May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (44 page)

She claimed the panel was politically motivated and she worried that the proceedings against her would drag on for another five years. The government was paying for her legal defense. “This doesn’t shake my faith,” she said of her troubles. “I have, after all, been in the service with my eyes and ears open all along. I’ve been fighting injustice for others. Now I’m fighting a personal battle.”

She was certain that the battle was so bitter because she was a woman. “I think that somewhere deep down in the subconscious mind this has bugged them,” she said of the lawyers. “I don’t think there would have been a personal vendetta to that extent if I hadn’t been a woman. In a woman they found a common enemy. They had something to rally around. I think deep down they resented it that a woman did not surrender or concede. They have nursed it. Perhaps this is their first encounter with a woman in authority. It was getting too hard for them.”

THE KITTY PARTY AT MRS. RANA’S WAS CALLED FOR SATURDAY AT NOON
, and by half past the hour all the ladies had sunk comfortably into the sofa and chairs in anticipation of money and lunch. Mrs. Dharmaraj, Mrs. Nagpal, Mrs. Rihal, Mrs. Mathur, Mrs. Chabra, Mrs. Singh—that was how they addressed one another—wore cool summer saris and loose salwar kameezes and engaged in the desultory conversation of women who had lived in the same neighborhood and gossiped about each other for years. Mrs. Rana, a deft hostess who had held such parties for decades, was relaxed and attentive, looking slim in a flowered chiffon sari and a single strand of pearls. She had been cooking her special eggplant dish since the day before and had dusted her living room that morning. Modest by American standards, the room had a Bokhara rug, Moghul-style miniature paintings, Western furniture and a Sony television set, marking it as the home of an upper-middle-class woman who read the decorating articles in the women’s magazines and entertained her husband’s colleagues for dinner. The house,
a single-story concrete-and-plaster-block structure with a tiny front veranda, sat on a quiet semicircular street in one of Delhi’s affluent housing colonies, named by some literal-minded government bureaucrat, or so I always imagined, as the Safdarjung Development Area. Architects were always deploring the monotonous design of such projects, particularly the government-built and drearily named Delhi Development Authority Flats (that same bureaucrat again), yet Mrs. Rana’s neighborhood looked better than it sounded. The clutter of Indian life had brought character to the streets. Mrs. Rana could go on a morning walk and see balconies crowded with pots of white summer lilies, children’s tricycles overturned in driveways and outdoor chick blinds shading the cane chairs on her neighbors’ verandas. A good monsoon that summer had turned the little lawns into lush swatches of green.

Mrs. Rana belonged to three different kitty groups. Each met once a month, and each member contributed about two hundred rupees, or sixteen dollars, to a kitty. Whoever drew the slip at the end of the party got the kitty and had to be the hostess the next month. Then she was excluded from the drawing until all the others had won. The kitty for this particular group amounted to more than two hundred dollars, a minor windfall. The ladies used it for special treats for themselves or their families. For Mrs. Rana, the parties were a chance to see people; otherwise she was home alone for most of the day. The kitties she won helped her save money on a budget determined by her husband. As one of the ladies, Mrs. Dharmaraj, explained to me: “Some people get a certain amount of money from their husbands, which is just sufficient to run a home. But this way, you know you’ll have some money in the year.” When Mrs. Rana built her house, she joined a kitty party, won at her first meeting and used the prize to buy her television set. “It’s a savings,” she said. It was somewhat illogical, though; why couldn’t the women set aside two hundred rupees in a bank account each month and earn interest as well? Mrs. Dharmaraj gave me a patient look. “We cannot,” she said, in a tone that implied there was nothing to be done to change this sad fact of life. “There is a temptation to spend the money you have at home.”

I had been introduced to Mrs. Rana by Renuka Singh, the friend who had helped me track down the dowry case. Renuka’s mother had known Mrs. Rana for years and lived down the street. I had told Mrs. Rana that I wanted to write about a “typical” middle-class housewife, and she had readily agreed to be interviewed. Like many Indians, she
believed that Americans thought there were only poor people in India, and she felt they should also know that there were Indian women like herself.

Kitty parties are an institution among middle- and upper-middle-class women in India, so I was glad to be invited, even though the other women, all kitty-party veterans, were a little embarrassed, I think, that I had turned up to catch them in the act. Like Tupperware parties, India’s kitty parties were easy targets. Professional women and husbands always made fun of them. Maybe the women thought I would do that too, or would think they did nothing else all day. Mrs. Dharmaraj, a retired gynecologist and apparently the only former working woman in the group, was introduced to me first and spent the party preliminaries describing her former practice to me. All the other women listened intently. When Mrs. Dharmaraj was finished, I looked up and found myself eye to eye with another woman. “I am just a housewife,” she offered quickly, as if afraid I would ask her what she did for a living. Mrs. Dharmaraj then took it upon herself to put the kitty party in context. “Most of the women here are also members of the Hauz Khas-Green Park Welfare Association,” she said, referring to two neighborhoods nearby. “Every year we give away wheelchairs and sweaters to the poor. That is not only for fun. This is for fun.”

The fun began before lunch, when the women played two rounds of a game called Tambola; an American would recognize it as Lotto or Bingo. This also had a winner’s kitty, to which everyone contributed five rupees. While the woman who sat next to me called out the numbers she pulled from a bag in a singsongy voice—“six-one, sixty-one, four-eight, forty-eight”—the other ladies intently marked off the numbers on their cards. “This is also a thrill, you know,” Mrs. Rana said, suggesting, I guess, that it wasn’t just money the women were after.

I had always been fascinated by the various permutations of the Delhi housewife, not least because the infrastructure in India that I had inherited—the house, the servants, the garden, the social schedule of the
New York Times
spouse, guests from overseas who stayed a month—was like that of an Indian general’s wife. I often felt as if I were a secret visitor to her world. Sometimes I would cross paths with such a woman at parties, where she sat silently near the buffet, intensely bored by the official world of her husband. Other times, I watched her at one of the hotel beauty parlors as she was attended simultaneously by a manicurist, a pedicurist, a hair styler, a person to hold the blow-dryer,
and a friend to advise. Most of all, I loved listening to her gossip in the sauna of a health club favored by Delhi’s new money, where she would sit, with a fantastic belly and enormous glistening breasts, discussing the attributes of the grooms who had been found for the daughters of her friends.

This was usually the preferred topic of conversation in any group. I once went to a lunch at the home of a housewife where the talk centered on a woman whose daughter had agreed to marry a boy selected by the family after only fifteen days. Everyone marveled at the good luck of the mother of the bride but then became a little crabby when they moved on to discuss the engagement party she was throwing the next day. The family traveled in a fashionable crowd that liked European cigarettes and Scotch, but the bride’s mother, in what was viewed as a craven attempt to impress the boy’s more conservative family, had asked all her friends not to smoke and drink at the party. The ramifications of this were discussed at length until lunch, which wasn’t served until two-thirty. When I left later in the afternoon, the bridge game was just getting started.

People, usually Indian men, were always telling me, in trying to explain the “complicated” situation of the Indian woman, that many housewives had attained considerable happiness and power within a family as chief manager, nurturer and behind-the-scenes decisionmaker. I could see for myself that this was true, but the statement always annoyed me because the family, for the middle-class housewife, in most cases remained the only outlet for her energy and ambition. What was her alternative? Mrs. Rana had made her choice, or had the choice made for her, many years ago. Did she yearn for more? Was there enough to fill her day?

Mrs. Rana usually got up at five-thirty in the morning, when she and her husband went for a walk. Her husband was in the United States on business during the time I spent with her, but usually they would both be back in the house by six-thirty. She would make herself a cup of tea, glance at the headlines in
The Times of India
, then start preparing packed lunches for her youngest daughter and husband. They carried the food to school and work in tiffins, little aluminum containers that had separate compartments for a dal, or lentil stew, with gravy or cooked green peppers and potatoes. In the other compartments Mrs. Rana put homemade yogurt, a salad of sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and several chapaties, the round Indian flat bread. Mrs. Rana, like most serious Indian housewives, would never send her family off in the
morning without a properly cooked meal from home. Even Kiran Bedi’s mother made sure that her daughter carried a tiffin to work.

By eight-thirty Mrs. Rana’s maid had arrived to clean the kitchen, sweep the house and mop the floors, which had to be done every day. Grit and pollution from the air would settle all over a freshly cleaned house in a matter of hours, and in minutes during the dust storms of May and June. While the maid was working, Mrs. Rana had a bath, changed into a fresh sari, then prayed for fifteen minutes. Like most Indians, she wanted to be clean before worshiping God, and like most housewives, she was in charge of the family’s spiritual life. As a religious Sikh woman, she fasted for her family’s health on holidays and prayed for her husband’s and daughters’ well-being every day.

After her prayers, she dusted and cleaned up the living room, and, depending on her mood, did the laundry. It was really a job for the maid, but the maid could not always be trusted. “She doesn’t do it properly, actually,” Mrs. Rana said. “Sometimes I feel I need some exercise, so I wash the clothes. But if I get fed up, I give them to her.” She had no washing machine, so everything, even sheets and towels, was done by hand.

By ten-fifteen the maid usually left, and by eleven Mrs. Rana was free. She loved the quiet. Her daughters were gone, and the kitchen and house were clean. This was her time to really read the newspaper—she considered keeping up with events very important—and to make some calls to friends. Then she usually went out, either to a kitty party, or to the bank, or to do some shopping, or to pay the water or electric bills, which always had to be taken to the office in person. On Tuesdays she went to a religious meeting. The Sikh women in the neighborhood would gather at someone’s home, pray for an hour, then have lunch. Other days Mrs. Rana just went to a friend’s house for coffee. “That is the time when I don’t like to be home,” she said. “That is the time I like to relax.”

She came back to the house around two and had lunch, usually the same food she had cooked for the tiffins that morning. After lunch she took a half-hour nap, then got up, listened to music and read. She liked Sidney Sheldon and Mills & Boon, the English series of romance novels. The family subscribed to the periodicals that were required reading for the English-speaking middle class:
India Today, Business India
and
The Economic Times
. Mrs. Rana borrowed the glossy personality magazines and women’s magazines, like
Savvy, Society, Eve’s Weekly
and
Femina
, from her local lending library for a nickel a day
each. She liked
Reader’s Digest
, too; that cost seven cents. “Mostly I try to read one magazine a day,” she said. She had read
Femina
for years, although she was less enamored of it now than she once was. “The recipes are all right, but not too great,” she said. “The stories are bad. The decorating articles are good, although I feel most of them are just ads for people. Usually I can find one or two good articles, on laws affecting women, or investments.”

This was hardly the life of a revolutionary, and yet the world that was available to Mrs. Rana was radically different from the one her mother had known. Her day, as unremarkable as it was, nonetheless reflected the progress that had occurred in the lives of urban middle-class women in India since independence. Mrs. Rana’s mother never knew English, and even if she had, there were no magazines in her time that would have discussed such preposterous subjects as how women might best invest money. Mrs. Rana’s mother spoke only Punjabi, and as the wife of an assistant commissioner in the Indian Revenue Service, dutifully set up a new household when her husband was transferred every three years. The family had lived all over the subcontinent’s northwest: Karachi, Quetta, Bombay, Gwalior, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jalandhar and finally Delhi.