I have known Daniya Alvi for months now. I remember the first time I went to her place clutching a piece of paper where I had scribbled her address in Kalamahal that her teachers at the Jama Masjid No. 2 school gave me. She came downstairs to see who had come looking for her. She had been preparing for her Class 12 board examinations and I thought she'd get anywhere. She had been struggling to fund her studies then. And then I met her a second time when the results came. And her mother told me she was planning to get Daniya married. And then I kept going to their little quarter, spending time with the family, noting down the frustration in Daniya's life, and convincing them this wasn't the best decision. On the last day of our visit, when we were sitting in her grandmother's room, Asifa Alvi said in a flat tone that Daniya woldn't be studying further, that it wasn't the tradition in their family for girls to go for higher studies because eventually they had to look after their families.
And Daniya's face dropped. My photo editor kept the camera aside. The revelation was too much for me, too. I tried reasoning, keeping aside the principles of journalism that I had crammed at the university that you shouldn't get involved, and that you are an observer and you need to record things as they happened.
An edited version of the article appeared in the Indian Express on July 12, 2009.
I hope Daniya can still make it. I hope she can study.
Chinki Sinha
New Delhi, July 9, 2009
There she stands, on the dark stairs, perched between the two dreams. Seventeen-year-old Daniya Alvi could choose to run down the broken steps, break free, and be a rebel. If she could have spoken out, brighter paths would have opened.
Alvi passed the Class XII examinations from the Jama masjid Sarvodaya Kanya Vidyalaya No. 2, an Urdu medium school, in the Walled City, scoring 68 percent. She had hoped to go to college, and eventually become a teacher.
But she turned back, her small silhouette pronounced in the evening light that seeped in through the narrow opening, the one that took her home, to the confines of the one-room tenement she shared with her family, where she played the obedient daughter, the one who feigned happiness, and showed off her new clothes that are part of her trousseau with a hesitant smile, her hazel brown eyes restless. Here, she was living her family’s dreams.
But if you looked close enough, these were the eyes that conveyed a certain tenacity, even as they projected a sadness that perhaps captured her subdued dreams. She likes to think she’d still be able to study, that marriage isn’t an impediment, and that it is a necessary evil. She never mentions marriage, as if the plans they made about her and discuss so enthusiastically, doesn’t really involve her, or include her.
“What will be, will be. It’s okay. Maybe things will change and they will let me go to college,” she said.
In the stack of clothes, she pulls out from the almirah, there’s a blue sequinned kurta, a white lehenga, and a bright green silk kameez. Her father is stitching these for the daughter. When the results had come and he thougth Daniya would go to college, he had stitched a white kameez for her to wear to college. The purpose had changed now.
Alvi, who likes rock climbing and was a kabbadi champion at school, and participates in street theatre and mushairas, wrote her first poem on her mother Ruby Anwar, praising her for the hope she gave her daughters.
“She had to get married one day. The offer came and we said yes. I have faith in the boy,” Ruby said.
If Alvi had deviated from the destiny her family chose for her, she would be denounced, and tagged as the daughter who betrayed the family’s will, her grandmother’s wish that she be married off at an early age. Offers were pouring in, and life looked promising enough. Alvi didn’t protest. Not even a word. With her large brown, and translucent eyes, she just looked at her grandmother Asifa Alvi when she said that it wasn’t the family tradition for women to go for higher studies. Daniya had done her bit. It was now time for real responsibilities, Asifa said.
“Girls in our family don’t study beyond Class XII. She has learned her letters. The fate of a woman is to attend to her house. What is the point of collecting degrees when at the end, you have to cook and look after your children,” the 75-year-old grandmother said.
Alvi’s father Anwar Nafees just looked away. If he could, he would have sent her to college. But that afternoon, when the heat was oppressive, almost cruel, and there was stillness in the air, as he sat at the corner of the bed, his daughter by his side, he was helpless. His eldest daughter Arisha too had been married off after she passed her Class XII examinations.
“We obey our mother. My own limitations are such that I can’t do what I want,” he said.
The matriarch who lives downstairs, mostly sprawled on the bed on the side of the hall, draped in her white dupatta, not a strand of hair to be seen, is the one in command, and who decreed that the granddaughter be married to a young man, known to the family, and working as a travel agent. This was a seemingly good prospect for the family that fell on bad times after Alvi’s father lost his job, and then after a heart surgery had to give up on a food stall he ran near the family’s modest quarters in Daryaganj.
Now, the father, a poet at heart who can recite Urdu poetry penned down by the known and revered poets of the older times, as well as those written by his own uncles, while he stitches more new clothes for his daughter – a green satin churidar with sequins, a blue brocade kurta with frills, and a white salwar with pleats. After his ailment limited his options at earning a livelihood, he switched to tailoring and spends most of afternoons bent over a sewing machine, the fan whirring, and the television blaring news. He had wanted Alvi to become a news anchor. She is his chosen one, she is the one who completes the couplets as he recites them, and she is the one with a sweet voice, and an impeccable diction. Alvi is the one who can pronounce the Urdu words effortlessly, as if they came pouring out from her soul. And she is the one who has memorized all her father’s favorite poems.
Alvi hasn’t seen the prospective groom’s photographs. In front of her parents, under her mother’s stare, she doesn’t say much. Alvi, with her dark brown eyes, and long-flowing hair, isn’t curious either. It doesn’t become her to ask for it. That would be against the family traditions. When life throws surprises at you, you take it as you go, full of hope, and prayers.
“Inshallah, they will let me study,” she says.
They have told her the boy’s family would let her continue her studies. And the promise lingers in her imagination.
When they made the plans for her, they didn’t accommodate her own dreams. Alvi had battled the odds to pass the examinations through the results disappointed her. She had wanted more. But then, the circumstances had been such. Two of her family members died while the examinations were on and the family had too many visitors and too many obligations. She stayed up late in the nights, cramming from textbooks, translating notes from Hindi to Urdu, in the little kitchenette while the family slept in the adjoining room. Until the day her examinations began, she was taking tuitions. The Rs. 1,500 she brought home monthly was a relief. Because she was the eldest, and she was supplementing the family’s modest income, she had wanted to continue in the role. Her two siblings are still in school.
Alvi filled up the forms for admissions to the B. El. Ed. course in colleges. Her teachers had told her it was a safe bet and she would have no difficulty finding jobs after the course. A teaching job, with limited work hours, was something her family would let her take up, too.
These were human aspirations. College was the hope. She didn’t fill the admissions forms at Delhi University. At Jamia Millia Islamia, she didn’t get through.
“My name wasn’t there,” she said. “Other colleges I couldn’t check.”
Her mother said she wasn’t able to see the cut off lists while Alvi was out of town with her aunt. It just slipped off her mind.
And it didn’t matter now, she said.
Meanwhile Alvi stands between the dreams of two lives, awaiting the day these will unfold. She wasn’t happy then, while she sat next to her grandmother, listening to her as she charted her future. But she thought she might be someday. Who could tell?
"Destiny can surprise," she said. "It always does."
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