90) A life of clenched teeth

This is one relationship that has brought me a lot of solace and it started so innocuously. I would blog on blogspot and Meena was the one of the regular readers and she would leave a comment. Soon we started corresponding and those mails have enriched me in a million ways – full of warmth and concern.

Meena Barot heads a pharmaceutical company in China and this is friendship based on mutual respect. Pretty soon, we shared our life’s vicissitudes for solace. Good and powerful enough reason for a virtual friendship given that both of us had scars inflicted on us from childhood.

The woman now is mid 30s is a veteran soldier in the game of life. Meena hails from such a conservative Gujarati family where the girls are considered a liability and married off even before the legal age of 18. She had seen her sister married off at 17, totally baffled and unprepared and before she realized ended up with three kids and a husband with a predilection for settling any arguments with blows.

Meena, the second daughter in the family of three was determined that her fate would not be similar. Even at home her younger brother had all the privileges – pampered with clothes, sweets and extra attention – while the girls were ordered to help the mother on domestic chores.

When Meena was in her second year at college, she was engaged without even the bride and groom meeting one another. Her father came to her one fine day and declared,” He is going to be your husband”, while handing over a photograph. BTW, the year was 1988 in uptown Mumbai amidst the veneer of modernity.

She was made of sterner stuff and had anticipated something like this. Working part time as a receptionist after college hours, she had pooled in good sum over the years.
She contacted a NGO and sought their intervention which only ended up infuriating the
villain more. He just threw her out of her house for according to him, he had lost face in the community for reneging on the marriage and rearing such a rebellious daughter.

At 19, Meena was on her own ways and the NGO did support her by locating a working women’s hostel. After graduation, she worked in a hospital as a pathologist assistant before finding her niche in marketing. And now at 34, heads the Chinese operation of a MNC.

There has been plenty of humiliation along the way. She was not invited to her brother’s marriage and her mother was physically assaulted for maintaining contact on the sly. She has purchased a flat in Mumbai and drives a swank car and has remained a spinster.

Tenacity and grit has seen through many a tight situation at work. She is a lone Indian in a Chinese city with an unpronounceable name and still a strict vegetarian in a land where eating snakes and crabs are the norm. How she manages, god only knows!!!!

I asked her,” Don’t you have any fear of your physical safety?”

She said,” I carry a chilli powder in my handbag and at nights when I go to bed don’t switch off the lights”. (530 words)