Anniamma

Anniamma tells me her life would make for a wonderful movie script and the movie would definitely be a super-hit. I try to avoid the tears and the pain as she says this.

Anniamma is 29 years old. Of all the women, I have spoken to, she was the only one who made her children people for me. She called them by their names. Arun and Mani. They were not just numbers to feed or care for in the daily routine called life.

After being thrown out of two homes where people did not want to talk to me, her inviting smile eased me as she agreed to answer my questions, terribly insignificant ones in the face of her life, as it unfolded before me.

I ask her what she does in her free time. She laughs and tells me there is no such thing. I persist. I ask her if she sat around and talked to the other women after work. No, I don't. People don't talk to me. They tell me I have lost my jati and that's why they will not talk to me.

And before I know it, I am privy to details about a life of a woman I am unlikely to ever meet or make a difference to. Anniamma is maaried, she says, to her husband's younger brother because the former died from being afflicted with HIV. And as is custom, she lost any rights she had to the house she lived in with her first husband. Her other brother-in-law took the house away, sold it and didnt pay her a penny. (Inheritance laws are not for poor women)

As she sits facing me and the road, she is constantly looking out. She wants to show me her daughter. The daughter who does not acknowledge her as mother. Who lives with her uncle across the road. Her daughter walks past us as she gets ready to do the day's cooking. Anniamma tells me that a child' heart is like stone and a mother's like a flower. I cry looking at my daughter who is no longer my daughter, she says.

I do not ask all the questions swimming in my head, despite my valiant efforts to not have them even exist. I am wondering, despite myself, about the details. How did the estrangement happen? Why did the daughter choose her uncle over her mother? Was the "sin of sexual incest" something she could not "forgive" her mother of? Or is her "unforgiving stance" because her mother left her behind when she ran away with her lover?

But I ask none of them. I keep begging her to stop, in my head. I am telling her that I cannot handle more of these stark contradictions, the injustice, my helplessness. Please stop. Anniamma asks me if I would like to see her dead husband's photo. I quickly say no. But she persists and hands me a happy photo of her, her dead husband, her estranged daughter, her dead niece and her young son. Standing in front of a bush with pink and purple flowers in Majestic. My eyes glaze over as I try desperately to maintain the distance. Her words keep chipping away at this barrier I've constructed that helps me go on with the farce called research.

I can no longer take it and I try to shift the conversation to lighter things. I ask, quite casually, if she had her dinner. Since everyone else around seemed to be eating. She tells me then that she does not have wood to light the stove, no food to eat, no money to buy them. So the fires are out today, she says.

With that, I had to leave before she could tear down my barrier anymore. I mutter my thanks and leave but not before she has this to say: "If God can't look after us and give us a good life, why does he not just end this life?"

I am told that research does not entail action. I must not hold myself to obligations. That I do my research, get out of there and help later when I can. Anniamma exposed and laid bare the fallacy of this reasoning for me.