Unwritten rules of womanhood

I meet them everyday on the bus to work: young mothers with little children, hauling toddlers, toys and prams, checking and rechecking that they have remembered everything. It makes me smile sometimes, and worry at others, that the images I see here, in Dublin, in the heart of the developed world, are little different from those I see every day back home in Lucknow, the bustling state capital of India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh.

Childcare, as a viable option for working mothers, still has to evolve as an answer there, leaving working mothers hostage to the whims and fancies of child-minders, usually called ayahs, who fill in during work hours. And they are the luckier ones - it is only better-off women who can actually afford professional childcare. Yet people tell me it's not so different here.

The pressure of urban living in India's metropolitan areas has led to the creation of creches, but in the smaller cities, the idea of leaving a child in a creche remains anathema to Indian society. This, along with the crumbling of the extended family, leaves young mothers with few options. To the cynical eye, India must seem a rude, chaotic world: overpopulated, under-educated, a blazing effigy of urban hell - at least it would seem so in the scorching 48 degrees of summer. And yet it entices people, drawing them hypnotically closer to the searing vortex, marking visitors forevermore with impressions of diverse cultures and a warm, vibrant people.

Lucknow, known for its architectural heritage, its culture, its craft and cuisine, is a city with one foot in the past, the other in the present. And it is with that background that I view things I see here, often noticing the striking similarities, the glaring discrepancies between the two worlds.

I wonder if, like us, working mothers here find the pressure of being supermom at home and ultra efficient at work saps their energy. I would love to know why the better halves of the population, here as well as back home, are content to remain the bitter halves - sulking, moping, coping but never emerging as a tour de force to pressurise authorities into developing real options.

Between remembering dentists' appointments and delivering impeccable presentations at work, has today's woman distanced herself from her femininity, viewing it more as a bother than an asset? I would ask working mothers here: how many roles do you play? And I would compare their tallies to those at home. For role playing comes naturally to women everywhere - in India as elsewhere in the world. And survival is often governed by a set of unwritten rules that must be remembered at all times if a modern woman is to survive India.

Rule No.1: You are not a career woman

This seems absurd at the outset. If you're working, you are one, aren't you? But to admit to being a "career woman" is akin to treason. If you're single, you'll be "singled" out as trouble, for no decent Indian family would want a "career woman" as a daughter-in-law. If you're married, your husband will be treated to a lot of sympathy and patronising looks from the moment you tie the knot. You can admit to being a doctor, a teacher, a bungee jumper or even a journalist (yes, alas, we're not rated very high up on the marriage market) but never use the word "career woman" to describe yourself. Not unless you want to be stereotyped as a hard, calculating, scheming creature who was morphed from an alligator - and a particularly vicious strain of the species on one of God's bad days, at that.

Rule No. 2: You love family gatherings

You don't, actually. You can think of nothing worse than a horde of in-laws (or even your own family, for that matter) descending upon you without a month's notice (even employees are allowed that!), but be prepared to gush about how much you loved that visit by your mother-in-law's brother-in-law's cousin's aunt with a brood of kids bang in the middle of the children's exams. This rule applies to all of your husband's friends, in-laws of your in-laws and anyone remotely associated with "that" side of the family. Failure to comply can result in disastrous consequences which even your greatgrandchildren would hear about.

Rule No. 3: You love festivals

This comes close on the heels of Rule No. 2. You can't be Indian and not rejoice in the country's various festivals, many of them linked more to the changing seasons and the celebration of crops than to religions as such. Enjoy the firecrackers on Diwali, the festival of lights, usher in spring with Holi, the festival of colours, rejoice in the end of the long winter with Lohri or participate in the maddening mayhem of Durga Puja in Calcutta.

You can't be in India for a month and not witness some major or minor festival, each arriving with demands for different savouries and desserts and religious observations. After a while you just learn to love it as a wondrous break in the monotony and mediocrity of everyday living.

Rule No. 4: You love children

You don't. You can't think of anything worse than a saliva-dripping, snotty-nosed monster screaming his lungs out in your silent, peaceful domain. But never say it, and especially not to any of his family. They'd be stabbed to the core that you don't want to be a part of the little guy's admiration society. You have to learn to hold, cuddle (if ever so gingerly), kiss and be kissed back by all the slobbery urchins in the family, so grin and bear it.

Also be prepared for people making very pointed queries and developing an obsessive interest in your midriff as days mingle into months after your marriage. You are in one of the world's most populous countries that is very proud of its reputation as one! And why would one wish to get married if not to have babies? But at the same time any extraneous details about "the birds and the bees" or any studious references to "the facts of life" are to be avoided at all times. For the country of the Kamasutra and Khajuraho, admissions of carnal desires are sacrilege.

Rule No 5: Remember your roots

This phrase is so often repeated that after the nth repetition you tend to feel like a 100-year-old gnarled banyan tree springing out external roots. It is a loose reprimand and may have been sparked off either by something as trivial as listening to Madonna's latest album or some more serious indiscretion on your part.

To be Indian is to love all the myriad moods and moments of this vibrant nation, revel in its festivals, mourn in its riots, reverberate in its warmth and pulsating intensity. On a more serious note it entails obligations on your part to respect and if possible carry the cultural and religious obligations of your ancestors into the next millennium. While there are those who love to deviate from the norm, others will adhere to it more rigidly and avoid the gourmet dishes laid out on the supermarket shelves to search for vegetarian/non-beef/non-pork products. While a rebel is not necessarily ostracised, a conformist will be respected and left alone. That is the one beauty of this nation of diverse cultures - a respect for alien cultures that is deeply inherent and shines through at the most tumultuous phases in our history.

But as a member of the Muslim community you are generally faced with a larger degree of constraint than usual. Enjoying a drink in public requires a certain degree of foolhardy recklessness, especially if the accompanying cocktail snack happens to be a pepperoni! Few, I admit, would like to bite the bait - in public at least. But rebels exist everywhere, and I am glad that I am one.

Survival for me as a journalist has been easier than existence as a modern Muslim woman with two young children in a city steeped in culture and confining traditions, often claustrophobically so. Journalists everywhere, as in India, live in a maddening, chaotic world punctuated by deadlines and exposes.

As a non-practising Muslim, the decisions are tougher - educated in a convent of the Loreto order with Irish nuns, I do not find the choices before me as simple or as easy as a lot of women from my faith do. This is why I often find myself struggling with choices, the hardest being the quandary of whether to bring your children up as Muslims or Indians? I have settled for the latter, preferring to screen out the hatred and irrationality of communal conflict from their lives, to enable them to grow in a multi-religious India.

Unfortunately, it often means screening them from a large chunk of their culture, alienating them from their ethnic roots to mentally condition them to evolve in a more tolerant society. And I am often left questioning that decision. But there was little choice. Islam as a religion can be extremely restricting in issues of faith, contraception and family planning. There is often no middle path.

It was the images of veiled women, struggling with babies, that prompted me to chart a different course for myself, and opt for a destiny where I had more say in my life. In more ways than one, I am glad I made that choice. I was surprised to find the same images here, reflected in the harassed faces of young mothers struggling alone to cope with pressures that would sap the energy from anyone.

And it made me wonder - how long before they start to turn away from a system that denies them an equal existence?

Shirin Khan is on work experience with The Irish Times as part of the Chevening scholarship programme at the University of Westminster.