Oh well, I shrug. I should have become used to this by now. Just the month before, on a field trip with colleagues, three of us girls laughed and talked loudly while arranging for vehicles and fixing up hotels. After the program, our contact person sent a feedback form – to the only male member in our group, who had had zero involvement in the entire process.
Also, six months ago, I was the one who made plans for a trip with my husband – chose the travel agency, booked tickets, dealt with the visas. At the airport, I was looking for my name, and hence twice missed my husband's name in the placards; complete with the prefix Mr. I wasn't even aware that they knew his name till then.
This does not seem like a big deal. But it makes me uncomfortable. It reminds me of an incident from long ago. We were all spread out on the cool porch in our hometown of Jhapa, fanning ourselves furiously with tiny woven fans, gulping down great glasses of buttermilk. A vendor suddenly appeared in the midst of our green pathway, laden with an armful of dangly curtains and cushion covers and the like. We were so bogged down by the heat none of us even had the energy to look at his wares.
Just to be polite, Maili Aama invited him to sit on the wooden chair by the door, and he eagerly joined us after a drink at the hand pump. Soon, he started spreading out bedsheets in front of us, with the favorite refrain of most sellers, "I don't charge you for looking at things!" Maili Aama was mildly attracted to a shiny blue specimen. She queried about the price, was assured of it being given for half of what it was worth, and was almost considering making the purchase.
But the negotiations fell through, and she spiritedly declined to buy from the vendor. That was when he turned to Mailo Buwa. "Give her some money, Sir," he said, "Let her buy her trinkets." "She will buy them if she wants it," my uncle admonished the vendor. The vendor shook his head and said to my aunt, "I know you don't have any money. Ask your husband for some, go on."
My aunt started working since she was quite young, and served as the head teacher of our primary school for a while. She is a fierce lady unafraid to voice her opinions, and yet the vendor thought her unable to earn, to make decisions, to own. From this vendor to the head of state, there exists a common thought process – that women are incapable of (and thus should not be allowed) ownership of any kind, from money to property to their names and identities, bodies and existences.
Take identity, for one. I had to argue with a bank to address me as Ms., when they kept insisting that it should be a Mrs. Men who think this is no big deal, imagine being attached to your spouse for your identity, be known as 'a husband' instead of yourself – and you will know how distasteful it is.
Forget such complex concepts like identities. Think of a woman's body – which is never actually hers. In our context, the parents decide how it is to remain hidden, the society decrees how it is to be used, her partner considers it his asset and then the family has the final say on the number and sex of the children she is expected to produce immediately after marriage.
Or we could look at property. The Census 2011 states that out of the total property legally owned in the country, 19.7 percent belongs to women. But it's highly doubtful that even 0.7 of the women have control over their property as men do. While people proudly say that their homes (or factories or land) is registered under the name of their mothers and wives, it is, for the most part, just a ploy to avoid hassles while dividing the family property, or to enjoy rebates that the government offers to property and enterprises owned by women. This is also the case in committees and groups – from the community based ones to the complex – where women are used as mere showpieces, just because a quota needs to be fulfilled. In many cases, they are not even consulted in the decision-making processes.
The current debate over the citizenship is a mere spillover of this deeply rooted idea that women are not capable of ownership, and should not be entrusted with any. In an interview, a seemingly intellectual male argued that a mother's presence is not good enough, and the father's name must be mentioned in the citizenship certificate because the baby does not drop down from heaven. No one is negating the role of a father. But by the same logic, we went without the mothers' names on our citizenship certificates for hundreds of years, as if the mother was a completely unnecessary entity and the father procreated by himself. The unfairness of this stings – that a mother should produce something as precious as a child and then there is nothing, not even a piece of paper, to signify that the baby is hers.
The idea of women as thinking beings in positions of control and possession is frightening and unacceptable to many men, and an equal number of women. Many just refuse to acknowledge that women are not asking for anything other than what men have been taking for granted all through history. In his cartoon strip, Diwakar Chettri says it perfectly: A man asks a woman, "I don't understand...why do women want equal citizenship rights?" And the woman has a classic rejoinder, 'Well, how about for the very reasons that you men have been enjoying citizenship rights for all these years?"
Quite so.
bh.richa@gmail.com
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