Lighted to Lighten: The Hope of India | Page 6

her charm, only that she died in giving birth to her thirteenth child, and that for all those years of married life she had held her husband's adoration. For twenty-two succeeding years he spent his leisure in collecting precious things from every part of his world that there might be lacking no adornment to the most exquisite tomb ever raised. And when it was finished--rare commentary on the contradiction of Mughal character--the architect was blinded that he might never produce its like again.
All that was a part of yesterday--a story of rise and fall; of woman's repression, with outbursts of greatness; of countless treasures of talent and possibilities unrecognized and undeveloped, hidden behind the doors of Indian zenanas. What of to-day?
TO-DAY: The Average Girl.
Meenachi of Madura, if she could become articulate, might tell us something of the life of the average girl to-day. Being average, she belongs neither to the exclusive streets of the Brahman, nor to the hovels of the untouchable outcastes, but to the area of the great middle class which is in India as everywhere the backbone of society. Meenachi's father is a weaver of the far-famed Madura muslins with their gold thread border. Her earliest childhood memory is the quiet weavers' street where the afternoon sun glints under the tamarind trees and, striking the long looms set in the open air, brings out the blue and mauve, the deep crimson and purple and gold of the weaving.
There were rollicking babyhood days when Meenachi, clad only in the olive of her satin skin with a silver fig leaf and a bead necklace for adornment, wandered in and out the house and about the looms at will. With added years came the burden of clothing, much resented by the wearer, but accepted with philosophic submission, as harder things would be later on. Toys are few and simple. The palmyra rattle is exchanged for the stiff wooden doll, painted in gaudy colors, and the collection of tiny vessels in which sand and stones and seeds provide the equivalent of mud pies in repasts of imaginary rice and curry. Household duties begin also. Meenachi at the age of six grasps her small bundle of broom-grass and sweeps each morning her allotted section of verandah. Soon she is helping to polish the brass cooking pots and to follow her mother and older sisters, earthen waterpot on hip, on their morning and evening pilgrimages to the river.
Being only an average girl, Meenachi will never go to school. There are ninety and nine of these "average" unschooled girls to the one "above the average" to whom education offers its outlet for the questing spirit. She looks with curiosity at the books her brother brings home from high school, but the strange, black marks which cover their pages mean nothing to her. Not for her the release into broad spaces that comes only through the written word. For, mark you, to the illiterate life means only those circumscribed experiences that come within the range of one's own sight and touch and hearing. "What I have seen, what I have heard, what I have felt"--there experience ends. From personal unhappiness there is no escape into the world current.
Meenachi is twelve and the freedom of the long street is hers no more. Yellow chrysanthemums in her glossy hair, a special diet of milk and curds and sweet cakes fried in ghee, and the outspoken congratulations of relatives, male and female, mark her entrance into the estate of womanhood. What the West hides, the East delights to reveal.
Now follows the swift sequel of marriage. The husband, of just the right degree of relationship, has long been chosen. The family exchequer is drained to the dregs to provide the heavy dowry, the burdensome expenditure for wedding feast and jewels, and the presentation of numerous wedding garments to equally numerous and expectant relatives. Meenachi is carried away by the splendor of new clothes and jewels and processions, and the general tamash of the occasion. Has she not the handsomest bridegroom and the most expensive _trousseau,_ of this marriage month? Is she not the envy of all her former playmates? Only now and then comes a strange feeling of loneliness when she thinks of leaving the dear, familiar roof the narrow street with its tamarind trees and many colored looms. The mother-in-law's house is a hundred miles away, and the mother-in-law's face is strange.
Will Meenachi be sad or happy? The answer is complex and hard to find, for it depends on many contingencies. The husband--what will he be? He is not of Meenachi's choosing. Did she choose her father and mother, and the house in which she was born? Were they not chosen for her, "written upon her forehead" by her Karma, her inscrutable fate? Her husband has been chosen;