@Jyoti:
That is a beautiful beautiful comparison of Garima and Shobha and I loved the way you explained how when Shobha was not available for her Garima fell back on the coward boyfriend for support - and this only shows that the characters are flawed and lifelike!👏👏👏👏👏
Jyoti, here I am also reminded of one more comparison - of Shobha's mother and Garima's mother.
Shobha's mother once advised her to just act as if nothing had happened and to get on with life even though Samarth had cheated on her so badly. And here we have Garima's mother also acting as if nothing has happened in the family, her son has done nothing great or earth-shattering, and Shobha should take it all in her stride and take help from the weasly lawyer of Samarth who abetted his womanising!
At first it looks like Shobha's mother is less scheming than Garima's mother. Garima's mother is so scheming in fact that she wants to actively prevent Shobha from working so that Shobha does not get the upper hand in the family from financial powerfulness. She wants the family to be dependent on the lawyer (however suspect his own motives may be), so much so that she was willing to go and live in his house for free and is willing to take money from him for monthly expenses. I was initially thinking "Why is this MIL so ready to sponge on that weasly lawyer and is he by any chance blackmailing the MIL?" But then I realised that Garima's mother is behaving like a typical jealous female who cannot let another woman have the upper hand in the home. Shobha's financial independence and her own dependence on Shobha so irritates the MIL that she is willing to take money from an outsider rather than from Shobha's income! This hatred to give Shobha the upper hand is also behind her forcing Garima to marry the lawyer's brother to curry favour with the lawyer!
Now look again at Shobha's mother. Why did she say that Shobha should take life as it comes and not make much of Samarth's womanising. Somewhere in our society the mothers of daughters feel it will become a financial and societal burden on them if their daughters come back after failed marriages. When they give kanyadhan of daughters they want to wash their hands off and send off the daughters for good. It is considered a blot on them if the daughter returns home in shattered state. Underneath it all is again a "financial issue" because a daughter is married off at great cost and the mothers don't want to have to spend even more now on the returned daughter and her children! We may say that no mother counts the cost of her own daughter's return in financial terms and its all societal, but finances are at the bottom of every societal argument if you track society closely.
So it is very interesting for me that one mother (Shobha's mother) is advising her daughter to stay on quietly in her sasuraal as if nothing happened, based on the costs of her return to her mother's house on her mother ... and on the other hand the mother of Garima is calculating the costs of giving Shobha the financial upper hand in the household and is even prepared to take money from an outsider than to depend on Shobha.
I recently read a book on women and their financial motivations and was surprised to find so many hundreds of ways in which women "calculate the financial costs" behind their behaviours and the author says its a myth than only men are money-conscious in their dealings and are open about money being their motivating factor.
In fact women are even more money-conscious but they pass off their money-vulnerabilities in "emotional language".
.
comment:
p_commentcount