This morning, though, she had true reason to tell me. Her husband had been missing since Saturday afternoon. From what I gather from the story, he drank some bad home-brewed liquor and it made him a little crazy. Saturday afternoon he left the house at 2, and when she got home at 3, no one knew where he was ... and for five days there was no sign of him. Some husbands come and go (especially when liquor is involved), but her's never had. She admitted he would go out drinking, but said he always returned by 9 the next morning for work (he would wait to come home until after she left for work to avoid the inevitable scolding from her).
For as wonderful as Sarwary is for our family, I have found it difficult this last year to hear about her husband. She never brought it up, since that's not appropriate in the employer-employee relationship ... but out of curiosity, I asked once what her husband was doing - and got her honest answer. Were we in the US, where a single woman with a good paying job wouldn't need a dead weight husband, her life would be so different. But, we're not in the US. We're in India. And she's not part of the upper class where some cultural norms are starting to erode.
Thus, a missing husband to her is life-changing, and not in a good way. Even if her husband was half drunk all the time, at least he was home -- that was enough to keep people in the neighborhood from talking about her and her children and enough to keep people with bad intentions away from her house.
For instance, on Day Four of the missing husband, Sarwary had to go to my office to complete her security interview. Naturally, she wore one of her best saris. She was near tears when she arrived in the morning because someone in the neighborhood said something to the effect of: "your husband has only been gone four days and you're already dressing up." Say nothing of the fact that after work she would spend a few hours (and her hard earned money) getting a friend or an auto driver to take her around to different neighborhoods to look for him.
Greg and I, honestly, feared the worst, especially because of the possibility of her being left in limbo since you can't be a widow if a dead husband never surfaces. After all, what good can come of a person who was half crazy being missing for so long? It is so easy to overlook the people on the side of the road - between poverty, mental illness, people who don't want to be found, etc, finding one person amongst the many really is like finding a needle in a haystack. But through all this, Sarwary kept telling me, "God is Great," and her husband would come home. Her faith in these two simple tenets seemed so simple - and also like she would be set up for disappointment. If he didn't come home, what would she do?
The story, from the blog title, has a (relatively) happy ending. Yesterday I told her to go home early to start her search - she was hesitant (not wanting to lose her job), but I reassured her it was more important at this point for her to take care of her own family. As she was leaving, her brother in law who works in Saudi called; she took this as a good omen and set off with determination.
I could tell from the moment she stepped in our house this morning that her prayers had come true and that her God was still Great. She found him in a town about 20 KM (12 miles) from her house; how he got there is a mystery, since he left with no money. He was covered in mosquito bites and wearing a different shirt. It sounds like a friend who lives that direction had helped spread the word he was missing, and some tile-cutter told her husband to stay put in front of his workshop until Sarwary could come out to check if this bedraggled man was the missing one.
Her husband will stay with his mother for a week to recover - and I told her to take him to a doctor to make sure he doesn't have any of the various mosquito-borne illnesses. Tellingly, people in her neighborhood who had started to gossip about her, last night came to her house to offer their thanks that her prayers had been answered; her position in society was restored. God is Great.
1 comment:
What a story! I'm glad Sarwary's husband was found. We are so fortunate in the US that it is easy to forget how much of the rest of the world lives, especially women.
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