Cyclones and Wet Nurses

 Last night cyclone Sitrang rang through the gaps in my windows. I wondered if I would be able to sleep. The weather was not too violent in Dhaka, though I was able to spend the evening and night inside. I'm sure for many it was a rough night. 

A flooded road in Dhaka on 10/24/2022.
My neighborhood does not look like this. 

The hardest hit part of the country, along the southeastern coast on the Bay of Bengal, is where almost a million Rohingya refugees are resettled in camps, having fled Myanmar's repressive regime. They have been moved to islands and coastal areas, and are not free to leave these areas. These areas were hit hardest by the cyclone, and some areas received 12 inches of rain yesterday. Here is where I read about it.

This morning in the breakfast room the students were happy. No school! I think the city must be too wet, and transportation must be too tricky, for most to get to school with reasonable effort. The architecture students were happy that their quiz was cancelled. 

I brought the short story "The Wet Nurse" to the breakfast table, hoping to finish it. It's a story that was offered in a workshop on South Asian women's literature at Bread Loaf this summer, with Dr. Marjorie Sabin and her husband. Each week Dr. Sabin would discuss a short story. Given the quantities of writing otherwise assigned for credit-bearing classes, I didn't read any of the stories in their entirety. I brought my print-out of this story with me here because it's an Indian author, Mahasveta Devi, and was originally written in Bangla. 

The story is about Jashoda, a woman whose breasts produce copious amounts of milk. She becomes employed by a richer family as a wet nurse for all the wives' children, which helps the women bear lots of children but not lose their physical beauty, which is important to their husbands. 

This is how we are introduced to Jashoda: 

"Jashoda never had the time to decide whether she could or couldn't tolerate motherhood. Interminable motherhood was the only way she could keep her large family alive. She was a professional mother; it was her career. She was not an amateur in the game like the women in the bhadralog, babu households. After all this world is the monopoly of professionals. The city has no time for amateur beggars, pickpockets, or whores; even the street dogs and crows hanging around trash cans, tempted by the garbage, will not yield an inch of their territory to an amateur newcomer. And so, perforce, Jashoda took up motherhood as a profession."

Mahasveta Devi

I am reminded how lucky and privileged I am as a woman to be able to choose not to be a mother, and to have sources of motivation in my life that do not involve the safety and feeding of my family. The story was written in 1977, so Jashoda's experience is not very remote. Even now motherhood is compulsory for so many women. I wonder how many of my female students can conceive of a future without motherhood, and how many of them would want such a future. 

Well, Jashoda dies, used up, disregarded and alone, of breast cancer. She suckled so many of those around her, and in the end no one wants to take responsibility for her welfare. She is mother to all, but no one fills the role of caretaking child. And it is her sickly breasts that finally end her life. Well, if that isn't a metaphor for how deadly the compulsory role of motherhood is, I don't know what is. 

It makes me think of the first episode of The State of the Union, where the wife asks her husband if he'd rather not go into marriage counseling, and be like a cancer patient who doesn't want someone to poke around inside their body. He says he absolutely wants to avoid the poking. She says that's how cancer kills. You have to go in there and have "a bit of a poke". 

Marriages don't die all at once, she says. They've been sick for a while before they go. Women must be the same way, according to Jashoda's experience. We can live under ill conditions for a long time before the sickness takes over all function. 

It's really too bad the rest of this mini mini series is not available in my current location.