Having served her Alzheimer-stricken husband for the last twenty years of his life, carrying his bedpan, and sometimes him with the house help to bathroom every day, my Maami was granted retirement by her good children when they decided to keep a male attendant for him. University sweethearts, married for as long as they could remember, united by culture but divided by politics, their enchantment ended back in their youth when Maama, after a disagreement over Marxist dialectics, snipped away his wife’s waist length shiny mane of hair in her sleep, and went back to reading Das Kapital till the wee hours of dawn.
When Binoy the male nurse joined, Maami shifted with her grandkids and forgot Maama completely. Once, when she accidentally confronted her now forty-kilo husband in the corridor, stripped and enroute to his daily wash in the arms of Binoy, the male nurse, arms flailing about and smelling of urine and sweat as bedridden patients often do, she exclaimed, “My God! Naked flying grandfather!”
I was reading Invisible Women, Criado Perez’s insightful book about the data-gap on women that afflicts the data and algorithm-driven world of ours, when I suddenly remembered Maalati maami whom we used to call Malati Parker due to her sense of humor that befuddled us as children. She spoke when she was not spoken to, kept her hair open all day, laughed loud in the presence of elder males exposing her teeth and tongue to good proportions. In fact, my cousins were distressed with the fact that neighbors would often ask them, “Your mother was heard guffawing in the kitchen today. Tell us no, what happened?” While the studious husband and children shrank and sought refuge in books, Maalati Parker’s laughter grew louder and louder till it reached the Municipal Authorities one day, and they quietly slipped a Notice for littering in my Maama’s Post Box.
In Invisible Women, Criado Perez makes a journal of several ways women have been overlooked: while creating databases designed to generate algorithms, designing uniforms for personnel that are not women friendly, including life-saving jackets, toilets designed for urinating preferences of men but not women, pain medication designed for the male body, musical instruments that fit men’s larger palms and mobile phones with emojis representing male activity and touch screens to suit a male hand but eluding the female grip… The list is endless.
Women have been laughing since Eve who joked with Lilith that Adam was the rough draft. Contrary to popular knowledge, Adam’s first wife was not Eve but Lilith. The old wisdom that men and women are made from clay must have inspired the story about Adam’s first wife, created by God from the same dust as Adam, called Lilith. Their creation on an equal footing had terrible consequences, because Lilith wanted to have sex on top. In some versions, Adam refused this, divorced her and sent her away, but in others she was the one who abandoned him. She uttered the name of God, flew up out of Paradise into the air, and went off to the Red Sea. God sent angels to bully her into coming back, threatening that if she didn’t come along, she would lose a hundred of her demon children daily. Rather than return to Adam, Lilith preferred that. Ever since, she has taken her revenge on Eve (her rival) by strangling babies, and swallowing the sperm of men who sleep alone at night.
It set me thinking about an article on “Canned Laughter” that I had been reading.
The term “canned laughter” is often attributed to American sound engineer Charley Douglass who devised the technique in the late 50s. the technique is now being done to death, thanks to a proliferation of Instagram reels and tik-tok videos. “Canned laughter” was introduced to induce an unpredictable audience to laugh. In a society where laughter is getting increasingly scarce, canned laughter appears to the rescue like the Chorus in Greek tragedies which guided the spectator’s emotions. But where are the women laughing? All I hear in audio recordings of canned laughter are men laughing themselves hoarse. There is not a single woman’s voice in them. What is it with women and laughter?
Addicted to sitcoms and romcoms since early age, I secretly admired Maalati maami when she laughed that laugh which Maama and their Municipality deemed equivalent to littering. Humor was how she regained her power. Her spontaneity was refreshing. Giving out a faint whiff of paan, freshly bathed and hair spread over her ample waist down to her knees, squatting on her “bontii” (cutter with wooden base) chopping aubergines the color of her sari, lady fingers beautifully shaped like her own fingers with a pomegranate sized ruby on them, her white shell bangle and her red coral bangle catching the milk-white paleness of her complexion, she would simply flip her swan-like long neck back and laugh like there was no tomorrow. You cannot put that laughter in a can, Adams.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
