Let me tell you about Mikan ki Ma. My mother often speaks of her, so these are her words rather than mine. The only exchange I had with Mikan ki Ma was limited to her greeting me. A salaam from her side and mine was all that stood between us. I only knew that she was one of the few women working at our farmhouse.

Though she was poor, it doesn’t mean she had nothing. It might not have been material wealth but she had her laughter, her gossip, her honour, all of them determined by her social standing. This standing was jealously guarded because it was so important, and as a woman she had no escape, unlike the men. The men could leave the village to work in the city or even go to a faraway State to do seasonal work. There they were out of range of prying eyes and wagging tongues. What they did far from the fields remained largely unknown back at the farm.

For the women there was no such escape, no matter how temporary. The city was sinful, as everyone knows. What kind of work would a woman do that would not expose her to the licentiousness of the city folk? No amount of tainted money could buy back a clean name.

The men went to stand in the market square in the big city where they were examined and their labour bought for a day, a week or longer. Their sweat was auctioned off to the builders. It was not just with their crops that the farmers fed the maw of cities, but also with their bitter sweat, their strained muscles and their aching bones with which they built the houses of the rich.

Women were useless at such work. Who would pay for them as much as they would pay for men to carry the cement, lug the equipment and lay the bricks? Who would listen to the caterwauling of hungry children? No, the women were tied to their homes as effectively as if they were chained to them by links of steel. They earned the little income they could as field hands and the bitter wages they received as mothers, daughters and wives.

Mikan ki Ma should have been considered fortunate. Her husband, Paras, owned five acres of land, a considerable amount. There is a Persian saying that a man usually commits a crime for one of three reasons: zan, zar ya zameen (women, money or land), and zameen is the greatest of these. It gives you somewhere to build your home, somewhere for your children to play, somewhere to graze your cattle and to plant your crop. It is your mother, your provider, and your place of rest. It is the wealth that cannot be calculated, but it is one that can be lost.

Paras was comparatively well off. He could afford a proper house, so he built one beyond his needs. He could afford to drink and gamble, so he did. He could afford to be lazy, so he was. He could afford to beat his wife, so he did. Prosperity can break a man as easily as poverty if he does not have the character to handle it. Paras lost his wealth swiftly because he mistreated it. He lost his land not much later because he was too shiftless to care for it properly. His wife he beat and stole from, abused and threw out of his house, but it took a long time to lose her because she had nowhere to go.

Mikan ki Ma sought refuge at our farmhouse. My mother employed her and fed her, listened to her story and paid her. Maybe you believe that more could have been done, that the authorities should have been brought in and Paras arrested and fined? Not in India, and not among the poor in India.

What money, what compensation, would Mikan ki Ma have received even if the police would have registered her complaint, even if a lawyer had fought her case, even if a judge would have passed a ruling? Paras was too poor to be fined anything more than a pittance. He had already sold all the land that his sons had not otherwise snatched away from him. What little money he got was what he stole from Mikan ki Ma after she earned it at our farmhouse.

Even if Mikan ki Ma had received something from Paras, where would she have gone for refuge? To her sons, maybe; to Mikan after whose proud birth she was given her public name? But Mikan and his brother were as shiftless and violent as their father, as apt to beat and steal from her as Paras was.

Justice is for those that can afford it and demand it, for Mikan ki Ma it was not even a dream. We talk these days so easily about equal rights for women, about misogyny and similar social constructs, but we rarely talk of the human beings, of the people that they were. I learned Mikan ki Ma’s story from my mother, but in reality, I only knew her as one of a flock of women who were found happily gossiping at the farm. These days when I hear of exploitation and other horrors, I think of people like her, and wonder how much we leave out of the stories we tell about the women we speak about so confidently.

(Omair Ahmad is an author. His last book was on Bhutan.)

Follow Omair Ahmad on Twitter @OmairTAhmad

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