For Widows, Life After Loss
In some cultures, the death of a husband has meant exile, vulnerability, and abuse. But bereaved women are beginning to fight back.
INDIA In a shelter in Vrindavan, known as a “city of widows,” Lalita (at right) bears the cropped hair and white wrap her culture once considered obligatory for widowhood. Shelter manager Ranjana, a much younger widow, is less constrained by traditional customs.
1. RETURNING TO LIFE, Vrindavan, India
Long before sunrise the widows of Vrindavan hurried along dark, unpaved alleys, trying to sidestep mud puddles and fresh cow dung. There’s a certain broken sidewalk on which volunteers set out a big propane burner every morning and brew a bathtub-size vat of tea. The widows know they must arrive very early, taking their place on rag mats, lifting their sari hems from the dirt, resting elbows on their knees as they wait. If they come too late, the tea might be gone. Or the puffed rice might be running out at the next charity’s spot, many alleys away. “I can’t rush in the morning—I’m not well,” a widow complained. “But we have to rush. You don’t know what you will miss.”
It was 5:30 a.m., a cool dawn, a sliver moon. A few widows had wrapped themselves in colorful saris, but most wore white, in India the surest signifier of a woman whose husband has died, perhaps recently, perhaps decades ago. In the dim light they moved like schools of fish, still hurrying together, pouring around street corners, a dozen here, two dozen there.
No one has reliably counted the number of widows in Vrindavan. Some reports estimate two or three thousand, others 10,000 or more; the city and its neighboring towns are a spiritual center, crowded with temples to the Hindu god Krishna and ashrams in which bhajans—devotional songs—are chanted all day long by impoverished widows who crowd side by side on the floor. The sanctity of bhajan ashrams is sustained by steady chanting, and although this is nominally the role of pilgrims and priests, the widows earn hot meals, and perhaps nighttime sleeping mats, by singing these chants over and over, sometimes three or four hours at a time.
They live in shelters too, and in shared rental rooms, and under roadside tarps when no indoor accommodation will admit them. Vrindavan is about 100 miles south of Delhi, but the widows come here from all over India, particularly the state of West Bengal, where allegiance to Krishna is intense. Sometimes they arrive accompanied by gurus they trust. Sometimes their relatives bring them, depositing the family widow in an ashram or on a street corner and driving away.
Even relatives who don’t literally drive a widow from the family home can make it plain every day that her role among them has ended—that a widow in India, forever burdened by the misfortune of having outlived her husband, is “physically alive but socially dead,” in the words of Delhi psychologist Vasantha Patri, who has written about the plight of India’s widows. So, because Vrindavan is known as a “city of widows,” a possible source of hot meals and companionship and purpose, they also come alone, on buses or trains, as they have for generations. “None of us wants to go back to our families,” a spidery woman named Kanaklata Adhikari declared in firm Bengali from her bed in the shelter room she shares with seven other widows. “We never talk to our families. We are our family.”
A widow must not dress in colors or make herself pretty, because that would be inappropriate to her new role as eternally diminished mourner. A widow must eat only bland food, in small portions, because richness and spice would stir passions she should never again experience. These are fading Hindu rules, largely dismissed by educated Indians as relics of another century, but they are still taken seriously in some villages and conservative families. Meera Khanna, a Delhi writer who works for a widows’ advocacy organization called Guild for Service, observes that the stigmatizing of widows comes not from the Vedas, the Hindu scriptures, but from generations of repressive tradition.
“In the Vedas nowhere is it ever said the widow has to live a life of austerity,” she told me. “There’s a line that says: You, woman. Why are you crying for the man who’s no more? Get up, take the hand of a living man, and start life anew.”
We planned our visits to Vrindavan, and Varanasi, a city northwest of Kolkata that also draws thousands of widows, to coincide with a simple campaign: making it possible, during celebratory festivals, for widowed women to join in. This is more subversive than it might seem. All over India the holidays of Diwali and Holi are occasions of public joy and merriment. Diwali includes gifts, bright lights, and fireworks; Holi is carried into the streets so people can “play Holi,” as Indians say, flinging brilliant powders and water at each other.
For a woman expected to live out her remaining years in muffled dignity, nothing about this kind of exuberance used to be considered
acceptable. “Once you become widowed, they say you are not allowed to do any festivals,” a charity worker named Vinita Verma told me. “But we want these ladies to be a part of society. They have a full right to live their lives.”
Verma is vice president of Sulabh International, an Indian organization that provides support services and small monthly stipends to widows in shelters in Vrindavan and Varanasi. A few years ago—tentatively at first and then on a bolder scale—Sulabh began arranging Diwali and Holi events for widows in the two cities. Even in private, indoors, some of the women needed time to learn to relax among holiday flowers and Holi powders, Verma said. “They felt, ‘If I touch this red color, some bad thing will happen to me.’ ”
But by 2015 the holiday festivities in the “cities of widows,” as Vrindavan and Varanasi are sometimes labeled in the media, were moving purposefully outdoors. No denunciations appeared in the Indian media, and when Toensing and I were in India, the only complaint we heard about plans for the widows’ festivities was that they made for photogenic show with little substance—that what the widows really need are more comfortable lodgings, meals they don’t have to sing for, families that will take them home, communities that won’t label widowed women useless and inauspicious.
“The real change has to come from the societies that produced them,” said Gautam, the social worker who would like to strike “widow” from the dictionary. Gautam’s home usually houses a few widows unable to find lodging, and when I asked what labels might suit these women better, it was obvious she’d considered this before too. “Mother,” she said. “If she’s not a mother, she’s a daughter, perhaps a sister. She’s also a wife. It’s just that her husband is not alive.”
It seems important to remember too: The Vrindavan widows can be fierce. It takes stamina to chant for three hours without break, to squat on a hard temple floor, to bustle through unlit muddy streets in search of the next meal and hot tea. When I arrived, in November 2015, Diwali was about to begin, and one afternoon I followed Verma as she prepared for the Sulabh events, which would include a boisterous outdoor procession, fireworks on the river, and a thousand new saris for the widows to wear and keep as their own—in any colors they might fancy. The saris were a gift from Sulabh, and a Vrindavan store had them stacked on display; widows in the charity’s stipend program were to arrive in groups over the course of a few hours, examining and choosing as skillful Indian sari-shoppers do.
Inside the sari store my interpreter and I watched the first widows push their way toward the stack, study the saris, and summon the shopkeeper. “I like those on that other rack better,” a woman said. “Can’t we choose from those?”
No, the shopkeeper explained, those were for sale. “Humph,” a widow said. She fingered the cloth of a charity sari. “Not especially good quality,” another widow said. “Could you please move over?” another widow said, and the widow she was elbowing said, Why should she—there was already enough space, and another widow said the breath of the widow beside her smelled foul, that she smoked too many bidis, the strong Indian cigarettes tied together with string. It took longer than expected to get everybody attended to, and I watched one quartet of widows walk out without new saris, harrumphing to each other. “As if our time had no value,” one said.
The Diwali procession and riverside fireworks would prove very grand, full of singing and sparklers and saris both white and colored—astonishing colors, to an outsider’s eye: sapphire, scarlet, lime, magenta, saffron. Many Indian news photographers came. Smoke swirled, fireworks lit the river pink, floating oil lamps made glowing circles in the moving water, and in spite of this my sharpest Vrindavan memory is of those four dignified widows disdaining their gift saris and marching out the door. They stayed close to each other, wrapped in widow white, chuckling, and when they stepped off the sidewalk together to cross the busy street, the traffic stopped to let them pass.
2. BURYING THE PAST, Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina
When the first call came from the forensic identification center, Mirsada Uzunović was home with her 13-year-old son and so willed herself to stay calm. The voice on the other end was gentle. Remains of Uzunović’s husband, Ekrem, had been identified by laboratory testing, the voice said. The remains were … small. A partial skull. Nothing else. If Uzunović wished a burial, in the new memorial cemetery, that could be arranged.
No.
For three months she told no one. “In the nighttime, that was the difficult part. I was alone with my thoughts. From the big man I knew, only a piece of skull. I couldn’t imagine. OK, they killed him. But why didn’t they bury him? He was scattered around. I didn’t know where. Where were those bones? Where was he?”
That initial call came in 2005, a decade after Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 7,000 Bosnian Muslim men—the number remains in dispute, but this is the figure on record at the International Court of Justice—during a single week of the three-year Bosnian war. From July 11 to July 19, 1995, the men were killed in and near the town of Srebrenica, on the eastern edge of the Balkan nation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Some were forcibly separated from their families and bused to execution sites; most were shot as they tried to escape to safer Bosnian Army–held territory. Ekrem Uzunović, whom Mirsada had loved since they met at a village dance when she was 15, was wearing black trousers and a T-shirt the last time she saw him, and in his backpack carried a loaf of bread she had baked that morning. He bent down to kiss their son, turned away, and ran. He thought he might escape by hiding in the woods.
A FAMILY OF WIDOWSTheir son was two. Ekrem was 27. In Tuzla, the city in which Uzunović and many other Srebrenica war widows were resettled, there is today a two-room office whose inside walls are covered to the ceiling with photos of dark-haired Bosnian men like Ekrem, all dead or presumed dead. Stacked albums hold thousands more, and in the photos the men are smiling or smoking or looking celebratory with drinks held out mid-toast. The photos also show boys barely in their teens and men old enough to have been Ekrem’s grandfather. Uzunović: “In every yard there was the same scene—the men running out of their houses. Women and families were crying for them, and the men didn’t react or anything; they were walking toward the woods, not looking back. There was this blackness, with the forest behind it. A river of men. Yes, I have had nightmares, especially during this time of the year. After my psychotherapy it didn’t get easier. But my doctor gave me pills, for July, so I can cope. I still have dreams. But it’s better, because of the pills.”
When we met, inside the hillside Tuzla house where Uzunović and her son still live, it was July. Every July 11, in large part because of the relentless efforts of a network of bereaved Bosnian women, a group funeral—the coffin-by-coffin burial of remains identified during the previous year and approved by families for interment—takes place at a vast hillside cemetery established solely for the Srebrenica dead. The cemetery is in a village called Potočari, a few miles from Srebrenica; the first 600 coffins were buried in 2003, as investigators and DNA examiners were learning the full horror of what had happened to the bodies of the dead.
Now, in the first week of July 2015, the 20th anniversary was a few days away. Former U.S. president Bill Clinton was coming, Uzunović had been told, along with other international dignitaries. Uzunović was 41 now and regrettably familiar with the cemetery in midsummer, its beautiful green undulations, its exhausting rows of headstones, its open grass for gravesites not yet dug. She had sat through many July 11 Potočari burials already: her brother, her grandfather, three uncles, four cousins, men from Ekrem’s family, husbands of other widows. Every year until this one she had said not Ekrem, not yet; when the forensic center telephoned a second time, in 2007, and informed her that her husband’s hip and femur bones had been identified, Uzunović had declined again to proceed with a funeral. There was still not enough of him.
“But I have been carrying such heavy baggage on my shoulders,” Uzunović said to me and my interpreter, pouring thick Bosnian coffee into our cups. She had been painting a wall that morning and wore a paint-splattered sweatshirt and blue jeans, her black hair pulled into a ponytail. She looked drained and composed. “I’ve waited too long,” Uzunović said. “I need to close the chapter. I cannot wait anymore.” This year, at the Potočari ceremonies, she would bury her husband.
In some cultures, the death of a husband has meant exile, vulnerability, and abuse. But bereaved women are beginning to fight back.
INDIA In a shelter in Vrindavan, known as a “city of widows,” Lalita (at right) bears the cropped hair and white wrap her culture once considered obligatory for widowhood. Shelter manager Ranjana, a much younger widow, is less constrained by traditional customs.
