My mother was quite surprised at this comment. She recalled that once when my aunt was around, she had asked my dad to cook some part of the dinner. Not because she didn’t know how to cook, but because she was too tied up with the guests. She had no clue that the word traveled to our entire extended family and later she heard that the family was quite hurt and shocked that my dad was asked to cook. The general accusation that my mother faced was – ‘it’s a wife’s duty to cook. It’s outrageous if she asked the man of the house to cook, when she was in perfect health.’

I took offence immediately on the blame piled on my mom. For us it was very normal to see dad doing house chores. But a little shuffling through my memory bank brought to my notice that it was not a common sight in most other households back in my hometown. The man of the house was responsible to go to the vegetable and fish market. In my uncles’ families, the women folk have no clue about the vegetable prices. One of my aunts has never in her life visited the fish market. It is taboo for her to go there. As long as my uncle was around he would do the shopping. When my brothers entered their teens they took over. I remember when I went to stay with them, and expressed my wish to visit the local fish market there were many glum faces in the house. I was stamped as a rebellious girl who wants to go “where no woman has gone before.”

When we shifted to the metro city from a small town; the first thing that crippled our household was the lack of good house help. Living in a protected cantonment like area, we were very used to having an ayah, a cook, a house attendant and a guard at our disposal. In the city the scene was different. Even if my folks managed to get part time domestic help, they couldn’t afford to keep a cook or an ayah. There was no question of having a full time man in the house to run errands.

But here in the metro, both my parents were busy day in & day out trying to make ends meet. I saw less and less of dad as I grew up. With the highly expensive living standard of the city, he worked harder to lead a decent life. Later he got busy doing post graduation from the Univ. So most of his evenings were spent in college. Whereas my mother was always busy, cooking, or shopping for groceries, paying bills, going to the doctor, to the bank, to the ration shop, to the post office, to the tailor etc. etc. In the beginning she would lock my kid sister in the house, to pick me up from school. Some times they would lock us both in the house to go to buy fish, which was pretty far off.

I grew up seeing my mother as the “(Wo)Man of the house”, doing all that was expected to be done by my dad. Going to all those places that were blasphemous, for the other women of our families. And the same was happening at home. Our family is small, yet there was a lot to do. We grew up seeing my parents divide their work between themselves. While my dad was busy in office and attended evening college in FMS, it was my mother who would lock us in the house, walk a couple of kilometers to a typist and sit there for hours, getting my dad’s project reports typed. There was no Xerox those days, so she often spent her afternoons copying from books marked by him. When my dad came back from office, and my mother helped us with homework, I often saw him cooking, dusting or repairing things around the house. It was a regular sight to see him cutting vegetables or fish while mother cooked. Even now at 67yrs, he cuts fish, in the absence of the maids, insists on doing the dishes, washes and cleans around the house and does 90% of our major repairs.

There is no demarked job for him or for my mom. They gave each other trainings. Like my mother trained him to cut fish, and cook some basic dishes, while my father taught her all the banking and other paper work. There are certain things they do best and the other person doesn’t interfere in that. For eg. Mom doesn’t try to repair electrical things, while dad doesn’t try to limit her movements out of the house. But when my sister showed interest, he taught her all the repairing tricks. She can fix things in a jiffy.

To the utter astonishment of my aunts, my mom does half my dad’s job and vice versa. Often they are shocked that we leave him alone, to fend for himself, when we go off on month long holidays to our hometown. It was unthinkable for many that dad will go to work, as well as do all other household chores, ALONE.

But all this change in “gender roles” didn’t happen in a day. Both my grandmothers were partially responsible for breaking the barriers of “gender domains” in the house. My maternal grandmother was widowed at 24 and started working way back in 1950s. So she taught my uncle to be equally self-dependant as my mom. While many of my mother’s friend’s can’t even think of asking their husbands to warm up their own dinner, my mother never had any guilt pangs to ask my dad to help her in the house. Because she was brought up in a household where men weren't a pampered lot.

My paternal grandmother had to single handedly bring up a family of 10, when my grandfather was bedridden following an accident. She taught her sons to cook, to stitch their own basic pajama and shirt, and always encouraged them to do their own work themselves. Both these women knew that the men needed to be as independent and helpful in the house as women. So my father never found it awkward if his wife's so called "duties" started becoming his own.

The men of our house never considered doing household chores a woman’s job or a menial job. The same has come down to our generation and I see it replicated in several families around us. My nephews, cousins are given basic survival cooking lessons, and are assigned small responsibilities around the house, so that in future they can grow up to help their wives. Whereas the girls are encouraged to go out and do their own banking and not depend on anybody in particular. My sister and a close friend are often praised for their repairing skills.

But I feel sad for the women who are so boxed in in their gender roles that the world outside is just a distant blur for them. A friend, who came to live in this city post marriage, had a culture shock and took yrs to come to terms with the fact that she needed to be more independent. To adjust to the fact that she had to do 90% of the household work, cause her husband is in office for over 12 hrs.

I have also met some men who can’t come to terms with the fact that they might have to do some of the things which was traditionally done only by the sister or mother. As a stark example – there was one guy I knew, who wouldn’t even serve food or a glass of water on his own, which was usually served by his sister. His mother threw a fit when we asked him to put some clothes in the washing machine.

I used to think it only happened in the older generations. But recently I met a seemingly modern, urban family where the mother threw a fit, when we asked the son to serve his own food. Worse than that, after eating, when everybody took the plates to the sink, he called out to his mother – “I have eaten, you can take the dish now.”

Please pinch me hard if I am wrong – but I definitely feel that how men behave towards women, largely depends on how their mothers define “women and their roles” in and outside the homes.

Princess Baatcheet