Daughters of Durga by Manjula Datta O'Connor

Author:Manjula Datta O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522878264
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing

9

HUGE COST OF MENTAL ILLNESS

How do society’s ideal female roles affect the mental health of women who don’t live up to them? Or those who discover that the man they’ve married is not a benevolent patriarch? The effects of violence and abuse have been touched on in previous chapters, but let us now look at them in detail.

Myma is aged forty-two, from Delhi, and one of five children. Her two sisters and two brothers are married. They all complied with the societal norms of a happy family, as did Myma’s parents. Each family is headed by a patriarch, with the feminine role filled by a working wife, who is subservient to the needs of her family.

After high school, Myma was married to a man chosen by her father. Her husband was lower middle class; he had a clerical job, and he went to work on his scooter.

One day while riding home, he was hit by a truck and killed. Myma was widowed before she had a chance to have children. She was a single woman in a society where the only important role a women can perform is to be married. Whether or not she is educated and/or working, society sees her primary roles as being a wife and a mother. These roles are more important than her own self-worth as an individual. If she tries to break out of those roles, she will face barriers.

Myma knew she was in a bad place. And, to confirm her fears, her neighbours started calling her ‘unlucky’. She was unlucky her husband died; and, worse luck, she was childless: a ‘childless, unlucky woman’. She had no job, nowhere to live, and both her parents had died. As a single woman in India, society decrees she may not live alone. If she defies that convention, she will be an object of suspicion and gossip, and vulnerable to predators.

Myma begged one of her brothers and his ‘ideal family’to let her live with them. He reluctantly agreed. The family was saving money for dowries for their two daughters, aged ten and eleven. Another mouth to feed was too much trouble. After a short while, Myma found a job in a factory and started to study to keep busy—maybe she would earn a promotion.

Then, suddenly, one day all her dreams come true. She was to be married off to a divorced man who wanted a wife. He lived in Australia with his teenage daughter. His brother arranged the marriage. Myma saw her future husband only once. He had a crooked nose, strong body odour, and funny teeth. But she did not dare think he was ugly, and suppressed her negative emotions. Society would value her more if she was married. Would she have married him if she had completed her education and was earning a handsome income in Delhi? Perhaps, yes, to be rid of her lowly status as a widow. Would she have married him if she could exercise choice, despite her lack of attraction to him? Perhaps, yes, for the same reason.

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