No medals for those who love and fear.

By Sashwati Bora.

Husband and I had just reached Mhow for his course when I felt quite adventurous one day and decided to make rotis along with the rest of the meal. It was something that I had never tried before but I figured, how hard could it be, right? (As it turned out, very). So I set about mixing the flour with water and then used a belan (a rolling pin) to give my hapless dough some kind of shape. Burnt finger, burnt rotis (yes, in plural) later, I sat on the floor, almost on the verge of tears, realising to my horror that I had become a caricature. I was the “woman with the belan”, immortalised in comic strips and not even a very good one at that.

“Why? Why? Why was I doing this to myself?”

I wondered through tears of frustration. I could have worked and created things and instead, I left my job and I was here, trying to do something I wasn’t even good at.

The answer, of course, was right in front of my eyes with his nose firmly buried in his book. I was doing it for my husband so that he can study for two months peacefully without having to worry about how our home functions during this time.

In the Mhow Cantonment, I am amazed to see the amount of responsibility women take on – from buying groceries to taking care of children to working from home – doing every small thing in and outside the house all alone. Women holding the fort while their husbands study. After all, being spouses or partners is built on the idea of love and shared responsibility. Barring, of course, those times when one person has to step up for the other.
What I also see among these army wives is the desire to find meaningful camaraderie – women bonding over the dailyness, the all knowingness of what the other person is going through. Friendships among the army wives are reliable and, above all, easy, comforting, constant. This is a tribe of women whose friendship can see us through success and failures, marriage and children, joys and losses. In each other, we find respite, recognition, conversation and that comfort that our lives, our struggles and experiences are so closely interwoven. In the stories of other army wives, we find traces of our own.

Of course, it is not all joy and light in paradise. There is no denying the fact that some women don’t get along with some other women sometimes. There are petty jealousies, arguments, power struggle, even loss of friendship among the army wives, much like anywhere else. However, I choose to be quite optimistic and believe that for every negative story, there are also many hopeful ones. From my own experience, my first “First Lady” was someone who set an example for me quite early on. A doctor by profession, she always encouraged us to work and be financially independent, never making unnecessary demands on us that we couldn’t fulfill. She was always helpful, always there if we ever needed her, and to me, she is everything that a leader is supposed to be. Even now I remember her with respect and fondness and that I believe is and should be the tradition of the army wives – of genuine concern and respect for each other, no matter what our husband’s rank, the tradition of kindness, of helpfulness, of shared humanity.

When you are married to a fauji, one question you get asked often is, “You are so strong. How do you do it?” I tell anyone who asks, that on most days, I am not strong. On most days, my heart is in my throat. But I do see brave army wives all around me. I see brave army wives who live alone or with children away from their husbands. I see brave army wives who pack their entire world into boxes at a moment’s notice. I see brave army wives who are unable to talk to their husbands for days. I see brave army wives even surviving unspeakable loss. In all of this, however, I also see brave army wives making hard choices every day, be it deciding to leave their jobs and moving to the most interior places or staying on in one place to work and provide for their families, away from their husbands.

All of us come from different walks of life, all of us have different backgrounds and education and stories. However, there is one fierce link that connects us all: it is this realization that the things we pray for have changed over the course of being an army wife – now we all desperately just want our husbands to come home to us safe. And when the said husband gets up from his desk to give me warm water for my stomach ache without being asked to, I know I will sit on the floor and make world – map shaped rotis for him a thousand times more.