Beginnings and Connections

I am an Indian born woman with a Canadian passport, in an Austrian airport, on route to the Middle East, all the while reading about an Iranian woman’s literary analysis of Nakobov’s works. The connections between our stories are sometimes apparent and sometimes hidden, but always infinite. Recently, I have become taken by what all this means for the woman. This is, I suppose, the purpose of this trip and my research. Putting aside my literature reviews and the scholarly implications put forth by academics, what I know about this topic comes mainly from my encounters with three women. 

The first is a domestic worker. As a child, I spent my summers at my grandparent’s place situated in a little village in Southern India. It quite typically had its lush green paddy fields and whistling washer-women. Most importantly, it had an invisible line that separated the poor from the rich and the ‘lower’ from the ‘upper’ castes in the village. In other words, all the usual social hierarchies that governed rural India applied. In our home, we had a domestic maid by the name of Baagyam. When I was six, she was a seventy-five. I remember her on our doorstep at the crack of dawn every morning clad in a plain cotton saree and white hair tied back into a neat bun. With a confident resolve, she completed every task ‘male’ or ‘female’ in nature without fail. I remember her strong muscles churning hard lentils to a creamy dough and her toothy grin as she slapped cow manure into fertilizer, but also her soft and silvery voice humming children to sleep. 

Contradictory? Not for her. At seventy-five, she was singlehandedly supporting her children and their children, her drunkard husband completely out of the picture. How she managed to cross the ‘invisible line of caste’ (as Rohinton Mistry calls it) and overcome the humiliation and forbearance that resulted from it, I do not know. As a single woman, she was able to ignore the hostile orthodoxy that was entrenched under the nice overtones of our village. I wish I could have turned on a tape recorder and asked her some questions, like I am going to this summer. Perhaps I would have known how she came to be my most potent symbol of quiet strength in the face of adversity. 

On this trip, I must remember not to cast aside the contradictions as outliers but treat them as careful points of observation for further research. I must draw connections between the contradictions, the Baagyams of the Middle East, because their stories will serve as moulds for systemic changes we are looking to make. 

The next girl is another domestic. My grandparents had left their beloved village to live in a small town and with this, came a new set of workers. I had come back to India for a visit at age 11 and first met Rajia as she was drying dishes - she was my age. Back then, I was a hard Free the Children enthusiast and carried all the simplistic notions of child labour that came with it. As a result, I stubbornly spoke to her mother a few weeks later, demanding that she send her to school. Instead of the simple economic problems I was expecting, her mother lay a wide range of social disasters that would result from her daughter’s schooling. Where would they find a man for an educated woman? She is a ‘mature’ woman now and needs to be protected. Keep in mind this theme of ‘protection’ - it will come up again soon. Even if she goes to school, there are no jobs for people ‘of our kind’. The government does not help us. I would not understand the weight of these problems until much later. Nevertheless, for some reason, our conversation had produced the results I desired and off to school Rajia went that summer. 

A happy ending? Not really. I went back to India when I was seventeen, for a cousin’s marriage. Over lunch one day, I casually asked how Rajia was doing. I was told by a weary uncle that she had been taken out of school a few months later and married off at fifteen. She was abused by her husband and came home soon after the marriage. Her parents were once again, looking for a husband for her. When I met Rajia that summer, she seemed did not seem phased by her tragic life. She arched her hip in a way that I never could to hold babies tightly to her side and watched black and white movies on her TV set with an unblinking stare. Perhaps her innocence prevented her from realizing what had happened.

 What I took away from this story is that the problems we seek to address are always more complicated than we intend them to be. If we are careless enough to turn our back on the people we help, their lives will go back to the way they were. 

The third woman was a Lebanese Canadian, at a university booth labeled “Women and Islam”. The booth was handing out little yellow Korans and had pamphlets about the inclusive nature of Islam and Women. Behind this display stood a girl around my age, a student at University in a dull pink chador. I asked her to explain this to me, pointing to the array of material that had been dedicated to women and Islam. She immediately proceeded to tell me that wearing the Chador was her choice as a woman. No one forced her to wear it and she felt even more free with it on.

 I asked her why that was. She responded with the fact that it kept away wandering eyes and further that women need to be protected. 

I asked her why women needed to be protected. She looked dumbfounded for a second, as if no one had ever asked her this stupid question. She stumbled for the right words for a few seconds, finally she formed a vague answer, casting men as predators and women as their prey. The grand theme of protection has always comes up. It is what the Islamic Public of Iran uses as an excuse to carry out its agenda against women and it is what my parents might use to get me to stick to my curfew.

Protection from what is the real question. Perhaps I am putting words in this girl’s mouth, or perhaps she really had meant to say that it is our virginity that needs to be protected. This certainly seemed to be what Rajia’s mother was referring to when she refused to send her daughter to school. I am not questioning her choice to wear the chador - that is entirely up to her. However, there appears to be a sexist bias within her that she does not fully understand. That begs this question: is her choice really a choice? Is her decision informed? I curtly thanked her for her time and realized what I will be facing as I conduct my research this summer. How can I, as a Canadian woman, possibly begin to remain objective at these blatantly patriarchal attitudes? 

When I shared this dilemma with a brilliant professor at Western, he told me to think of myself as a child looking at a fish in a round bowl. You can observe the fish but you cannot touch it. He told me to draw upon my own experiences, as a Canadian woman, an Indian to empathize with these people so they may feel comfortable sharing their stories. In essence, don’t rock the boat. Another professor, quite a strong female at the Western history department, told me she paraded around the Middle East dressed in whatever she wanted. What does it teach them if we conform to their ways? You represent something, she told me. Then as if catching herself, she said, but I am an old woman and you are a beautiful, young girl. I have not decided what stance I will take but I think my experience limits me to the fish bowl option. 

Really, the question that I wish to derive from these experiences is how are all these women connected?  How does the girl at Western University compare to the strong Bagyam? Why does she appear to carry the same notions as Rajia’s uneducated mother? How will a world that has largely reduced the essence of women to their chastity move forward? And how do I, as a Canadian, a ‘researcher’ (I use the term loosely, because my qualifications hardly deserve the term), a woman, go about searching for the answers to these questions? I suppose this is really the purpose of my trip, my research, and if I may be so bold, perhaps even my life.