Whenever she can find the time, my pal Rama makes it a point to watch Sex and the City, the blockbuster series about four single women in New York. ?They have great clothes, great salaries, great apartments and the men they date take them out to proper restaurants, not Chawla Chickun Inn,? she tells me. ?Somewhere, I need to know that some woman is living the dream.?
Rama came to Delhi about eight years ago, despite family opposition and her own fears that small-town girls were what the city ate up and spat out whole. Like so many of the single women I know, she?s under pressure to get married, to ?be settled?, and she isn?t averse to the idea. But it?s easier to choose her time and place ? and husband ? when she?s far away from home. It?s just one of the things she likes about being single in the city.
The glossy mag and the Hindi film versions of the Indian single woman are starkly different from reality. Most of the singletons you see here worry about makeovers and hair colouring issues, or how to decorate their home offices. Most of the singletons I know worry about rude auto drivers, how to afford an extra packet of Surf and Maggi, and when the landlord will cut off the water.
In Delhi and Mumbai, the biggest issues for single women are safety and accommodation. You work your way up from the shared flat or room to the single bedsit with a gloomy but unshared bathroom to the relative nirvana of the barsati ? and from there, who knows? If Lady Luck ? single herself, why wouldn?t she understand your problems? ? smiles on you, an entire flat might not be such a distant dream. Money smoothens the safe life: cars are safer than autos or buses, higher rents mean slightly more security. Until the bank balance catches up, though, most women struggle. A new lipstick, a larger pizza, cushions ? are all causes for celebration.
The single life in Mumbai implies gruelling working hours and home in the genteel slums known as PG accommodation. In Delhi, schizophrenia rules as you leave work in your crisp business suit and wait an hour for a bus, grateful for the cocktail snacks you grabbed that you fondly call dinner. In Calcutta, the lack of interesting men was a persistent theme on my last visit there. The women seemed so much brighter; the good men had left or married or were gay.
So why do the single life? Many of the women who struggle for concepts like ?space? when they?re squeezed into some anonymous building or ?freedom? when they?re tied to thankless jobs offer different answers.
It?s about bonding with new friends. It?s about taking on a city and wearing the I Will Survive T-shirt. It?s about getting away from the image your family wants you to fit into.
?Arre, yaar,? says Rama, switching off Sex and the City, ?it sucks sometimes. But it?s me who chose this for me, not my parents or my brother or some husband guy. It?s worth it.? And as she goes off, to heat up leftover cold Maggi and set the alarm that will wake her up at 4 am to fill buckets of water, it strikes me that she is one of the happiest women I know.
