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Women on Women

by Shobhita Thakur
(Pune, India)

I don’t know why I love Fran Lebowitz so much; she hasn’t written anything consequential in decades. She literally almost always repeats herself on every show, yet I find her so damn entertaining. She is the polar opposite of Kim Kardashian, and yet oddly similar in the way she causes an addictive consumption of herself among her ardent viewers. A year ago on Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show, in her classic poker-face style, she said, “I am good for the environment because I have no children, which are, by the way, very bad for the environment…” This I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude just won’t fly in India not now, not ever, I guess. When the national capital has already turned into a gas chamber, stating this fact aloud might land you in trouble with the far right.

Well, national politics isn’t what led me to reflect on my long-standing decision to remain child-free; the national, unofficial council of aunties did. As a struggling filmmaker, I practically divide my time among three major cities known for their highly skilled and educated demographic. I never expected that the sheer act of choosing to get married would hand out a free licence to nosy aunties, buas, didis, and chachis from the extended family to start dropping probing, judgmental missiles at me during every family gathering.

I have been married for quite a number of years, long enough for my presence, without a young, annoying thing hovering around me, to be considered a sour visual. This sudden “poor her” sentiment emboldened one of the didis, who works in the field of clinical research in one of the metro cities, to offer me unsolicited, point-blank advice that I should adopt a child in the future. She was shockingly conclusive; her clithead-on-purpose skipped a tiny but very important fact that you have to gather data first and then conclude.

In Indian society, especially among women, it is hard to digest the fact that there are happy women very much alive and breathing who may never feel maternal. In another incident, far more caustic in tone, an older female relative conclusively declared that women who do not love animals and children are, in fact, witches. At that moment, I had to fight the urge to add plants to her list, but I let it go. Knowing that I am a plant killer too, she would have banned me from all family gatherings which would have deprived me of delicious Bengali food. So I played along and acted dumb. Who wants to give up delicious food that lands on your plate straight without having spent a single minute in the kitchen.

Back in my film school days, one of my friends and I would often walk and talk on our way to the evening film screenings at the National Film Archive of India (NFAI), Pune. In one of those conversations, she confessed almost obsessively about dreaming of having a golu-molu baby by her side. She spoke excitedly about how much fun it would have been if the baby were present during her shoots, screenings, and everything else right on campus to witness her life. Her boyfriend at the time showed no interest in the idea. She was so deeply in love with the idea of the baby that not having a husband seemed perfectly acceptable to her.

Unfortunately, even in 2011, our society refused to be non-judgmental or to stop inserting itself into the deeply personal decisions of women. That conversation stayed with me for a long time afterward. Forget having a baby I have always struggled to understand the utterly futile concept of having monthly periods. Although I have been fortunate enough to have the easiest periods all my life, it is hard to ignore the massive design flaw and sheer liability of it all. Whoever designed the female reproductive system must have fallen asleep during the process and later been too lazy to revisit it for corrections. Who knows, perhaps it was a sarkari employee, operating on a lifelong sab chalta hai policy.

If only it were an efficient design with scientific precision, it would have at least solved the problem of losing five long days of great sex, not that period sex isn’t good. But the excessive preparation with towels and bedsheets turns it into a chore. And afterward, you are left with bloody laundry. Better to avoid it altogether than to turn into a dhobi.

Talking of bloody periods takes me further back in time when at Film Club of Bharat Bhavan (Bhopal) I watched Cries and Whispers for the very first time. I was thrilled to see a filmmaker daring to show a woman mutilating her vagina and smearing the blood on her mouth as an act of rebellion on screen in a very Bergmanian way. A sophisticated seventy five- ish man sitting next to me was so aghast he yelled “Badtameez” at the Swedish actress Ingrid Thulin playing Maria. It was the precise moment that became my real-life lesson in understanding the utter disgust men and women alike in our society have for the vagina and the blood that comes from it. Strangely enough In poetry and Indian sculpture, women’s breasts are lovingly celebrated, immortalised in stone and verse. And in real life? Let’s just say men have ensured they never fall out of cultural circulation. I wonder why such an absence from Indian art and the dirty status assigned to the vagina in real life. How easily and comfortably they forget that tiny golu-molu was swimming in the same detestable blood for nine months. Women remain untouchable for one and a quarter months after birth, while the baby is celebrated by all instantly. The casual disrespect and discarding of the body that brings new life into the world is striking. Even today, in my home state of Madhya Pradesh, I see senior women enforcing this disturbing ritual with strict devotion.

My decision to exercise my free will and remain child-free is not only religiously policed by female relatives or the building society’s nosy aunties; it is subjected to a far more performative moral audit by Instagram’s proudly multitasking goddesses, who have very carefully curated lives that function less as lived experience and more as virtue-signalling brands. Their relentless feeds normalize a glossy checklist of must-haves: a handsome, army-candy husband; a jet-set lifestyle; a cuddly cat or dog; a child or two for emotional optics; a meticulously styled home that resembles an art gallery, dishing out yummy meals in between work calls; and an impossible career punctuated by Insta-worthy milestones. Essentially, it is an envy-inducing life, meticulously engineered to appear effortlessly abundant forever auditioning for a feature on Open Door AD. These are the same women who live-tweet scathing takes on Meghan Markle’s cooking show, a show that contains barely any actual cooking; using her celebrity as convenient bait for likes. Publicly, they perform aspirational disavowal, calling her fake, calculated, and insufferable. Privately, they would trade places with her in a heartbeat.

I often wonder whether, in all this chaos, there is any space left in the real world for profoundly inefficient women like me, those who can barely perform one task at a time, who zone out so completely that we don’t just burn food, we come dangerously close to setting the entire kitchen on fire. Interestingly, when I was a film student in class, a female film appreciation professor at FTII, Pune, dropped her gyan with such confidence and ease that she declared anyone who did not know and enjoy the art of cooking could never become a good filmmaker. She scared me to death. I had always known the kitchen was the bane of my existence, and suddenly I was flooded with regret. Why the hell had I avoided it like the plague? Perhaps I truly didn’t stand a chance of becoming a filmmaker after all.

And then I turn to Fran Lebowitz for comfort and hope. She looks like she has been around since the Stone Age. She has successfully avoided marriage, children, the internet, social media, smartphones, and cooking. In spite of or perhaps because of all this, she has effortlessly aced the game of enduring fame. She is a masterclass in monetizing a brand that is the absolute antithesis of everything that constitutes fast-selling influencer culture. And funnily enough, in this endless deluge of online gibberish, Fran has never suffered from what Ben Gutmann so perfectly calls “talker’s block.”

What if inefficiency is not a personal flaw or failing but a deliberate slowing down. And whether opting out of kitchens, of hustle, of curated perfection is not about winning at life at all, but about protecting the inner life where art, thought, and honesty are still allowed to exist without needing to perform constantly. Maybe the point was never to keep up, but to stay inward long enough for something honest to form.