually, their parents would select young men who were appropriate and the young women would marry them. These young women would then move into their husbands' families' homes, taking care of their husbands, in laws and the children that they would definitely produce within a reasonable amount of time. This would be their lives.

"We raise our daughters with this custom," the women kept repeating. "They don't think about what they want because they already know what they will get." I asked the 19 year old daughter of one of the women how she thought her mother would react if she respectfully said: "Mom, I don't want to get married in the next few years. I may want to just do something else first. Or I may not want to marry at all." The daughter looked quizzically at me and calmly responded: "I wouldn't say that to my mother." When I asked her why not, she asked me: "Why would I tell my mother I didn't want to get married?" I didn't have an answer to her question. So, I asked her mother: "Can she put in requests for the TYPE of husband she wants? Qualities she'd like in the man she's going to spend the rest of her life with?"

All of the women in the room chuckled. One of the younger women said she wouldn't request any qualities in a husband. It seemed to be my understanding that there weren't any specific qualities or special "personality" traits that went into the selection of a husband. Her parents would, of course, only entertain proposals from boys who were respectful, kind, caring and had good earning potential. What need would she have for a "list" of qualities? I kept waiting for someone to voice dissatisfaction with this major life decision being made by other people, even if those other people were your parents. I kept waiting for one of the ladies to speak to the unfairness of such an arrangement. For some woman to ruefully wonder how different her life would have been if she had stayed in school longer, travelled or pursued some other dream besides family.

I waited in vain. From the older women (late 30s to early 40s), to the younger women (late teens and early 20s), no one questioned fairness. Even Hema Lata, the 46 year old woman who had to quit school at 19 to take on her deceased sister's husband and son, never spoke of what could have been or how her lack of choice left her resentful of her life. It was certainly not Hema's idea to marry her sister's husband. I am certain it would not have been her preferred route to the life as wife and mother she knew she would eventually take, anyway. Her family chose for her and she honored the choice they made. Although Hema resigned herself to the duty she did not really choose for herself, she expresses satisfaction with the life that duty has brought her. She has steadily built up her beauty salon, the business once only consisting of Hema going from house to house in her neighborhood and giving her friends facials. "My husband is a good man," she confirms. "I have a nice home. I have raised decent, respectable children." Hema seems just as satisfied with her life as my friend, Rhonda, who chose to marry at an age and time in her life that seemed right to her and eventually chose to put her career and needs on the side to support her husband's career and to raise her children.

Rhonda made a decided choice. Hema did not. Both proudly chatter on about their children. Both go about their daily duties of caring for their husbands, compromising when necessary to keep the family in tact. And both Rhonda and Hema have their own personal pursuits - Rhonda is working on her doctorate through an online course and Hema earns extra money for her family through the beauty salon she runs out of her home. These personal pursuits obviously come second to the needs of the family, but the women do pursue them with gusto.

Does it really matter that Rhonda chose her husband? Chose to be a wife and mother when her family would have respected (and allowed) any other lifestyle she thought best suited her? At the end of the day, both women seem to have ended up with very similiar lives. I asked Hema and her neighbors if they were happy. While none of them seemed to put much value in what I, as an American woman, count as "personal happiness," all of them expressed a sense of satisfaction. "I am content with the life my husband has given me," I heard on several occasions.

In the western world, which offers a malaria-like dizziness of choices, how many women can even claim contentment, let alone something as difficult to define as happiness?

I have immensely benefited from this luxury of choice. I do not distance myself from my appreciation of and desire to maintain it. In one short generation, the lives of women in the west have afforded them with this luxury of "not being so sure if I want to _______." This not being sure, this rather adolescent ability to explore one's self and reinvent the wheel of an adult life is what I most appreciate about my life. It is why I have comfortably chosen to live in an American city where on any given block you will find hundreds of people choosing hundreds of variations of an adult life. But, I now question if we are assuming that this luxury of choice is our special little key to happiness. That today's generation of American women are somehow luckier than their mothers who can probably identify more with the 19 year old girl in Delhi than they can with their 35 year old daughters here in the states.

And here is the funny part: most of us women who "choose" our lives eventually end up choosing what the women in Delhi do not have a say in. The road to our version of it seems to take longer and is often more complicated and requires more negotiation than sometimes seems neccesary. In two days, I will be leaving this country, wondering why we are so smug about this benefit we have. Questioning if choice alone is why I am happy with my life. Had I been raised without the expectation of making these life choices on my own, would it have made any difference in the end?

Savitri's Dreams

although I try not to dream

I sometimes do

when my husband drinks more than he works

I remember my girlhood in the village

I pretend I can run away

go back to my family

I pretend I was not married to this nuisance

when I was only 15

when a girl marries

she does not return home

if not the village, then where will I go

when he broke the beer bottle over my arm

I remembered my old dreams

fantasies of my husband

a good boy from the village

a caring man who would take me to the city

I look forward to the next day's work

so I do not have to dwell on these dreams

My daughter has already begun to dream

I will drink poison

she says

if I marry someone like my father

I dream

her husband will be a good man

the opposite of mine

Sunita Rhandelwal's Joy

at thirty I lost my husband
I was prepared to raise my boys alone
although he is dead
my sons' father is still my husband
I will never remarry

to live is to struggle
to struggle is to have stress
to be content is the only option

I have only known a life of work
selling sweets
teaching girls to cook
managing my house
my days begin early and end late

To be idle is to be unhappy
To work is to have joy

What Hema Lata Had To Do

when my sister left this earth

she didn't take her family

she left

a husband and son

at 19 I took over her family

I thought then

what I think now

This has to be done

This is what I must do

I do not wonder what it would have been like to finish school

or if I am happy

in my shop

when I am working on my clients

the cold water washes the beauty cream from their faces

what is left is what was always there

the face that God gave them

My sister's death

washed away my dreams of school

what was left was my life

what God gave me

my daughter already knows the design of her life

she is familiar with its fabric, its shape, its color

her life will look like mine

she will do what she has to do

never leaving her husband

accepting the life he gives her

she will set up her own house

never returning to mine

Delhi: Tourist in the Temple!

Yesterday, I was reading a story in the Hindustan Times about a school principal who was in serious trouble for CANING a kid in front of the school. According to the story, the pre-teen had broken school policy by going into another part of the school when he did not have permission and talking to one of the girls. Harsh, no? Well, the kid explained how unfair it was to be caned especially since the girl he was talking to was his sister. "I kept trying to tell the teachers she was my sister, but they would not listen," the kid said.

The principal had a very reasonable defense for his extreme disciplinary measure. "He broke the rules," Dude is quoted as saying. "Every student must be in the place he has been assigned at each moment of the day. There are no exceptions to this. He did not have permission to go to the room where the girl was; he broke the rules." And then, Mr. Principal says: "We must strictly enforce the rules because it is very difficult to keep track of 2,000 students with only 22 teachers."

What. The. Hell? Somewhere in Delhi, there's a school building housing 2,000 children with barely two dozen adults to keep them from declaring mutiny?

I don't know if this school is representative of the school system here, but I did think of that 90 to 1 student-teacher ratio this afternoon when my guide took me on a tour to the latest Hindu temple, just opened a few years ago. Apparently, several school groups decided to take a field trip to the temple today as well.

It rained off and on this afternoon so at a certain point in my tour, the guide and I were waiting out the rain in the corridors surrounding the temple. While we waited, one of the school groups was preparing to leave.

First of all: Elementary school children are so pure in their every way of being. They do not have the sophistication yet to morph into the person you need them to be or the person who it is more appropriate to be at the moment. Seeing this displayed today still puts a smile on my face.

The line the kiddies were forming to get on their bus was in front of me. As the kids passed, they ALL stared at me. A few stopped in their tracks and caused a little bottle neck in the line behind them. At first, many of them were too shy to say anything. How the scene transpired: The little 7 year olds walked nosily to the bus in their inattentive, uncoordinated manner and at a certain point, they just happened to look to the right AND... a tourist in the temple! The first 50 or so kids looked in disbelief and turned to their friends in line behind them, rapidly chattering and giving their peers a heads up on who to look out for as they neared the bus. By the 75th kid, I started waving at them and I think this gave them absolute relief! They gleefully waved and shouted eagerly: "Hello!" As the line progressed, more kids built up courage. After five or so minutes of waving like Princess Di and saying: "Hello," a few asked: "Where are you from?" My casual: "U.S.A." was often met with giggles and claps and a series of words that sounded a little bit like English and a little bit like Hindi and a little bit like the incomplete, choppy thoughts characteristic of children who are still trying to master ANY language.

It occured to me that I had been standing there waving forever and had only seen like 3 teachers (who looked a lot like I do when I take my students out; let's just say the temple was not a peaceful place for the adults that day!) I remembered the story from the Hindustan Times and thought: Now, see...this is exactly how kids end up getting caned! A hundred ELEMENTARY SCHOOL KIDS out in the open in the middle of the rain and three exhausted looking teachers. I see about five or six kids right now who might end up being caned before the bus even pulls off!

I asked the guide if these kids were from a public school and he quickly responded: "No, they are definitely private school children." From what my friend/guide in Kolkata had told me, parents such as himself who sent their kids to private schools paid anywhere from $50 - $100 dollars a month (which is quite a bit of money, actually). I found it difficult to believe that THESE children - the offpsring of the business class - would be in a school environment where the student to teacher ratio was so high.

When I finally spotted a fourth teacher, I walked over to her (much to the delight of the children who were surrounding her). After I said hello and told her where I was from, I asked her how many students she had in her classroom. "Oh, only about 25 or 30." When I looked out at the sea of soft blue uniforms in front of me, she chuckled and reassured me: "Oh, no this is about 20 different classes; we have all the children from Levels 1 - 5 out today." I told her I was happy to hear that it wasn't just the four teachers I saw who were responsible for educating all these rambunctious children. "That would drive me absolutely crazy!"

She nodded and proceeded to prove she was, definitely, a school teacher. "Children," she turned to the three girls who were ignoring the other teacher's commands to hurry to the bus as they stood there giggling and covering their mouths. "Say hello to the lady." And this is when I knew she was showing off HER students. "In her language, please."

And much like an Easter program in a Black church, the girls straightened up and sang together: "Hello, Madam...how are you today?" I told them I was doing well and I hoped they were not being naughty because that would not be fair to their teacher. I think I loaded them with too many English words too quickly because they looked a little confused. One of them did recognize the word naughty, though. "Naughty," she looked concerned. Then, she turned and pointed to a boy who was no doubt a future victim of caning. Looking to be about 8 or 9, this young lad was several feet away from us, slapping a playmate on the back of his head and then pointing to any number of children in line when the aggravated playmate turned around. "Very naughty," the little girl snitched.

Delhi: A Different Experience

I've been in Delhi for about two hours now. But, I can already tell my experience of India will greatly differ in this city. In Kolkata, I had little interest in "seeing the sites" and when I did venture out to barge in on worshippers in Kaliguat Temple and take numerous pictures at The Maidan, it was always colored with some level of frustration and stress. My taxi cab was hot. The driver often lost and neither of us very capable of solving this little problem. There seemed to be no real traffic laws in the city, which has to be the most congested metropolis I have seen yet in my travels. It became apparent from the first 15 minutes in the Kolkata airport that black women with gigantic red afros don't make it out to Kolkata often. People STARED at me as if I were some inexplicable creature from some bizarro world they had only assumed existed in fiction. No, I do not drift into the melodrama for which I am known and loved when I say this. I was a constant point of interest in Kolkata. Children stared at me in awe. Men asked me to get into their cars. (Well, in all fairness, that was just one ridiculously cocky fellow who seemed overly offended when I ignored his looking at me as if I were a lamb kebab and gesturing for me to: "Come. Come. Madam, you come.".) Women looked me up and down and sometimes talked about me to each other in Bengali or Hindi as I wondered why my presence created such a stir. I do not regret any of my time in Kolkata, mind you. I am just clear on the real benefit of being in the city. My fondest moments in Kolkata were spent dialoguing with the three women who would enlighten me on life for women in their culture. I valued the six nights I spent in Kolkata because it fulfilled (in a way I could have never imagined) my rather abstract goal of traveling across the world simply to see what women thought of their lives. A means to do more than have my girls read a book set in India and then write an essay about it.

Delhi "feels" different; only a two-hour plane ride away, but a different vibe already.

So far, in Delhi, I have deduced: THERE ARE TRAFFIC RULES. People follow them. I imagine there must be some sort of routintely inforced penalty for breaking traffic laws since in my taxi ride from the airport every car on the road drove in the same direction, as if this were the most logical way to conduct one's self on a highway. Drivers didn't use their horns every 2 seconds as a means of articulating what THEY planned on doing or what they needed the rest of the haphazardly moving vehicles to do so they could get to where they were going. There are plenty of paved roads. Modern buildings. Only a few curious looks from locals and hotel clerks alike. I imagine them thinking: Hmmmm....wonder where she's from cuz it damn sure ain't India.

The college student who I've been working with to organize this round of interviews has had some sort of complications from a recent surgery. A dutiful young lad, Santosh had his friend email me (as he was being transferred to anoter hospital!) to take over for him. The friend, Sahil, apologized profusely for the inconvenience his friend's illness would cause me and wanted to know what he was supposed to do in Santosh's place. I had planned on knocking out the four interviews here in Delhi within the first few days so I could get my actual work done before I used the car and tour guide I hired to "see the sites." Looks like that will be flip flopped. Already, a different experience from Kolkata. Sahil may not be able to get to my hotel today to work out the semantics of the interviewing/translating so I must press on and be a tourist until he can adjust his life enough to assist me.

It will be tough, but I will make the best of my situation. I have a camera and the uniform of "the tourist." Yoga/Gym pants, Old Navy t-shirt. Sneakers. Tomorrow, when I go out to be the person I routinely mock, I am debating if I will wrap up my 'fro like I did those last few days in Kolkata. I am truly curious if Delhi is simply more "modern" and cosmopolitan, therefore not as floored by the sight of nappy hair attahed to a woman who does not seem to understand just how nappy her hair is.

We shall see.

A Kolkata Maid and Her Disturbing Peace

My conversation with Sundari Sardar still leaves me stunned. Talking with her solidified something I have long suspected. The circumstances that come with being poor in any country weaken a woman's humanity. To be poor in India, however, is to accept the circumstances of your plight with such finality that it is THIS that actually seems to weaken a woman's humanity more so than just poverty itself.

Sundari Sardar was uncomfortable during the entire duration of our 20 minute conversation. At first, I thought it was because here I was, this strange lady from the west with strange hair and a note pad (on which I wrote non-stop) interviewing her for some strange reason in one of the homes she cleaned every day. I was soon to find out the discomfort had begun for a much more complex reason.

Sundari did not want to sit on Mausumi's dining room chair to talk to me (through Mausumi) because then she would be on the same "level" as her employer. She was Mausumi's maid; to sit in her chair, make eye contact with her guest, talk to the guest and the boss casually...it didn't seem right.

"She really wanted to sit on the floor," Mausumi explained to me.

Born in a rural village, Sundari was not sure of her age. Through her boss, I deduced she had married very young and currently had a 15 year old daughter. We estimated her age to be around 30.

This was the beginning of my conversation with Sundari. A woman whose name meant "Beautiful," but who didn't feel worthy enough to sit in a chair. A woman who had no birthday.

A woman who had no dreams.

The two middle class women I interviewed in Kolkata saw it as their duty to sacrifice and compromise for their families; Sundari saw her status in the lower class as "just the way it is." Her own version of duty. When I asked her the same questions as I asked her boss, Sundari didn't understand why I was asking them and sometimes she didn't understand what the questions even meant.

"I didn't have space in my life, in my head for dreaming," she responded to my question about what she wanted for her life when she was a younger woman.

When I asked, "What brings you joy," she looked even more uncomfortable, but eventually replied, "Whatever comes my way."

Women who make a living cleaning houses is not alarming to me. It is one of far too few ways that the uneducated can earn a modest, yet comfortable living. Women who marry young simply because there is not enough food in their parents' houses to feed them do not cause me a great deal of distress. Marrying a man who can afford to feed you is a very sensible way to avoid the other options offered to you in a city infamous for its "hidden" yet visible cluster of brothels.

I was (and still am) disturbed by Sundari's unquestioned acceptance of her status. She is beneath her employer. And not because her employer has told her so. Because customs have. Because her own sense of status has.

She actually said to me: "I was born for sacrifice. This is my lot in life." It was Mausumi who made certain I knew that her maid had planned out her adult life the best she could. She and her husband decided early on to have only ONE child. "That is very unusual for women in her class," Mausumi told me. "Normally, they don't really plan pregnancies; they just have children. Several." Mausumi also stressed that Sundari made a point to try to put her daughter in special art and creative classes in addition to sending her to regular school when she could.

Trying to latch on to any thing, I asked Sundari if she had wanted to take those types of classes when she was growing up in the village. She looked timidly at the floor before telling Mausumi in Bengali that such thoughts never entered her mind when she was a child. It was not something she even knew to think about.

I grew up in New Orleans, Louisiana in the 1980s, the height of the crack epidemic. I have friends who grew up in New York City at the very same time during the very same epidemic. To know a poor person who has grown up with insurmountable odds is to be a Black American during any point in the United States' evolution. Despite the inhumanity of not having the same opportunities as Americans with whiter skin and larger bank accounts, even the most hopeless, poverty-stricken girl I encountered in New Orleans wanted SOMETHING. Dreamed of SOMETHING. Even if it was simply to go to Biloxi with her friends for her 16th birthday. To be one of the booty shakers on a 2 Live Crew video. To be the dope dealer's girlfriend. Some. Thing.

Sundari never thought to want even an art class. She didn't know "wanting" was an emotion she could access.

Even though my conversation with Sundari was the shortest of the three, she left the most powerful impression on me. I found her acceptance of her plight and the status it brought difficult to understand. Even while I struggled to wrap my brain around a woman who never knew she could WANT, I acknowledged how her peace with such a dismal reality probably served her well.

In my brief time in Kolkata, I have seen children roaming the street in only filthy underwear, bombarding passengers in taxi cabs with pleas for rupees. I have seen mothers barrage these same taxi cabs holding naked babies on their bony hips. They stand at the window and repeat their pleas over and over and over until either the cab pulls off or the passenger pulls out cash. The sight of this makes me sad, nervous and with each beggar who approaches, afraid. I have wondered once or twice why the aggression of these mothers who simply want to feed their babies make me fearful beyond explanation. Deep down, I know my fear of them stems from thinking of myself in their position. Being certain that to be that hungry, to be that in need would fill me with such rage I would lash out at each and every person who had the nerve to know the silence of a full belly. Ripping the skin off of each tourist who had the audacity to ride in a private cab, claiming she did not have even 10 rupees to give me and my filthy, hungry baby.

The absence of such rage has to be what salvaged Sanduri's sanity. To not access want is to never have to confront the truth of your life: it was not built to fulfill wants. It is not large enough to house dreams. With enough careful maintenance, it will do a decent enough job catering to needs.