Hallucinating the Future
“It’s 1969, Lucknow, India. A woman in her thirties wearing a sari is smoking a hand-rolled cigarette filled with Prince Henry tobacco. Her wavy black hair is astray in the wind as she distributes wages to the dozen rickshaw pullers who constitute her first entrepreneurial venture. The next morning at 7, she drives her three young children and two of the neighbor’s kids to school in her green and beige Fiat, the only woman in a parking lot full of male chauffeurs. At night, she will return to the small pharmacy she has invested in and tally the daily income until closing time at 11 pm.
Those are images of my mother, the unlikely dissident who sparked my own departure from the status quo. She rewrote the narrative she might have inherited – the daughter of a patriarchal land-owning family must acquiesce to an arranged marriage, raise many children, and leave the future to her husband and destiny.
My mother was a study in contradictions- an obedient daughter who broke all the rules while appearing to abide by them. She refused to be just a dutiful wife and had no regard for public opinion. She was stubborn and had a superhuman ability to handle failure. Nonchalantly defying the odds, my mother earned a medical degree late in her fifties after founding the first private hospital in the city. I rarely saw her cry or bemoan her lot, even as we struggled financially in the early years. When she was denied loans to start her business because banks didn’t lend to women, she took a risk and hocked her own jewelry, the most precious asset owned by an Indian family. This incredible and selfless woman, unglamorous and naïve about anything outside of her small city, was the one who taught me to question the status quo and take on the world.”
