Of a Woman by a Woman

I was reading an article on Women in Workplace and how glass ceilings are being shattered here-there-everywhere. During the past few days, the media has done its bit to woo the fairer (?) sex. Advertisements on Billboards, television channels, print media and so forth... On women, their progress, their achievements and also the flipside of it all....their backward subjugated role in a major segment of the society irrespective of the social / economic strata to which they belong!

Normally I'm the unsentimental kind. Not one to be swayed by the much commercialised sugar dripping DAYS...the Valentine's, the Mothers, Fathers, Friends and what not....they do not touch my heart. The selling of emotions leaves me cold. I dont feel compelled to wish or send a card to the concerned persons in my life because I just cannot contemplate restricting their significance to a DAY per year. And thankfully, none of them care a hoot either for these DAYS!!!

However, today was a trifle different...
On the eve of International Women's Day, the other working woman in my house returned to her workplace....my home. My live-in maid (M), after an almost month long break, came back from her village. I've spent several bytes of cyber space recounting her workplace activities (here). But after three weeks of super juggling and multitasking, to say that I was elated to have her back, will be an understatement.
This evening when I saw M, I was shocked....the healthy woman who had left my home three weeks back, to meet her ailing mother, had come back a dark, skinny, starved and almost unrecognizable version of her former self. She had fallen ill, she said. And running around for her mother's medicines had supposedly taken its toll.

M too was today's Woman; A working Woman. Not by choice, rather by compulsion. Married at fifteen, widowed at eighteen with a one year old child, she had started working since her child was 2 years old. The child was brought up by the grandmother. M was the youngest of seven brothers and two sisters. When she joined me a year and a half back, I had asked M, a woman in her late twenties or early thirties, why she had never remarried..she still could, I told her. She couldnt, she replied. Her brothers had promised her a piece of land in their village, on condition that she retain 'purity of character', by not remarrying!!!
And we talk of Women's emancipation!
I wondered aloud - what's the guarantee of actually getting the piece of land from the brothers, who do not hesisate to demand money from the widowed sister, for the mother's upkeep and treatment. Their justification being....it was M's duty, apparently, as the mother was taking care of HER daughter!!

"They're my brothers after all...they cant cheat me. And if they do, that's my destiny!" was her naive reply.

The sentimental mushy mood I was in, I forgave her for her work-shirking, lazy attitude. I excused her habit of procrastination and gossiping nature. It was here at my home, her workplace, that M was indulging herself in a life otherwise devoid of any indulgences.....

As you & I wish our women friends and colleagues a Happy Women's Day, basking in our confidence and right to choose, remember we are a minority. In our country, women like M belong to the majority, for whom life is all about a constant struggle, to stay afloat. Choice is not a word they can afford to have in their dictionary. For them, being a woman, is a curse of destiny.

HAPPY WOMEN's DAY!