Skip to main content

Bruised Sisters

 I saw Provoked only recently - by now almost 20 years after it was released. Aishwarya Rai carries the movie almost on her with Naveen Andrew doing his part (somewhat) as the menacing, abusive husband. Around the time that movie was made, I used to know a woman, V who I had met through a support group for single mothers from India trying to raise their kids alone in America. At first she did not want to share her real name or location with me and mostly talked about her struggles trying to get custody of her daughter while living in a women's shelter. At some point she trusted me enough to exchange phone numbers and sometimes she would call. 

The conversations were long and rambled through past and present in ways that it often left me confused. There were days when she recounted particularly traumatic events from the past that had lead to hospitalization and she still had lingering health issues from her husband's physical abuse. She was trying to rationalize her decision to leave her daughter with this man - he is a very good father, but a bad husband. I found it hard to fathom but realized that she was in no position to financially support her daughter - V had never worked in America. There were days when the conversations were lucid, when she asked me about what was going on in my life and offered me good advice. 

I enjoyed those conversations a lot more because it gave me a fleeting glimpse into the person V had once mean before the horrific abuse had destroyed her body and mind. We stayed in touch off and on for about three years. Last I spoke to her, V had managed to get her daughter away from the father - she had decided to send the child to India to live with her family. She remained disoriented about her own life, fighting on many fronts to earn her freedom give her daughter a better life, not be beholden to her relatives back home. The immigration woes were never ending given her separated pending divorce status. Watching Provoked brought back memories of those long ago phone conversations with V. 

Even as a woman with similarities in culture and background, I could not fully comprehend the depths of her suffering, how mortally afraid she was of the man she was married to, and how her mind raced infinitely hoping to find peace and quiet. I hope V and her daughter have ended up having a good life.  

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more