An eye-opening incident occurred in 2002 when we were visiting villages in Mehrauni block of Lalitpur district, Uttar Pradesh, to talk to women during their afternoon break from their backbreaking work as agricultural labour.
The women sat around in groups in someone’s barandah or outside someone’s house. We joined them to chitchat and our talk invariably veered around to answering their queries. Were we married, they asked, did we have children?
They laughed uproariously at some of their own questions. Like, how did our husbands allow us to travel so far to their. . .
