Woman by the roadside

The two children were playing outside in the dust. They were plump and looked healthy though a little dirt-encrusted. They were also bottomless and seemed inordinately pleased about that state of affairs. The mother stood nearby in the outfit that seems to have emerged as the symbol of today’s Indian womanhood – the nightie. One would think that a nightdress was something one had to wear at night. But this particular manifestation of nightwear is most often seen in daytime as well and is a shapeless tent like attire commonly made of synthetic fabric – cotton being more expensive. The women of the lower classes liked theirs frilly and about ankle length to allow for the showing of decrepit and frayed petticoats. The middle-class women wore longer ones which were neatly ironed and possibly classified into day-wear and night-wear.
So the little kids were playing in the dirt in and around a prone and rusted bicycle with bottoms bared for the world to see while their mother fed them some sort of mash out of a dabba which she further mashed in her fingers and pasted onto their tongues. The boys were perhaps a year and a half old and were twins. They seemed to be mesmerised by the rusty cycle and parked their rear ends on dangerously pointed and variously dented parts. I cringed when I saw one tiny bottom settling on one of the toothed wheel s on which the cycle chain rested. The mother seemed oblivious, standing by the roadside and watching the cars go on the road with a vacant expression, moving on a hidden timer to paste more mush into one of her offspring. She was the shopkeeper’s wife and they were rather decently off. He owned the small shop and the property around it and also rented out four or five small sets of rooms to make a comfortable living.
I wondered what the lady was thinking while she watched the cars and the people pass by. Did she yearn for a lifestyle different from hers? Did she display a sense of superiority over her neighbours whose shacks did not even boast of a tin roof? Did she wallow in a sense of achievement for having produced two male offspring in a land where daughters-in-law were likely to be abused or abandoned for giving birth to girls? Did she merely stare in order to watch men strut around knowing that she watched? Perhaps she was catching a break and failed to see her sons almost impaling themselves. Or perhaps she didn’t care – it was one more chore on her list and she would do it and that was it. Meanwhile, she could always dream.