Double Day? More like a Quadruple Day

I spent the past week out with three of our students in one of the most picturesque villages I have ever seen. I was facilitating and interpreting interviews for these students on topics related to women (pregnancy/childbirth/gendered differences/sex rations/training programs), and thus got to hear stories and interact with many incredible women from roughly 18 to 80+ years of age (though we spent time with lots of small children as well).

We met a young woman who is an orphan and a scholarship recipient who sang us a stunning rendition of the title song of a Bollywood film (Kal ho naa ho). We met an older unmarried preschool teacher with a physical handicap, who told us that she became a teacher because she had always loved children and had none of her own. We met women who proudly told us they had had ‘love marriages’. We met a woman who had an arranged marriage and lamented her terrible luck with a bad husband as well as a very bad-natured mother in-law.

One woman told of how she wakes up at 4am to cook food for everyone in her home, to wash clothes, and to collect fodder from the forest for the fire and for the animals before heading off for a full day’s work at a local NGO. When she returns home, hopefully before dark, she once again goes out into the forest to collect fodder, she cooks and cleans and spends a moment with her young daughter.

We met women who told of the pressures they face to have boys, and the disappointment and grief they experience if they give birth to a second girl. “Having a minimum of one boy is required”, several young women told us. They told of the secrecy around the illegal use of ultrasounds to determine sex and around the practice of sex-selective abortions.

A few women told of how, despite not having had a boy, they would not have more children. They told of how they intend to resist societal pressures to have boys, "come what may".

I found myself thinking about the idea of the ‘double day’ – an explanation for what happens when women are expected to do all of the work within the home, in addition to waged work outside the home (productive and reproductive labor). This idea shows how women’s labor comes to be seen as elastic. This idea is taken to another level in an area where there are increasing opportunities for women to work outside of the home, without change to household dynamics and, in particular, the expectations upon women as wives and daughter’s in law. Forget the double day, here we are talking about something like a quadruple day.

Needlesstosay this has been a powerful week. The three young women (perhaps 21, 24 and 28) from Chirag that worked with us (made the work possible, really) are incredibly strong, affectionate, intelligent and dynamic women. On the last day, I found myself on a rooftop overlooking this village, with hay stacks behind me, and the Himalayas ahead of me, dancing to Bollywood songs on someone’s cellphone with lovely young Indian women and my wonderful students – it just felt right.

I don’t want to leave, I am fascinated and delighted by this place. I have so much to learn and there is so much that I would like to do, but since Sage has agreed that we will come back, whether next summer or further down the road, I am saying only "phir milenge" (see you soon).