February 15 to 29, 2004

Can’t you see glimpses of yourself in them?

HARD to believe, but I ran into the three women whose stories I am going to tell you, all in the space of one evening. Unrelated women, but the same spirit runs through them.

I WAS sitting next to woman # I in a bus. She asked me if I was returning from work. We got talking and it turned out she was a qualified nurse. Her job took her out of the house at seven every morning, Sundays included, and she worked a non-stop 12-hour shift. Her ward, an elderly gentleman, had everything from Alzheimer’s and hypertensions of myasthenia gravis. With the result, he was completely unable to move, had to be lifted and fed and cleaned and even reminded to swallow his food. It must have been the most taxing assignment she had had, but she seemed to take it in her stride. “Last week, he choked on a piece of fruit,” she narrated, “and I watched in horror as his eyes watered and then bulged and his face reddened. He had no idea of how to help himself, he wouldn’t open his mouth; there was no time to call for help.” In desperation, she managed to push her finger in between his teeth, and pushed at his Adam’s apple with her hand, and dislodged the fruit. “He started mechanically chewing on the fruit again, and bit my finger in the process,” she said, showing the tooth marks that it still bore. “But I saved him - that is important.”

IT was a lot of work for Rs 420 a day, but she said she did it because she had to keep the home fires burning. And even the fact that she had to leave her two-year-old daughter in her village seemed not to matter too much. “Finally,” she said, as she was leaving. “it is not what you do but how you do it that matters.” And with that, she hurried out of the bus, and ran to get her connecting train. TEN minutes later, I was listening to another woman, this time unwittingly. She sat a seat behind me, and was firing someone, a boyfriend or her husband, in chaste Hindi, on the cell phone. She had obviously waited for him, and called him about 10 times, and he had finally responded saying he was quite far away and would not be able to make it in time to see her. Her initial disappointment had turned to anger. She knew he was lying; his facts were mixed up, his explanations contradictory. She was sure he had been with some other woman... It was the oldest story in the world, the thwarted Radha had made such a plaint eons ago... and in this modern-day Radha’s voice too, was a mix of anger and hope, waiting to be convinced that her suspicions were wrong. Then, finally, when she could not find any reason to hope, she told him she would show him what she was made of when they met, and she switched off her phone.

I WATCHED her getting off... a smart young woman, her eyes still blazed, and I knew here was a woman who would walk away from this relationship, should she have enough reason to do so.

AND then, even as I settled down to mull over my two encounters, the third hit me squarely. I turned at the sound of a barrage of words, to see a well dressed, sari-clad woman shouting at a man on the other side of the aisle. “If you don’t stop staring at me, I will hit you with my ‘chappal’,” she said. And went on to threaten to march him to the police at the next stop. The conductor had to calm her down by telling the man to move to another seat ahead of us.

WOMEN of today. Unafraid to face up to life, and to the challenges of being women in a fast changing world. To me, they embodied the new spirit of Indian womanhood.