Banality of dusk and dawn – the trials of the educated woman | Swaswati Borkataki

The past few months have been emotionally and psychophysically draining – the burden of education and the apprehension of sinking into the clouds of oblivion can be disturbing beyond imagination. The paradox of being an educated ‘insignificant’ woman has been the best description of my being and the greatest fear that I have lived with for the past many years, ever since I have blossomed into the dark coffers of maturity, with life slowly effacing the last traces of boyish innocence that characterized the erstwhile sanity that I now crave for.

This feeling is deeply embedded in the fear of ‘banality’ – the blanket of the ordinariness that has typically characterized the everyday lives of most women in my lineage who lived before me as well as others whom I have encountered in various stages of life, as I ponder and relate to, in certain aspects with the character of Feroza Begum from a wonderful read – The Begum and the Dastan, where Tarana Hussain Khan pours her heart out with some flamboyant vocabulary along with a vivid description of the Dastan of Feroza Begum, coming alive through the narration of Ameera’s grandmother espousing the girl’s amusement as well as undivided attention.

Feroza Begum’s predicaments, her whims and caprices, her wild, obstinate tantrums, her helplessness, her haplessness as well as her retaliation, are all relatable, endearing and loathsome, all at the same time, placing her, my grandmother, Ameera, Ameera’s grandmother, the author, me and a host of other women in a similar prismatic microcosm, despite temporal spatial, social and cultural discrepancies. It all struck me more and the whole world came boiling down into one giant cocoon, more so like the pavement traps where all of the women seemed to be suffocating in paradoxical realities, struggling to breathe, as well as putting up a face against the world outside, while still suffering every day with the perennially assailing inner demons, when Khan mentioned about Feroza’s trepidation at the “banality of the years stretching ahead” – as she looked at the frontage of her new palace, where she was forcefully brought by the Nawab’s orders, despite her ‘noble birth’ and all the privileges she was proud of. But she slowly gives in to her new situation and even craves for the Nawab whom she initially loathed, which again is part of another dimension of thought and happening.

As I progressed into the succeeding length of the book, this being my fifth read within the course of the past month, as I was struggling with the enigma of being, as well as a hitherto unprecedented identity crisis, Feroza’s tale became more alluring, as also the story placed her at the center-stage of a Dastan which transcended the boundaries of space and time, engulfing the struggles of Ameera, who was dealing with her own insecurities as a teenager living in the 21st century, carrying the burden of a forgotten legacy, while her father neglected the payment of her school fees, while never leaving an occasion to dote on his son, her mother who was slowly becoming indifferent to most events around her, as also oscillating back to Feroza and the other women characters in the story – her sister Gauhar, Bua, Daroga Chamman, Layla, the maid servant and others, all floating in some mid-air bubble of either ignorance, consciousness, hope or lack of it.

But all of the women in my imagined microcosm are not ones who surrender willingly or passively to the escapades of fate. Feroza still resists being a prisoner, despite her fundamental condition of being entrapped within the confines of the bejeweled walls of the palace – she views the Nawab as the man who destroys her whole world, despite her gradual yearning for his presence – but she yearns for him only in the absence of her former husband, as she craves for the presence of a man when she wakes up in the morning. Feroza distinguishes herself from any other women in the harem, and consciously so. She never ‘surrenders’ to the demands of the Nawab, and even insists on calling the Nawab by his first name, Shams, a situation that her mother desired – an equal partnership – something that no one in the Nawab’s harem ever ‘dared’ to aspire.

But Feroza and the women in my prism of imagination were forward looking and ambitious in an ambit where they stood out or stand out because the other women never dared or never willed.

But their world too, is banal, as banal as the worlds of the rest of the women, all wrapped in the confines, upheavals and vicissitudes of family, society and life. This banality is what is dreary, deadening.

But they still continued and continue to fight their battles, seamlessly striving to counter the persistent and unchanging ordinariness of their lives, ruminating on how their lives could be different, had they dared a little more than they did, sometimes giving in to their realities, other times, not.

(Author: Swaswati Borkataki is an independent researcher and writer)