Is A Woman Duty To The Nation To Stay Home?

It was past 11 pm at the airport. I had 5-year-old Kabir with me — tired, cranky, legs too uncomfortable for the trolley I’d asked him to sit on. The cab hadn’t arrived yet. I was on the phone, trying to sort it out, when he looked up at me and said — ‘Aap gande ho.’

Not the best moment to be told you are dirty by your own child. In front of a stranger, no less.

The stranger was Bhaijaan — a man from Kashmir, also waiting for the same cab. Polite, well-dressed, clearly a person of some standing. When the cab finally came, we all got in. 

He asked me what I did.

I said — with genuine pride — ‘I’m a mother. I work. I run my home. I write a little. And I give some time to social work.’

Kabir, squeezed into the back seat of the tiny car with nowhere to put his legs, said: ‘Sona hai.’ And then again — ‘Aap gande ho.’

Bhaijaan looked at this scene — tired child, heavy bags, late hour — and decided this was the moment to offer clarity.

He said: ‘That is all very good. But I want to say one thing clearly. This is your son’s sleeping time. If you had been home, he would have slept properly by now. A mother’s role in a child’s life is very important. She is responsible for his all-round development. Our future is in these children, and their responsibility falls first on the mother. A responsible father’s job is to give the mother and children their rights, to keep them happy. A woman builds the home. If the home is strong, society will be strong. If society is strong, the country will be strong. This is why for a woman, desh seva begins at home.’

He wasn’t finished. When we reached the hostel, and he saw me carrying a heavy bag, managing luggage and a half-asleep child, he added: ‘Our sisters’ delicate shoulders should not have to carry such burdens.’

He said this — about my delicate shoulders — to me. The woman who had just described a life of working, writing, parenting alone, and doing social work. The shoulders he was worried about had, in fact, been carrying quite a lot.

I didn’t argue. I thanked him. I got out of the cab.

The speech every working woman has heard 

I lay awake that entire night wondering: is this why I couldn’t build a home? I had my own house, but is it also not my home? Is the wooden kitchen set that my parents brought for me at Amarkantak not enough to teach me home-building? Where did things go wrong? Why am I the home-wrecker even if I may not be solely responsible for it? Am I responsible for the fact that Kabir did not have a responsible father?

This was not the first time I had heard this argument. It has many forms. In my paternal village where I  would spend months of school holidays, it came at 4 am — in the form of a woman, my grandmother who woke us before dawn, made us carry sacks of wheat on our thin necks, ground atta until our wrists swelled. She had no speech. She just ran the house. 

And at night, the same hands that drove us all day pressed warm rotis with ghee into our plates. That was her desh seva. No one asked if she was tired. She was training us for our future – our home-building. 

This is much before I studied feminism formally, yet I have heard this theory about women and home-building so many times. It comes from people who mean well. It comes dressed in the language of responsibility, of children’s futures, of national strength. It is very hard to argue with because it sounds so reasonable.

But here is what I’ve noticed. The men who deliver this speech most fluently are never the ones building the home. They are in the cab. They are passengers, observing, commenting. The woman with the heavy bag and the cranky child and the phone call she’s trying to make — she’s not failing to build a home. She is the infrastructure. She is carrying her home with her.

The argument goes: woman makes home → home makes society → society makes nation. Therefore, woman’s place is at home.

What it never asks is: who supports the woman? Who carries her bags? Who sits with her child when she is also trying to do the ten other things she is doing? Who, at 11 pm, says — ‘You look tired. Let me take that.’

No one. Because that is not part of the speech.

I spent years trying to be the kind of woman the speech described. I cooked. I organised. I made the home comfortable and warm. I also worked and wrote and travelled for social causes — because I am built that way and I cannot be otherwise. And the home fell apart anyway. Not because I was away at an airport at 11 pm. But because a home is not built by one person’s surrender.  It takes a village to raise a child, but then we put the onus on just one woman.

Bhaijaan was not a bad man. He believed what he said. That is the problem — not with him, but with the idea. It is so old and so repeated that it sounds like truth. It gets delivered by strangers in cabs, by relatives at weddings, by well-meaning people everywhere, always to the woman, never to the man sitting next to her. And if there is no man, then too she is the problem. She pushed him away. She didn’t try hard enough. She wanted too much. She should have known better.

My desh seva (national service), apparently, starts at home.

His, I notice, gets to start wherever he happens to be.

Kabir, for what it’s worth, fell asleep in the cab. Delicate shoulders and all.