May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (45 page)

Mrs. Rana was born and reared in the undivided India that was the prize of the British Empire. In 1947, when she was twelve years old, the family was living in Quetta, a city in the mountains of Baluchistan near the Afghan border. In June of that year her father was transferred to the city of Pune near Bombay. He went ahead to find a house, saying he would send for the family when all was in order. History of course intervened. In August the British withdrew from the subcontinent, hastily dividing the empire into independent India and the new nation of Pakistan, which was created to meet Muslim demands for their own country. Quetta was part of Pakistan, Pune of India, and Mrs. Rana and her mother and sister suddenly found themselves, a Sikh woman and two daughters, on the wrong side of the border. When Quetta dissolved in the rioting that eventually killed hundreds of thousands of people, the mother and two girls were terrified they would never get out. It wasn’t until September that they were able to obtain seats on a train, wearing just the clothes on their backs, fearful throughout the long journey that they would die. They tried to send a few possessions by rail car, but the train was looted along the way and the boxes were full of stones when they opened them. “It was only after we reached here,” Mrs. Rana said, “that we realized we had nothing.”

Her story was one I had heard dozens of times before, from friends and the parents of friends in Delhi. It was the story of an entire generation traumatized by some of the bloodiest partition riots in history, of millions of uprooted families having to start lives all over again. Four decades later the wounds were still healing. A friend of ours, knowing that Steve and I made trips to Pakistan, gave me the addresses of the two places her parents had lived in Lahore before partition and asked if I could take pictures of them the next time I was there. She had written “Our houses in Lahore” at the top of the directions, as if the homes had been frozen in time with all of the furniture intact. That was how her family remembered them, as home, and now it was impossible for her parents, as it was for most other Indians, to get visas into Pakistan, India’s bitter enemy in three wars since partition. In 1988, when the government-owned television network broadcast a six-part television series called
Tamas
, or “Darkness,” based on a novel about several families caught up in the carnage of partition, the country seemed to go through a national exorcism. The series had an estimated audience of fifty million. It showed how violence had been provoked deliberately by Muslim and Hindu extremist groups, some of which still exist today. Demonstrations against
Tamas
erupted in several cities across India. At one television station, police fired into a rampaging mob of Hindu political workers, injuring fifteen. A Muslim businessman from Bombay filed a lawsuit to halt the showing of
Tamas
, on the grounds that it would “poison the minds of the people,” but the Bombay High Court supported the broadcast, saying, “You cannot whisk away history simply by brushing it under the carpet.” Those in the older generation who had lived through partition wept during the series, or found it too painful to watch at all.

That was Mrs. Rana’s generation, the people who had to resettle and rebuild. When she earned her bachelor’s degree in economics from Delhi University in 1954, only seven years after the train trip from Quetta, it was a symbol of how far the family, and India, had come. Two years later, she received her master’s degree and was married into another Sikh family that had resettled from Quetta. The parents knew each other from pre-partition days—Mrs. Rana’s father-in-law, who sold Persian carpets, was a former secretary of the Quetta Race Club—and they were certain their children would be compatible. “It just struck them that this could be a suitable match,” Mrs. Rana explained. “They asked us if we would meet, and so we met for a while. Then
they asked us if marriage was okay with both of us, and it was.” Her husband had a master’s degree from Delhi University and was starting a new job at the U.S. Information Service. It was a stirring time. In the next few years, relations between India and the United States would reach a pinnacle, unmatched since then. The United States, certain that the best American intentions and technology could haul India into a prosperous future, was on one of its third world missions of goodwill, a mission that some historians—and Indians—would later judge to be as arrogant and naïve as it was well meaning. But at the time, Nehru was delighted to welcome the hundreds of American specialists and later the flood of John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps volunteers. India became one of the world’s laboratories for testing the new development theories, and the atmosphere at the American embassy was electric. Indians still talk about the parties that U.S. ambassadors like Chester Bowles and John Kenneth Galbraith gave on the big lawn of the residence on the old Ratendone Road, where everyone knew they could find out what was happening in town.

Mrs. Rana spent those years at home raising children. Although she had toyed with working in a public relations office after her wedding, her first child was born within a year of the marriage and the job idea was put aside. Her two other children came soon after that. “Since my girls arrived quickly, I had no time,” she said. “My husband always told me, ‘You look after the girls first, and afterward you can take a job.’ But I never did. You can’t leave girls alone, and you can’t leave them with the servants. You have to take care of them more than the boys.” In India, even college girls are rarely left home alone for the weekend with servants. It is not just that something could happen, although the fear is certainly there, but also that leaving unmarried daughters unchaperoned is considered improper and bad for the girls’ reputation.

Only one of Mrs. Rana’s daughters still lived at home, although she was gone most of the day at a job working for an export house. Mrs. Rana could have gone to work herself, but she found that the habits formed when her children were young were difficult to change. “Somehow, I got so used to being at home,” she said. But her daughters, like all their friends, had been educated to be professionals. Mrs. Rana’s husband had insisted on it. One daughter taught grade school in Punjab, and another worked for a large company in Bombay. “Times have changed,” Mrs. Rana said. “Things have become so expensive. With one person’s earnings you can’t maintain a house.
When I got married, you could make do with what your husband made.”

Mrs. Rana’s quiet afternoon of music and magazines usually ended at four-thirty, when she had a cup of tea and then started cooking for dinner. Her maid came to help in the kitchen, and by six-thirty her husband and daughter were home. Sometimes she made them a snack of samosas, plump, deep-fried dumplings filled with ground meat or vegetables. At seven, she and her husband would go for another walk, or drop in on friends, then return home to read or watch television. Sometimes people would drop in on them, always unannounced, and they would have to be fussed over and attended to with tea and biscuits. Dinner was at nine, usually a chicken, mutton or fish curry, with a vegetable, like cauliflower that had been cooked in spices. There was also dal, sliced tomatoes and cucumbers, and freshly made chapaties. Dessert was caramel custard, ice cream or fruit. Afterward, the family would settle in front of the television to watch a rented video or an Indian serial.

This was another departure from the life Mrs. Rana’s mother had known. In the past decade or so, television and the consumer culture it helped spawn have exploded in India, forever changing the expectations of the middle class. In 1983, the government estimated that Indians owned fewer than three million televisions, but five years later the number was up to twelve million, with an estimated ten viewers per set. The programming had changed too, also reflecting the concerns of the new middle class. When I first arrived in India, the government-owned network, Doordarshan, was broadcasting only its standard fare: deadly documentaries on fertilizer plants and somnolent discussions by panels of experts on the outlook for the government’s Sixth Economic Plan. (As wretched as the stuff was, I always liked Doordarshan’s name.
Door
in Hindi means “distant” and
darshan
means “a show or a viewing.”) Things improved in 1985 with the arrival
of Hum Log
, or “We People,” an evening soap opera about an extended family that had left the village to struggle with a new life in the big city. It was the story of many of its viewers, and the show took off. It was soon followed by
Rajani
, a wildly popular hit about the somewhat implausible exploits of a crusading middle-class housewife who for a period of months became a national heroine. As Indians cheered every Sunday in front of their television sets, the young and pretty Rajani took on the daily injustices and petty corruption that plagued middle-class life. She went after fake astrologers, bribe-demanding cooking-gas delivery
men, rude cabdrivers and pickpockets on buses. In one episode, when a rude taxi driver refused to take her on a short trip, she went, outraged, to the police, which immediately prompted an angry demonstration by five hundred real-life taxi drivers outside Doordarshan’s Bombay offices. In another, Rajani discovered that her maid’s husband was beating her, and that he was planning to take a second wife. Rajani bullied the husband into his senses. In another episode, when the police refused to do anything about the noise coming from the loudspeakers at a wedding, Rajani got her own loudspeaker and aimed it straight at the station. The police gave in, and Rajani won once again.

Although upper-class women found Rajani’s loudmouth style unsophisticated, millions of middle-class women saw her as a positive role model. Meena Kaushik, a Bombay sociologist and market researcher, interviewed women about their attitudes toward the show and came to this conclusion: “Rajani is providing a catharsis for a number of women who are leading very repressed lives and who are not allowed to voice their opinions. I think she’s a harbinger of change.” Advertisers of consumer goods began to rethink the decades-old strategy of appealing to the Indian woman as a doormat whose self-image was provided only by her family. Meera Vasudevan, another Bombay market researcher, complained in an article in a trade publication that traditional advertising “pandered to this self-abnegation” by turning any product a housewife bought “into a ‘badge’ of her motherly concern and care.” There was a billboard I used to pass in Delhi that advertised a product—I can’t remember what now; possibly it was cooking oil—with a slogan to the effect that if you use it, “even your children will be proud of you.” The reason I remember it at all is that my own mother noticed it on the road when she visited me in India, and wondered why the woman on the billboard was so desperate for approval from her children. Such advertising, Meera Vasudevan argued, was missing a new breed of woman “no longer willing to be trampled upon,” typified in part by Rajani, who represented “a good Indian wife and mother, not very sophisticated, but a revolutionary nevertheless.”

By eleven or sometimes midnight, Mrs. Rana was in bed. It was usually the end of an eighteen-hour day, and she was always tired. “There is so much work in the house,” she said. “Being a housewife is a full-time job.” On weekends she had to do the shopping at the local market, and there were always letters to answer from relatives and friends. Some years ago, she had thought of starting a nursery
school, but that, like the public relations work, had been set aside. “I wanted to take up a part-time job, but I had no initiative, actually,” Mrs. Rana said. “And I didn’t want to be a saleswoman. Now I feel, Oh, now it’s too late. But I’m satisfied. That time is past.” Her new idea was voluntary work, and she had gone so far as to ask a friend at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences whether the patients needed someone to write letters or to read books to them.

When I first met Mrs. Rana, I had thought I might find a frustrated woman under the graceful housewife exterior. Maybe that woman was there, but I never saw her. What I did see was someone who had a few regrets but was, like Kiran Bedi, resigned to them. I think this made her more typical than the angst-ridden housewife I might have imagined. I suppose feminists would have called her repressed; certainly she was dependent. But her life, by anyone’s standards, was rewarding. Her marriage had lasted more than thirty years and produced three fine daughters, of whom she was very proud. She had several grandchildren and was looking forward to more. She had a nice home and a respected place in the community. She had good friends, good health and activities that she enjoyed. Most important, she had some sense of control over her life. And if, compared with Kiran Bedi, she did not have a jam-packed day, no one could call her lazy. She liked what she did, and as she said herself, “This is a very fulfilling job.” Her life may have lacked the edge of Kiran Bedi’s, but it was far more serene, and I don’t think it contained any less passion for the things that were important to her. It was a triumph for middle-class women in India that both Kiran Bedi and Arvindar Rana could find a niche and become, in their own ways, content.