May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (50 page)

But the influences of the old matrilineal system and more recently of education had given Kerala’s women something that many other women across India could not imagine: a voice within the family. As population-control officials had learned, that voice was loud enough for women to make family-planning decisions on their own. In the village of Peyard on the outskirts of Kerala’s capital city of Trivandrum, for instance, a health worker named Gouri Indira had records which showed that 584 of the village’s 791 families had undergone sterilization operations. Most of those operations had been performed on women, as was the case in India in general, but the fact that the overall rate of sterilization was several times the national average was significant. Gouri Indira said it was the women in the village who did the harder labor—carrying bricks to a construction site, for example, while the men merely mixed the mortar and baked the bricks in a kiln—and it was the women who were not afraid, as were the men, that the operation would leave them too weak to work. At the very least, the brick carriers had earned themselves the right to choose to limit the size of their families. In a much larger sense, Kerala had proved that educating and employing women was the most effective and far-reaching way to lower the birth rate.

No one in India disputed the notion that the status of women had to improve, and doing so was actually an official part of the government’s population-control program. As the revised family-planning strategy stated: “Significant impact on fertility can be brought about when the status of women is raised and they become equal partners in decision making.” The problem, of course, was that educating enough women to make a difference in the birth rate would take several generations, and India did not have that kind of time. “If we rely on standards of living improving, then it will be too late,” one of India’s leading family welfare officials explained. “We don’t have one hundred years to experiment with.”

Until then, the family-planning targets were seen, correctly I think, as a necessary evil. Population-control officials were well aware of “target fever” and its abuses and often said they would have preferred
to drop the targets entirely if the family-planning program could have made progress without them. But that did not appear to be the case. The government had eliminated targets in the three years after the excesses of Sanjay Gandhi, and at the same time had increased the budget for family planning. But in the absence of a standard by which to judge their work, the performance of health workers was so poor that the “couple protection ratio” actually took a step backward. More important, the statistics showed that during that period the population growth rate increased.

India’s goal is to arrive at zero population growth by the year 2050, when the population is expected to be an incredible 1.3 billion. To accomplish this goal, the family-planning program desperately needs to reach not the older mother, as it has in the past, but the women fifteen to thirty years of age, the ones causing most of the population problem. What is worse, this age group is increasing in size, so that even if these women have fewer offspring, the number of children will still be growing exponentially for years to come.

The problems and the work ahead remain overwhelming. Bilquish Jahan, for example, the government health worker for the village of Khajuron, was supposed to be responsible for five thousand people, but in reality she had to handle a population of twelve thousand spread out over three villages and dozens of hamlets. Worse, her medicines ran out four or five months before the end of the year—which wasn’t surprising, since a family-planning official once calculated that the government was spending only $20 million a year on medicines for basic health care, or about twelve cents a person. The cost of an effective program, he said, would be fifteen times that. Where was the money going to come from? Certainly not from the international agencies, whose contributions to the family-planning program amounted to millions of dollars but covered only 10 percent of the program’s budget. And even if the United Nations, U.S. A.I.D. and European foreign-aid agencies offered India great sums of money, a country historically wary of compromising its independence would likely reject the funding, seeing it as too much of an interference from outsiders.

“Our population problems are frightening,” one of India’s top population-control officials concluded. Although the $3 billion that India had allocated to family planning over a five-year period seemed an enormous sum, in reality it was only 1.5 percent of the government’s annual budget. “You often hear people wonder why we are wasting
so much money on population control,” the official continued. “My own feeling is that we are wasting the money unless we spend a lot more. Only a massive effort will solve the problem.”

By the time I returned from Kerala and Gujarat, I had learned that, at its heart, the country’s population problem was the most profound symbol there was of the powerlessness of India’s women. And yet it was these women who held the power to help India solve its greatest crisis. In the end, Indian women had to do more than just save themselves; in essence, they had to save India. To realize this was to discover a different dimension altogether to the problems and potentials of women in India, and also to my journey itself. I was depressed about the obstacles, guardedly hopeful about the possibilities, and ultimately moved that there was suddenly a reason, an incentive, for the ruling forces in the country to agree that India could not continue oppressing its women. The women of India had to be lifted out of their bondage, not only to reduce the shocking rate of maternal and infant deaths, or even to establish equality and justice. Women had to be recognized because no less than the future of India depended on it.

STEVE AND I LEFT INDIA AT THE END OF THE MONSOON IN AUGUST$$
on a drizzly, sweltering evening that promised three more months of heat. We were headed for California, where Steve would study Japanese for six months at an institute in Monterey before becoming the
Times
bureau chief in Tokyo, and where I would work on this book in a small house we had rented in nearby Carmel. California should have stretched before us like a promised land, but leaving India turned out to be more wrenching than I had ever imagined. During three and a half of the most exhilarating and difficult years of our lives, Steve and I felt we had made lifelong friends. A month before, we had left Sheo Singh and Bhabhiji for the last time in the village, promising to write and one day return. A few weeks later, a group of friends organized a good-bye train trip with us across the Rajasthan desert, made suddenly green by the monsoon rains. For three days we talked and laughed, stopping to wander through the deserted palaces and mighty fortresses of the maharajas who had once ruled India. Back in
Delhi, our final days deteriorated into a blur of good-bye parties and the exchanging of addresses as a team of movers packed up the house and dismantled our lives. By the time we arrived at the airport, I was in tears. Bim Bissell and Renuka Singh, the friend who three years earlier had helped me find the burned bride, came to see us off. As I said good-bye to them, I felt as if I were saying good-bye to a part of myself.

India, the country that once made me feel as if I were free-falling in space, was home. Delhi, once so foreign and overpowering, had evolved into a lovely, vaguely dull suburb to which I was always happy to return after my other adventures. The exotic had become the routine. Once, when an American friend asked what Steve and I planned to do for our vacation that summer, I had replied, offhandedly, “Oh, I guess we’ll just go to Kashmir again.” She pointed out that I had become alarmingly blasé about our annual trips to see dawn over the mirror of Dal Lake, or to ride horses through alpine meadows up to the snow line of the Himalayas.

I never have had patience with people who romanticized India, but as I write these last pages in Tokyo, in a modern, Westernized house, with all of the latest conveniences but none of the charm of our old place on Prithvi Raj Road, I am afraid I am perilously close to sinking into sentiment. When I look at our pictures of India now, of meals on the mud floor of Bhabhiji’s house, or of peacocks on the ramparts of Rajasthan, or of our garden of dahlias, it does not seem possible to me that I lived there. India seems part of another time, as if it were a dream I had before awaking one morning. And yet, this nostalgia has overcome me only since I left. While I was living in India, the day-to-day irritants—power outages, water shortages, erratic phones, heat, dust, months of stomach troubles—always balanced out the romance. But I do not think I ever found myself in that love-hate relationship with India that is peculiar to foreigners, and which Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, herself a foreigner, described in her essay “Myself in India.” As she wrote: “It goes like this: first stage, tremendous enthusiasm—everything Indian is marvelous; second stage, everything Indian not so marvelous; third stage, everything Indian abominable. For some people it ends there, for others the cycle renews itself and goes on. I have been through it so many times that now I think of myself as strapped to a wheel that goes round and round and sometimes I’m up and sometimes I’m down.”

India was an up-and-down experience for me, too, but I see it more
as a gradual journey in which I moved from utter confusion to a measure of understanding. I was too bewildered to love India in the beginning, although I felt that I somehow should. Nor did I love it at the end, when I realized that it is neither possible nor right to “love” a country where there still exists such widespread poverty and injustice. What I can say, selfishly, is that I loved my life in India. The country brought a depth and a richness to my experience that I had never known before and changed many of the assumptions that I had brought with me. I am a Christian but my husband is Jewish, and I occasionally used to worry about the difficulties of combining the two religions in our family. But in India, the all-absorbent nature of Hinduism helped to teach me that all religions are essentially one, separated only by cultural ritual, and that death is not necessarily an end to life. I found a richness, too, in my ordinary day-to-day existence, a joy that has always been difficult to articulate to puzzled friends. The chaos of India was in the beginning overpowering to me, but in the end I was amused by the anarchy it brought to my ordered life. The embattled Indian author Salman Rushdie, in
The Satanic Verses
, explains a little of what I mean when he imagines what a “tropicalized” London would look like: “Improved street life, outrageously colored flowers (magenta, vermilion, neon-green), spider-monkeys in the oaks … Religious fervor, political ferment, renewal of interest in the intelligentsia. No more British reserve; hot-water bottles to be banished forever, replaced in the fetid nights by the making of slow and odorous love. Emergence of new social values: friends to commence dropping in on one another without making appointments, closure of old folks’ homes, emphasis on the extended family. Spicier food; the use of water as well as paper in English toilets; the joy of running fully dressed through the first rains of the monsoon.”

I have been gone from India for nearly a year now, and the newspapers tell me that little has changed. It was 106 degrees yesterday in Delhi, as it often is in June. A few days ago a bomb went off in the city’s busiest train station. Police suspect, as usual, that it was planted by a Sikh terrorist. The Delhi intelligentsia are still complaining about Rajiv Gandhi, and buses are still plunging off cliffs. But the India that touched me more directly has changed, sometimes in shocking ways. Smita Patil, the thirty-year-old actress who was five months pregnant when I interviewed her on the set of
Dance Dance
, died tragically of complications a few days after giving birth to her son. This past November in Khajuron, after Sheo Singh fell ill, the family decided
to take him to a doctor outside the village. But he died of a heart attack on the way, somewhere along the road to Gurha. Dr. Singh will hold on to the family land, but I worry about what will happen to Bhabhiji. Dr. Singh sent us the news in California of his brother’s death, and a letter from Shardul Singh, Khajuron’s largest landowner, followed a few weeks later. Sheo Singh, he wrote, had been “complaining of pain in the chest for the last few days. But he, or anyone that he told, did not know that it was something serious. We could never imagine that he would leave us so soon.” It was incredible to me that a letter should find its way to us in America all the way from the dusty paths of Khajuron, and it seemed, like our photographs, a voice from another time. Earlier, Shardul Singh had sent us a letter with a passage that nearly made me cry. “The thought that you will no more visit our village gives us pain,” he wrote. “We feel that we are losing something which cannot be explained. My wife is remembering you both very much.”

I also continued to hear from R. L. Verma, the lawyer I had hired to follow the bride-burning trial. The trial was moving at its usual glacial rate, and Verma dutifully kept me informed of developments. One incident of note occurred in September 1988, a month after I left India, when Verma wrote me that there was a “heated argument” in the courtroom between the bride, Surinder, and the husband who was charged with burning her. According to Verma, the husband threatened Surinder, and she hit him back. “She caught him by his beard,” Verma wrote, “and his turban fell on the floor.” The trial, and the letters, continued into 1989. Only a few weeks ago I again heard from Verma, who is now sending the news of the trial to Japan.