Last week, when I found myself in the vicinity of the house in Asiad Village where my family had lived for nine years, it was a bitter-sweet experience. While our old house looked so unbearably familiar, most of our neighbours had moved on. Or so I thought. “Didi...?” I heard a tentative voice behind me, “is that you?” For a minute I didn’t recognise her. Then a sudden image of a bold flash of kohl-rimmed eyes and jingling bangles came to me. Although the woman in white who’d addressed me bore little resemblance to the pretty Gujarati girl who’d once walked through the colony with a baby on her ample hips and a toddler trailing behind, I knew her at once.
She was Bhanwari, itinerant seller of steel utensils, who offered her wares in exchange for old clothes, shoes and other sundry things one wanted to get rid of. She had an alcoholic husband who’d wait for her at their doorstep to snatch her earnings from her. All he gave her, she used to say, were babies and beatings. Yet, her ready smile and zest for life were infectious.
We met affectionately, for she remembered us pampering her kids while my mother bargained amicably with her over utensils she didn’t really need. I asked how she’d been, and she shook her head sadly. Her husband was dead, she said, but her tribulations hadn’t ended there.
Poverty and lack of formal schooling made it impossible for her to find any other work. “I had three children under 12 and nowhere to leave them as I walked tens of kilometres with a heavy basket of metal pots and pans on my head…,” she said somberly. Then, when she thought things couldn’t get worse, her son, the eldest, died. At her wits’ end, she married off her elder daughter at the ripe age of 15 to reduce her liabilities. Sorry to hear her tale of woes, I gave her my address and asked her to drop in whenever she was in the vicinity.
Days later, Bhanwari arrived with her basket of utensils and daughter Kiran, a pretty, sturdy teenager. “Which class are you in?” I asked her. Kiran looked blankly at me: “I’ve never gone to school,” she said. Bhanwari piped in: “Actually I didn’t want her to study. We are too poor for such luxuries and I’ve seen that education brings too many expectations and eventually, frustration!” I’d heard this argument too often to take it lying down. But all my pleas to send her daughter at least to open school fell upon deaf ears. “Instead of wasting time and money on school, I’m training Kiran in my profession — it’s something she can do respectably after she’s married as it is well accepted by our community. All I want is for her to be independent, just like I’ve always been!” Bhanwari said. I couldn’t get my eyes off Kiran as she expertly packed away all the old clothes I’d given them, seemingly oblivious to the fact that her mother was wishing upon her the exact same life that she’d had.
These days, Bhanwari said, all her time was spent in looking for suitable matches for her daughter. “We aren’t aiming high... I’m looking at families like my own. I’ll come to you when her marriage is fixed and maybe you can give me a sari or two?” she said hopefully. I watched them leave with a troubled mind.
Was poverty or destitution a good enough excuse to not educate one’s children? I didn’t know, but that day, when I saw Kiran deftly hoist the heavy basket upon her head and follow in her mother’s footsteps, I felt I was witnessing history repeat itself.