IF SHE COULD FLY

India is a baffling country of colours, shapes, sizes, idiosyncrasies and hypocrisies. Perhaps the most eye-catching of the list is colours. There is colour in everything we do, to everything we do, and we colour everything we do, food, apparel, literature, music, festivals, family, and life in general. Colour is apparent everywhere, in the rust of the city and in pastoral rusticity.

So we were very pleasantly surprised to find at our cancer support group a lady steeped in rustic pastoralism. She was the wife of a cancer patient. Thin and wiry, with a ramrod figure, she said she was 45 years old, didn’t look a day less than 55. Her skin was dark, polished, and appeared to have been layered by many rays of the sun; her hair, salt and pepper, more salt over the frontal aspect where it parted in a fish bone pattern. The light skeins generously smudged with ‘sindoor’, the vermillion-blood red powder smeared on the crown that leaves no Indian guessing as to a woman’s marital status. Her sinewy left forearm bore the brand of a tattoo, albeit stamped with primitive modernity, no tattoo parlour recce for sure. She was attractive in a rustic way, the homely kind who would be adept at fixing a six course meal in the blink of an eye and supervising her guest’s appetite with the clockwork precision of a mother hen. Heaven help you if you don’t taste all six. Of course, the wavering palate would be reprimanded with a class that only rustics know.

She was clad in a sari, what else? Bright blue and red, draped the way they do in Bhagalpur, a city to the east, in Bihar, on the planes of the river Ganges, known to produce good quality Tussar silk. If one is an animal activist, the silk is inconsequential.
She viewed the refreshments that were served with scholarly trepidation. “We don’t eat meat”, she chimed in Bhagalpuri Hindi. Upon being reassured that it was quite vegetarian, she did full justice to the yoghurt, potatoes, wafer and chutney mixture. Between mouthfuls she mesmerized us with her questions, her insight, her thirst for knowing about her husband’s disease, his prognosis, what the future held for him, the medical benefits he would receive with the eldest son being in the police, her fortitude and her positiveness.

She studied in the village school till class 7 whereafter she was married at the age of 14, and, as her in-laws did not want an educated daughter-in-law, she had to stop attending school. ‘I can read and write Hindi, and read the alphabets in English’. She demonstrated her skill by reading S-U-P-P-O-R-T G-R-O-U-P on the attendance register. “But I don’t know what they mean.”
Her first child was born at 19. Wasn’t that a little late in life, we asked. ‘Yes’, she piped, ‘my husband wasn’t staying with me’. ‘My husband is a farmer, we have fields where we plant sugarcane and make jaggery.’ Four more children followed; ‘all well educated’, she exclaimed proudly. More exchanges followed, we urbanites were floored as she departed to speak to the attending physician and we turned our attention to another patient’s family.
And so the proceedings drew to a close for the day. We were supposed to support her through these troubled times, instead she taught us.

You and I are not archetypal Indian women, well educated, well nourished, and well dressed with ample opportunities at hand. The bulk of Indian women are in the mould of this lady from Bhagalpur. Paltry resources, a slave to society, steeped in customs of yore, yet so articulate, so forthright, so confident, so innocent, so inspiring. If only these women had the resources we did, to what lengths this nation would have gone.