Chapter 7- The Child Brides
In India, what's known as a tuk-tuk everywhere else in Asia is referred to as an auto rickshaw. One particular winter, when I was 34 years old, four of us had crowded into one, in order to visit the village my father had been born in. My father had died a few years before, and this was my family's first trip to India without him. My sibling and I had asked to see his birthplace. We did not fit comfortably, and as the smallest individual, I was assigned to sitting on a cousin's lap. Next to me were my mother and sibling.
The heat and dust permeated through the open vehicle as we clung to whatever we could grab on to, determined not to go flying out of the open sides with every rock on the bumpy road we hit along the way. "How much longer?" I asked my cousin, trying to keep the frustration out of my voice. After all, I was the one who had asked for this trip. The journey was about a half an hour from the more populated village we were staying in.
After weaving in and out of lanes of chaotic traffic, competing for road space with cow-carts and motorcycles, we had started to approach the more rural parts of South India. Most of the time, we traveled through vibrant green rice fields, manned by mammoth water buffaloes with intimidating horns and their sturdy herders, seemingly unbothered by standing out in the blazing sun all day. Occasionally, the rice fields were interrupted by small villages, crowded and ripe with poverty.
Each village looked identical. Small mud huts the size of camping tents lined portions of the road, each likely housing families of 4 to 6. Most of the women and men busily hustled around, draped in traditional clothing. Some worked at concession food stalls, while others balanced something or another on their heads-sugar cane, fire wood, or large silver vessels of water. Others simply loitered around, chewing betel nuts as their teeth turned red. Little children, scantily clad, shrieked happily as they chased old bike tires down the road with sticks for amusement.
I pondered grabbing my phone so that I could snap photos of the scenes along the way, aware that many of the shots were National Geographic worthy. But the chance that either my phone or I would be tossed out of the scrappy vehicle was high, and I continued to cling to whatever I could to steady myself. I looked at the layers of clothing on the villagers and found myself wishing I were wearing a bikini. The heat and dirt were stifling. I didn't have on as many layers of clothing as they did, but what I had on was sticking to my skin, glued on by sweat. But more skin exposure also meant more insect bites, more sunburn and more dirt to wash off my skin later.
This was my 9th trip to India and none of what I saw or experienced was new to me. But I had become adept at forgetting the difficult realities of traveling through rural India once I left it. While rural India formed the roots of existence, the reality of my life in NYC was a world away, both literally and philosophically. When I was a child, my parents tried to keep ties to their world in India, bringing us to spend summers in their humble childhood homes. As time went on, the trips became less and less frequent, until my sibling and I went to college, essentially granting us a permanent reprieve from the visits.
By the time I moved to Manhattan in my 30s, I had cultivated a new persona with no hint of the poverty or horrendous mental health issues that plagued my family in India. I had a good job, lived in a nice place on the Upper East Side, and my superficial instagram posts were the source of envy for many, filled with family, friends, and world travel. I made certain the instagram posts never documented my heavy past, and certainly not my depression - only the glamor, independence and fun.
The memories I collected from visiting India had been embarrassing to me as as child- stories of poverty, starvation, disease and abuse in the backdrop of small, poor villages. And as a child at a prestigious private school in Chicago, I wanted nothing more than to have blonde hair and be named Jenny. I wanted parents who made pork chops steeped in canned Campbell's soup for dinner, just like my my classmates had.
Eventually, through time, America managed to move a step forward (though sometimes it then took a few steps backwards). As a whole, the country consistently changed its appearance and composition, now sporting more and more people from different cultures, races and religions. This new diverse crop of individuals - the families of immigrants- came with stories very different than the ones told by people whose families came to this country on the Mayflower. And with so many families of immigrants telling their unique stories of origin, I began to accept my own. I also became extremely grateful that my parents did not serve me meat and potatoes drenched in canned soup every night.
We finally arrived at the village that was my dad's birthplace, a village so small that google maps did not find it necessary to include it. In the many decades that passed since my father was born, nothing changed in that village. The streets were simple paths cleared through red dirt. Remnants of tropical forests that had once existed popped up here and there, with unruly trees and vines housing exotic birds and monkeys. In the midst of the foliage were clearings that had been made to build thatched roof huts made of mud and brick for housing the villagers.
There were no more that 30 huts in the village, all lining one main road. There were no stores or businesses to speak of- just a small dilapidated Hindu temple at the end of the street, where I was told one of our relatives worked once upon a time as a priest. The village had no electricity and all of the cooking was done on top of a fire pit in a small section of the hut, with the eldest women assigned to stand over the heat and smoke while cooking for the family, wrapped in several yards of silk. For women, the more important you were, the more fabric you got draped around your body. My mother wore a 6 yard sari but her mother, once she became a grandmother, had worn 9 yards.
As our vehicle came to a stop, my mother and cousin prepared to enter the temple. I was not excited with the prospect. As hot as it was outdoors, I knew it would be even more stifling inside the prayer areas of the temple, with incense and fire added to the already murky air. With no ventilation and large cockroaches visibly parading around the large statues of Hindu Gods, the insides of those small temples were my personal hell.
Suddenly a question popped into my head. "Where did people get their groceries and supplies in this village?" I asked. "Your father's oldest brother used to walk 10 miles to the first town that carried supplies," my mom responded.
As we started walking, I peeked curiously inside each small house, trying to envision how it may have been to be my father, living there as a child. Curious eyes stared back out at me from each house. It was clear we were not locals. "Do you want to see your father's house?" asked my cousin. Excitedly, I nodded. I had not known this was a possibility. I had assumed the house no longer existed. Wanting to see his past and wanting to put off going into the roach infested temple as long as possible, I followed my cousin as he started walking away from the temple towards the end of the road.
A few minutes later, we came to what looked like an architectural relic-some dilapidated bricks and mud being overtaken by a small miniature forest. A symphony of cacophonous insects set the mood for the conversation we would soon have So this had been the place my father's story had started. Even after he died, I struggled to understand his perspective. To make some sense of why he had tortured our family with his archaic rules and outbursts of anger. I wondered if this village would hold some answers for me. I started to grill my mother and cousin about my father's childhood.
I learned my father's family lived a meager life in this rural village, struggling to get as many necessities met as they could. They were considered incredibly fortunate to live in that meager hut. It was a home with a roof over their heads and many in India didn’t have even that. My father was the last of eight children, four of whom died in infancy. His birth was considered a nuisance as opposed to being a source of joy, because there simply weren’t enough resources to support another child. Burdened with an additional child to care for, my father’s parents didn’t give him a name, and the family rumor was that the local milk lady had named him.
My father was named after the Hindu God Krishna, who was the eight child, according to Hindu mythology, like himself. Since my father’s birth was considered a burdensome annoyance, rather than a celebrated moment, he hated his birthday. He would continue to hate his birthday for the rest of his life, even as his American born children would try to bring excitement and joy to the day. He would attempt to act pleased, as his children ran around with balloons and cake, urging him to be happy, but his facial expression stayed etched in bitter pain. It was a reminder that he was not celebrated as a child. That he wished he had never been born.
Then, when my father was four, his father died. It wasn’t clear what he died from- the causes of death in rural India in those days were never clear, since there was no quality medical care available, to speak of. The only thing that was clear is that the one person in the family who earned an income was gone, as my grandmother had no skills that could bring in money. My grandmother, like all females in that era in India, had been a child bride, married off at the age of 7 or 8 and not permitted to attend school afterwards. My maternal grandmother and even my mother's two sisters had similar stories of their marriages, though they waited until my mother's sisters were teenagers, which was considered progressive at the time.
"It was just how things were done," my mother defensively explained, sensing my judgement. "The newly married girl continues to live with their own parents until puberty, at which point she gets released to live a proper married life with their husband," she declared, as though this made everything better. The conversation came to a pause. Talking about little girls getting married had taxed all of us. We all knew we were in a country where these stories were pervasive.
I looked at my mother, whose patience with telling this story had started to wane. I started to feel lightheaded from the heat and dehydration. The only water we had on hand were some stainless steel thermoses filled with boiled water. There was no refrigerator at the house we were staying in and even if there had been, the electricity only sporadically worked. I took some small sips of the lukewarm water, which made very little difference in my exhaustion. The fatigue of jetlag was also hitting me.
I stopped asking questions and became quiet, pondering child marriage. I couldn't even fathom a regular adult arranged marriage. But to have the choice taken away as a small child? Something was hurting within my soul for all the children born in India in the past. I felt a small grip of pain near my heart as I struggled not to cry. I never cried in front of people and I would not start then. Plus, tears contained valuable water. I could not afford the dehydration.
Many years later, in NYC in the 2020’s, as I flitted about at a social gathering in a friend's upper west side apartment in Manhattan, stories of our grandmothers made their way into conversation. Many spoke of having hardworking grandmothers with simple pasts. My Jewish friends had sickening stories of their grandparents in concentration camps. "My grandmothers were both child brides," I announced.
Silence. A very uncomfortable silence.
The women in the room were not sure whether I was making a sick joke, or whether this was truly the fate my grandmothers had faced. As they realized it wasn't a joke, I saw some of the faces soften with compassion. "Yeah, it's true," I affirmed, adamantly content that I had abandoned my shame with my this sordid family detail and secretly enjoying the discomfort of some of the snobbier members of the group, who were clearly wishing I had never said a word.