Meera Roy: Is marriage worth it?

PEOPLE LIKE THEM

Vijaya arrived out of the blue one day to work with my family as a cleaner. She was fresh from the village, in her mid-twenties, thin as a rake, and must have been, my father used to say, a German hausfrau in her last life, because she cleaned like nobody else could, including most German hausfraus.

For the fourteen years that she stayed with us, she waged a daily blitzkrieg on dirt in all its shapes and forms. She fed us, washed and ironed our clothes, knew our extended family and friends intimately, kept the house running, and incrementally, piece by tiny piece, filched the junk jewellery we bought on Janpath. Our saris disappeared, our glassware found its way into her room.

It didn't matter. Vijaya was a great asset. But she came with a no-good husband, as so many women do. He had enormous buckteeth, a huge potbelly from drinking, and a filthy temper that he enthusiastically lavished on her. Her inability to conceive was the thorn in their marriage "" her greatest sorrow, his biggest grudge. Still, they had two adopted sons, both of them her murdered brother's children. Her brother's wife, left with two small children, had suddenly become paralysed, and so Vijaya took the children in as her own.

Vijaya's husband hated Delhi. He wanted to go back to his village, where he could lie on his charpai and drink, and wait for the crops to ripen, and not lift a finger. Vijaya dug her thin heels in and stated quite clearly in her soft, high-pitched voice, which dropped two octaves and several degrees on occasions like this, that over her dead body would they go to the village, where she, as the youngest bahu, would become the slave of his mother and his brothers and their snotty wives. She would have to do everything she was doing here, but also press everyone's feet and be rewarded with contempt. She preferred to be enslaved to us.

And so, to keep everyone happy, my mother, for a while, employed Vijaya's husband too as a chowkidar and occasional cook. He sat on a low stool at the door all day, with an open magazine upside down in his hands, allegedly protecting us from intruders. Whatever they earned, he continued to drink. When their elder child developed tuberculosis, he drank the money earmarked for the medication. Their younger son was, at age twelve, still in class three at school, because his school fees kept being drunk away. They maintained credit at a criminal rate of interest at the local stores because no matter how much money came in, it was never enough for his habit.

Vijaya got so desperate that she took loans, which, it later transpired, were to buy a job as an employee of the MCD. The plan was to get the job and subcontract it at a fraction of the cost to someone else, so that you got a salary and a pension without having to do the job. Somehow, despite Rs 50,000 bribes in borrowed funds, the job never happened. Then they decided to marry off their elder child at the age of fifteen, in the hopes of snagging a bride with a dowry. Somehow this ended with Rs 20,000 worth of marriage jewellery mysteriously disappearing from Vijaya's bags, and the groom took to beating his mother as he'd seen his father do.

After fourteen years with us, Vijaya suddenly became pregnant and gave birth to a little daughter one dark Diwali. That was the end of her reign in our house; she was taken back to the suburban Delhi stronghold of her husband's family. She's still trying to make ends meet; she tried to run a shop, which failed, and tried to take in ironing, but that isn't doing so well either. And her husband is still drinking.