Our Motivation:

FROM ONE WOMAN TO ANOTHER…

It was a day like any other, nevertheless, this day would mark a very important change in my life; a change which at that time was still unknown.

India was no longer a mystery to me. It was a country I knew very well from my numerous travels. Still, there were some phrases that fell upon me which would be the catalyst for all that was to come.

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These phrases impacted me greatly. They made me get up off my quiet and comfortable sofa in my organized and care free life and give it all up. The life of widows was the great unknown, the big issue hidden so deep behind cultural lines that barely any information existed on the topic. The little that I found was each time more and more terrifying and bleak. How could I have not noticed this until now?

It’s a difficult feeling to explain. It was a feeling that made me catch a plane to the unknown and try to figure out what was going on there. It was November 28th, 2008. During this time, there were deportations of Spaniards due to attacks in Bombay. Despite warnings from friends and family, I knew I had to catch that plane.

“Vrindavan please, ma’am?” I asked the taxi driver in Delhi. This was the beginning of a five hour road trip to Vrindavan. It’s a small city completely removed from the tourist routes. I wondered if I would find some accommodation for the night, crossing my fingers amidst feelings of fear and joy before entering the unknown.

I landed with my suitcase in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by a bustle of people. I began to walk among thousands of barefoot women dressed in white rages wandering like ghosts through the streets of Vrindavan. I remember what struck me were their faces, their lost eyes, sad and full of pain, yet so sweet.

I felt I was the center of their gazes and I tried to get close to them, to sit among them take their hands and simply smile.

I only had a name: Komala Ghosh. I searched all throughout Vrindavan for three days until I finally found her. I was grateful for this well-known teacher, who is now a simple housewife, who has been helping widows for 40 years. I just gave her love and simply cried with them every night as they told me their stories.

She is a brave woman with a resolute voice. The government only granted her an honorary title of “woman who fights for social change.” “But this is all I have received,” she told me sadly. A framed photograph but not a rupee to help these women and what’s more, her husband and children chastise her as they do not understand why she helps.

Sitting next to her she shows me a box of old photographs of all the women who came to her house asking for help, often with badly bruised bodies. “Many things have to change. The excuse of this tradition no longer suffices. This is just exploitation.” she laments deeply outraged.

This is how a friendship began between a woman of the first world and a woman of the third world who joined together go start a common project for this issue. So THE GREAT UNKNOWN does not fall into oblivion and, above all, so that the faces of these women are not erased forever.

This is a letter from a woman in the first world to another in the third…

By Diana Ros & Komala Ghosh