May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India

The elements was once often suffocatingly sizzling, and flies buzzed frequently round my head. from time to time I misplaced middle and made up our minds the questionnaire used to be a foul suggestion and used to be now not getting me at any place. I knew most of the solutions have been made up, and that the synthetic state of affairs I had constructed—an interview—was no longer how to examine the reality approximately rural women’s lives. And but it was once a starting, a fashion of having to understand them. The interviews allowed me to take a seat of their homes for hours. I watched them knead the chapati dough, observed how they massaged their infants with mustard oil and listened to them struggle with their mothers-in-law. the ladies have been terrible, yet this didn't suggest all of them had inhibited personalities. whilst I requested the village pradhan’s daughter-in-law, Santosh Kumari, if she had any say in her prepared marriage, she laughed and gestured towards the dust ground and crumbling brick partitions of her domestic. “If they'd requested me, I wouldn’t have come to this house,” she stated. “I may have long past to a far better position. ” while I requested if her partner's mother handled her good, she laughed back. “If my spouse's mother is bad,” she stated, “will you deliver me a pleasant one? ” humans I knew in rural improvement had urged me to be as particular as attainable in my questions. i'd get nowhere, they stated, dealing in summary innovations like equity and equality. So I devised my questions as basic construction blocks on easy topics. for instance: “What is your schooling? ” “Would you're keen on to understand tips to learn and write? ” “Why did you now not visit tuition? ” “Do your kids visit university? ” “Who is it extra vital to educate—your son or your daughter? ” perpetually, the sons have been despatched to varsity and the daughters stayed at domestic. I additionally requested the ladies to inform me accurately how they'd spent the day sooner than, from the instant they received as much as the time they went to mattress. The trivia continually led me to an analogous end: the ladies labored tougher than the lads. Phula, for instance, was once 40 years outdated, a mom of 4, the spouse of a wealthy Pasi farmer who had lived in Khajuron all his lifestyles. He grew sugarcane, potatoes, rice, coriander and wheat. in the course of the harvest, he hired as much as fifteen humans an afternoon, and he made as regards to $1,000 every year. within the govt census, a guy like Phula’s husband will be indexed because the head of family, which he used to be, yet a spouse like Phula will be thought of a nonworking established. And but think of what she did all day: “Yesterday I obtained up at 5 within the morning,” she instructed me as we sat in a dismal, cramped room off her crucial courtyard. After emerging, Phula walked part an hour into the fields, as the relations had no latrine, then part an hour again. whilst she lower back, she wiped clean the pots used for the meal the evening prior to. cleaning soap used to be a luxurious, so she used dust and water, scraping together with her naked fingers. She swept the ground of the home, squatting over a short-handled broom, then walked again to the fields to gather tall grasses for her cows to devour. This took a number of hours simply because she needed to eliminate all of the thorns.