The Embroiderer

                        

The early morning rays of the sun silently crept up on the sand dunes, casting a glow here and a shadow there. The air was still cool and the birds which had started chirping about an hour ago were slowing down on their melody. At this serene moment when nature and its living things were attuned to each other, the womenfolk of Pir Bagan Shah began their diurnal routine silently and swiftly without any rancor or misgivings.

There was no point in sitting and doing nothing as in the end they alone were responsible for every iota of work done in this small hamlet of about twenty odd houses. Fifteen year old Tara, swiftly started to brush her house and the surrounding area clean, then there was the morning meal to be cooked and then a trudge of ten kilometers to get water and another ten to come back home laden with four pots filled to the brim, supported one on top of the other. Then the endless march over the blistering dunes in search of firewood… the list of chores was endless.

Her reverie was broken by the harsh reprimands of her mother-in-law who wanted her morning cup of tea with milk, not black tea like she had every morning. She ran to milk the cow whom she lovingly called Gauri. With a couple of liters of milk in her pail she ran to make the tea for the insistent mother-in-law and her sister. Tara felt a kind of kinship with her mother-in law’s sister, maybe she imagined the kinship in her silence or  the silent tears swimming in her eyes conveying her soundless support when she was struck by her husband or mother-in-law.

After giving tea she was busy cooking the morning meal when loud thuds and silent sobs drifted in the kitchen from the neighbour’s house. The sizzle from her frying pan matched the searing and simmering anger and angst in her heart, her neighbor all of twelve years and the new bride was being thrashed again into submission to do all the work of the house. The small girl had just come last week from her parent’s house or shall we say she landed from the frying pan into the fire. At such moments Tara felt an intense irritation at the bride’s mother for not making her aware and prepared for the reality of life but the very next moment Tara wanted to rush into her neighbour’s house and do all the work herself, the thought of replying back or getting angry with the perpetrators never ever crossed her mind at all. This was how all the good girls were supposed to be, brought up as to never to question the elders of the house. Maybe it was her bad fate that made her suffer so. Tara did not waste any more thoughts on her neighbour’s plight but carried on with her work like an automaton, unquestioning, unflinchingly and unemotionally. Everything was a duty, destined to burden the likes of her and all womenfolk.

Nevertheless, something was different these days, the air surged and swirled with hope. It had something to do with a group of people who had rented the only haveli of that village and were going around talking and telling the women folk about things that they had hitherto unimagined. They wanted to teach the women. However, the idea was squashed in it’s infancy by the men – the village elders. Then the group had set up some banner outside the haveli, but God knows what was written, the women could not read and the men did not enlighten. Any curiosity was nipped in the bud. Nevertheless, the group kept coming at all the village meetings and slowly started to make small inroads in the minds of the men. They had told the men that if the womenfolk could do some craft work en masse, they could start a cooperative and finances would improve by leaps and bounds.

The finance part of the argument went down very well with the menfolk who ordered their women to go to the haveli in the afternoon to do the bidden craftwork. It started with a few men accompanying the women then it petered down to the men visiting the haveli occasionally.

With the advent of women, the eclectic group of people set about their venture by asking them about their skills. Once a consensus was reached, the women folk of Pir Bagan Shah were taught the finer aspects of embroidery by a few of their village women who were wonderful craftsmen; one of these was Tara’s own mother-in-law! Tara was amazed by her mother-in-law’s skill and the beauty of her work, as for her mother-in-law, it seemed that this work had quietened down her demons, so engrossed was she in her work that apparently she hardly found time to holler at Tara leave alone beat her.

All the embroidery work continued at a steady pace with sari after sari of exquisite work being created followed along with the singing of folklore and dancing when the time permitted. Then came the time when the saris were taken to the nearest city which was more than six hundred kilometers away. The very next day the group called the women and gave them the money due to them. There was a grand communal get together in the village that night.

 The very next day the women were subtly taught counting on the pretext of keeping a track of the money earned, this flowed on seamlessly into the learning of alphabets.   Most of the women caught on pretty quickly and their latent desire to make a change in their own lives made them diligent students. It was not just the learning and earning but there was a change in their entire demeanor. There was of course a spring in their walk, a certain decisiveness with which they conducted their household affairs but the biggest change was that they started educating their own children. For the first time in their life they had dreams and aspirations, which were a result of their own labour and hard work. The biggest change was in Tara’s neighbour’s house where the child bride, the star embroiderer of the village who had studied before coming to Pir Bagan Shah was holding classes for all the other women, including her own mother-in-law!

 Ajaya