SINDHU, SAKSHI STILL NOT CHAMPIONS TO ALL
One of the jokes going around the internet says, “India after Rio: not Beti Bachao but Beti, Bachao!” I showed my part-time maid the medal winners and Dipa’s death vault on Youtube. Kaisa laga? (What did she think?)
Satyavati (name changed), is in her twenties and is trim, bright and nicely dressed. She does not mind getting into corners with the broom and wields the duster with a judicious eye. She was sent to my home by her mother-in-law, who worked for me but wanted her daughterin-law to add to the family income.
Their husbands work as drivers. Satyavati had never gone out to work before and the mother-in-law thought I would be a safe, no-chik-chik employer.
Satyavati gets Sundays off because everybody needs a day off (home-makers, too, surely?) and besides, she has two sons in primary school.
Back to the Olympics, she was not particularly excited about our champions because to her mind she is the bigger achiever, as the mother of two healthy sons, and she said so in no uncertain terms. She even said she thanks God “lakhlakh times” that she has no daughters.
Why ever not, I asked. “I am thankful that I have no daughters to save from the evil eye of society,” she said.
Satyavati is very proud of her status at home, in her clan and neighbourhood as the mother of two sons. People respect her for it, she told me, and she gets new clothes, ear-rings, toe-rings, bangles and visits to the cinema and a good share of food. She does the cooking at home, in fact. Her motherin-law, in the months she worked for me, would proudly say that lunch was ready and waiting when she got home.
Sometimes, after I cooked for friends who came to dinner her mother in law did a big help because I tend to make a bit too much and it’s a mild health fetish with me to dodge leftovers as far as possible.
Satyavati does not mind either, which I appreciate very much, and observing the rules of our transactional universe, I don’t inflict strange food on her like blue cheese-and-walnut dosas.
“I brought the family luck since I gave them two sons,” Satyavati said, when telling me why she thought she was a bigger achiever than the Olympic women athletes, and jingled her bracelets a little.
It was not my place to harangue her on women’s rights or spoil her satisfaction so I just smiled and murmured the customary blessings.
The fact is, Satyavati’s view is echoed and reinforced in almost every Hindu ritual. The lunar month of Shravan from July 20 to August 18 in the North, and August 3 to September 1 in the South this year, is choc-a-bloc with them.
Especially important were Varalakshmi Vratam, in which married women prayed for their husbands, and Raksha Bandhan, in which sisters prayed for their brothers and invoked their protection. Regarding our Olympic athletes, I guess we have no cultural vocabulary for women as precious individuals beyond kinship terms like bet and behen?