UMR QAID (LIFE SENTENCE) by Hajira Shakoor

“I expect you will never cause my mother any displeasure and will never make my brothers and sisters feel as if this house is not their own. I have faith in your tranquil personality and trust you will always remember to act thoughtfully”- this excerpt from the story made an impact on me and compelled me to analyse, review, relate and to think why the title of the story is ‘Umr Qaid’. As a woman (married), I can relate to the emotional struggle and emptiness that Janki must be going through when she hears this as the first thing from her husband when she had just left behind everything what was her own. No wife can ever expect and accept her husband sharing (in fact demanding, with no choice left other than accepting the demand) his love through this strange way (by showing how caring and responsible he is for his family and but not for his wife), but that’s how a marriage is for many women and that’s how they get love from their spouses. My background and exposure to lives at both rural and urban settings gave me an access to do a transactional analysis of how this character still exists predominantly in our society even today irrespective of the background such as rural or urban, nuclear family or joint family. A woman’s primary role is taking care of family; and her passion, dream, career (if she has one) must come after this or in other words she can’t choose herself over family. She has to learn to balance other commitments but same is not expected of men.

I assumed that Susie Tharu and K.Lalita must have felt and experienced this disparity that is very prevalent in our society not only in their personal lives but also in their professional lives. That might be one of the reasons why they edited this book called ‘‘Women Writing in India: 600 B.C to the Present. Volume 1: 600 B.C to the Early Twentieth Century’ that has many short stories by women writers to give a voice to women literature in this male dominated literary society.

‘Umr Qaid’ is one of the short stories of this volume, written by Hajira Shakoor. Hajira Shakoor is a sociologist and was a professor at Jamia Milia University. She had extensively written about women’s issues and status/condition (tolerance, equality, human rights aspects) of mostly middle class women. In this story, her choosing the character of a Hindu Brahmin woman, when she is a Muslim and settled in a urban space as a lecturer, gave me the confidence to say that irrespective of background, the societal conditions of women are similar.

This story is about a woman ‘Janki’, and her sufferings which is realised by her husband (the narrator of story) after 20 years of their marriage and that too after her death. The story has many flashback moments when the narrator is relating his present condition after 7years of his wife’s death; where he feels exposed, shelter-less and a burden to his children.

Janaki’s family were neighbours of the narrator’s family, she was the daughter of a teacher and according to him she belonged to a respectable family. She belonged to a high caste Brahmin family. The narrator had seen Janaki from her childhood to youth. He finds Janaki to be a very quiet and shy girl and interprets her personality to be subdued and unobtrusive and finds her pretty though a bit thin. I felt through this that the writer hinting at the standards of beauty in a society and specifically beauty from a man’s perspective while taking the decision of marriage.

The narrator has also described how her father had struggled to deposit all the required things and money to ensure his daughter gets married, thus paying the penalty of being the father of a girl. Even though Janki’s father was successful in getting a groom for his daughter the groom’s family was striking a deal to extract more money from her father on the wedding day. That was the turning point, when the narrator who had finished MA and studying Law, was present in the wedding ceremony to represent his family suddenly became the star of the night and main character of the story. He asked janki’s father not to accept their demands of more dowry and send them back. He offered to marry Janki who had studied up to intermediate, to avoid their embarrassment in society.

The above incident may be directly talking about the ugly picture of dowry system that still exists today, but I could unfold few other hidden meanings from the text that corresponds to the disparity in the educational status of a man and woman and a man’s ego to marry a woman who had studied much less than him academically by highlighting the educational status. The entire culture of marriage is designed in such a way that it will not only let down the status of women in society, but keep creating a false consciousness among the women about their role, responsibility, duty and their worthiness which can be witnessed in other parts of the story.

As one of our group member rightly pointed out – would the narrator have taken the decision to marry her if the same girl belonged to a lower caste and this marriage would have impacted the marriage prospects of his younger siblings! It raises really an interesting question to analyse further.

As the story moves further, the narrator describes that Janki in her entire 20 years of married life never asked for anything, even when his mother grew fond of her due to her servitude, she never took any advantage and kept continuing her servitude towards the family even when she was pregnant at her eighth month. Whenever she received a saree or gifts, she always kept it aside for somebody else. She not only does her work, she also helps the domestic help in their work after she finishes her. She has always been empathetic towards her sister-in-law and other family members. More often, she has always been treated as a servant in the family by all the others including the narrator. But when she was on death bed, nobody came forward to look after her including her sister-in-law whom she served at her eighth month pregnancy and mother-in-law who preferred to be with her daughter who was about to deliver a baby but not her daughter-in-law who had served her entire life without any complaint and was now on death bed.

It reflects the status of a married woman who is not accepted by her in-laws irrespective of her sacrifice and hard work and never became truly a member of the family. One of our group members shared that “in the beginning of the story, the character of Janki has been mentioned as shy, quiet and that might be the reason why she behaved so indifferently and never accepted any gifts; even she had a normal marriage(irrespective of her husband’s first communication or not)”. But I didn’t agree with this at all, as I felt she is a human being after all. She must have all those emotional and physical needs like any other. And I could relate the evidences to justify this when the narrator describes that she mumbles about her father while sleeping, she talks about her daughter, her sad smile when the narrator asks her to put some make up for photographs, her distress when her father passed away, her demands to have pink saree and jewellery when she was unconscious during her death bed, infact her rejection of gifts and sarees itself shows that she lost all the expectations to have love and care that she deserved, which is so humane.

It also reflects how badly she needed love and affection. But through not expressing her needs, she was just repaying the debt that her husband did to her by marrying her and saved her father from embarrassment. She was also living this life sentence knowing that this society doesn’t give the respect and value what she needs and wants, hence she didn’t even feel the urge to express. Nobody including her father even asked her if she wanted to marry this man or not. When she married, her husband never asked her what she wanted rather he imposed on her what he wanted from her. They had four children, but the narrator describes that she was still strange to him. Isn’t it really strange and ridiculous? Many rituals like fathers not taking glass of water from daughter’s family reflect the extreme social illness to ensure the women must be oppressed and just follow what is said to them. All these are clear breach of human rights, but these rituals have always been manipulated as our great tradition and culture. Then no body questions them and a woman creates a false conscious within her as if these are her ultimate goal of life and reasons for existence.

The patriarchal societies not only harm the being of a woman, it equally harms the men too. It can be evidenced from this story, when narrator is describing “at the last stage of my life, I realize how hollow my existence has been and it bows my head down. I have nothing left of my own. I am a man lost in the flow of the crowd” and “Where are you Janki? In how many ways did I humiliate you in my ignorance? But by your silence you have turned each thoughtless gesture into an unpardonable sin”. Living with guilt is not less than living in a prison.