Parvati Bai

I saw "Dor" on Friday evening and have blogged about it. The movie affected me in so many ways. It drives home the fact that women are mistreated in India, which goes even further shedding light on the plausible reasons why certain nonsensical and regressive customs are prevalent even today.

This reminded me of the story of Parvati Bai, who is a caretaker of one of my father-in-law’s weekend homes. When I got married around ten years ago, I met this woman for the first time. Her Marathi was pretty weird and it sounded more like Hindi. I asked my husband, “Where the hell is she from and where did you find her?” My husband told me that she was from Rajasthan and then proceeded to tell me how she started working for them.

When they were developing their property in the late 80s, there was this group of migrant construction workers working on the site. Upon completion of the project, the entire group left, except for this woman. One evening my husband, along with his parents, had come to their new home and found this woman sitting and crying by the gate. They asked her what was wrong and she said that she had nowhere to go and that the group had left her behind. My in-law’s felt compassion for her and offered her a job, to take care of their property and to take care of its maintenance, etc. So she has been working for them for the past 18 years. They also gave her a self-contained room on their property, so she had a roof over her head. This woman has absolutely no idea how to cook but takes good care of the house and garden. She has a green thumb and has grown avocados, passion fruit, lemons, roses, etc. I had planted a few bulbs of gladioli and tuberoses and she nurtured them as if they were her own children!


This photo of Parvati was taken when we visited our home in February 2006.

When we were newly weds, my husband and I would go to that home every other weekend. We also moved there for two years while working on some projects outside Mumbai. I noticed that her arms had many tattoos. That lined face and tattoos had so much character and told a story. Once I asked her if she would let me do her portrait. Painting is not just my hobby but my passion as well. She happily agreed and we had around two to three sittings.

I started asking her questions about her life. She told me that she was born in a remote village in Rajasthan, not far from Jaipur. She was married at a young age. She couldn’t bear any children therefore her husband had married again. She was treated badly by her husband and his family, who would starve her and her own family disowned her. She couldn’t take it anymore and escaped from there but had nowhere to go to. Yet she had the will to live. She worked day in and day out on different construction sites for years. She even worked on a construction of a dam and shared a lot of horror stories about that experience with me. This kind of arduous manual labor took its toll and she eventually lost the strength required to work on construction sites; therefore no one wanted to employ her. She found some hope to live when my father-in-law offered her this job, which she considers a very easy job.

She loves children very much so whenever my older sister used to visit with her son, who was five years old then, she would take him with her to the park and entertain him. You would see her with other children in the neighborhood and it was obvious that she loved them a lot. I always felt very sympathetic towards her. My in-laws used to tell me that she had found a gullible idiot in me! That is untrue because I am not at all gullible and have a good perception about people. She would always tell me in her broken rural dialect of Marathi, “Bhabhisaa….lai vaitag kadalaya,” which means that she has had a very difficult life.

One day she told us that she had never seen the sea and wanted to see the sea. My father-in-law owns another weekend house by the Arabian Sea, so we offered to take her with us the next time we went there. As one descends the beautiful Sahayadri Mountains, the small homes in the valley below look very scenic. That particular day was during the monsoon season, when the mountains come to life! She was in the backseat, jumping up and down like a child and clapping her hands and exclaiming, “Aiyyaaa baaya….Khaddyat lee ghara,” which translates as “Oh my God, look at the homes in the hole (gorge)!” She had never seen different landscapes that we all take so much for granted! She used to always tell my husband and me with tears in her eyes, that no one treated her well and that people always have been so mean and nasty to her, till she met our family. She told my husband that his parents gave her money and shelter but both of us gave her love. We didn’t think and still don’t think that we were doing anything exceptional. This is the least a human being can do for a less fortunate fellow human being.

This brings back to the question are women commodities for barter? Is she worth only when she can bear children, albeit a male heir to continue the family legacy? God forbid if she were to lose her spouse then she can be exploited and her fate can be decided by some callous male member of her late husband’s family. If she felt helpless and didn’t have courage to fight back and was exploited and consequently was to get pregnant, then the family loses face. When did such people even have any credibility to begin with?

The moral of Parvati’s story is that one should take one’s own decisions and not let someone else take them for you. Yes, her life was full of hardships but isn’t that better since she has led it on her own terms and not dictated by others. The movie “Dor” was just that… a movie. You are entertained and when it’s over you go back to your life. Experiences of women like Parvati, is the cruel reality of life. Yet if one has the guts and courage to fight all the harshness, life does offer some clemency...EVENTUALLY!