എന്നെ എനിക്ക് വേണം

ഞാന്‍ എന്തിന് നിന്നെ പേടിക്കുന്നു?
നീ ഇതു ചോദിച്ച് മടുത്തുക്കാണും
അന്നാല്‍ ഇപ്പോള്‍ ഞാന്‍ പറഞ്ഞേക്കാം
ഒരുപക്ഷെ നാളെ ഉത്തരം മാറി പോയാലൊ

The Shades of “Liberation”

Islam has always fascinated me. When I was little, I found the muezzin’s calls from the mosque near my house beautiful. I loved to just sit outside, close my eyes and listen. As I grew up, Islam had other significances. Islam was my friend, who happened to have ‘Osama’ as a part of his name and you can imagine the discrimination he has faced. Beat up by mobs, spit at and completely humiliated, he left America last year. Islam was my Hindu friend who found out that she was actually adopted from a Muslim family. She cried more because she had Muslim roots than because she was adopted. I slapped her across the face. My best friend. The poor girl. Islam was the most misstated in that ridiculous History curriculum  I wrote of earlier.  Islam is my friends from Pakistan, Sudan, Iran, Qatar, Bahrain and the list goes on. And of course I have Indian friends from all different religions.  So what’s my point? That Islam didn’t make my first friend a bad person, he endured more than any human being could have and he still didn’t let go of his faith. Islamic roots didn’t hurt that Hindu friend, whose doing fine now and is actually thinking of converting to Islam. And those friends I have, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them. Yea, I just felt the need to affirm their normalness.

I go to the mall once in a while with my friends. We’d be a group of girls just walking in the mall, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet, but no matter our mood or our noise level, we always seem to attract unwanted attraction. “Hey beautiful!” men, or perhaps I should call them boys, would yell and crowd around us, “Wanna come over tonight? I have a king.”

Women and the Church

Firstly, let me say that I love my church. I am not one of those “I don’t know if there’s a God and I don’t care anyway” brand of new-age teens. As a matter of fact, I think I might be more religious than my parents. So back to my church.. The Malankara Syrian Orthodox Church is founded on traditions and perhaps that’s why I like it so much; the rituals and the symbolic meaning behind every little action is mesmerizing. And I don’t even mind our extra long masses (2-3 hours is pretty long compared to our Catholic and Protestant counterparts).

It’s the apparent gender bias that I hate the most.

Provoked

“My culture is like my blood; flowing through every vein of my body. It is the culture in which I was born, which sees the woman as the honor of the house. In order to uphold this false honor, she’s taught to endure many kinds of oppression and pain in silence. A woman is a toy, a plaything. Broken at will, stuck together at will. For ten years, I lived a life of beatings and degradation, and no one noticed. I came out of my husband’s jail and entered the jail of law. It is here, at last, that I have found a kind of freedom.”
- From Provoked: A true story(2006)

You know what I noticed? In almost all Mohanlal-Mammooty-Superstar movies, the movies that supposedly define manhood, they hit the women. It’s never out there, in front of the screen. Rather, it’s just like something in the background, like someone drinking coffee in the morning, something normal. So what if a husband hits his wife now and then? So what? It’s not abuse, they say. She said that and this, she annoyed me so I hit her.. that’s what you do to a dog. Where do you draw the line between these slaps of disciplining and abuse? There just is no line. An adult woman doesn’t need your disciplining, thank you very much. Hitting children can be perhaps justified in that manner but hitting someone who’s your equal can’t, no matter what. So why do we consider it normal? Why is it that even when we hear stories of people like Kiranjit Ahluwalia, we don’t truly believe? We tend to distance her story from the story of the Kirans we know. No, it’s just not the same, we think. How many uncles we know hit the aunties? Count. And whose fault is it? The man’s, for his actions, or the woman’s, for not speaking up? Or is it society’s, for defining normal so unfairly?

Divorce in my society is looked down upon. Good respectable women don’t get divorced. What happens in the family stays in the family. I wonder, is our honor more important than our freedom? I wonder why nothing ever gets done. There are so many groups who are helping women but the extent to which they can be helped is so slight comparatively. Still, so many women die at the hands of their husbands, the people who promise to love and take care of them throughout their life… Normalcy has to be changed first. Especially among us, Indians. Arranged marriages; no, the fault isn’t within the system but within the people’s minds. If your husband beats you, get out. I don’t understand why that’s such a hard concept. Just get out. I really don’t understand.

If I ever get married to an MCP who even raises his hand against me once, I swear he’ll never raise his hand again.