Unveiling hope

Geetanjali Gayatri

In Haryana, Women’s Day can’t be about the faces of a few famous women who have made a mark for themselves because they have made it in spite of the debilitating circumstances that exist in a hostile patriarchal society drunk on male superiority. Instead, the Women’s Day is a story of a grim picture that redraws itself year after year on the state’s canvas — colourless and silent, bordering on the repulsive sometimes. And, I say this from the experience of travelling to villages across the state for stories on khaps and their draconian diktats, honour killings which die for want of evidence and women’s issues which are hardly on anybody’s minds since the men call the shots and women can be arm-twisted into submission (such a need hardly ever arises).

As I sat down to write about Women’s Day, I remembered the one picture that remains unchanged in the very heart of Jatland — men, sitting in chaupals playing cards over numerous rounds of smoking hookah and their women slogging in the fields, tending to cattle, managing home, washing, patting cow dung cakes and more as their chores seem a monotonous string of endlessness. Many a face of women I met flitted across my memory as many painful stories crowded my mind. I remembered the night I heard a boy was lynched in Narwana when he went with a warrant officer of the High Court and a posse of 15 cops to bring back his newly-wed wife from her village. Unhappy over the alliance since he belonged to a sub-caste, a mob lynched him and there was no remorse. Asked about the fate of the widowed girl, a villager elder remarked, “Ladki ka kya hai, iss khoontay se bandhi ya uss sey!” My mind went numb with this response. 

I read the helplessness in the eyes of a father who, without meeting my eye, said his daughter and her cousin consumed sweets on Diwali night, had an excruciating stomach ache and died. She was cremated hurriedly after midnight. The case met a dead end because that officially became the village stand. It’s another matter that the girl was spotted getting out of a car by a villager who mobilised opinion that favoured death for her and a cousin who had helped her sneak out. 

More recently, when farmers’ suicides rocked Haryana last year on account of a failed wheat crop due to untimely rain and hail, I travelled to their homes to get to know reasons for giving up on life. Debt-ridden and poor, they had little hope of tiding over the crisis. In a village in Jhajjar, I met a widow, inconsolable and obviously shattered. But, even more moving was the way the menfolk had treated her after her husband’s death. She kept repeating that till evening nobody had cared to inform her that her husband had hung himself from a tree and died. She ran around the village in desperate search, knocking on doors and visiting his “friends” to know his whereabouts. She heard nothing.

When a villager casually remarked that they had found her farmer husband hanging from a tree in the field, I, out of sheer curiosity, asked why, in that case, was she not told. I was aghast at what I heard. Without so much as the blink of an eye, the villager said, “She is a woman. Who would have milked the cows and cooked food if we had told her in the morning itself? The men were handling it. At least she had finished her household chores before she discovered it.” One Women’s Day celebrated for a handful of women seems meaningless in the face of such callousness, such insensitivity Everytime I return from my village visits, I think it has to get better from there. Each time, I realise I am wrong. It only gets worse. For someone who has been threatened and asked to leave villages or “temporarily detained” by complete strangers for prying into cases of honour killings and child marriages and “diktat-prescribed” deaths, I believe these mindsets reflect the unfair attitude of men. 

Despite this, there is, sometimes, one tiny ray of hope that finds a way out of nooks and crannies. I hang by that. Like in Kaithal, where I went to cover a night camp by the district administration. I chose this village only because the sarpanch was a woman. Much to my disappointment, I found a man “playing” sarpanch. I was told that he was the “sarpanch pati,” who performed all her duties. At my insistence and fearing negative reporting, the sarpanch was called in. She came, in a veil, her face completely covered, sat down with me and we got chatting.

I couldn’t resist saying it and, so I did—I told her that her veil seemed out of place since she was not on the stage as a wife or a daughter-in-law but as the head of the village. “Little girls watching you will grow up thinking that women can occupy any seat of power but they have to hide behind the veil,” I said, speaking to her husband, too, about the futility of it all. Something must have clicked because, a few days later, I got a call from her. “Didi, you come to my village now. I remove my veil when I meet villagers and I am leading an anti-veil crusade in my village,” she said, her tone was excited. Next I heard that she was made the brand ambassador for the “anti-veil” campaign of the district administration. So, despite this morbidity, there is a hope. It is buried but it is there. It is waiting for a push here and a nudge there. Maybe, these seeds will sprout. Someday. Or, maybe, they will die. Till then, we can hope, only hope.

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