Renée Ranchan/ The Buffet Box

A few mornings back, I had to accompany my husband to the hospital. This, in itself, is hardly headline material. Husbands go to the hospital; wives accompany them; wives carry handbags containing half a household and, increasingly, a small branch of the Indian administrative system. However, the specifically unusual feeling that came upon me when I reached home was that I had begun to wonder whether I had accompanied my spouse to the hospital or whether I had simply turned up with a man who, in some mysterious bureaucratic fashion, was also attached to me.

The healthcare centre was one of those swanky new establishments that seem to have been airlifted straight out of America — all glass, polished floors, discreet lighting and corridors so long that one begins to wonder whether the surgery is actually in another state. My partner had an infected ear and so, surgery was the piercing need of the hour; I, meanwhile, was doing what wives meticulously do at medical facilities—answering questions, producing documents and signing ten times over papers absolving the hospital of any responsibility in case the operation is botched up, and yes, generally running from pillar-to-post, while the patient, mercifully, lies still.

In the morning, I had deposited the money. The file had already been prepared, my signatures were there, and our relationship was, as far as the records were concerned, perfectly respectable and properly established. Then later in the day, a very pleasant young Sardar ji at the desk courteously requested, “Ma’am, Aadhaar, please.” My Aadhaar?! I began rummaging through my handbag. Nothing.

I tried again, with greater determination. One develops a particular technique for searching a handbag — first the calm delve, then the increasingly frantic excavation, followed by the final stage in which objects emerge that have no conceivable connection with the matter at hand. And then, viola, out came my India International Centre card. "Here", I announced triumphantly. It had my name on it, and my husband’s name as well. I am a spouse member, rather than the principal member, which seemed, at that moment, like a perfectly respectable form of identification.

The young man knowledgeably concluded, “No, Ma’am, Aadhaar. This is not a government document!’’ I told him that I couldn’t locate it. My spouse’s locked phone, however, was with me, in my tote. The 12-digit requirement was in it. So I decided I would return to the Day-Care Ward, procure the information and come back. Which meant walking nearly a mile through this magnificent hospital complex — a journey of such proportions that I began to feel less like a caretaker and more like an Olympic walker.

Eventually, I returned with the blessed card beaming bright on the screen. And then, in the manner of all great bureaucratic anti-climaxes, it was discovered that the hospital already had my details in its ``system’’ because I had made the payment earlier that morning. It was while I was standing there, slightly breathless and clutching my Identification, that a thought occurred to me.

His Aadhaar tells the world who he is. His father’s name appears in the appropriate place. And yes, there it is, right in your face: on a woman’s Aadhaar, her husband’s name can sit quite explicitly along with her address, whereas in a man’s Aadhaar card the wife’s name is nowhere in sight.

And why, I wondered, does the woman so often arrive with a man attached to her paperwork? We have S/o — Son of; D/o — Daughter of; W/o — Wife of. A man may be introduced as himself, while a woman has, for generations, frequently been introduced by reference to the man to whom “she belongs”.

Last to last Sunday, over sugary lemonade, cousin Sasha raged about the nonsense she encountered, while dealing with bank forms. There is something almost comic about watching an educated, financially independent woman sit before a whiff-thin paper which regards her as a perfectly competent adult, until it suddenly wants to know who the “head of the family” is.

Head of the family!

The woman may know the school timetable, the doctor’s number by heart, the children’s vaccination dates, the domestic help’s whereabouts, the insurance papers and precisely where the spare keys are. She may run the household with the efficiency of a small corporation. Yet on a form, somewhere between “name” and “occupation”, the family can suddenly acquire a male head.

It is rather like discovering that your house has been run by a managing director for thirty years, only to find that the company secretary insists the chairman is somebody who has never attended a board meeting! The irony is that the modern Indian woman has travelled considerably further than her paperwork sometimes suggests.

She has her own bank account, her own profession, her own investments, her own passport, her own opinions — and, if she is anything like me --- her own handbag in which she can never find what she needs when it is needed most. Yet somewhere in the administrative vocabulary lingers the age-old assumption that a woman must be located in relation to a man. It reminded me, inevitably, of Manu. A Woman is always a Man’s Property.

Manusmriti 9.3 gives us the undisputed sequence: the father in childhood, the husband in youth and the sons in old age; the verse concludes with the assertion that a woman is not entitled to independence. What an arrangement! No woman could apparently be allowed to wander about the world without a designated male custodian. Father. Husband. Son. A sort of lifelong relay team.

The remarkable thing is not that an Ancient text proclaimed so. Ancient societies had the same anachronistic ideas. What is striking is how persistent certain echoes of those proclamations can be — sometimes not in laws, but in language, forms, assumptions and those tiny administrative protocols nobody questions because, well, this is how it has always been done. Of course, the world has changed.

As I said, women run companies. Women fly aeroplanes, practise medicine, sit in Parliament, build businesses, write books and, in my experience, are perfectly capable of handling the unmanageably bulky hospital file while the man whose ear is being operated upon is blissfully unaware of the goings on.

Yet the stubborn ghosts remain. Whose daughter? Whose wife?  Who is the head of the family?

And, yes, in a particularly grand hospital, after you have already paid the money, signed the papers and established the relationship — please produce your Aadhaar… I had gone to the hospital as a wife, and had returned thinking about women.

And somewhere between my handbag, my spouse’s locked phone and a young Sardar ji, I had stumbled upon one of those absurd truths hiding in plain sight. A woman may spend a lifetime becoming herself.

Then she arrives at a counter and somebody asks, quite matter-of-factly: “And whose are you?” After all, the man on the form may not be the man who proves her existence. Sometimes, he is simply the person whose inaccessible phone you happen to be carrying.
(Dr Renée Ranchan writes on socio-psychological issues, quasi-political matters and concerns that touch us all…)