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| Out of the Shadows Single. Indian. Woman. Here's the poignant story of one from this ever-increasing tribe who confronted a painful conflict-- to please her parents or retain her free spirit By Mridu Khullar Think stereotypes, and you’ll have a variety to choose from. Americans are obese, ignorant and arrogant. The English drink tea, talk posh and assume they’re better than you. Africans are uncivilized. Italian men are womanizers. And Indian women who live alone are morally flawed. I am one such morally flawed woman. But I wasn’t always this way. Like many other single women caught in the web of stereotypes, where deviating from the path set out for us by our families is considered outlandish, I stopped listening to the voice of my heart, and started listening to the voices of so-called reason instead. So when I turned 23, I let go of my dreams of flying solo, exploring the world and being independent, and got ready for the idea of marriage instead. After all, wasn’t that automatically the ambition of every twenty-something girl’s life? A few months before I would take the final plunge though, I got the opportunity to venture out on my own to unfamiliar surroundings. I don’t know what happened there—whether it was the realization that I could never begin to understand the world until I’d first understood myself, or whether my few moments of liberation convinced me that this was the life I was supposed to live, or whether the inching closeness of the finality of my fate put me face-to-face with the truth. Whatever it was, left no room for doubt. By the time I came back, I had made up my mind. I couldn’t get married. How could I fulfill someone else’s needs when I hadn’t yet figured out my own? I couldn’t live a lie and become part of a system I neither understood nor believed in. I had to take charge of my own destiny. * For the complete story, please contact Mridu. |
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