On the margins
Their names were Yasmin and Fatima. Yasmin, the eldest, was fifteen years old. Fatima was fourteen. Their parents had rented a place out to my dad when he lived in a town called Salem. I was living with my uncle and aunt at the time, and I visited Salem for the first time during my summer break of 1992, which was when I first met Yasmin and Fatima.
The girls fascinated me. They had delicate skin, skin that turned pink like rose milk in the blistering Indian heat. They had lush curly hair and brilliant irises flecked with chestnut brown. They were self-assured, rich, elegant, and beautiful. I was slightly intimidated by them.
But a bored teenager on a summer break, with no books to read, is no match for intimidation. One day, I worked up the courage to talk to them. We quickly became friends. Many afternoons that summer, I spent in their warm company. They told me all about the local customs, shared neighborhood gossip, complained about their parents, talked about boys. We ate roasted peanuts from paper cones, sitting with our legs folded beneath us. I was thrilled that they chose to be my friends, that they chose to share their stories with me. As the time came for me to leave Salem, I started feeling a pang in my heart. I knew I'd miss Yasmin and Fatima.
A few days before I left, Fatima found me, alone on our common terrace, gathering the crackling hot clothes that had dried on our clothesline.
"My sister is going to get married," she said, without much ado.
I looked at her, confused. Yasmin was just 15-years old, a high schooler like me. Even though I had been brought up in a very traditional family myself, the fact didn't compute in my head. But Fatima didn't feel anything odd about the arrangement. She had come there to just tell me the news, not to bemoan what was happening.
Later, my dad told me that it was not uncommon for "girls like Fatima and Yasmin" to get married before they finished school. By that he meant girls in small towns, girls with parents that kept the old ways of old religions, girls with parents that were not very educated themselves. In the case of Yasmin, her family just wanted her married before she became "unmarketable". Older, more educated girls were deemed more trouble, and therefore less desirable. A woman who worked not just took away a job that was rightfully a man's, but her character could be thrown into question too.
In the end, I didn't attend Yasmin's wedding. I had to leave Salem before then. But my dad told me that the wedding was a lavish affair. Yasmin sparkled with rows of gold necklaces around her neck. Over a thousand guests attended. Yasmin dropped out of school and was misty-eyed when she left her father's home, but she was happy. She had achieved one of the biggest goals that she had been trained to pursue: make yourself attractive enough for someone of good status to marry you. Yasmin and Fatima weren't encouraged to have dreams beyond that. Most of their lives, their work would be the traditional kind that goes unpaid: the work of a mother, the work of a homemaker, the work of a caretaker for the elderly.
It was not just Yasmin and Fatima who left me with the nagging question, "But what about school/college?"
Before I was five, my mother had the habit of leaving me in the care of our servant Meenakshi, a skinny woman with a face that was shriveled like a dark raisin. Meenakshi lived in a shanty by a canal filled with flotsam. Her house had one room where her family slept, cooked, and bathed. I spent many an afternoon in her home, wrapped in the smells of onions and old oil. Meenakshi became like a mother to me. She often fed me Tamarind rice from her aluminum plate, mixing a spicy and tangy homemade paste with cold rice. She was a poor woman with a heart as large as the ocean.
Meenakshi had a 10-year daughter Lalli who played with me and told me stories while her mother cooked. Lalli never went to school, would never go to school in her life. Sometimes she would run her hands over my school books wrapped in crisp, brown paper, and take a whiff of their insides, but she could not read what was written in them. When Lalli was fifteen, she was sent off to be the live-in help for someone in Delhi. I never thought of it then, but have frequently done so after.
How could someone like Lalli escape the life she found herself in? How could she become someone who could go to school and then college and then off to a job that would pay her well?
I was undoubtedly more privileged than Lalli. I was born into more money than her, a more dominant caste than her, to parents with more education than hers. But I had my struggles too. My folks liked to stay true to the old ways, and I had to argue for the many things that I wanted to do: to study, to study further, to have a career, and so on. In my family, women were always an afterthought. We ate after all the menfolk had finished eating. I washed my brother's and my dad's dinnerplates every day, clattering them over our stone sink. My brother was expected to do his homework in the evenings, whereas I was expected to help around the house - and only after that, do my homework. In college, I was told that I was wasting a "seat" that a boy deserved more.
But still, I had my guardian angels. My dad believed in my right to an education. He believed that I could make something of myself, besides being a mother and a wife. He stood by my side against everyone who questioned my right to be "so studious". One of my aunts - a role model - inspired me to pursue a career. We could afford books, notebooks, pens, and uniforms.
Lalli didn't have any of that. Her family expected her to bring in money when she was just a child, not spend it on school and books. I could see how people like Lalli - marginalized, mistreated, abandoned by society - could find it hard to escape the vicious vortex they were in. I could see how people like Yasmin didn't have role models of career women, or even people around them that encouraged them to pursue a career.
I have lost touch with Lalli, Yasmin, and Fatima. Meenakshi is now dead. I look back on my friendship with them today because someone recently asked me why the work to lift up and include folks on the margin is so important to me.
Why do I feel strongly about the inclusion of people on the margins in our workplace?
Because I know that including everyone's potential in our workplace will make for more innovation and better products.
Because I know that it is better for our economy to not leave hordes of people and their productivity out.
Because I know that the world will be a better place to have everyone lifted.
Because I know tech education empowers people, and empowered people can make big things happen for humanity.
But more than any of that…I feel, in my bones, the struggles that people on the margins face. Girls that must defeat not just the voices of society, but their own inner voices, to be successful in male-dominated fields. Children that do not have the luxury of playing on their Xboxes or even using a computer in the evenings. Children that must work to fund not just their education, but that of their siblings too. Girls that are expected to get married when they are barely adults, and if they become professionals at all, it must have been after many pitched battles. Women like my own mother-in-law who, even though she was bringing in her fair share of her family's income, was expected to do 100% of the unpaid labor at home too.
I know about the odds stacked against people like them, the people on the margins of our world. I know it is the morally right thing to do, to empower folks on the margins and make sure they have a seat at the table. One of the best humans that ever walked this earth, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, famously said this, and like many things she said, it makes a lot of sense.
"I tell law students…if you want to be a true professional, you will do something outside yourself… something that makes life a little better for people less fortunate than you."
People with privilege have a responsibility to help pull up a stepstool for the less privileged folks to stand on. I have been advised many times by well-wishers not to take up the cause of women or other marginalized people. This advice often comes from a good place. My people don't want me to suffer any adverse consequences at work because of any kind of crusade I might send myself on. But this is a cause that is important. Important to all of us because of all the reasons above, and important to me deeply, because of who I am, where I come from, and everything that has made me.
If you want to read more on this topic, here are some book recommendations.
Half the sky by Nicholas Kristof
The moment of lift by Melinda Gates