Somebody asked me recently, “Are you single?”
The question triggered off a chain of thoughts, further questions, dilemmas, uncertainties and more in me. I tried to get the exact import of the question. For me, a woman almost 29 years old, what does this question imply? Or, to put it more generally, what does this question imply for women like me? What does it imply in general, to any female? Or maybe to even men? (And the third gender? Would anyone ever bother to ask her) (I also increasingly felt surer that only the age was not the determining factor. What then?)
‘Single’ for a girl of 16 means having no boyfriend – no young male friend to go out on a date with, read poetry to, whisper over the phone late into the nights and at times dream about ‘settling down’ with …
‘Single’ for a woman of 25, especially if she is out of studies and not into any ‘career’, means not-yet-married …
For the ‘career’ woman though, ‘single’ at 25 would perhaps still imply no ‘commitment’ of future ‘settling down’ with any man …
But the moment she is close to 30, ‘single’ would start to imply not-yet-married …
And the legally married woman who perhaps stays away from home and family for a livelihood? Month after month, is she not ‘single’?
And the woman who has decided not to marry ever and stays by herself but is into a ‘steady’ relationship? Would she be considered ‘single’?
And the woman who supposedly had boyfriends at the right age, got married at the right age, but later broke out and then stays on her own? Single?
The widow?
The divorced woman?
The divorced woman into a relationship?
And the woman, who believes that notwithstanding all her social-legal relationships, she is emotionally single at the end of the day? Would we not grant her single-hood?
But then, I realized, this was not the neatly-charted-out-all-accommodating list; it could never be. The definitions of ‘single’-hood vary according to social and economic class, religion and region – there are surely more factors that would continue to inform it; however, I am yet to concretely figure those out at the moment.
We go 70 km away from the city and the figures start getting shuffled; the not-yet-married criterion probably already becomes valid by the time the subject is 22, irrespective of her ‘working’ status, only because she is bound to work, because working is not an option for her – else her family fails to manage to make the ends meet.
If one travels further away from the urban elite space and goes to the tribal villages that struggle to exist in the face of the grand developmental symbols we are thrusting on them, there are again revisions – and I am ashamed to say I do not know exactly how. But there are. Actually, the very notion of ‘single’-hood might not exist in certain registers after all. The notion itself arises from the socially ubiquitous and accepted expectation that ‘marriage’ (and a marriage that is to stay till death do them part) is a must, necessary and required part of life. Just make marriage optional, and the pressure of ‘single’-hood will dissipate to a large extent.
And for yet again the humbly middle-class or lower-middle-class woman who has lost her father, and who has more unmarried sisters in queue after her, and whose mother survives on the deceased husband’s meager pension, starts to surprise people by her ‘single’-hood if she is still unmarried at 24. Or maybe even while she is hoping to enroll for the masters degree.
But if her father has passed on a fortune to them before his death, nobody would think she was ‘single’ till she had crossed 28.
So then, I am not only the 29-year-old woman who is asked the question. There is more here than mere biological age. I am here floating between Ben Anderson’s "unbound serialities" – I occupy multiple subject-positions, a plurality of identities. I am female, come from a middle-class background, was born and brought up in a suburban town, convent educated (whatever that means), higher education took place in the city and then into got a decent job, father is still alive but has no fortune to pass on, mother a housewife who contributes to the family income by teaching at home, now am into academics, etc. And of course, all these descriptions are fluid and many are contingent too. Instance: the town was once-upon-a-time suburban and had large areas covered with dense forests. It is now shedding its greenery fast and factories and colleges and management institutes are coming up like grass shoots during the monsoons. My father is still alive but no man is immortal. I have had three jobs till now, but there always has been decent job-less gaps between each. And I have never been able to figure out for good if I am an elite or a subaltern.
In fact I have started feeling that since this dichotomous rendition of society as elite and subaltern began as a politico-historical project, it perhaps should be allowed to stay at that; extending it beyond that, to the domains of culture, the existential, the everyday for that matter, is reductive – it clearly leaves out a vast number of people and becomes a subaltern rendition of the old two-valued logic. If the subalterns are only those living in the state identified rural spaces or pockets of the rural within cities, then I am not a subaltern. I lived in rented houses and later in an office flat my father obtained. Right now I live in a rented 250 sq feet one room-one kitchen place. I have never lived in shanties. However, I have visited one quite a few times, in order to meet some of my relatives who lived there. If subaltern people cannot afford going to convent schools, I am not a subaltern. I studied in an English-medium convent school. I was also punished a few times when teachers caught me talking in Bangla. Yet again, this convent school is not in any remote way akin to the convents located in contemporary city spaces – it was quite humble – children of municipal sweepers and low-end government employees attended it, as did daughters of general managers of private companies – and its humility at times accounted for its bursts of authoritarian domination. If again subaltern means yearning to join the elite brigade, I am not a subaltern. If elites are those whose lives are informed according to the logic of capital, who are singularly bothered about obtaining and retaining hegemonic power, I am not an elite. If elitism is about refusing to grant the subaltern their status, I am not an elite. If elite means economic affluence, I never grew up in an elite family – I still remember the time when my mother used to light the unoon (mud stove) before cooking each meal separately (no gas oven, no refrigerator), and at times it used to take up to half an hour to light it up. Yet, they never complained if it came to spending for our education or health. Either I am neither-subaltern-nor- elite, or I am both – floating in and out like the möebius strip. Fluid subjectivites and mobile identities. Affiliations and filiations are to different registers and at times they lie in mutual contradiction.
Coming back to the question of ‘single’-ness, how does such a fluid subject confidently say a 'yes' or a 'no' to the posed query? How can she know that even the answer is not shifting? It’s a question of how I see things, how I view life, how I have tried to design my life for me, what are my priorities, who am I, how should I live? Moments vary and so do emotions. Yes, as far as I am a subject of the nation-state, certain identities are to remain fixed, immutable – my sex, my date of birth, my Permanent Account Number, my Unique Identity code, my place of birth, my religion (it can be changed of course, but once it’s been changed it gets fixed again), names of my parents, date of matriculation, of graduation, my thesis registration number, my legal marital status, my legal divorce date, the date of birth of my children, my date of death …
The more fixed and unambiguous these data are, the better a citizen I am. But caught within these webs of data, statistics and details of government information, I failed to answer if I am single …
Socrates began it … it till continues …
The search …
Who am I?
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