She Left a Strict System in India to Become Liberated

There came a moment of clarity for Asha Singh one day in New Delhi that she remembers as an inner milestone. It was in the late ‘70s and she was in the backyard of the house where she rented rooms from the busybody landlord who maligned her to her children. The neighbors were having a wedding and the woman of the house stepped into the adjoining backyard with the bride. At the sight of Asha she stopped. A divorced mother of three, struggling to survive and living beneath her former station, Asha Singh was a living scandal and a social outcast.

“Oh! There’s that woman,” the neighbor said. “Let’s go inside. She’ll bring us bad luck.”

The bride, Asha knew, could not afford bad luck. She was her new husband’s second wife. The first had died under mysterious circumstances. She had burned to death, and while it would never be proven and the husband and his family would never be questioned, it was widely assumed to be a “dowry burning”--a murder motivated by the bride’s lack of wealth.

“It made me question the whole system,” she said recently. “I asked myself, ‘What kind of society can let people get away with that and not even question it, and condemn me?’ What was my crime? Here I had taken myself and my children out of an unhappy situation. I had tried for 10 years to make my marriage work, to please my in-laws. I was trying to raise my kids, working. . . . I hadn’t walked out on my responsibilities. Yet I was looked down on.

“It was very liberating for me. I stopped trying to fit in and started to be me.”

She had been reading of the feminist movement. Increasingly, America was looking good to her.

“It seemed America would be a very supportive place. . . . I was right. It’s been even better than I hoped for.”

Another milestone for Asha Singh in her continuing journey toward being herself will be marked Sunday. At 42, she will graduate from Scripps College in Claremont.

Apparently, being Asha Singh is a movable feast. A full tuition and room and board scholarship recipient since her second semester, a Phi Beta Kappa member since her junior year, a volunteer at a mental health center and on a hot line for battered wives, a campus journalist, jogger, weight lifter, yoga practitioner and drummer, she has done well at Scripps. She graduates with a 3.94 grade average, and in September she will start a five-year Ph.D. program in clinical psychology at UCLA.

All that not only sounds impressive, it sounds tiresome. Here comes one more frantic overachiever who has chucked her identity for a fragmented personality. Look out, world!

Peace and Strength

What a relief, then, to meet Asha Singh, a serene, mature woman who is taking a kid’s delight in being alive. Instead of frenzy within there seems to be peace and strength.

A tall, slender woman with long curly hair that is just beginning to gray, she was wearing jeans, a sweater and Indian silver jewelry: “I dress like a student because that’s what I am, but I have my little things,” she said, fingering her necklace. “I’m an Indian.”

Exams behind her and graduation ahead, she is having a relaxed week. She was happy to spend a quiet day on campus earlier this week, away from the clutter at home. Her three children (two sons, Vikram, 23, and Deepak, 18, and a daughter, Rena, 21) are still taking exams at Pomona College and the apartment that is home base for the family has a finals week disarray about it.

She is ready to leave Scripps, she said, but she was going over the campus lovingly. Undergraduates were studying at tables in the orange courtyard of Dennison Library and she looked on, whispering that it was her favorite place. It looks like a medieval cloister garden and the silence was monastic. She loves the peacefulness of it. Upstairs in the library, there was her carrel, her shelved study table with her name lettered on the edge, overlooking the courtyard.

“I love being surrounded by books,” she said in a hush, looking around the room. “You know, this is a safe place to study.”

Back outside, she caught sight of a young woman whizzing by on a bike, yellow backpack strapped in place. “That could be my daughter,” she nodded in the biker’s direction, then realized that it was her daughter. “When I see my kids around here on this campus, it’s pretty neat,” she said, grinning.

She is full of self-conscious comparative references that begin with “when” and “to think.” There is a tone of wonder to them, and they all have to do with then and now.

The daughter of a Hindu father and Sikh mother, she lived an upper-class life attending boarding school and learning skills befitting a lady. Years later, when she would leave her husband, an army officer, and the leisured life of servants, wealth and privilege that her marriage had entailed, she would know how to make souffles and ‘apfel strudel,’ she said, but not a cup of tea. She would be able to embroider, but would not be able to mend or sew clothes for her children. She could sit at an easel and paint, play the piano, but she had never made a bed.

When she was 15, her mother broke the news that a family with a marriageable son, an army captain in his 20s, was coming to visit. They were in search of a wife and Asha was a candidate. She was dismayed, but in the end, after several more visits, she consented, and married at 16.

“There was nothing wrong with him, and if it had not been him, it would have been someone else,” she said. Besides, after the initial shock, she had found herself wanting to be found acceptable by the captain and his family. News of rejection would travel fast.

She had liked school, but was not too upset at dropping out. Marriage and being an officer’s wife had been described glowingly to her. She did not get to know her future husband, of course. That would come later.

What came later was the realization the marriage would not work. Her mother had always called her “willful” and her husband found her too independent. She found him uncommunicative. She now calls it a personality conflict.

Half the time she went with him to posts that varied from the jungles of Assam in the northeast to a desert area in the southwest Gulf of Kutch. When she could not accompany him, she lived, as custom demanded, with his parents.

It was a life of canasta, bridge and mah-jongg at the officer’s mess, drinking, talking, socializing. Of quarreling at home, fighting, sometimes violently. Of headaches, depression and tranquilizers of such increasing dosage that eventually they were injected.

‘Harmful to Children’

She had tried to fit in, tried to please. It had not worked.

“I finally came to the conclusion it was harmful to the children,” she said. “If it’s not a loving home, it does more harm than good.”

(Not coincidentally, she acknowledged, she wants her doctoral program to focus on family interactions, and “how faulty interactions can lead to psychopathology in adolescents and children.”)

No one approved. Not her parents, not her in-laws, not her husband. But he consented to separate. She was determined to raise the children, then ages 8, 6 and 3, and while his parents wanted them, he went with her wishes. No one wanted it to end in divorce, and to encourage, or force a reconciliation, her parents provided no financial support.

It was hard. She suddenly had no friends. Women felt threatened by her; men considered her “available.” No one wanted to rent to a divorced woman. No one wanted to hire her. She started a business, buying a printing press and printing letterheads and visiting cards. Later she went into partnership with an engineer and they produced electrical heating parts. The engineer was one of the few who befriended her. They married briefly. A mistake, she said, but she is happy it ended amicably. The business made little profit.

She is not interested in placing blame or nurturing ill-feelings. Nor does she want to present herself as a victim, although she volunteered it is true she was one, explaining, “It’s very easy to become a victim in a system that has no room for a person who is different. I don’t want to blame any people. It’s the system.”

Rather than leave her bitter, it seems to have left her sympathetic.

“Sometimes I have this romantic idea of wanting to help people,” she said of herself. Thus, her plans to practice as a clinical psychologist--”really, this is what I need to do: help people who are in pain.”

Respected in Community

That she is perceived in this country as “a respected member of the community” is something that is still new to her. She settled on California and Scripps after exploring college catalogues at the embassy, overcoming her fears and taking the necessary tests.

“I thought of them (small, women’s colleges) being much more supportive of older women. It’s been everything I wanted. The quality, the support, the flexibility--it’s all here. So it’s up to you.”

That she has taken on so much here, including playing the drums in a not-too-terrific rock band, is something she explains with much amused tolerance for herself. After so much restraint and repression, she feels good about herself. She has to keep sampling. The latest has been jogging. Her daughter Rena’s friend and classmate Laurie Hitchcock is her coach. She comes for her at 6 a.m.

Later, Rena and Laurie joined her on campus for a few minutes. They confirmed her great promise as a runner. Laurie said she has a triathlon (running, swimming, biking) in mind for her.

Her mother is her best friend, Rena said. Clearly she is proud of her, and of the life they led in India.

True they were forced out of society and lived without the servants, space and privilege that had been their lot. And people would say things about her mother. All of that she shrugged off, saying: “I kind of liked it. It was real fun having it be that life was hard and we could handle it.”

Financial Struggle

Life can hardly be called easy now. Asha and her children are challenging themselves academically and it is a financial struggle. One son has declared her car, a ’67 heap, unfit for the roads of Los Angeles, and is fashioning and fitting out a Camaro for her. She will be giving up the apartment in Claremont. Her children will live on campus.

Her biggest worry of the moment is finding a place to live near UCLA, one big enough for her children to visit and cheap enough for her to afford. She started to voice real worry over it, and then stopped herself with, “to think five years ago that I would be sitting here in California. “ It put things back in perspective.

“I have this feeling about America,” she said, almost apologetic for the seeming Pollyanna-like quality of her appreciation of a society that she admits is not without faults. “My impression of America is biased. I found support and caring here.”

Before she even arrived, she wrote MS. magazine asking for help from its foundation, saying she had been accepted at Scripps, but she had no money to go. She did not receive funds from it, but MS. printed her letter in the magazine, and people, “perfect strangers” started sending her encouraging letters and small amounts of money. Scripps gave her a “let’s see how you do” scholarship for one semester, she said. Once here and on full scholarship she developed a hearing problem. The Lions’ Club took care of the surgery.

The caring shows no sign of stopping and she related with delight that her friends are having a graduation party for her Sunday.

“Can you imagine what that is like for me?” she asked, smiling, her eyes full. “For someone like me, who had no friends at all?”