Geetanjali Krishna: Fifty shades of a grey life

Women who stay home and look after their families often think their lives would have been much better if they too went out of the home to work. And the ones who are unfortunate enough to encounter marital conflict, often believe (and rightly so) that their lives are undervalued in comparison with their bread-winning spouses. But recently, I met Anita, and realised that life isn’t all black and white — it is made up of fifty shades of grey... and then some. Here’s her story.

The only sister of three reasonably well-to-do brothers, Anita was asked to drop out of school after she completed class eight. “My brothers always told me that they’d find me a husband who earned well and would look after me,” she said. And so they did. When she came of age, she was married to Ramesh, a handsome young fellow with a well-paid job as a driver in a private company. In the following three years, they had two children. “I thought my life was perfect,” she said.

 

Then, one evening, Anita got a call from a hospital. It turned out that her husband had had an accident on his motorcycle. At the hospital, she found that he was not critically injured, but had injuries to his back that had caused temporary paralysis in his right leg. The husband’s company refused to shell out money for his treatment, so Anita’s brothers pitched in. Ten days later, when he was discharged, he still needed at least a month of physiotherapy to regain even partial use of his leg. Quite expectedly, his company said they couldn’t wait for him to recover. They replaced him with someone else. “Out of the blue, from being comfortably well off, we had no monthly income,” narrated Anita. “Not being very educated, I was at my wits’ end as to how to pay my children’s school fees and run my kitchen!”

Given that her husband was months away from total recovery, Anita took on whatever odd jobs she could find to make ends meet. Her brothers pitched in again, letting her shift en famille to the rear portion of their family home. Slowly, their lives began to stabilise. Her family and neighbours were sympathetic towards her husband. “They all said life could be so uncertain for people like us who have no savings or insurance, but decent salaries,” she said. “When the going is good, everything is fine. But there’s no security, no fall back when bad things happen to us... neither private companies nor the government assumes any responsibility for people like us!”

How long back had her husband been injured, I asked. She suddenly reddened. “It’s been six years,” she replied. I asked if he has fully recovered. She fell silent. Then she said, “He’s still not all right. Every time he does any work, he says his back hurts. It almost seems to us that he has become averse to the very idea of working. He just lies in bed and watches television all day!” The outlook wasn’t all black, she said. “My brothers have told me we are welcome to stay as long as we want. As a shop assistant, I earn enough for all of us to eat and for the kids to go to school.” I asked if she had any regrets. Said she glumly, “Sometimes I feel so envious of women who live off their husbands’. I wish I could relax sometimes, oil my hair sitting in the sun...”

Before leaving, she said as a parting shot, “First I used to blame my husband’s company for not taking care of us — now all I can do is blame my own fate!”