An Indian girl spends her life dreaming about everything she will do when she grows up, only to have her dreams shattered by the reality of marriage. But she holds onto hope. Read to see if she can still manage to make something out of her aspiratio...
My childhood summer vacations were spent in the village of Roorka Kalan in Punjab, running out in maize fields, chasing tractors along dirt roads, playing games that the boys played. The heat here was different from that which we felt upon our faces throughout the year in the southern parts of Rajasthan and we never had a thing to complain about. Amidst the nights spent sleeping on the terrace with the entire family, and the daytime activities that kept us to our feet, we never missed home.
But there were other reasons besides the cool evening breeze and glasses of Sugarcane juice that we gulped down our throats like it was water, that made us love Punjab. Me and my three sisters were treated special here. This could be seen in small things, like the freshly prepared mango pickle that we were served while my cousins were told to finish the one from last year first.
Our special treatment was owed to my grandfather whom I never met and who everyone says was a brilliant man. In Lahore, when it was a part of India under the British rule, he had landed the job of a Subedar and was the most eligible Punjabi bachelor in the community. Following the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919, and taking on Gandhi's advice about discarding British institutions under the Swaraj movement, he left his job.
With nothing to do and another set of mouth to feed, he soon learnt the art of melting waste iron pieces into useful parts. This is how we came to be known as a part of the Ramgarhia or Lohar community. Mother told me that it was easier to get accepted in the new India if you belonged to a known caste. For many years I had believed that castes only belonged in history textbooks.
When they came over to India, he set up a factory of assembling sewing machines. Schools were accessible now and he ensured that all his younger siblings attended. For three years he worked, ate and slept at the factory, until our family name was established in the modern market. After his early demise, when my mother was only 13, Chote Nanu, whom mother addressed as Mohan Chachu, took over the factory and with it the responsibility of the entire household. This meant marrying their youngest sister, who was now 23 and getting much older with each passing day.
All women who had ever lived in the old haweli visited with their children during the summers, sans their husbands. Only my father came to drop us here at the beginning of the month of May, since we were the only ones coming over from Rajasthan. My cousins, more children who took school textbooks a bit too seriously, often enquired about the availability of water in the state and if there really were tigers where we lived. I always told them the one story of our encounter with a lion on the roads of Sariska and they knew not to trouble me and my sisters the entire summers.
Mother told me that when Chote Nanu had decided to marry her to father, who always talked about doing something different then all his brothers and had taken a job in the Copper Mines of Khetri so far away from home, it reminded him of his elder brother. Everyone was reluctant to send mother away at the young age of 18, but he believed that it would be the right time for her to get accustomed to the environment there. It was customary to send the bride away with a trunk full of cloth and jewelry that could be measured equivalent to her body weight. Thus the men were told to arrange things.
But Father was a modern thinker, the first one in the entire village to turn down dowry. When they went away, grandmother requested him to let her take a sewing machine with her. It was one of the last pieces that grandfather had assembled before the incident.
Mother would buy raw saree cloth back at home and spend hours sewing golden laces on them and making patterns. I always asked her if she was going to wear them at Nani's house. But the bags we packed for our summer vacations to Punjab only contained Salwar Suits, which strangely she never wore at home.
When the holidays were about to get over, father would come back to get us, and they would take them both shopping in the markets in Jalandhar. They returned with several pieces of dress materials and just one Safari suit for father. Son-in-laws couldn't be sent away empty handed, and father never found the time to go cloth shopping by himself, so he accepted them.
On top of the pile was always an elaborately designed, intricately embroidered, traditional Phulkari Chunni. My eyes would light up at the sight of those. But Mother, reluctant to take them, ended up removing them, saying that she has too many already. They made their way back into the suitcase only after Grandmother reminded her they'll come in handy when we grow up. The four girls who were receiver of the world's pity because of the liability they pose to their father.
Back at home, we helped mother select one or two of these dress pieces and she sent them over to Masterji, her entrusted ladies tailor. Rest of the material magically appeared to transform themselves into little frocks for our birthdays and we were the four models in the mining town of Khetri.
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