Rini of Tirur

The Rini of Tirur in the middle. Her uncle Ashraf on the left and Jenna.


"There is much discrimination in America, nahn?" Rini asked us, her round eyes fixed on our faces, which, at this moment, must have looked as if a doctor had just told Jenna she was pregnant.



Rini—a boarding school student and future civil engineer—had the disconcertingly adolescent habit of getting to the point.



Jenna and I were sitting in the living room of Rini’s home. We had dropped by on the holiday of Eid-al-Adha; the owner of the house—Rini’s father—was a good friend of our ATI minder Shareef. Several people including Rini and her mother Bina watched us eat sweet rice dumplings and drink chai. We got the distinct impression this was the first time two Americans had sat in this room.



"I mean, discrimination against Muslims," Rini continued, as I tried to discreetly shove the other half of a rice dumpling in my mouth.



"Well…" I started, my words muffled by sugar and rice flour.



"I mean, Americans all think we are terrorists," she continued. At this point, Bina—her mother—looked over her shoulder and quietly shushed her. Yet, when she turned back to look at use, her face appeared pleased. I was beginning to realize where Rini got her independence.



"There is just a lot of misunderstanding," I stammered. "A lot of Americans do not understand Islam. There was 9/11 and for some Americans, that is there only exposure ever to Muslims. So, yeah, some Americans think all Muslims are terrorists."



Rini was nodding in a way that I recognized from the students I had taught in Houston—they heard you but they did not agree with you. For her part, Rini would turn out to be the most articulate, astute person I had met in Tirur. And she was barely seventeen.



Like most people her age, she switched topics with a scatological rapidity. "Men around here," she said, shaking her head as if she was an old maid. "Men: they just look at you. Very uncomfortable." It seemed Rini disliked injustice, no matter who was perpetrating it.
As she talked, the others in the room stared at us as we finished our chai: Bina and Rini’s aunt Shakeela, Shakeela’s husband Ashraf, Rini’s younger brother Basil and two neighbor children whose names I had not caught. Various other women and children shuffled in and out. A baby wailed from another room. Pots and pans clinked from the kitchen.



The others remained resolutely silent and grinning as Rini interrogated us. I felt I was on a weird version of The Newlyweds’ Game, my responses being surreptitiously judged by people who had the correct answers on cards in front of them.



"You must find it hard here?" Rini gestured towards Jenna. "I mean, I had this one teacher one time. She taught English but she was from Italy," her eyes widened. "She had this beautiful blonde hair. And she dressed like she was still in Italy. She had a hard time. She left to go back to Italy crying. It was bad."



Rini sounded sympathetic and triumphant at the same time. Jenna instinctively clutched her kameez closer to her throat. "Well," Jenna began, "it helps that I look Indian. And that I have him," she threw her thumb at me.



Rini nodded in understanding. "Yes, your husband probably helps a lot. When a woman walks around alone here, it is dangerous. I hate it." I was beginning to like Rini, her constant expressions of belief so certainly articulated, her sense of right and wrong apparent and uncontrived.



For example, she knew for sure that once she finished boarding school in the nearby town of Thrissur—an hour’s train ride from Tirur—that she would go to university and become a civil engineer. "I want to build bridges," she said, I think being literal and not metaphorical. She spoke English with an uncommon clarity for someone from this part of Kerala. It revealed not only her fortune to have had good English teachers but also a drive to work on her own. I knew from experience the kids here did not pick up the language that well in less they pushed themselves to it.



A week after meeting Rini I read about another Indian woman with a similar name: Rani Lakshmibai, known by all Indian schoolchildren as the Rani of Jhansi. Rani led a group of rebels in the unsuccessful revolt of 1857 (known as the Sepoy Mutiny because it started as a rebellion of Indian soldiers, called sepoys). Rani and her rebels fought against the British fiercely but were eventually defeated a little more than a year after the rebellion began. The Rani of Jhansi died in the final battle defending her garrison. The British general who defeated the Rani’s forces came across her body and said, "Here lay the woman who was the only man among the rebels".



A high compliment for the Victorian age, but I have a feeling Rini would scoff at such a sexist judgment now. "Men can be truly terrible here. Everywhere really," she said, concluding her remarks about the state of gender relations in Tirur and the world.



The Rani of Jhansi. The Rini of Tirur. India—still a bastion of sexist values and gender discrimination in some regions—continues to surprise outsiders in producing such fiercely independent women.



But I know this: when I ever have to cross a bridge in the future, I want that bridge to have been built by someone like Rini.