A Woman’s Heart- Searches for some answers:

Family how rooted it is especially in the Indian context and yet there are so many wheels within wheels. The coiled umbilical cord never really begins or ends. With one sharp cut it is separated from the mother. This is how a life is nurtured, brought onto earth and then given an identity as per its sex, religion and caste.

If the child happens to be a She, she is brought up under strict supervision, guidance and restriction; she becomes acquainted with the real duties of the girl at an early age. A woman’s life, they had told me, contained no choices. And so far in life, I had seen the truth of this. The women had no choices but to submit, to accept. And I had often wondered... have they been born without wills, or have their will atrophied through a lifetime of disuse?

The mode and style of their development inculcates in them submissiveness, silence and passiveness which hold a strong hold on their psyche. Even modern educated women consciously drape themselves with this trait and find themselves in a fix. The big fix that a woman faced in a modern civilised society, was when her husband passed away. The good man was a Malaysian citizen and he gave his heart to an Indian Bengali damsel.

The girl found the match incongruous. But in order to save her father from further complexities of her marriage, she poses a semblance of agreement and decides not to show her disagreement.

Her initial thoughts were somewhat like this- “May be the boy is little fudgy, may be a little non-vocal... but everything else is fine. The family is good, they seem good, and they have money.  What else could I ask for?

The thoughts truly reflect a stereo typed mind setting in selecting a groom the traditional way. As a matter of fact, the girl may not have welcomed the proposal of marriage so far away from Kolkata in the first place, living in the confines of a small family life. But gave her mute consent.

She also feels humiliated when people rejected her on the ground of her physical appearance or the matter of her dressing. After being interviewed and rejected several times, she loses all her buoyancy and enthusiasm, and her only wish is to get married in order to save her parents from the imbroglio of groom search.

Women’s experience is primarily defined through interpersonal, usually domestic and familial relationships— serving the needs of others. Her identity exists largely on being for others. A woman responding to other’s needs may detract her from her own sense of identity, of her becoming fluid as to assume any shape. At times a woman may feel as if she had become so fluid that she has no tangible shape, no form of her own. Without wants of her own, what is her identity in the family? A woman who sheds her ‘I’ who loses her identity in her husband, a woman who bears everything without a drop of tear. Is she still the ideal Women?

And then what happens to this ideal woman, when suddenly at a relatively tender age of mid thirties the husband passes away. In this case, what social forms would she aspire? What is her true identity now? is she an Indian citizen or a Malaysian by marriage? What is she?

Now after 10 12 years of marriage shedding all bonds of her native land when she has adopted the foreign culture, manner and family, just because of marriage, when the mate is no longer there what is her position in this land-Malaysia?