Life in the Western World for a Woman

So, here I was. In a strange land. Three months gone and counting. Nine months to go till I completed a year’s contract. I could continue longer, try and take my exams and apply for permanent residency or carry on as a temporary resident for years, either way it wasn’t much of a problem. Relatives doled out advice long distance, “Think of the long term. Do you want to go back to all the power cuts? Will you get the same quality of life there? Think of your child?” I thought. I pondered. Definitely the power cuts were an issue. Still, I thought a move to the south or to Pune would still be better than a permanent residency here. Or a house in the hills of Himachal Pradesh. I had identified the region as well. A little ahead of Narkanda if I had to choose Himachal Pradesh or Connoor, a small town near Ooty in the Nilgiris in the south. Why was it easier to move to another country than to another state in your own was something I hadn’t been able to fathom. Not that Australia was bad. Far from it.

Work was satisfying. Everyone did their job and at that conscientiously. The environment was good and friendly. Come weekends and you could be off to Brisbane or to the coast if you wished, money was easier to come by and everything more streamlined. I guess one just needed time to adapt. Like an Indian friend said, “It will grow on you.” She had been here for 13 years now, married at 19 to an engineer. She had two daughters aged 12 and 8 years.

She had left her husband 10 years after marriage after he became physically abusive towards her and later the daughters as well. She had no relatives close by and was helped by Women’s refuge who moved her to this town and helped her take out a domestic violence order against her husband so he couldn’t come near her while she attempted to reconstruct her life. Her widowed mother back home in Punjab cursed her for leaving her husband worried at the haranguing from the relatives that would inevitably follow.

The husband meanwhile left his job and went on the dole so that he wouldn’t have to pay for childcare. Simar (name changed) meanwhile decided she couldn’t sit and mope around and got on with the business of living. The town had a club for dating for singles and, she, with a typical zest for life threw her customary Indian caution to the winds and went for one of the Do’s. She met James there, a 50 year old security guard and soon they were seeing more of each other. She was a tiny, petite 34 year old who looked younger than her years with vivacious eyes and a lively smile.

Soon she was living with James yet when he asked her to marry him she told him, “ Wait for 10 years and then ask me again, Then I might.” She was in no hurry to marry again. James got along famously with the daughters who didn’t seem any worse off despite the acrimonious divorce. James’ family, a daughter, two stepsons and sisters adopted Simar and the girls as their own, keeping the girls for three weeks when their father refused to keep them the day Simar and James were flying to India for a visit.

The father would not allow the girls to get passports so they couldn’t go to India and since he didn’t want Simar to go either even after the divorce so he backtracked on keeping the girls for the Christmas holidays. It must have hurt the children, having their father reject them this way but they let Simar go on her holiday after four years to India. Simar’s mother had been worrying about what she would tell the neighbours about James- who was he and why had he come with Simar? Would she keep them in separate bedrooms? The problem was finally solved when Simar’s brother arranged for them to move to Delhi, Agra and Jaipur after a week in Amritsar so people wouldn’t get much time to speculate.

The last trip when Simar had travelled to India was still fresh in the relatives' minds when she had confronted her mother’s brothers about helping to find another partner for her mother- after all she was only 58 years old and needed someone! Simar avoided the Indian community in Australia to some extent. Some of them knew her ex-inlaws and others would question her living with an Australian man, or at the least, would raise eyebrows. I enjoyed having her around, we could speak in Punjabi to one another and I admired her vibrancy and spunk. There was no guilt or hesitancy over her actions, no explanations, she was a free woman, Australia had been good to her- it had liberated her.

I went with her to Brisbane one weekend. We visited James’ grandson who was in hospital there recovering from an accident. We were talking away over coffee, or rather she was talking and I was listening. A woman came into the kitchen to make some coffee for herself. She held on listening to us and finally asked “what language are you speaking?” On hearing that it was Punjabi, her face lit up and she described how she had lived with a Sikh family for a while in Punjab and how they had wanted her to marry their older son. She however declined and went on to spend six months in India traveling from Leh, Ladakh to Srinagar to down south. She recalled how a holy man in Varanasi and later a policeman in Nepal had attempted to seduce her, interpreting her interest as availability. After all here was a singe white woman traveling alone and everyone knew they had few scruples regarding sex.

However, Elaine disappointed them and later went on to Japan where she married a Japanese for a year after which she returned to Australia to give birth to her son. She still retained the desire to return to India explaining how she had felt at home there, almost as if she had been an Indian in her last birth. She was delighted at meeting us and it was with some effort that we finally bid adieu and went to say our goodbyes to James’ grandson. On the way back, I spotted Elaine in a room and went inside. Her son, a boy who looked completely Japanese lay there with tubes running in and out of his nose, chest, arms and urethra. He had cerebral palsy at birth and spent a large part of his life in and out of hospitals battling infections. This time he had been here for two months and was none the better, his chest heaving fighting to take in enough oxygen for survival. Each breath was an effort.

Elaine spent most of her time at his bedside, an independent western woman who had spent her time in Osho’s ashrams and had her share of men in her life in the elusive search for love or if not that fleeting tenderness. Yet I admired her for having lived life on her terms, maybe lonely at the end but weren’t we all? Even with our families and relatives, all alone in the end.