A question about children

I had an Ayurvedic oil massage. It involves being hit with a cloth covered stick all over your body and lying on your back and having aromatic oil poured on your forehead for about 30 minutes. Then you sit in this box filled with steam and watch the lovely girl who did your massage clear up the room. She is slight with dark hair, long in a ponytail. Skin like cream. . We have communicated in smiles during the two hours. Hers is wide and exquisite. Now she says to me, “ Auntie, you marry?” “ No” I say. “ Good thing” she says back at me , smiling. I learn that she lives in a hostel here in Thekkady. She is twenty three. She works seven days a week and her home is in a village some 30 miles away. She gets back once a month for four days and she really loves her job. I ask her, “ are you married’ “ Oh no “ she says. “ But I will marry. Fixed.” “ Ah, “ I say. “ when will that be? “ “ April 28th, she says. “ Have you met him? “ I ask. “ No” she says. “ Fixed. We text.” I know the answer to this next question, but I ask it anyway. “ will you work after marry?” “ No” she says. “ No more this work.” “ you will live with your husbands parents. yes?” I ask “ Yes.” She says. “ That will home from now.”

I knew the answer because the woman who was taking our tour was a beautiful strong independent woman called Usha Mary. She is now 42. She was brought up Roman Catholic. She is the older of two girls. Her mother died a year ago from cancer. Usha is married to a man called Aardi. He is Hindu. He is also a guide and they married for love some 14 years ago. She has converted to Hindu in principle. And she lives with his parents. Because that’s what brides do in India. She said she was grateful for the British for bringing in school uniforms. It meant that for all of her happy schooldays she never knew she was poor. or that many of the girls in her class were of a higher caste than she. Her husband is of a higher caste than she. That is a problem. But the bigger problem is that she hasn’t had a child. In India, you marry. You move into your husbands home. You learn to cook from his mother. You have babies, ideally boys. Because girls involve the expense of a dowry and they don’t look after you in old age. Female infanticide is now outlawed. But when Usha was growing up it wasn’t. She has a problem getting pregnant. Five years ago at the beginning of Covid she sold all her jewelry and special sarees to pay for a course of IVF. She learned she was expecting twin girls. There was a big party with a banner that read. “ Prayed for one. Blessed with two.” She carried them to term and then they died in the hospital; one after a few hours and the other after six days. Her father in law, who once came in and burned his wife with a hot poker because he had called her name three times and she hadn’t answered him, wanted his son to dump Usha and get a second wife. Usha told him she would be happy to step aside and that any child he had with another woman she would give love to. Aardi said he didn’t want another wife. And the mother in law stood up to her husband and said she would kill herself if he made Usha leave.

She told me that when she was at the hospital after the death of her babies there was another young woman whose baby had also died. She was abandoned there. Her husband and his family just left her there as he went to find a new wife. So they still live in a small house in a village outside Madurai. Usha and Aardi at least have their own room and not the curtain that was drawn across the bedroom to separate the two sleeping quarters. Usha wanted to adopt, but her father in law would not sign off on the paperwork. She told me that many women of her mother in laws generation will never say their husbands name because they are like a god. They will sometime have the husbands name tattooed on their arms and when they are asked the name of their husband they will lift up their arm to be read so as not to sully his name by speaking it.

Usha has AARDi tattooed on her arm. Because she loves him. She is a rockstar. She is changing the world because she is talking about what women like her have to go through. I hope she keeps going. India needs her.