अनकही #03

Ankita-Devi spends her days with the tag of ‘the inferior gender’ forever following her around. It is with her when she wakes and is inevitably restricted to the duties of kitchen and cleaning, it is with her when she steps outside the house for groceries, and it is with her when her husband comes home and reminds her of it. She has never known life without it, and it is her biggest fear that her own children will never either. 

She sat in front of me with a newborn in her lap, a girl she told me, that was born just two months ago. She was the fifth child Ankita-Devi had given birth to, in the 30 years she had spent on this planet. Back home when I had done the calculations, I realised that she had spent almost two years pregnant, and had raised over three kids while being noticeably with-child, all on her own. Ankita-Devi also did not know how much her monthly household income was, innocently shaking her head as she continued to tell me that it was not her place to know all of that. When asked if she was educated, she scoffed, shrugging her shoulders, “Obviously not.”

As I slowly turned the conversation towards what we both knew we had to eventually speak about, Ankita-Devi’s posture suddenly changed. She gripped the girl in her lap tighter and looked around the room before she shared her concerns with me. “Will he hear this? Will you tell him about this?” she fired away at me, worried that the details of her conversation with me will be leaked to her husband, and she did not want to make him angry. Because his anger is not his, it is her body’s.  

Ankita-Devi is a mother to four girls, and in the backwaters of the village she spends her time in, nothing can be more shameful. For the entirety of her life as a mother, she has had to hear nasty, disgusting things about her ability to give birth to a child, how she is cursed only to bring girls into this world. Her incompetency in birthing a boy is the most unlikeable, unloveable, significant detail of her life, she told me then. And it was this anger of not fathering boys that drives Ankita-Devi’s husband to hit her, abuse her and violate her. Despite repeated denials from her side, her husband forces himself upon her, all in the insatiable hunger of being a father to four boys, not four girls. 

It is, like an age-old tale, also about money. Four girls in a house bring with them the responsibility of four marriages, four families to appease, and four dowries to fulfil. And, with Ankita-Devi’s husband deep into alcohol because of his piling stress, funds for the girls’ marriages are limited if any. She told me, staring into the amber eyes of the girl in her lap, that she did not understand how to help him, and deep down feels immense pity for his state. She cannot find a well-paying job, not with the duty of raising five children and running a house. He cannot seem to let go of his addiction, spending their very last pennies for himself. In between live their five children, hopelessly relying on these two people for everything they will ever need in life. 

Ankita-Devi’s eyes swelled with tears when she recounted her own childhood for me. Her parents were the poorest of the entire community—unable to afford food, water and shelter, let alone education—that surrounded them but were fortunate enough to be blessed with two boys who would come to take care of them, years later. From the very beginning, Ankita-Devi had understood that she was the burden in the house, the visitor, the temporary stranger. In one way or another, her parents managed to pay off her dowry when she was 16 and sent her away to a man she had never seen before in her life. “Now my brothers work and earn and support my parents,” she told, regaining her posture and her stoic expression. 

And for Ankita-Devi, such casual violence was never the norm. She had never before seen a man laying a hand on a woman, her own parents never touching each other no matter how angry. Nor had she seen it in the neighbourhoods around her, or in her friends’ houses. From where she came, the boundaries of anger were restricted to verbal spats or silent treatments. For her, never had anger ever meant the right to hit someone or touch someone without their permission, without their absolute agreement. 

At the end of our conversation, her daughter had also awoken and was begging for some attention from her mother. “I want to study. I want to work. I don’t want to be married and for the love of god, I want alcohol to disappear,” were her last confessions to me, spoken in such a hushed voice that I had to replay my audio recordings to identify her words. Her defeated sigh when I told her she could go now echoed the fatigue and injustice of millions of women that inhabit this country. Ankita-Devi is not a hero, neither has she found herself yet. Ankita-Devi’s story is not one of inspiration, change or determination, rather it’s a clear reflection of the lives of the women who are living in places too remote for the privilege of awareness, or ‘wokeness’. Women, who spend their whole lives carrying around the tag of ‘the inferior gender’.