A matter of conditioning

Raaja Bhasin

A while before I got married, I received my first formal invitation to a dinner hosted by a senior officer of the Army. The ADC called and said, “If you are married, please bring the lady wife.” I wasn’t married then and that was the first time one had heard the phrase, ‘lady wife’.

“What other kind is there?” were the first words that passed through my head. I, too, was a product of the conditioning of our times. These were years before some of us put aside a tiny measure of our hypocrisy and accepted that the entire human race is not ‘straight’— and that that is one of the characteristics of what makes us human. For all the unswerving inflexibility of a male-dominated and often malefic world, everyone is entitled to love and whatever measure of happiness life may have to offer.

It was only years later and in an entirely different context that one learnt that the use of the words ‘lady wife’, at least in India, stemmed from our years of being colonised and carried the rancid odour of racism. Its connotation was quite different from what may have been in the West, where it could be a genteel wording of politeness. In India, however, ‘lady wife’ meant the lady who had come from the mother country, Britain, and was not the native ‘Bibi’, the common-law or legally-wed local lady. When men from Britain sailed out to India and spent several years, if not entire lifetimes in the country, expectedly, they formed liaisons or relationships with local ladies — who were often courtesans and who, out of compulsion or choice, stepped out of the taboos imposed on women. However, this was not always the case, and many high-born Indian women had white husbands. One result of this free-mingling were the early ‘Anglo-Indians’ or ‘Eurasians’ — a community, one may add, that has had to suffer neglect, indifference and even discrimination at the hands of all parties concerned.

Often unnoticed, these dyed-in-wool attitudes carry on in other ways. My late mother’s nameplate, written and placed without a second thought, one assumes, had the prefix, ‘Dr (Mrs)’, before her name. The ‘Dr’ on its own obviously required the assistance of the ‘Mrs’ to complete the nameplate and subsequently, this appeared on visiting cards and letterheads. Then, not very long back, someone called to say that a nurse from overseas wanted to visit. We expected a lady and were fairly surprised to receive a hulking 6-foot- tall nurse, who was male.

Like the nurse, depending on where you are in the world, some simple activities remain interpreted by gender. When we were young, numerous Tibetan refugees arrived in the hills. We could not but help notice and admire how they kept their young. These displaced persons often worked on road gangs, shifting rock and rubble, and somewhere by the side, in a wooden box held up by canvas straps, would be a baby that everyone would take turns to peek at and see if all was well. When not working or spinning their prayer wheels, almost all the men knitted. Caps, gloves and socks poured out from those sharply clicking needles held by large muscular hands. Another fairly common sight and one that is not seen any more is of Pahari men who walked and performed their normal tasks while wielding drop spindles, taklis, and spun coarse wool.

Again, a task that came along and crossed the bridge of gender was art. At one point, I was painting terrible landscapes and even worse images of still-life. A teacher had handed me a piece of cloth, some thread and a needle. “Embroider and stitch,” I was told. “It will make your fingers and hands more dexterous.” Others with greater talent had been handed a pack of cards to shuffle and that was expected to realise the same thing that people at the bottom of the art barrel, like me, were expected to achieve.

There was a moment, however, that I was able to palm off a bit of rubbish as inspired art. That came from a plank of wood over which I had pasted some other bits of wood and several leftover blocks from childhood building sets. It went over a wall on a landing. Visitors came by and remarked on the new addition. I explained it like it was — “A piece of wood and more pieces of wood stuck on.” That it was colourful and supposedly creative, should have merited more than the casual remark, “How nice”, that it drew. For the next lot of dinner guests, a story was in position. Now, that plank of wood signified the earth and the forests, the bits over it were cities and mankind, the funny little thing on top was man searching for meaning and balance in this world. Now, this had everyone’s attention. I waxed eloquent and the dinner guests nodded sagely. They even gave my parents that dangerous line, “He has promise.”

I stood below that piece of wood, which also had twists from the wire spiral of an old calendar. Someone asked me about those helices spinning on the sides of the wood. I happily explained them away as genders seeking their position in the human zoo.

Join Whatsapp Channel of The Tribune for latest updates.