When the mighty men came back from faraway places, they were strangers in their own homes. They were catered to and kept in the dark. At some point the fathers had to be brought in, implicated if you will, in the deeds of their sons and their daughters, but until that day dawned, until a daughter’s transgressions became too public a matter to be ignored, or a son’s ways could no longer be indulged, the men were pampered and left ignorant. In the dark hours, when a reckoning could no longer be avoided, when the code of the place had been stretched to the breaking point, the women had to do things of great cruelty. It was their burden, their task. “She is the sister of men” was the highest compliment paid a woman who had to keep the world intact. To the women fell the task of smuggling diamonds from Sierra Leone because the skilled man of affairs who insisted that the high officials of the customs office were in his back pocket had gotten himself deported out of the country. The women were the ones who kept the constituents of a member of Parliament from finally having it out with him. They were the ones who prepared their sons for the duel and who stiffened their backs, reminded them of the hidden defects and capricious ways of their fathers. And it was their responsibility, of course, to keep the daughters in line. It was but a short distance from the daughter’s conduct, after all, to the mother herself. Better grieve for a daughter than play havoc with the order of things. This is the way things were understood here. It happened among us that a woman of radiant strength had to “do something” about one of our daughters. The daughter’s indiscretions had become too much to bear. The pompous and dangerous head of the household had signaled that his patience was running out. The sturdy woman would do the task that was hers to do. Dalal was taken to her father’s village for burial. The young woman, it was announced, had committed suicide. But it was commonly known that her mother had struck. It had about it an air of inevitability. Dalal had rejected all offers of help and punctured all the pretenses of her people’s code. She had taken a step into a world she could not understand, and she had not known where to draw the line. The evasions and the consolations of the old world, the world of her mother and her aunts, were denied her, but the new ways were not yet internalized by the young woman, who had just begun to see the world on the other side of the prohibitions. Dalal had been given the best of what a generation on the make thought their children should be given. Parents who toiled in Africa made possible boarding schools, a new prosperity, a new freedom, less encumbered and burdened by inherited ways of seeing and encountering things. The fears of the old world, the need to “walk by the wall” and to “kiss the hand that you cannot confront,” the fear of the unknown and of the alien, the need to placate and to conceal — from all this the young woman seemed released. The limits that had defined the world of her mother and her aunts had irretrievably collapsed, and with their collapse it was hard to distinguish the permissible from the impermissible. Dalal had ventured into the world on the other side of the divide; she was the first of her kin to venture beyond the line of the familiar sounds and customs. She developed a sudden and total disdain for the ways of her elders, for their tales, for their dire warnings. They, in turn, were unable to explain how the young woman should juggle the two worlds on the margins of which she had been placed. There came a time when she began to complain about the women from the village, the grandmothers and great-aunts who came visiting and who stayed at her home. She complained about their tattoos, about their wrinkled and toothless faces, about their prayers and the ablutions that preceded them. Above all, she complained of the smell that clung to the old women: she believed that they came with a special smell. And so she recoiled when they approached her and wanted to kiss her and wish her a life of honor and rectitude in the home of a decent God-fearing man. Yes, Dalal, if you go about doing what is asked of you, if you follow the straight path, if you remain untarnished and your reputation remains unblemished, happiness will come your way, and you will go from the home of your father to the home of your husband, an honored woman in whose reputa-tion and whose conduct your father and brothers can take pride. No other man could humble your family by having his way with you. No ill-wisher could point to you whenever men and women sought to devour the reputations of others. A relative of Dalal prided herself on the fact that she had been the first to detect early signs of trouble. The world here came in very small ways and expressions. The unwashed relatives from the village noted that Dalal did not invite relatives and friends to join a meal in the way that such invita-tions should be extended. Dalal would only offer a single invitation. And when the guest insisted that he or she had just eaten, she always took them at their word and left them to eye the food. In the protocol of the villagers you had to extent endless invitations and drag the guest to the table. Then you watched the guests who had “just eaten” stuff themselves with abandon. But the sophisticated young woman who had broken with her world would not play the game. Nor would she willingly join, it was noted in
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence