A lady I met in my travels

When I first saw Huliamma, she’d come to a school I was visiting to collect a transfer certificate for Lakshmi, her 16 year old daughter, who’d dropped out of the education system a year before in order to get married. She didn’t know her own age or how old she might have been when she herself had an arranged married. If she had to guess, Huliamma said, she was probably around 35 years. But then I asked her the age of her eldest child, and she said with fair certainty that her son, Hulgappa, was around 25.

Now, taking into account the average age that women of her generation and social class were married in Bellary District of the State of Karnataka, India, it was possible to make an educated guess as to her real age. Many of the women I’ve spoken to were married around the age of 14 or 15. They usually had their first child when they were 16 going on 17 and they were almost always uneducated, without any basic literacy or arithmetic skills. Not surprising. Adults in South Asia have, on average, completed only 4.5 years of schooling according to a UN report. If Huliamma’s eldest child, Hulgappa, was around 25, then that would place her age between 40 and 45 years.

Only 40 years and she was the mother of 6 children and the grandmother of one baby girl. Both her daughters were already married. Hulggiamma, her eldest daughter, was only 20 years old. And she was pregnant with her second child.

“Girls still marry at a very early age around here. We try and tell them not to marry them off so soon, but they won’t listen. That’s how it’s always been,” says Renuka, a teacher in the village.

The weather-beaten contours of Huliamma’s face appeared much older than 40. They hinted at decades of hard labour in the unforgiving Bellary sun. She’d been working since she was 13, she said. They were field workers. Gaddi kelsa was their way of living. And life was tough. If it wasn’t the heavy rains, then it was the severe shortage of them during dry seasons that constantly added to their troubles. But agriculture was their only source of income and they had a lot of mouths to feed.

On average, field workers get paid between Rs. 150 to Rs. 200 per day around Bellary. That’s around US $3 to $4. The cost of a kilo of rice in Karnataka is around Rs. 40. Average cost of a kilo of dal: Rs. 60. It’s fair to say that it costs at least Rs.100 for a large family like Huliamma to eat a simple meal of rice and sambar three times a day. Where is there money left for anything else?

A few hundred meters from the main highway that threads through all the surrounding villages like a string to so many pearls, was Huliamma’s home. Five feet from her doorstep, in the cool shade of a thatched roof shed, buffalo lay resting.

Coming from the concrete jungle that is Bangalore, I was touched to see such civil pastoral simplicity. What was even more touching was the close knit sense of community that wrapped around me as I sat down at her doorstep. All her neighbours came out to see their new visitor, come all the way from the big City. And for a brief moment, I felt I was a part of her life and her village. In that moment, I also felt trapped and powerless. What would I do if I couldn’t write?

Huliamma was staying home these days, because of Shivappa, her 18 year old son. Shivappa was sitting in front of the family house, one swollen leg wrapped in a towel, his emaciated form showing clear signs of chronic distress. He’d been cycling when he fell into a ditch months ago. They weren’t sure what was wrong with his leg.

“We went everywhere, from Bellary, to Hospet to Bangalore, but nothing happened. We spent nearly Rs. 150, 000 but no one did anything,” said Huliamma.

When I asked her which hospital in Bangalore they took her son to, she responded, “I don’t know. I’m a woman, how will I know these things? Our work is just cooking and cleaning. The men will know,” she said. So Shivappa was still suffering, with his left leg swollen and bandaged in a towel. And as an uneducated mother, she was powerless to do anything about it.

I’ve read so many statistics about the need to educate and empower women. How an educated mother will improve the quality of life for her children. How an empowered woman will have the means to sustain her family through difficult times. I think this is the first time that it really hit home.

I know it won’t be the last time. There are hundreds of thousands in the world like her. I’ll read another article in the newspaper tomorrow on the plight of women the world over. It’ll be written with an ‘angle’ on human development and have oh so many facts and figures that show just what a shame it is no one’s doing anything about it. The story will be right next to the latest scam on Government corruption, after the all important news on the latest superstar gossip.

But for people like Huliamma, this is their life. She has to get up the next day and go about her household chores. She has to tend to her son and ease his suffering. She has to find a way to cook three meals a day on whatever can be afforded. At least her daughters can read and write. Maybe her granddaughters will do much more.

When I read about this competition by Dove on the beauty of a woman, I was so happy because it gave me the opportunity to show others how amazing we women are through Huliamma's story. I thought of her immediately. For me, this is the true beauty of a woman: our ability to face life head on, despite the trials we have faced, despite the pain we have suffered, just like Huliamma does everyday. We find a way to get up each day and deal with everything that comes our way with a quite fortitude unmatched in any man I've ever come across. I see it in my mother's eyes, I see it in my Ajji's careworn features. I saw it Huliamma. And one day, I hope to see it in myself.