On Women's Lib, Gender Equality and Other Myths...

"Sit with your legs together"

"Pull that skirt over your knees!"

"You shouldn't be out after dark"

"Who was the boy you were talking to on the phone?"

"You can't wear that and I don't care if your friends are wearing it!"

'You're not going and that's FINAL."

Women readers, particularly those of South Asian origin, I'm quite sure, read these familiar admonitions and felt their skins bristle all over again. Pretty much every girl growing up in a South Asian household has been reprimanded thus, at some point or other. From the moment a baby is conceived, the parents' protective instincts kick in- you want to ensure that your child never knows harm or fear and has every opportunity to lead a full and productive life. With parents of girl children, this protective instinct is manifold greater, for despite the tall claims of progressiveness and liberation by certain sections of the population, it is culturally ingrained into our psyche that any time there is a tug of war between the sexes, it is always the woman that stands to lose more. There is a saying in my native tongue, Malayalam, that literally means that regardless of whether the leaf falls on the thorn or the thorn on the leaf, it is the leaf that will have to pay the price. This is also, unfortunately, the message that we unconsciously pass on to our daughters through (not so) subtle words and actions every single day. I will confess to being guilty of this myself and I'm not proud of it. But that being said, I think it is important to keep it real with our children, and the sad fact is that it isn't an equal world. But chances are, they will figure it out soon enough. The fact is, gender-equality and women's liberation- progressive, pertinent, powerful words- are a largely selective phenomenon that pertains almost exclusively to the elite and upper middle class.

From the time a girl child starts showing signs of developing physical maturity, perhaps even earlier than that, a rather pervasive, almost unreasonable dread takes hold of the parents. We begin to worry incessantly for their safety- a trip on the bus or train, waiting in line for tickets at the movies, sitting down to watch the movie in a darkened theater, walking in crowded places, being a few minutes late to call or get home - all cause the parents’ stomachs to clench, their breaths come out in shallow gasps; all kind of horrible scenarios play out in their heads and they end up fearing the worst. How do I know it so well? Because I am both a woman and a mother to two growing girls. Among the South Asian community, who are often (rightly) thought to be overprotective parents, this worry can take on rather obsessive proportions, and I don't blame them. It is simply how we are raised to be.

Having spent the most impressionable years of my girlhood in Kerala, growing up in a conservative, upper middle class family, I would learn early on that being a girl made me very different from my male cousins. I got glared at or reprimanded by my "well-meaning" uncles (and aunts) for laughing too loud, talking too much, swearing (sacrilege!), experimenting with make-up, standing outside talking by the gate after sun-down, or even having opinions that differed from theirs. I would learn that men would be served first at meals and women and children would eat together later. Without a doubt, my mother and aunts were doted on by my father and uncles, but it was clear to me even back then, that they were far from equal. Children pick up on these things quickly, and I grew up knowing well from a very early age, that I was never to disappoint or tarnish the family name. That no matter how well I did at school or whatever accolades I would go on to achieve academically or professionally, at the end of the day, none of it would matter. It all boiled down to my being a "good" girl in the eyes of my family and society. I knew that the same rules did not apply to my male cousins, whose daring and non-conformist exploits were often the subject of pride and made for highly animated family discussions.

Today, as the mother of a tween and teenaged girl growing up in what is deemed the most developed country in the world, I know for a fact that at their age, I was not as naive or guileless as they are. Looking back, I believe I crossed over from being a little girl into a (perceived) woman at age 9. And that was not only because my body said so (which it did) but also because it was during the summer that I turned 9, while vacationing at my ancestral home in Kerala, that my family decided one eventful day, that I had lost my innocence. The day had started off normally enough- idyllic as summer vacations tend to be- I had played long and hard with my cousins, gorged on ripe, juicy mangoes till my stomach hurt, and swung to my heart's content from the swing which hung from a hardy branch on the mango tree in my grandmother's yard. In the late afternoon, I waited as always for the young servant girl, only older to me by two or three years, to come home from school, so I could play with her after she had finished her chores. I was especially eager to play with her that day because she had told me with a mischievous glint in her eyes that she had a surprise for me.

That afternoon, as my mother sat brushing out my tangled mane, I had my nose buried in the pages of one of the servant girl's English textbooks as usual. I was turning a page when suddenly, a beautiful, hand-drawn sketch fluttered down and fell right at my feet. But one quick glance at it was enough to know that things were going to take an unpleasant turn. For, boldly emblazoned across the pale, full moon which hung like a glowing orb over a lake that glowed silver in the night, were the words "I Love You Priya" and a name that I recognized as one I'd heard my friend mention a few times. I was only nine, but every instinct in me screamed out to hide that juvenile declaration of love, which I tried to, right away. Only, my mother had caught a glimpse of it too. To make a long story short, the servant girl was sent away for good and asked never to set foot into our home again; the young Romeo, I heard, was interrogated and if some sources are to be believed, also got a sound thrashing. But the cruelest cut of all was yet to come. My beloved swing that I had spent endless afternoons on- reading, dreaming and gazing out at the street below- was felled that very day. Its remains hung there- two gnarly bits of rope dangling from the mango tree in the yard- like a poignant symbol of my girlhood which seemed to have abruptly ended- at least in my mind, right there with it. I was all of nine and made to think that I had brought unforgivable shame upon my family. Nobody asked for my version of the story; nobody even talked about it afterwards, and I guess, after the initial awkwardness, things somehow fell right back to how they used to be. Except, I never forgot. Today, my youngest is nine- the same age I was at the time of the incident. In my eyes, she is still my baby, innocent as the day she was born. Sometimes, though, when I look at her, I see a guilt-stricken nine-year-old me, stare back. I know there's a part of me that still grieves for that child. There is also a part of me that wonders, had it been one of my male cousins who sent some unsuspecting young girl a similar token of love, wouldn't it have been recounted with much amusement in family circles, and perhaps, even make it into the family annals of funny childhood chronicles?

The double standards make me cringe.

The realization that one is a woman, can be a rather defining one. It alters one's perceptions of the world, of society and even people, quite significantly. I was born in Kuwait and the first fifteen years of my life played out in that land....right up until Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi despot, decided he wanted in on Kuwait's flourishing oil reserves and wreaked the havoc that has since gone down in history as the First Gulf War. I was in tenth grade then and our three-month long summer vacation was just coming to an end, when the series of incidents that would shape the destinies of many impressionable youngsters like myself, unraveled. Leaving the war-ravaged land that was the place of my birth and the only real home we'd known, became an inescapable reality after some two weeks into the invasion, when we started to run out of gas and other basic supplies. It would take us twelve days to make it out of Kuwait, and reach Cochin, my hometown in Kerala. We stayed at various camps in Baghdad, Basra (Iraq) and Amman (Jordan) for days at a stretch, among tens of thousands of other refugees like ourselves, all trying to escape war-torn Kuwait. War can make a big impression on a fifteen-year-old girl. I never felt more aware of my gender or my vulnerability than when rowdy Iraqi soldiers clambered into our bus at various check points, with their machine guns and made a big show of pointing them at my girl cousins and myself, as if scanning who to pick among us, to do their will, openly leering at us and sniggering among themselves. Nights at the camps were long and harsh....women and men were segregated and we spent the better part of the night huddled together for warmth, the flimsy blankets that we had been provided with, no match for the biting cold winds of the great Arabian Desert. Nobody really slept, partly from cold, mostly from fear. The days, in striking contrast, were excruciatingly hot. I remember longing for a bath until I realized that showers were communal affairs- about fifty women in a tent at a time- with two sharing a bucket of water between them. The very first time I had to subject myself to this mortification, I noticed the strategically placed holes in the back of the tent. I have no doubt that the 'Women's Shower Room’ as it was called, was an endless source of entertainment to the young Iraqi soldiers who seemed to loiter aimlessly around the camps at all times of the day and night. I remember how my cousins and I, all in our early teens, would say how much easier all of this would have been, had we been men. I still remember the helplessness in the faces of my father and uncles and the dark circles around the eyes of my mother and aunts, from constantly keeping vigil over us girls. It would seem that they had aged a decade in ten days. Thus, at fifteen, I knew that the rules were different for women and men. War is a great leveler. It puts things in perspective- you, your place in the world, who and what really matters and perhaps, most of all, it teaches you to value what little you have.

Living in India for the next eight years of my life would teach me new lessons which further cemented the ones I'd already learned about how, at least in certain parts of the world, regardless of education, intelligence and social status, women trailed many steps behind men when it comes to safety or any semblance of "equality". The first time I was groped on a public bus was three days after joining my new school, about a week after moving to India. From having a minivan take me to school and back home, to scrambling into public buses and hanging on for dear life, I had come a long way, literally and figuratively. That said, nothing can quite prepare one for a strange hand squeezing your breast or rubbing up against you from behind on a moving bus. I remember hot tears pricking my eyes and my cheeks burning red with shame for an instant before something snapped inside of me and manifested itself as blind fury. They say I grabbed his hand and shoved him against the steps before the conductor and other passengers evicted him from the bus. It is all a blur now, and all I remember is crying inwardly, sitting in the seat somebody hastily offered me and trying to avoid a busful of questioning glances that shot my way. I did not tell my parents for fear of upsetting them, but they would come to know eventually of course; for nothing a woman does goes unnoticed or undiscussed with exaggerated details. The scenario would go on to repeat itself many times over, in the years to come- in buses, trains, crowded cinema halls....but I guess one learns to develop a tough outer skin over time. Perhaps nothing explains that conditioning better than my young, college-going cousin's words to me, years later: "Oh, if I have to take public transport, I go well-armed with a Swiss army knife, safety pins and a can of pepper spray...too many pervs out there these days."

When even smart, educated and financially independent young women have no qualms whatsoever about marrying the man their parents choose for them (many even go on to have successful marriages, thank god- but that is a topic for another day...); when they decide to ditch promising careers because their husbands prefer for them to stay at home; when they are not allowed to choose for themselves how or where they want to have their babies, or how their children should be raised for fear of offending their parents or in-laws; when they do the same work as men (maybe more), but get paid way less….it makes you look at the words Freedom and Equality in a very different light....and with great wariness. Perhaps it is this wariness that manifests itself as over-protectiveness in parents of girl children, even in seemingly liberal families.

Practically every woman will agree that at some point in her life, likely in her teens or early twenties, when it seemed like she had sole control of her bright and shiny future, she had solemnly sworn that if ever she went on to have girl children, she would raise them to live life on their own terms and make their own decisions; that her girls wouldn't have to endure the narrow-mindedness, unjust restrictions and judgmentalism that she herself had been subjected to; that they would be no different  from their male counterparts. I am one of those women. While to a great extent, I have stayed true to that promise, I hate to admit that I do worry for their safety when they're late, or have to walk back home alone; my eyes are forever scouring the crowds in public places and a part of my mind is always alert for straying/prying hands on my children. Although I think my girls look cute in shorts and little dresses, a part of me is also anxious when they wear them; when they're out with their friends at the mall, I have to tell myself to not keep checking on them every thirty minutes. It was hard for me to tell my nine-year-old that she couldn't wear shorts in India; it was harder still to listen to her say "I know, I don't think I want to either, after all the stares I got on the street and in the mall the last time". And yes, I have, somehow, turned into *that* mom who is constantly telling her growing girls to be mindful of how they sit, stand, walk and talk. But then, I am also the mom who tells her girls to stand up for what they believe in, even if they have to stand alone; but little do they know that I worry privately about the consequences of their doing just that, despite my outer bravado.

It is a contrary world that we live in, where expectation and reality are often far removed from each other. I have come to realize, with time, that there is no point in putting up pretenses. I would much rather have my girls walk into their future as strong, street-smart yet compassionate women with realistic perceptions of the world, than have their heads in some utopian cloud with unreal notions of fairness and equality. That said, fairness and equality most definitely are goals to aspire to and strive for, and I hope that in their lifetime, they get to truly experience them.

The word Freedom has evolved to take on a whole new meaning for me. It is no longer the right to think, act and live as I please, as I had naively assumed when I was younger. Freedom, I know now, is about feeling safe. It is the right to live a life free of fear; to be able to pursue one's dreams and rise to one's fullest potential without feeling threatened, objectified, guilty or apologetic.

To (mis)quote the great Bard of Bengal, Tagore, "Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let our daughters awake...."