Discourses From the East
From the day I started earning, I have never known a life in which attending to domesticities was optional. Buy groceries, send the laundry, call the plumber, get duplicate keys made, change the RO filters, compare Nerolac with Asian Paints, call and then reschedule the carpenter because the landlord will not pay for the termite-eaten kitchen cabinet anyway. Then call the carpenter again, closer to the date, to make sure he comes at an hour when nobody at home is asleep. Tip the chowkidar well enough that he remembers you when you actually need help. Keep soft-copy backups of original documents and PVC copies of licences and RCs. Check FD interest rates. Read copious health-insurance documents to find out whether some innocent-looking clause will suddenly impose a room-rent cap when somebody is in hospital.
There are other responsibilities which do not even look like domestic chores until one realises that somebody has to remember them too. Have different doctors on speed dial. Know roughly when different family members wake up and when they are likely to be free, so that calls do not become disturbances. Plan a trip to the hills only after reading a hundred hotel reviews. Learn what to say to the fishseller so that he is less likely to palm off stale fish on you. Learn to drive better because cab bills add up. Keep learning new skills because what if AI takes away your livelihood. Call on bereaved friends and relatives. And, somewhere in the head, quietly plan for the possibility that one parent may die before the other, leaving somebody old, lonely, unsafe and suddenly expected to understand a world that two people had previously managed together.
None of these responsibilities ever arrived after a family meeting in which it was decided that I was best suited to them. There was really no conversation to be had. It was easy enough to understand that these things needed doing and that people around me would, meaningfully, look to me to do many of them. You either loved the work and did it, or you hated the work and did it. Probably shoddily.
It is perhaps because of this that I have always thought rather intently about two Assamese songs. The first is O More Lorar Maak, Maasoloi Jao, Nakhao Nakhao Xuda Bhaat, written by Diganta Bharati and sung by Zubeen Garg. The other is Manas Robin’s Sarita Khuti Puti, sung as a conversation by Simanta Shekhar and Subasana Dutta in Jonbai 2. They are very different songs, but both return me to the same question: what happens when responsibility begins to look like affection?
There is a lovely domestic urgency to O Mure Lorar Maak. The refrain itself contains the entire plan: “মাছলৈ যাঁও নাখাওঁ শুদা ভাত” (“I’ll go for fish; I won’t eat plain rice”). The man wants fish for lunch. He will go and get it, and his wife should get the rest ready. There are greens to be plucked, fishing things to be brought down, betel to be prepared and a meal waiting somewhere at the end of all this activity.
There is also Rongmon.
Rongmon, the neighbour, has apparently been doing rather well with his fishing, returning with his khaloi full. Our man admits what this does to him: “দেখি মোৰ দেহা জ্বলি যায়” (“seeing it makes me burn”). I have always liked this little world of the song: the appetite, the household instructions, the prospect of a good meal and the mild masculine annoyance that another man seems to be better at catching fish. Another man’s better catch has somehow entered this marriage and this lunch.
It is a deeply gendered world too. The man goes out to catch the fish. The woman stays back and prepares what will eventually become lunch. One can, of course, ask several questions of this arrangement. Could she have gone fishing? Could he have stayed back to cook? Was this division chosen, inherited or simply expected? A song about a man craving fish does not owe us answers to all of these questions. What interests me is something else: the gender roles here do not arrive looking particularly like rules.
They arrive looking like lunch.
The man will bring something home. The woman will make something of what he brings home. Neither activity, by itself, produces the meal. Catching a fish is not quite the same thing as feeding a household: the fish has to be cleaned, cooked and combined with everything else. What we casually call providing, therefore, has itself been split between the two of them. And yet, because he is the one who goes out and returns with the catch, something else gets attached to his task too. Pride, perhaps. Rongmon’s khaloi would not matter otherwise.
Men, it appears, can make even fish competitive.
Manas Robin’s Sarita Khuti Puti gives us a different household. And because Simanta Shekhar and Subasana Dutta sing the two sides of the conversation, the disagreement has an immediacy that is easy to miss if one only reads the lyrics. Here, there is no anticipated fish lunch. There is work. There is money. There is night. And there is a woman waiting for a man who still has not come home. She has prepared the bed, waited through the night and worried about what may have happened to him. He, meanwhile, has an explanation: earning money is difficult. Hunger can make happiness disappear. He is working because the household needs money and because, in his understanding of things, working harder is something he does for the woman he loves.
So far, everything appears familiar enough. He goes out and she stays home. He earns and she waits. His care travels outward into work and money; hers turns inward into waiting, worrying and wondering when he will return.
And then she ruins the neatness of the arrangement.
“আমি দুটাহে মানুহ” — there are only two of us, she reminds him. And then, even more directly: “নালাগে ঘটিব ৰাতি” — there is no need to earn at night. What he earns during the day already fills their stomachs. How much more money do the two of them really need?
I love this moment in the song because the woman who could very easily be described as the economically dependent wife is not asking the man to provide more. She is asking him to provide less. Or, more accurately, she is asking him to stop deciding that more money is necessarily what she wants. She has not left the domestic arrangement in order to acquire a voice. She is still the one at home. She is still worried about him. She still wants this man, this relationship and this household. But from inside all of that, she argues. And hers is not a small argument either. She is telling him what she thinks a good life for the two of them should look like.
Enough food. Enough money. Enough work.
Come home.
Agency does not always announce itself as rebellion. Sometimes it appears as negotiation within the very roles one has inherited.
His response makes the disagreement even more tender. He tells her, essentially, that even when she is not beside him, he carries her image with him, and explains the long hours with three simple words: “তোৰে সুখৰ বাবে” — for your happiness.
There is something here which I find deeply affecting. The man experiences economic sacrifice as affection; the woman experiences the same sacrifice partly as absence, anxiety and unnecessary self-denial. He thinks: I am doing this for you. She seems to say: but this is not what I asked you to do for me. For him, love has become provision. For her, love has become presence. Neither is rejecting care. They are disagreeing over what care requires.
And suddenly his night work becomes more complicated than the familiar story of the hardworking man providing for his household. There is certainly something gendered about his ability to move through the outside world while she waits at home. But that mobility does not appear entirely as freedom either. He has inherited an instruction of his own: earn, provide, make sure there is enough. Preferably more than enough. The provider gets to go out; the provider also has to provide.
She, meanwhile, does not sit gratefully at the receiving end of his sacrifice. She sets a limit on it. There is something quietly powerful about telling another person: do not exhaust yourself in my name and then assume that the exhaustion is what I wanted. In fact, she is doing something that people inside relationships have probably always done, with or without grand vocabularies to describe it: negotiating what another person’s role will mean in their particular life together.
Some gendered arrangements are easy to judge. When somebody is forbidden from doing something, controlled, denied money, denied movement or denied a choice, there is not much interpretive difficulty. Everyday life is frequently less obliging. Sometimes gender comes to us through who brings home the fish and who cooks it, through who goes to work and who waits, through who thinks earning more is a sign of love and who would happily settle for less money if the person earning it returned home earlier.
Affection does not automatically make any of these arrangements fair. A woman can speak, argue and negotiate within a relationship while still living in a world where fewer choices are available to her outside it. A man can understand earning as responsibility while still possessing forms of authority his wife may not have. The fact that somebody loves a role, or loves through a role, does not tell us everything about where that role came from or what alternatives were ever available.
But the reverse is also worth thinking about. The fact that a role is inherited does not make the affection expressed through it counterfeit.
People love through the lives available to them. They bring home fish, cook it, save money, remember medicines, wait up at night, make phone calls, change water filters, learn to drive, read insurance clauses and worry about what will happen to everybody else if something happens to them. Some of these things are freely chosen; others are simply understood to be one’s work long before anybody thinks of asking why. Responsibility has a strange way of becoming affection after being performed for long enough. Affection, in turn, can make responsibility feel less like an instruction.
Perhaps this is why I am fond of the domestic relationships in these two songs. Not because they offer some perfect old-world arrangement that should be recovered. They do not. I am fond of them because the people inside them refuse to behave like neat illustrations of an argument. The woman in Sarita Khuti Puti remains inside a recognisably traditional household, but she is not swallowed by it. She thinks. She knows what she wants. She disagrees with the man who thinks he knows what she wants and she tells him so. The man, meanwhile, is not only someone who gets to roam outside while she waits. He is also someone who seems to have convinced himself that loving another person properly requires him to work himself harder.
That conviction may deserve questioning.
She questions it.
In Diganta Bharati’s O More Lorar Maak, the arrangement is easier: I will do this, you do that, let us eat well. In Manas Robin’s Sarita Khuti Puti, something has shifted: I am doing this for you. Please don’t. The first gives us cooperation within familiar roles; the second gives us negotiation within familiar roles. Between them lies something that tidy categories can sometimes miss. People do not merely obey or reject the roles they inherit. They fiddle with them, bargain inside them, complain about them, take pride in them, get tired of them and find ways of loving through them.
Sometimes they even disagree about the love.
Perhaps I hear these songs the way I do because, after a certain age, love begins to look suspiciously like administration. Someone remembers. Someone plans. Someone brings something home. Someone notices that the kitchen cabinet has termites before it collapses. Someone worries. Someone waits.
And sometimes one person works late because he loves the other.
The other asks him to come home for exactly the same reason.
Where, then, does the role end and the love begin?
I don’t know. If someone ever helps me find the answer, I’ll report back to Lamjai. Promise.
