May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (42 page)

Two women I knew in Delhi, a housewife and a professional, had taken this freedom and traveled in different directions, neither without some misgivings. Both had children, and both illustrate the costs and the rewards of their choice. One was Kiran Bedi, the first Indian woman to wear a police uniform, a controversial thirty-eight-year-old celebrity famous for her drive, integrity and flamboyant nerve. She once charged a mob of sword-wielding Sikh demonstrators, disarming them with her long police stick, and on another occasion was so determined to crack down on Delhi’s illegally parked vehicles that a subordinate actually towed away a car belonging to Indira Gandhi. In 1988, Kiran Bedi’s refusal to back down in a skirmish with the Delhi Bar Association led to a sometimes violent ninety-day lawyers’ strike that temporarily shut down the country’s criminal justice system and caused her transfer, not for the first time, to a job that kept her out of the newspapers. What interested me about her case was that behind the headlines was a woman trying to balance career and family obligations like so many others.

The other woman was Arvindar Rana, a fifty-four-year-old New Delhi housewife, a friend of a friend of mine, who since her marriage in 1956 had quietly devoted her life to looking after her husband and raising her three daughters. She had a master’s degree from Delhi University but had never gone to work for pay. It was more important, she felt, to send off her children when they left in the morning and to be there when they returned in the evening. Her husband worked as a program officer for the United States Information Service in Delhi, a prestigious job which allowed the family to live in one of Delhi’s better housing colonies. Mrs. Rana filled her pockets of spare time with reading, household projects and friends.

Both women were products of the upper middle class, both were from Punjab—Mrs. Rana was a Sikh; Kiran Bedi was a Hindu—and both had seen their lives change with the new prosperity of the top 10 percent. Mrs. Rana was involved in the affluence of her class principally as a consumer. She had a videocassette recorder and in the last five years had been able to rent the pirated tapes of such American shows as
Three’s Company
from the video shop in her local market. Kiran Bedi, on the other hand, found herself dealing, at least in part, with disaffected members of a new generation of young people, who felt left out of that prosperity and had turned to crime and terrorism.
Both women were familiar with
Femina
. Kiran Bedi had been featured in its pages, and Mrs. Rana regularly read it. Mrs. Rana had followed Kiran Bedi’s career, and had carefully read the news of the lawyers’ strike in
The Times of India
. She admired Kiran Bedi for her courage, although she would not have wanted that kind of life for herself. Essentially, the one thing the two women had in common was that each one, at the end of the day, was satisfied with the choice she had made. If nothing else, their lives showed the tremendous range in experience that had been made available to the privileged women of the middle class.

I CAUGHT UP WITH KIRAN BEDI AT HER HOME ON THE MORNING OF INDIA’S
Republic Day, January 26, when I arrived at eight to leave with her on her rounds. Kiran was not quite ready, so I sat down on the couch—Kiran lived in one of the drab, standard-issue one-story government houses in central New Delhi—and had a cup of tea while I waited. When Kiran emerged a few minutes later, I looked up, startled. In her police uniform and hat, high-heeled boots, diamond stud earrings and a smart, broad-shouldered trench coat, Kiran looked like some Bombay director’s fantasy of a policewoman. She had, in fact, been the inspiration for a stunning, hard-charging policewoman in one recent Hindi film. Kiran had the sturdy body, short hair and healthy skin of an athlete, and out of uniform she looked more well-scrubbed than glamorous. I sometimes passed her running in the opposite direction as we both did our laps around the fifteenth-century tombs in Lodi Garden. Usually she dressed in slacks and an open-necked cotton shirt, even when she attended dinner parties in Delhi; she said she had worn a sari only four times in her life. It was her eyes—large, dark, glistening, with thick lashes—that made her face beautiful. “Good morning!” she said enthusiastically as she strode into the room. Kiran had been raised on the positive thinking of Norman Vincent Peale—one of the quirks in her otherwise Indian upbringing—and she was always enthusiastic.

Today, however, she was also tense. Republic Day, the annual celebration in honor of the day when India first adopted a constitution declaring itself a republic, was one of her biggest headaches. Every year, thousands of people stood in the brilliant winter sunshine to watch the parade of schoolchildren and armored tanks down Raj Path, or Road of the King, the grand boulevard that slices through the
ceremonial mall of imperial New Delhi, and every year, the Delhi police hoped there would be no bombings, shootings or other violence committed by Sikh extremists agitating for an independent Punjab. As deputy commissioner of police in charge of the North District of Delhi, Kiran oversaw a territory that included the old walled city, one of the roughest areas in town. There were more than thirty thousand policemen and policewomen on the streets of the capital that morning, and in her district alone she was responsible for three thousand. Kiran had spent most of the previous night getting loiterers off the streets and checking out the reports of bomb threats, which always proliferated before Republic Day. She had not gone to bed until two in the morning.

Since the October 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh security guards and the subsequent anti-Sikh riots that killed at least twenty-five hundred people in New Delhi alone, visitors to the capital might have assumed that the country was at war. Barbed wire and guards with submachine guns surrounded the homes of cabinet ministers, government officials and others on the “hit lists” of Sikh terrorists. Police routinely stopped cars at checkpoints, and the road leading to Rajiv Gandhi’s residence was completely blocked to traffic. The prime minister always wore a bullet-proof vest and was surrounded by rings of security guards whenever he went out. Not quite two years after his mother’s death, Rajiv Gandhi had escaped one amateurish but serious attempt on his life during a ceremony at Raj Ghat, the memorial built on Mahatma Gandhi’s cremation site. Today he would be on an outdoor viewing stand. Further adding to the jitters about security was the presence of the government’s chief guest at the parade, Junius R. Jayewardene, the president of Sri Lanka, which had been ripped apart by a bloody civil war since 1983. Jayewardene had himself recently survived a bomb blast in the Sri Lankan parliament that had wounded the prime minister and several others, and authorities feared a possible new attempt on his life in Delhi.

“It’s like adding agony to agony,” Kiran said. Her own concern was focused on the parade route through the old city and up the main shopping street of Chandni Chowk to the ramparts of the Red Fort. She had fifteen hundred men and women on Chandni Chowk alone, spaced three feet apart, and yet she was nervous. Every single person on duty had to be alert to a potential disaster, and Kiran was well aware that the overall quality of the rank and file of the Delhi police force was poor. Problems of corruption, low educational standards and low
pay have made the police in India a generally disaffected and in some cases despised institution. Kiran’s promotion to deputy commissioner had in fact been part of an attempt by Rajiv Gandhi’s government a few years earlier to clean up the police. Today, her hopes for an uneventful celebration were shadowed by a police tip that the parade might be attacked en route. “On Raj Path they can’t do it,” Kiran said, referring to the heavy security around the prime minister, “but elsewhere it will be easy.”

The parade was not due in the North District until noon, but Kiran had been preparing for this day for a month and was too wound up to stop moving. She ordered her driver to take us on a round of the streets. The sun was behind a cloud, but a light wind had blown away the usual smog as thousands of spectators, wrapped in shawls and quilts, lined up behind the barricades to wait for the parade to start. Schools and businesses were closed, traffic was light and patriotic songs with the catchy, irresistible lilt of Hindi film music were playing through loudspeakers into the streets. The city was in a good mood.

As the car moved slowly past the gathering crowd, Kiran sat in the backseat and issued instructions to her constables through a loudspeaker on the roof of the car. “Separate yourselves!” sounded her booming voice when she caught several constables chatting. “Don’t talk on duty!” she ordered another group of lollygaggers. Then she turned to me. “Some of our police are so lethargic,” she complained. “They don’t want to work. They just want to bask in the sun.” Farther along she saw a group of mounted police clustered at an intersection, their horses at rest, enjoying the morning air. She ordered her driver to stop, rolled down her window and told the men to make a round of the parade route. “No rest for you!” she shouted in parting. As we continued our drive, she periodically looked up at the roofs and balconies of Chandni Chowk to check on the snipers stationed at dozens of positions along the route. Satisfied, she turned her attention to the crowd, asking them through her loudspeaker in polite and lilting Hindi to please report any “suspicious characters” to the police. Most of them seemed to recognize India’s most famous policewoman and smiled.

Kiran continued to patrol the streets for several hours but by late morning finally seemed satisfied that there was nothing more she could do. She asked her driver to pull up outside the hulking 350-year-old Red Fort. We sat listening to the cracklings of the police radio as the day grew warmer and the crowd more restless. At eleven-thirty, with half an hour to go, Kiran decided she would walk down Chandni
Chowk. It was, on the surface, an unnecessary gesture, but I think the setting was irresistible to her: the wide street, normally packed with cars, buses, oxcarts, scooters, horsecarts, people, beggars and cows, had been cleared, cleaned and watered into a beckoning stage. The clouds were gone, and the brilliant sunshine and music made any danger seem remote. Kiran jumped out of the car and started to walk, a lone figure in front of a crowd of thousands lining the street. I scrambled after her, feeling foolish, but was soon swept up in a sudden wave of exhilaration brought on by the warm sun, sweet music and my unexpected role with Kiran as a parade warm-up act. The crowd had been waiting so long that anything would have satisfied them; Kiran Bedi and an American sidekick with a notebook weren’t bad. When people waved at me, I happily waved back. Kiran waved at everybody, especially the little girls. “All potential lovers of the police,” she said, pleased. We continued past the closed shops, which normally offered spices, mustard oil, pickles, coconut powder, brooms and ghee. “It’s sending so many messages when I do this,” Kiran said. “It’s important for them to see that I will come down to their level.” It was now almost noon, and we could hear the parade. “And besides that,” she added, as if it weren’t completely obvious, “I love it.”

Kiran Bedi remains one of the more extraordinary women I have ever met. It was interesting to me that she admired Golda Meir, the former prime minister of Israel, more than any other woman, including Indira Gandhi, because “she was more self-made. I identify with a woman who is self-made. Indira Gandhi had a lot of things offered by destiny.”

Kiran was intelligent, obsessively hardworking and capable of great charm, all desirable qualities in an Indian woman. She was also unusually self-confident, direct, impatient, uncompromising and confrontational. These are not desirable qualities in an Indian woman. I found it remarkable that she had turned out the way she had, and when I tried to find out why, Kiran directed me to her father. “He and my mother have molded us completely,” she said. “They made us grow up as a mission. They invested everything of theirs into us. We were their walking goals, and still are.”

Kiran’s father, Prakash Peshawaria, had wanted to go to college and play competitive tennis, but his father, convinced that higher learning was unnecessary for a son who would inherit his business, had forced him into an arranged marriage and a job at the family starch mill. “My best years went by,” Prakash Peshawaria said, huddled in a shawl one
winter morning in Kiran’s flat. “I should have gained more knowledge from books. That, I think, made me think about my own family. Whatever I didn’t get, they should get. And they should get the best.”

It did not matter that he and his wife produced no sons. Prakash Peshawaria saw in his four daughters more pliable beings in whom he could instill the positive thinking culled from his collection of books by Peale and other positive thinkers. “Women, I found, have some qualities which are rare in men,” Kiran’s father explained to me. “For instance, they are most persevering. They are hard workers. They are very much composed and cool thinkers. They don’t lose their self-control. And most important, they are very obedient and loving.” If he had had a son, he concluded, “he would never have listened to me.” His goal was that his daughters should be entirely independent, because he hated seeing women ask their husbands for money. “It’s like keeping them as slaves,” he said.