THE WORLD IS THE HOME      by Shruthi Venukumar

 

 Her face in the mirror had as much pallor as its duskiness would allow. Her eyebrows would have converged into a red round bindi[1]but they halted abruptly, touches short of it. That was as close as she could get to tangibly expressing her marital status. The more assertive sindoor[2] was out of question. She thought it funny; since the age of sixteen, ever since she had read somewhere that the sindoor, a red powder sprinkled along the partition of a married woman’s hair, was a graphic way of showing that she is no longer a virgin, having consummated her marriage, she had decried it. Why should it always be women & not men to wear symbols of marriage on the body? Today, five months into her clandestine marriage, she held dear anything that alluded to her marital status, ambiguously of course.

 

She swiped the white envelop off the green plastic ledge of the mirror and fell back on her bed. It was her letter of acceptance into the Peace Studies MPhil Programme of the University of Jyna. To Ms.Amrita Mahalingam. “Mrs.Mahajan”, she thought. Great! So now I want his last name! What a hypocritical feminist I am! She had spent dark nights lit up by the prospects shone at by peace theories. Peace prospecting, she called it; because they seemed to dig for peace with the enthusiasm of 19^th century diamond prospectors.

 

It was for peace that they had wed in secret. They would have had no family members running them down like blood hounds. Their socially divergent communities would not have started riots against each other in the name of the breach. But the heartache their parents would have had! She could foresee her mother’s incessant insistence on going without food, a mark of protest as much as a symbol of grief. Her father would have evoked scenes from her childhood and lamented his misplaced trust in her. Would he have remembered his niche words that he always put together in a soothing sentence, “The world doesn’t end in a day,”? Everyone under his roof used to be counseled with these words when they showed intolerable misery, despair or impatience. His family was another story. She would be called names no less than the distinction of a gold-plated gold-digger by his mother. His father would have threatened with a disownment. As a student on a measly research scholarship, that would have been suicide for him. No! It was his lifestyle that he couldn’t risk dialing down. The wagging of people’s tongues itself would have been a murderer of calm airwaves….peace in the air!

 

“We can tell ma and pa later. When we have stable careers to leverage our decision,” she had told him.

 

Crossing one leg over the other and opening the letter, she now wondered why she had agreed to marriage with Prayag at all! Again, it was for peace. His career was tanking. So were his spirits. She had taken a year off after her Masters to study for bureaucracy exams. Her parents’ arguments over suspicions of her father’s infidelity caused major hurricanes at home everyday. Then came the tsunamis of tears. It was in no less dramatic terms that she had demanded her father to let her live away from home, lest it ruined her career and crushed her soul. She relocated to a place Google Earth couldn’t tell apart from her parents’ home, renting a flat 6 minutes of a brisk walk from it. What the cacophony of her parents’ home did to her, here the silence of the hours did. Eighteen hours of studying everyday, cooking her own meals because the tiffin system was expensive and staring into a future that appeared blank and bright in turns made her peace go to pieces. Her father would come in the mornings and evenings with bags of grocery. He would never stay for tea and would glance at his watch every half minute if she chitchatted. He was just anxious to get home without risking being asked questions about visiting “that ungrateful girl”. Soon, her shutting the door turned into slamming it into her father’s face. He diligently kept coming, his silence pregnant with his reasons for the ever-shortening briefs of time he spent with her. He wanted to keep peace at both places. She found solace in Prayag’s evening visits. Soon, they both wished the permanence of each other’s presence.

 

A court marriage would have led to a verification of their residences. Their parents would’ve been stormed! They got married in a temple, living every ritual that she had stood against as a religious reformist. For peace. She cringed at the idea of her name featuring in the next day’s newspaper as the woman who entered a temple to get married, with a secret agenda of desecrating it by disavowing its ways.[3] They later got the marriage registered. When their ideological arguments gave way to him having affairs, she kept quiet. The reason was not unfamiliar. Peace and hope often walk the darkness together.

 

A week into being a flushing bride, he had said, “Do you know Ajay P?” She didn’t. He sniggered, “You know him. Everyone at the University knows him. People think he speaks nonsense. But he talks the most sense!” He introduced them. She had to pool up all her diplomacy. Ajay was the leader of an underground organization - the voice of the upper castes of India. The caste system was an ancient system in which people were classified according to their occupation. Records show that in ancient times, members of the same family had different occupations. But like volcanic lava turns into boulders over time, the caste system became rigid and binding. It became a four-level vertical division with the priestly class at the top. A change of profession no longer meant a change of caste. A change of profession became forbidden. The lower castes came to be exploited at the hands of the upper castes. There was a category outside this system; that of butchers, disposers of dead bodies and scavengers. Just the sight and touch of them came to be considered polluting! Their colonies smacked of segregation. They, and some lower castes, were not allowed education. Independent India abolished discrimination. Educational institutions and government jobs threw their doors open for them by reserving seats for them but society failed to throw their arms open. The former were subsets of the latter. Centuries-old attitudes were hard to kill.

 

“About 49.5% seats in colleges are reserved for the lower castes. Holding our peace now would mean writing an economic death sentence for our children. They will not get jobs,” Ajay boomed. She sighed. The upper castes were 17-18% of the population and had access to the rest of the seats, 50.5% of them. Why was it so difficult for them to understand that their group will only further split a country where caste-based violence was the norm? There was already radicalization among groups of the lower castes. Even the diaspora. There were caste-based clashes within the Indian community in the UK, US and Australia. On the surface, these looked like a clamour for the dwindling number of low-skilled jobs in these countries. It made little sense to her that people who had migrated from India in need of jobs were divided abroad, not by skill-sets but by caste. It leads to a lack of integration into the host society and ghettoization. A student of International Relations, it was no surprise to her that a national caste conflict could spill across the border and cause violence across the world in this way.

 

All her life, she had held her peace at the wrong places, for reasons unworthy. For once she would work towards lasting peace. She swapped the letter in her hand for a train ticket placed on the bed. It was to the village Myrna. She was part of a group of people spreading school-level education to children of all castes in villages across India. The poor quality of school education made sure that the lower castes could not enroll at colleges despite reserved seats. It ensured their backwardness. She wanted to end that. She would catch them young…teach them their rights, not as members of a caste, but as humans. She would not let caste animosity smolder into a conflict sans borders.

 

Myrna was populated by 4500 odd people. A cringe-worthy feature of its design was the systematic segregation of house-clusters according to caste. The upper castes lived in raised flood-proof central area. The lower castes lived, literally and figuratively, on the margins. Amrita’s group conjured up katcha [4] rooms in the strips of land separating these. They painstakingly created classrooms, grouping students, according to age and ability. They used Hindi-medium government curriculum books.[5] Items drawn from the children’s immediate environment were used to teach them. Counting was taught using the local pomegranates, instead of the unfamiliar avocados shown in books. A heart-warming tool of India’s education is the “adarsh balak”[6] charts, a series of cartoon strips portraying ideal norms for children about cleanliness, good manners, health etc. Amrita designed an adarsh balak series on the “right attitude towards others”. Her slides graphically listed the act of preventing lower castes from using the common village wells and ponds as wrong. This illustration was juxtaposed with another, showing a young lower caste girl raising her voice against being stopped from entering a temple. This slide applauded her act as the right way to combat discrimination. The children were no strangers to either scene in the village. But till now, they didn’t know whose side to take. Many were from families at the receiving end of such exclusion from time to time. She drew instructive cartoons on many other such themes, engaging children in the fight for equality in a language simple enough for them to understand. Amrita had feared a backlash from the upper castes to their teaching methods. Her resolve got a boost when she realized that they had as supporters, city-returned adults even from the upper castes. Those who had lived a few years in cities working as laborers were exploited at the hands of their employers and contractors irrespective of their caste. The laborers were all one class, treated with contempt. They knew the true colours and psychology of discrimination and once back to their village, decided to put an end to caste bias at their hands. The children at the school found it confusing sometimes, being taught behaviour that their society seemed to run contrary to. But they were young enough to be molded into people respectful and mindful of themselves and others. In time. Thought Amrita. In time, they would venture into the more polarized villages. It could be a bloody struggle. They had heard of social workers being gunned down by the upper castes. But they would keep the flame burning. The strips of land of separation on which the school stood will one day be strips of land holding them together.

 

 

 

Indian words featuring in the novel:

 

1 Bindi: A round velvet adornment that Indian women stick on their foreheads. In some parts, the bindi is worn only by married woman. But increasingly, it is becoming a fashin accessory worn by women independent of marital status.

 

2 Sindoor: A vermillion-cloloured powder that Indian women apply to their forehead and the parting of their hair, indicating that they are married.

 

3 In India, a traditional Hindu-religion marriage can solemnized in a temple of the Hindu Gods. A Hindu marriage can also take place at any place, in the presence of a priest. Alternatively people can get married in the court by secular rules. It is now required by law that every marriage, even the ones that take place in a temple, be registered in a court. 

 

4 Katcha: A make-do building made of bricks, stones, mud and straw.

 

5 Hindi: A language spoken in the North of India.

 

6 Adarsh-balak: Ideal-boy