As It Turns Out, I am Not a Goddess
With everything that's going on in my country right now, I can't help but across a post or two where Indian women are portrayed as representative of Hindu goddesses. I also see pictures of a certain woman who met a horrific end, with quotes and background art reflecting all the qualities she possessed that made her a goddess personified. To be honest, I feel a little guilty for not being more supportive of all the Indians who have stood up during these tough times in support of all half a billion Goddesses living in India. The sentiment seems right: we worship women during the day, so why do we rape them at night (thank you, Veer Das)? So why do I feel so alieneted from this 'women as goddess' discourse?
Maybe it's because of my own experiences of being worshipped as a goddess. I don't know if I can trust my memory about this, though. I vaguely remember being invited to kanchan puja as a child till I started menstruating and was promptly left out from these ceremonies. Neighborhood aunties were at liberty to ask around if I had bled yet to confirm my qualification. If they couldn't confirm, they just judged based on my height and "growth" to see if I had become gandi, and I was a tall child. I must have been stupid, but I understood that to mean that the only way to continue being worshipped was to never become a woman at all. A goddess is a being that doesn't bleed, doesn't possess worldly knowledge, and doesn't partake in all that comes with mortality, most notably aging. In our tradition, a goddess is essentially an anti-woman who merely looks like a woman. Even men are closer to fulfilling the 'no bleeding' criteria.
If becoming a goddess is impossible, then maybe we just strive to get as close as possible to Her image. At the age of thirty, it seems I have failed at that endeavours. I have never come first. I fight with people sometimes. I haven't lived a life of service, and to be honest I don't even devote my life to serving my parents. Sometimes, I gossip. Sometimes, I criticize. And perhaps my greatest violation has been that I had a boyfriend. The truth is that I could never live up to these goddess-like women that are worthy of being defended in our tradition. I am indefensible. After all, from what I have gathered so far, what someone does to me is a question of my character (and my wardrobe) and since I score so low on the woman-to-Goddess scale, it would no doubt have to be me who would have to defend herself in case someone feels compelled to hurt me due to my own flaws.
While my country (and my region in particular) begin their annual wait for the Goddess and combine it with their calls for action for the safety and dignity of the Goddesses who walk amongst, I wonder if I should take solace in the fact that Goddesses are in the minority and most people who look like women are closer to me than they will ever be to the ideal that we consider worthy of defending. To be frank, there's not much solace in this. So I feel this gnawing compulsion to live by half and keep a tally of how many people like me enough to confirm I was a bhalo mey or achhi ladki or whatever if I were to go before my time. That is, if I go before my time because continuing to live after being hurt will take me farther away from the heavens and into the realm of mortals, and there are no protests and strikes for women, only for the ones that die. But because I am a human woman, i.e. as far as one could go from being godly as one could possibly get, I fear there might not be too many of such people.
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