These chelas are actually darogas, the hereditary servants who are the illegitimate offspring of a thakur with a daori, or female servant. The girls who were born to daoris were mostly killed at birth; the rest were either given away as dowry during the weddings of their legitimate daughters to chiefs and nobles, or married to other chelas.
The nobles, chiefs and thakurs housed the daoris in separate accommodations, often on the fringes of the havelis. Apart from serving as concubines for these thakurs, the daoris also doubled as rudaalis, or mourners, for the family in times of death and sickness.
.. “Women’s brains are hardwired to feel loss and grief. They have a weak heart,” the Thakur says, patting his chest under his kurta. “We don’t allow the women in our families to make a sight of themselves outside our homes. High-caste woman do not cry in front of commoners. Even if their husbands die, they need to preserve their dignity. These low-caste women, rudaalis, do the job for them. The whole village feels the loss . . . She represents their sadness,” he says, concluding his speech, and the chelas furiously nod their heads, as if mentally applauding him.
.. “Do they live with their families or—”
“No, no,” interjects the Thakur before I can finish the question. “They live in their own kutiya near the haveli. These women have no family. We are their family. The whole village is their family. Once they leave their home and come as a gift to me in marriage, they never go back, even to visit. They have to live with us in the village and serve us menfolk.
.. “Can I meet them?”
“No, madam, our women have to preserve their lajja,” he answers immediately, as if the possibility of such a feat had never been considered before. “They can’t be out in the open. It is their duty to take care of the children and men of the households. We don’t allow them to meet strangers. After all, we have to protect their virtue. You can ask me whatever you want to know. They are delicate fragile things . . .”
.. “Do you have any sisters?’ I ask the chela, a young boy with lost brown eyes.
“No, two were born to my mother, but died a few days after they were born. We don’t keep girl children, madam.”
.. Pushing the envelope a bit further, I ask one of the boys, “So is the Thakur your father?”
“No, madam, I only have a mother. We are not supposed to have fathers. My mother also never had a father,” he replies, in a low, even tone, his head slightly lowered.
.. “Do you know what the going rate for dowry is around here, madam?” he says in a mocking tone.
“It is six to eight kilos of gold at least. Plus, if you are from a rich family, you have to give them servants, cars, silver, welcome them with your heads lowered, and heed to their incessant demands. Last year, a girl’s wedding took place for the first time in this village in eighty years. She was among the few who survived. They tried to poison her but she vomited it out. So her family assumed that she was a gift from Lord Krishna and kept her.”
.. Where women’s participation in the public realm is carefully policed, occupying the position of a concubine gives them and their children access to the homes of rich landed men. They pray—to the god Bheruji, who himself was a lusty bachelor and loved seducing young girls, especially from lower castes—for these men to live long lives. In a way, they seize these cultural and religious practices to achieve dignity, which—otherwise, being landless, impoverished women—would not be accessible to them.
.. They also devised rituals where their high status and position was preserved, which translated into elaborate death rituals. Lamenters and mourners, hence, gained precedence, and unfortunate women who were widowed, impoverished or served as servants in the royal households were turned into rudaalis, or professional mourners. “The rudaali, somewhat “chose” her future the moment she survived her birth to a lower-caste mother,” murmurs Satar.
.. The rest sing praises in his memory.
“Yes, yes, he liked his moustache trimmed downwards,” says his barber.
“He helped me get my daughter married to his munshi’s son. What a great man!” whispers another.
“He did that without any commission?” asks another. “Just two kilos of gold and my three goats.”
.. But this is only the first session: the performance goes on for twelve days after a death. A longer mourning period better explains the family’s class denomination, and the more theatrical the act, the more it is spoken about in the neighbours’ homes.
.. “As long as a woman has a husband, she has esteem in the village,” says Feroja, one of the three rudaalis at the mourning. “With him gone, she has to cover her face from strangers, keep away from pujas and be the unlucky one who caused her husband’s death.”
Ingenious: Hope Jahren
.. I think that’s the fundamental difference between a plant and an animal, is that if an animal doesn’t like where it is, it can get up and move away. Plants have to stay there and take it. There are a lot of other differences between plants and animals of course, but I believe that seeps into everything about how different they are and I believe that I can look around me and see the things that stay. Better than a person who hasn’t devoted themselves to the same activities I have. I believe I know things about what it means to stay and endure and watch and grow.
.. You can do it too you know, look around you and think about the things that stay. And when you walk away, they’ll still be there and night will fall and rain will fall and the snow will melt and … in your mind you can inhabit another life and that’s the ultimate transcendence of yourself.
.. I have three older brothers and we went to my father’s laboratory in the evenings after school and we played in the laboratory while he graded or set things up for the next day or repaired the demonstrations. And we played with all the stuff, and he never, ever said “don’t touch that,” and we always wanted to take out the lasers and clap erasers in front of them.
.. Being in a laboratory was always just the most wonderful, comforting, familiar, happy, safe place—and I still feel that way.
.. When I got to college I learned very quickly that if I became a writer society would let me die on the street. And if I became a scientist I would always have a roof over my head and a job, and my labor would be something that people needed. That difference has always struck me as so arbitrary, because I was willing to put my soul into all those activities but it became very clear to me that society viewed one of them as important and one of them as optional. So, let’s think about that for a minute.
.. The most fulfilling thing that I hear about the book is that people tell me “I understood this stuff: I’m not a scientist but I understood it,” and they’re somehow surprised at that. Somehow along the way science stopped writing stuff that people could understand and we’ve somehow got the reader blaming themselves that they can’t understand it. I mean what a scam. So that gives me great joy, is that people will even say “I was told I’m not good at science” or “I never did any of this stuff, but gosh, I liked your book.
.. . We have this discomfort between enlightenment and romantic views of nature. Is it something that we manipulate or is it something that’s bigger and more expansive than we are? So who’s on top? In the romantic version, nature is bigger than we are, it knows more, it’s been here longer, it has ways of sustaining itself and healing itself that we cannot understand. In the enlightenment version, we’re able to control everything about nature, we can fix it, it’s our duty to make it yield, etc.
.. The real challenge is living with the dissonance
.. I love oak trees because there’s pretty much a species of oak that can live almost anywhere. They just seem so indestructible, and they just have so many things figured out that we don’t, like how to live on the planet for 100 million years without substantially wrecking everything or wrecking themselves. I wonder if we’ll be able to go 5 million more. So in some ways I feel like I can transcend all the stuff that human beings worry about, each other and money and how men and women treat each other, and all that kind of stuff. I feel like I can transcend that by looking at a being that figured it out.
.. . I call that the Costco effect. If you go buy 100 rolls of toilet paper you’re going to use toilet paper at your house very differently than if you’re buying it roll by roll.
.. It’s a different world when money is free. And thinking about a world where plants operate utterly unconstrained by that particular resource is very interesting. One thing that happens of course is that other things come into play. I mean if I quadruple your salary but I don’t give you any more vacation time, you can’t take that around-the-world tour even if it seems cheap to you, because you can’t get the time off. So now it’s not money that’s limiting; it’s time. Plants have a similar thing in that nitrogen can become limiting, water can become limiting when temperatures go up.
.. So I can say well, I won’t give these little guys water for a few days, and then I’ll measure how much they didn’t grow, and then I’ll compare the stress between them. But I’ve already projected my own assumption about what stress should be into that experiment—lack of growth. I’m having a lot of fun thinking really deeply about how subjective the experience of stress is.
.. I wanted to be a surgeon very, very badly. I didn’t have the money to go to medical school. Medical school is expensive, and graduate school in science—it’s free, and that’s the most important thing to tell people to make them be scientists. Law school is expensive, medical school is expensive, business school is expensive, graduate school in science is free with a capital “F.” So that’s why I didn’t go to medical school.
If Donald Trump Changed Genders
IMAGINE, for a moment, the presidential candidacy of a rich, brash real estate magnate and reality TV star named Donna Trump.
Quizzically coifed and stubbornly sun-kissed, she’s on her third marriage. There’s clear evidence that infidelity factored into the demise of the first, and among her children is one conceived when The Donna wasn’t married to the other parent.
Her sexual appetites have been prodigious, at least according to her frequent claims and vulgar cant. And she has a tendency — disturbing on its own, even more so in someone who aspires to civic leadership — to talk about men as sirloins and rump roasts of disparate succulence. She denigrates those who displease her on cosmetic grounds:
.. A young woman is supposed to be some sexual Goldilocks, finding a “just right” between frisky and frigid.
.. Now put those words in The Donna’s mouth instead. “What a hunk, that one,” she says of one of her sons. “If I weren’t happily married and, ya know, his mother. . . “
Have Evangelicals Who Support Trump Lost Their Values?
His personal morality is clear, not because of tabloid exposés but because of his own boasts. His attitude toward women is that of a Bronze Age warlord. He tells us in one of his books that he revels in the fact that he gets to sleep with some of the “top women in the world.” He has divorced two wives (so far) for other women.