The Dancing Queens of Agartala
(thomas;2023-June-25)
Agartala is the capital of Tripura, a Northeast state that borders Bangladesh. There's a park in A. with models of all the beautiful (well, more or less) monuments in the state, so we decided to go and have a look. While we were in the then almost empty park, we were spotted by a group of around a dozen ladies in their end-30s/start-40s (spotting us was very easy as we were the only Western tourists around). So these ladies first sent over a delegation of two or three women with some Indian sweets for us but after a while they got a bit bolder and so we joined them.
It turned out all of them were well-heeled middle-class mothers of 18-year old boys who were at that very moment sitting an important school exam in biology, lasting for around four or five hours. They all had accompanied their sons to the school and now were waiting, killing time in that park with talking, eating lots of food and sweets, dancing... Towards us (aliens that we were) they were not in any way shy or reserved, quite to the contrary -- though they would never, ever have been so open and uninhibited if an Indian man had been present. So we did the same as they did, talked, ate and danced. It became clear that for these women the occasion of accompanying their sons to the exam was a rare moment of freedom, of being able to freely enjoy themselves for a few hours without being under the watchful, even controlling eyes of their menfolk and extended families. All of them were now "only housewives" though many of them had had well-paid jobs before marrying. For most of them, marriage had been an unavoidable event, something they simply had to accept while trying to make the best of it. And for some at least their marriage had become a sort of trap... no leaving the gilded cage, no intellectual escape, no independence. And yet, for all that, they all were, like only Indians can be, full of joy, exuberance, life. Amazing.
Want to read more? Go back to The Dharmanagar Boys or go on to Lakshmi in Imphal or go up to Meet the Locals
$updated from: Blog.htxt Mon 04 Mar 2024 16:04:39 trvl2 (By Vero and Thomas Lauer)$