With each passing day I spend in India, I begin to feel more and more what it is like to be a woman in this country. Most of this understanding comes from my friendship with our housekeeper, Gouri. She has been teaching me to cook wonderful south Indian foods, and during this time we spend together, which is often hours each day, a friendship unlike any I have ever had continues to develop. With her limited use of English the language barrier between us requires creative use of body language and gestures, yet somehow we are able to understand each other, perhaps on a different level all together. There is a sameness we share through the commonality of being women that allows us a distinctive understanding of the other, even though our lives truly seem worlds apart.
When Gouri reveals things about her personal life to me, it usually takes me one full day to process what she has told me. Even then I can never truly understand the world she lives in, her existence as a lower caste woman in a society that values maleness and the higher castes. As she shows me how to pop mustard seeds in oil to release the flavor, she tells me stories about her life that seem no less foreign to me than I would think a story of a woman’s life on Mars would seem. I wondered if I could ever possibly relate to someone who was forced to quit school and begin full-time work when she was 10 years-old, who now at 28 years-old works 12 hour days, non-stop, constantly on her feet and moving around, manual labor which I can not comprehend. Would our lives have common intersections that would allow us to learn from each other and gain through our understanding of each other’s experiences? Surprisingly, over chopping okra and shelling peas, these common understandings begin to emerge, and we begin to grow in our experiences of knowing the other.
As we sit at the table snapping the ends off of green beans, Gouri begins to tell me of her life growing up. How her mother married her off, at age 13. Gouri has been the sole earner in her household since she has been married. Her husband stays at home while she is out earning a living to support him and their two children. I can tell she worries about her children and their future. My look of concern and pure astonishment at what she tells me causes Gouri to reassure me that things are a lot better for her now then they used to be. That she feels happy and blessed by God for the fact that she has enough work to feed her children and allow them to continue their education. She stresses her desire to see them get all the way through school, since she was not allowed this luxury. It was not until this moment in time that I viewed education as nothing less than a luxury one is afforded in life.
As Gouri watches me chop the tomato for the sambhar we are preparing, she takes the knife from me after I chop off the end of the tomato and shows me how much good tomato I was wasting by cutting it the way I did. When before this moment did I ever worry about wasting some of the end of a tomato? Yet, her whole life, Gouri has been worried about conserving every resource she has available to her. She knows the pain of hunger firsthand, and she would never think of wasting any types of valuable resources. From plastic bags to cardboard boxes to the ends of tomatoes, I am learning to use all the resources I have around me and to waste as little as possible. How could I possibly allow myself to waste in a place where so many people go without? These lessons in life that Gouri teaches me are invaluable and will follow me throughout time.
The question that continues to plague my mind: How did we come to be here, her and I, as who we are? Each of us has had unique and distinctive experiences of the world, and each of us has faced different struggles and challenges in life. Sometimes I feel so far from understanding Gouri’s life experiences, and sometimes I feel like they are all things that I comprehend on some level. Women all over the world have been subjugated for as far back as time spans. There are many different ways in which sexism enters women’s lives and reflects on their experiences. In India, it shows itself to be more apparent and more widespread then I am used to in the U.S. Wives do serve their husbands, women eat last at meals, women are often times not directly spoken to, the gender divisions are painstakingly clear. Yet, the movement for women in India gains more and more momentum as time passes. As more and more women become fed up with this archaic manner of relating, they fight for their rights as women and the way of their lives in India slowly begins to change. Gouri alone, opening up to me and sharing the circumstances of her life, spreads awareness and understanding of life for women in India. And believe me, Gouri does do her part to help India. Even though she has so little, she is still willing to help people who are less fortunate than her by giving what she can whenever she can. She once told me, anything, no matter how small, can help.
When we first arrived in India, Jon and I were quite uncomfortable with the idea of having a maid in our own apartment. We weren’t used to having someone else cleaning up after us, doing our laundry, scrubbing our dishes; just the idea of this made us feel snobby and over-privileged. But when the time came to leave the corporate apartment for our own place, my friendship with Gouri had become such that I was not willing to lose it. So we asked her to come and work at our new apartment, and thankfully she agreed. The amount of knowledge and understanding I gain from her about what it means to be a woman in India is invaluable beyond compare. Her openness and willingness to teach me new things and to share parts of her life with me has been integral to my understanding of the culture that I am living in for a year. I am grateful for Gouri and all that she has to offer me, and I hope that in our friendship, she is gaining just as much as I am.
