Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents (44 page)

Designating the spaces on three pieces of paper, she made them pledge to abide by Destiny's decision. Then they drew lots.

The space that Destiny gave to Madhukant had no storefront on the main street. He decided to open a wholesale business and named it, optimistically, Madhusons (thus far, he and Mala had only one son). With this, he began his own transformation, from dutiful youngest son to head of household.

Years before, as a young man visiting India, Madhukant had made a pilgrimage to a temple devoted to Hanuman, the monkey god of Hindu epic literature. There Madhukant had witnessed miracles—including an exorcism, a priest flogging a malevolent spirit out of a possessed woman—that gave him a powerful faith. Now his parents were making a trip to India, a sort of retirement journey for his father. When they came back, they brought Madhukant a vial of holy water from the temple grounds.

Drinking it, Madhukant felt a profound peace come over him. He was transformed. Where once he had been a poor student with little knack for the details of running a business, now he felt he could make the most of what he had been given. He became confident, and business started to feel natural to him; he could see, suddenly, how to make profits. Once each week he recited a lengthy praise-hymn to Hanuman, performing a full ceremony of worship to the god whose temple had given him such aid.

For Mala, the change was also dramatic. She rushed through her morning chores, cooked breakfast and lunch early in the day, sent her children off to school, and then joined Madhukant in the store. There she brushed up the skills she had learned in her parents' shop: tracking inventory, packing and unpacking wares, sorting merchandise, keeping accounts. She enjoyed a few hours' shelter from her saasu's gaze before returning home to cook the evening meal, put her children to bed, clean the house, and collapse into a heavy sleep.

That was her life six days a week. On Sundays, when the store was closed, Mala did not rest. Her in-laws demanded that she prepare a special labor-intensive feast, lamb-lentil stew and barbecued meatballs with all the trimmings. In addition to her daily chores, she also had to scrub all the floors and the dozens of old-fashioned louvers that covered the windows.

Mala's twenties were passing in a blur of activity and exhaustion. Still, working double duty in the shop was preferable to spending every waking hour with her mother-in-law.

On their son's seventh birthday, Madhukant and Mala decided to hold a celebration. Both of their families were invited. Mala's parents had another family event to attend, and came to the party a couple of hours late. As they walked up the path toward the house, Mala's father-in-law began shouting at them.

The curse words he used were so terrible that no one in my family will repeat them to me, although everyone seems to have heard the story. He excoriated them for their tardiness, then turned his harsh language to vilifying the lazy, worthless daughter they had given in marriage.

Mala's father told Mala to pack her clothes.—You don't need to stay in this house, he said.

Of the three stages of the Hindu female life cycle, the middle one, wife, is the one she must achieve and then hold on to at all costs—so much so that one classical heroine, upon the death of her husband, is said to have followed the God of Death all the way to the gates of the underworld in order to restore her husband to life and save herself from being a widow. One of the worst slurs one can call a woman in Gujarati, a curse word akin to "cunt," is
raan:
widow. For a divorcee there is no word, the phenomenon being so uncommon that we must insert, on the rare occasions when a reference is necessary, and always in that special undertone of projected whisper that is reserved for shame, the English word.

Mala had tried nearly every strategy available to her. Fighting back was never an option: it would mean thrashing upstream against not only her husband and his entire family, not only the community and its gossips, but also millennia of expectations of what a woman should be. So she had attempted to anticipate her saasu's wishes (but they were ever-changing); to enlist allies (but who in the household or neighborhood would take her side?); and to explain her point of view to her husband (but he had made it clear that it was her job to get along). When those failed, she bit her tongue and worked as hard as she could. But even silence and accommodation were not working; the escape route her father had offered meant divorce.

Growing up, I had heard of only one case of divorce in the entire history of my family on both sides. It was a miserable story.

My father's sister, Kanchan, left her husband in the 1950s and obtained a divorce from the
panch,
the five-man council that held jurisdiction over caste affairs in their village in India. The ruling was a rare triumph but also a great shame. Until her dying day Kanchan spoke of it only if pressed and then only obliquely. Whatever relief she might once have felt in freedom from her drinking and gambling husband had long since washed away in years of bitterness. Her father, then her brothers, and then her son took care of her materially, yet she was miserable, always living under the burden of her social-outcaste status. A woman without a husband is rootless in the world, shamed, and dependent forever on her male kin, who will always resent the burden. Such a social death was considered by many a fate worse than actual death—literally, in the case of the high proportion of Indian wives who attempt or accomplish suicide each year. Outside of marriage, for a woman, there was nothing.

Mala, sobbing, refused her father's order. She would soldier on, and remain
wife.

In retaliation for her parents' ill manners in threatening to take her back, Mala's in-laws cut off all contact with her family. They stopped delivering wholesale goods to Dhiraj's store and demanded immediate, early payment of outstanding invoices. If Mala's parents called the house, her father-in-law would curse them on the phone before hanging up. They were not allowed to visit; she could not visit them, or go to any family events where she would be likely to encounter them.

"In-law" among our people is
vevaai,
a particular type of kinship between two families. It is not, as the English term might imply, a matter of legality or technicality. Each marriage links not only individuals but clans; indeed, entire structures of community and caste persist only through such ties. One's vevaai, the parents of one's son- or daughter-in-law, are kin toward whom certain obligations exist. The severing of that relationship is thus an extreme and violent measure.

In 1987 Mala bore another son, Mithun. She was not allowed to go to her mother's home for the traditional convalescence period, nor were her parents allowed to come and see their newest grandchild.

Mithun's birth came at a dramatic time for the country. An Indo-Fijian was elected prime minister for the first time in the islands' history. But within weeks the military, composed mostly of native Fijian soldiers, revolted. As the army took over the government at gunpoint, looters took advantage of the momentary chaos to rampage through stores, most of which were owned by Gujaratis. It was Fiji's first military coup.

Fiji's shopkeeping Indians were fearful and exhausted, and so was Mala. She had wanted to have her tubes tied after the birth, but her mother-in-law had staged one of her infamous tantrums, ranting about how it was a sin. Mala had come home without the procedure.

Through the grapevine, she heard that her parents had weathered the coup. Through the grapevine, she sent word of her son's healthy birth.

Every day I was crying,
Mala says of this period of exile from her family. But if the extremity of the punishment was intended to increase her submission, it backfired. Cut off from her parents, feeling that she had little more to lose, Mala stopped trying to please. When her mother-in-law launched into one of her interminable complaints, Mala just shrugged and said,—Go ahead, talk, just keep talking about it!

Once unloosed, her tongue began to shriek, as if the years of self-repression had gathered an unholy force behind her words. Even if the words themselves were relatively mild, Mala found that she was often yelling them loud enough for neighbors three or four houses away to hear.—Say what you want, go ahead, talk talk talk!

One day the next-door neighbor, a kind Indian doctor, encouraged Mala to keep on shouting.—Yes, child, tell them. They've kept you so oppressed and fearful. Don't be afraid, speak your mind!

This advice, from a respected elder, emboldened her. She continued to shoulder her workload as a dutiful daughter-in-law, but spoke up when pushed to do more than that. She redefined her own sense of dharma, or moral duty, and decided to live it in her own way. Duty did not require suffering everything silently, as she had once believed. Respect meant speaking politely, but one had the right to verbal self-defense, to expression; so she spoke up, muttering at some times, shouting at others. Responsibility, hard work: these she continued to accept, but not beyond the point of fairness.

Still, she wept. When her grandmother was on her deathbed, Mala was not allowed to go to her for a last visit. When the old woman died and custom dictated that Mala's in-laws show their respect, they sent Madhukant as a representative; even he was instructed not to go home for the wake but only to attend the impersonal ceremony at the funeral home. It was an intentional slight.

In 1991, Mala's youngest sister, Pratibha, whom she had all but raised, was to be married. Mala was not allowed to go to the engagement ceremony.

But Pratibha was a force to be reckoned with. It was Pratibha who had urged Mala years ago,—If they yell, why don't you yell back? It was her advice that Mala was finally heeding. And it was at Pratibha's urging that a delegation, consisting of their parents and two community elders, arranged to visit Mala's home to meet with her in-laws. They would open up a dialogue after five years of stony silence.

Anticipation as well as tensions ran high in Mala's household as the meeting date neared. Mala could not wait to see her parents again, but she was terrified at the prospect of the quarrel that was sure to break out. But Madhukant was also fed up with the drawn-out drama. Older now, a father of three, and more confident—perhaps as the one who held the household's financial purse strings—he told his parents,—My parents-in-law are coming to talk. You be quiet and listen.

At the meeting, Mala's parents wept and begged:—How long can we live like this, not seeing our daughter's face?

Mala's in-laws, pressured thus by their son and by the community, relented. They agreed to let Mala, accompanied by her husband, attend Pratibha's wedding.

But they were under no obligation to make it easy. A wedding lasts at least three days, but Mala's in-laws told them to go only for the most important day, leaving early in the morning and coming back home before dark. Nevertheless, it was a thaw. The family reunion was tearful, tinged with joy as well as pain for the lost years.

Afterward, Mala told me wryly, "I became
jabri
myself."

Jabri
is a complicated word, one of the rare Gujarati terms whose meaning is unambiguously negative. Its possible meanings include shrewish, naughty, wicked, difficult. Once in a while it can be pronounced with a kind of grudging admiration, or admitted to be necessary, as in "Sometimes you've got to be
jabri
with these people." The
Modern Combined Gujarati—English Dictionary
lists only the masculine:
jabar,
powerful, strong.
Jabri
is the feminine version. And as in English, a woman claiming strength or power can be translated, more or less, as "bitch."

In Mala's case, becoming jabri entailed no wild or cruel behavior—only that from time to time she might, for example, cook something on her own initiative. One holiday she made a large batch of sweets and left them out for everyone to enjoy. Her mother-in-law complained,—The children come home from school and eat all this junk! You're letting them have bad habits!

An earlier Mala might have been cowed, might have gone to her room and wept. But the new Mala answered back,—I made it for them to eat, so they eat. I'm at the shop all day, I can't police them. But if it bothers you, why don't you get a safe, lock up all the food, and dole it out one morsel at a time?

A few days later, she told the children to start coming to the shop directly after school. There, she made tea on an electric kettle in the back storeroom and gave them store-bought snacks so they could eat their fill before heading home.

Then her mother-in-law complained,—You're wasting money buying them outside food. What, home food isn't good enough?

But Mala and Madhukant could afford a few snacks. In the post-coup years, real-estate values throughout Fiji had plummeted as shopkeeping Indians fled what they viewed as a newly hostile business and political climate. Pre-coup, Indians had made up a majority of Fiji's population; by 1996, with thousands emigrating to Australia, New Zealand, and beyond, they were only 44 percent.

Madhukant was his parents' youngest son, though, and it was his place to stay with them. Besides, for those who stayed, there were profits to be made. Within a few years Madhukant picked up a three-bedroom house for the bargain price of thirty thousand dollars. He also bought a commercial property: two large shops, four offices, two flats, and three warehouses. The same year, their youngest child, Pranil, was born. It was 1993, and by now Mala had the
himmat
—inner strength, courage, will—to ensure that her childbearing years were over. She told the doctor she wanted her tubes tied right after the birth, took the extra day's rest, and came home. When her saasu yelled, Mala said mildly,—Go ahead and yell.