Twenty years ago, we attended the wedding of a petite, carefree, intelligent girl, a commerce graduate, barely out of her teens. Looking radiant, she could not stop smiling on her wedding day. After that, she had little to smile about. Her husband and father-in-law (till his death a few years later) spent most of their earnings on liquor.
Within the next four years, she had given birth to a son and a daughter. And two more wine shops had opened in an area close to their house.
She could not go out to work as her frail mother-in-law could not take care of the children. Her husband had become abusive and resisted being taken to a rehabilitation centre. He died when the children were in middle school, after being in and out of government hospitals for two years.
Looking me straight in the eye, she said with a sad smile, “Only after his death, things got better for us. I was able to take up a job to support my family.” She worked as a receptionist in a private hospital. When she was 45, after much effort, she managed to get a government job.
There are thousands of similar stories.
At a counselling workshop addressing problems faced by college students, an alarming number of girls confided that their fathers’ alcoholism and domestic abuse suffered by their mothers were ruining their lives. In a Spoken English class with 20 students, the simple exercise of speaking about their families became traumatic for two of them who had alcoholic fathers and another two who had lost their fathers to alcoholism. An exceptionally motivated, intelligent, visually challenged girl, educated in a government-run special school, was desperate to take up employment to support her family. Her father was an alcoholic and her brother was becoming one.
We don’t have to go looking for young and older women whose dreams became nightmares. Forced to discontinue their education, they work as household help or saleswomen. Their destiny is shaped not by their aspirations but by the alcoholism of fathers, husbands and brothers. They are everywhere. Apparently, now a far wider circle and much larger number suffer with no hope.
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