Global Woman: Breadwinner No More PDF

# Global Woman: Breadwinner No More From: Global Woman. 2003. Ehrenreich & Hochschuld (eds.). NY: Routledge. ## Introduction **BARBARA EHRENREICH AND ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD** "Whose baby are you?" Josephine Perera, a nanny from Sri Lanka, asks Isadora, her pudgy two-year-old charge in Athens,...

# Global Woman: Breadwinner No More From: Global Woman. 2003. Ehrenreich & Hochschuld (eds.). NY: Routledge. ## Introduction **BARBARA EHRENREICH AND ARLIE RUSSELL HOCHSCHILD** "Whose baby are you?" Josephine Perera, a nanny from Sri Lanka, asks Isadora, her pudgy two-year-old charge in Athens, Greece. Thoughtful for a moment, the child glances toward the closed door of the next room, in which her mother is working, as if to say, "That's my mother in there." "No, you're my baby," Josephine teases, tickling Isadora lightly. Then, to settle the issue, Isadora answers, "Together!" She has two mommies — her mother and Josephine. And surely a child loved by many adults is richly blessed. In some ways, Josephine's story–which unfolds in an extraordinary documentary film, _When Mother Comes Home for Christmas_, directed by Nilita Vachani–describes an unparalleled success. Josephine has ventured around the world, achieving a degree of independence her mother could not have imagined, and amply supporting her three children with no help from her ex-husband, their father. Each month, she mails a remittance check from Athens to Hatton, Sri Lanka, to pay the children's living expenses and school fees. On her Christmas visit home, she bares gifts of pots, pans, and dishes. While she makes payments on a new bus that Suresh, her oldest son, now ## Global Woman drives for a living, she is also saving for a modest dowry for her daughter, Norma. She dreams of buying a new house in which the whole family can live. In the meantime, her work as a nanny enables Isadora's parents to devote themselves to their careers and avocations. But Josephine's story is also one of wrenching global inequality. While Isadora enjoys the attention of three adults, Josephine's three children in Sri Lanka have been far less lucky. According to Vachani, Josephine's youngest child, Suminda, was two–Isadora's age–when his mother first left home to work in Saudi Arabia. Her middle child, Norma, was nine; her oldest son, Suresh, thirteen. From Saudi Arabia, Josephine found her way first to Kuwait, then to Greece. Except for one two-month trip home, she has lived apart from her children for ten years. She writes them weekly letters, seeking news of relatives, asking about school, and complaining that Norma doesn't write back. Although Josephine left the children under her sister's supervision, the two youngest have shown signs of real distress. Norma has attempted suicide three times. Suminda, who was twelve when the film was made, boards in a grim, Dickensian orphanage that forbids talk during meals and showers. He visits his aunt on holidays. Although the oldest, Suresh, seems to be on good terms with his mother, Norma is tearful and sullen, and Suminda does poorly in school, picks quarrels, and otherwise seems withdrawn from the world. Still, at the end of the film, we see Josephine once again leave her three children in Sri Lanka to return to Isadora in Athens. For Josephine can either live with her children in desperate poverty or make money by living apart from them. Unlike her affluent First World employers, she cannot both live with her family and support it. Thanks to the process we loosely call "globalization," women are on the move as never before in history. In images familiar to the West from television commercials for credit cards, cell phones, and airlines, female executives jet about the world, phoning home from luxury hotels and reuniting with eager children in airports. But we hear much less about a far more prodigious flow of female labor and energy: the increasing migration of millions of women from poor countries to rich ones, where they serve as nannies, maids, and sometimes sex workers. In the absence of help from male partners, many women have succeeded in tough "male world" careers only by turning over the care of their children, elderly parents, and homes to women from the ## Breadwinner No More **MICHELE GAMBURD** "He's good-hearted guy, but what a fool!" Priyanthi exclaimed, laughing, as we sat in her living room three days after her return to Sri Lanka from two years' work as a domestic servant in the Middle East. Any money her alcoholic husband had, she told me, he spent right away: "Today he's like a white man, tomorrow like a beggar." Every time she came home from abroad, she found only the four walls of their house remaining; during her last trip, he even sold the kitchen knives. Nonetheless, Priyanthi radiated an affectionate, good-humored conviction that she could reform her husband and build a better life for her four sons with the money she had earned abroad. When Sri Lankan village women like Priyanthi leave their families to work abroad, their men remain at home, often unemployed and subsisting on the money their wives remit. The migration of these married women has expanded common notions of motherhood in Sri Lanka to include long absences from home. At the same time, female migration has reconfigured male gender roles in an often uncomfortable fashion. Many men feel a loss of self-respect and dignity when their wives become breadwinners. Such men only reluctantly take over the "women's work" of child care and cooking; if possible, they arrange to have female relatives assume these duties instead, in accordance with strongly felt local gender roles. Scenarios that circulate in television shows, newspaper articles, and local gossip suggest that uneducated, slothful husbands waste the money their wives earn abroad and turn to alcohol to drown their sorrows. Representations of delinquent, emasculated men appear in these stories in tandem with images of promiscuous, selfish, pleasure-seeking women who neglect their husbands and children. The prevalence of migration, itself a response to high unemployment in Sri Lanka, has introduced new social and economic realities in villages like Naeaegama, where Priyanthi lives. In so doing, migration also forces villagers to violate old gender norms and to generate new ideals. This sort of change affects the gut-level, commonsense conceptions of how the world is organized that Raymond Williams calls "structures of feeling."¹ In Sri Lanka, many people believe that women should stay at home and tend their families while men earn a living for the household. Local poverty and scarce job opportunities for men, however, drive many women to migrate for work. In the Naeaegama area in 1997, 90 percent of all migrants were women. Of the migrant women, 30 percent were single, and 70 percent were married, separated, or divorced. Most of the women in this latter group had at least one child, and approximately half had husbands who contributed regularly to their household income; the other half had husbands who were under- or unemployed. Despite the relatively high proportion of employed husbands, many villagers lump together all the husbands of migrant women as lazy spendthrifts. Common local stereotypes devalue these husbands' competence as breadwinners and as lovers. A number of housemaids in Naeaegama told me that "Arab people say that Sri Lankan men must be 'donkeys' because they send their wives abroad." The phrase carries two sets of implications. First, it emphasizes Sri Lankan men's inability to provide for their families. Second, the phrase implies that Sri Lankan women are not sexually satisfied with their husbands; if they were, they would not travel to the Middle East (and, presumably, sleep with Arab men). These images of Sri Lankan men rest on certain popular assumptions about migrant women: "If they can't eat grapes and apples, they go abroad. If they can't eat cheese and butter, they go abroad," runs one common adage. Grapes and apples, luxury fruits imported from abroad, signify a life of leisure and affluence. Cheese and butter, also luxury products, signify a rich and satisfying sexual life. This remark suggests that migrant women, dissatisfied with their lives and husbands in Sri Lanka, travel abroad in search of more gratifying economic and sexual situations. When my research associates, Siri and Sita, and I repeated the story about Arab men calling Sri Lankan men "donkeys" to people I interviewed, it often sparked a lively conversation. Many people, after a moment's contemplation, replied by detailing their financial situations. Some slightly shamefacedly, some matter-of-factly, cited poverty as the reason women went abroad. A family, they explained, could not make ends meet on a man's wages as a casual laborer. Migrant women did not seek anything as fancy as "grapes and apples"; they merely hoped to support their families above the poverty line. Fewer respondents addressed the implicit suggestion of sexual impotence. Pradeep, an articulate young man, bounced his two-year-old son on his knee and replied that he knew and trusted his wife. Despite his hard work, his family could not afford to buy land, build a house, and start a business on his salary alone. If he could save the money his wife sent from abroad and build a house, and if she came home without being unchaste, that would prove he was not a donkey. Despite the widespread awareness of such pragmatic concerns as local poverty and economic opportunities abroad, negative stereotypes continue to circulate, stigmatizing local men whose wives migrate for their inability to live up to older gender ideals. Both the stereotype of the Sri Lankan man as a "donkey" and the pragmatic discussions of poverty reflect the slow, difficult, and often painful negotiation of changing gender roles and family structures. ## Alcohol: Group Bonding and Masculinity In Naeaegama, alcohol is a business, a medicine, a pleasure, a necessity, and a mark of masculinity. Drinking, an exclusively male activity and a sign of wealth (however fleeting), preoccupies many of the under- and unemployed village men. When families do not prosper from female migration to the Middle East, villagers often blame husbands who quit work and take up drinking in their wives' absence. At once scornful and tolerant of such husbands, villagers commonly tut, "He sits idly, drinks, and wastes." Asked why these men indulge in such behavior, several villagers suggested that the men sought to emulate the rich landowners of the previous generation. One village notable explained to me: "It is good to be rich and look idle; in the absence of riches, looking idle will suffice." Hard work, particularly physical labor, carries significant stigma in the village; light skin, clean white clothing, and a sweatless brow indicate leisure, high status, or at the very least a respectable office job out of the burning sun. Alcohol is the despair of many a wife, and the basis of community among drinking buddies. When a migrant woman comes home, her husband often demands money to buy drinks for himself and to improve his status by buying rounds for poorer male friends and relatives. Some Naeaegama women anticipate these requests by bringing home prestigious foreign liquor they purchase at duty-free shops. Although they enable their husbands' drinking, these women nevertheless seek to limit it. Blame for bad male behavior–such as gambling, smoking, drinking, and womanizing–often falls on the absent wife, without whose control a husband, considered constitutionally incapable of controlling his baser urges, drifts helplessly into bad habits and bad company. Frequently, however, patterns of drinking, wasteful spending, and failure to prosper predate, and even prompt, female migration. While women are considered responsible for disciplining their families and regulating household finances, they often have little authority to enforce their will, especially while they are abroad. Drinking norms in Sri Lankan villages do not resemble Western norms of social drinking or before-dinner cocktails. At weddings, funerals, and other mixed-sex get-togethers, the host often "runs a bottle" of hard liquor out of a back room that most of the male guests visit surreptitiously, becoming progressively drunker as the event proceeds. While drinking, men do not eat, because food reduces the "current," or high. This style of drinking spans social classes. I once attended a university dinner party where I learned (a little too late) that respectable unmarried women rarely lingered at such functions past seven or eight in the evening. While their wives (and two uncomfortable female Western academics) huddled together in one room, married and unmarried men drank bottle after bottle in another until, around ten or eleven in the evening, the host decided to serve dinner. Immediately after eating, the visitors departed, most in cars driven by drunken men. Men strove to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible; drinking to excess was the norm, not the exception. The production, distribution, and consumption of alcohol form a significant component of the village economy. A bottle of the legal hard liquor, arrack, costs roughly what a manual laborer might earn in a day; in 1994 a bottle of the officially distilled arrack cost Rs 118 (US$2.36), while a laborer's daily wage was between Rs 100 and Rs 125 (US$2-$2.50). In 1994, one village outfit that offered wages of 150 Sri Lankan Rupees (Rs)—US$3—a night, with free food and drink, went into production twice a week, running three stills all night, each requiring six people's constant attention. Including production crews, complicit landowners and law enforcement officers, and distribution networks, this distillery, one of several in the area, directly involved more than fifty people. Women, who rarely if ever touch liquor, constantly pressure their husbands to spend money on items for family consumption rather than on alcohol. To save money, most local men drink kasippu, the local moonshine. A bottle of kasippu, a fruit, yeast, and sugar-based fractionally distilled liquor, cost about Rs 60 (US$1.20) in 1994. Despite their families' debts and hunger, many men spend a great deal on alcohol, and some work for local kasippu manufacturers who operate stills at night in remote, wooded places. Alcohol provides a strong basis for social allegiance and identity. Drinking groups often form around a particular kasippu producer. Heavy drinkers adopt the values and norms of their groups, which tolerate, even encourage, such activities as gambling, stealing, rape, and assault. Anthropologist Jonathan Spencer glosses lajja as shame, shyness, and social restraint—all essential ingredients of good public behavior. He glosses lajja-baya as "shame-fear," particularly the fear of ridicule and public humiliation. Those who drink are thought not to know lajja or baya. Spencer notes, "It is assumed that people who drink alcohol will no longer be in control of their actions and [will be] easily aroused to anger, which would be likely to spill out in physical violence, given the opportunity."2 Shifting groups of local men, usually of similar age and status, gather regularly to drink, surreptitiously visiting a distribution center or purchasing a bottle to take to a private location. Often those with money spot drinks for those without, who return the favor at a later date. Although they are rarely acknowledged by respectable village leaders, drinking groups form influential axes of political power. Outsiders occasionally employ such groups to assault opponents and to burn enemies' houses and property. Villagers fear the men in drinking groups, especially those with histories of thuggery and intimidation. And yet, drinking men remain integrated into village kinship and friendship networks. Alcohol producers provide generous support and protection to individuals and to village institutions, including schools and temples. Kasippu production groups maintain guardedly friendly ties with some law enforcement officers, and they often lend financial support to local politicians. For reasons ranging from loyalty to fear, villagers rarely challenge drinking groups or report their misdeeds to higher authorities—some of whom are complicit in the network anyway. For men whose incomes are eclipsed by those of their wives, or who fail to make the most of their wives' salaries, alcohol provides relief from personal responsibility. An extenuating condition that can be entered whenever needed, drunkenness provides the perfect alibi for poor judgment or socially unacceptable behavior. Responsibility falls on the alcohol for any foolish actions and on the absent wife for the drinking itself. With prosperity in the village resting primarily on female migration to the Middle East, involvement with kasippu production and distribution provides poor men with alcohol, money, community, political clout, and a means to reassert the male power and respect lost in the face of women's new economic role. Drinkers thus emulate the idle rich of prior generations and reject the work ethic of the contemporary wealthy. ## Meaning in the Making: Rukmini and Ramesh Although many families hope to save a female migrant's earnings for large purchases, such as buying land and building a house, in many cases supporting the family on the husband's wages while putting the wife's earnings aside proves difficult. Men can pursue sporadic, grueling physical labor for very low wages—or they can dip into their wives' remittances. Many men in the Naeaegama area choose to rely on the money their wives earn abroad to finance their daily needs. The following case presents a fairly typical example of voluntary male underemployment and the concomitant use of a migrant woman's wages for family consumption. In a series of interviews, family members struggled to explain to me and to themselves their lack of improvement despite seven years of work abroad. In the process, they wrestled with the meaning of their continued poverty, and with its effect on individual and family identity. Siri and I interviewed Hema, an elderly woman of a lower caste, and her son Ramesh. Ramesh's wife, Rukmini, was then working abroad as a house-maid. Rukmini, about thirty years old, had spent most of the previous seven years abroad. During the four years Rukmini worked in Jordan, she sent her money to her mother, who was supposed to look after her daughter. But Rukmini's mother had no stable home. She visited all of Rukmini's siblings, staying roughly six weeks with each, and spending lavishly with the checks Rukmini sent. The next time Rukmini went abroad, she left her daughter with Hema, her mother-in-law, instead. While Siri, Hema, Ramesh, and I sat in the shade of Hema's unfinished cement house, Siri half-jokingly explained to me in Sinhala that Rukmini did not send money to her husband Ramesh, an infamous drinker and gambler. Once the ice was broken, Hema took over the story, explaining that she had told Rukmini not to send the money but to keep it herself. Ramesh's gambling and drinking left nothing even to support himself and his daughter, Hema recounted. Ramesh had taken credit with many local stores, and he now owed interest-bearing debts to several moneylenders. Hema suggested that if Ramesh could earn money for himself and his daughter, his wife could save all of her salary, and the family could then buy land and build a house, as they had originally planned. Sober and embarrassed, Ramesh said nothing to contradict his mother. I asked him about his work. He said he made about Rs 125 (US$2.50, considered a good salary locally) a day doing physical labor, and more than that when he drummed for ceremonies. Silently contradicting the impression that all of his wife's earnings had evaporated, Ramesh took me into the two-room clay house where he, his mother, father, daughter, and several brothers all lived, and he showed us a crowded collection of furniture he had bought with Rukmini's remittances. When she returned to the village in mid-April 1994, I asked Rukmini to come meet with me at Siri's house for an interview. Usually I spoke with people in their homes, but at that time Rukmini and Ramesh were living in a six-by-twelve-foot lean-to built against the new cement wall of Hema's unfinished house. Unexpectedly, Ramesh accompanied his wife to the interview. Moreover, he was drunk. Siri tried to take Ramesh aside while Sita and I talked to Rukmini. Occasionally, however, Ramesh approached or interjected. When he did so, palpable tension pervaded the interview. Rukmini seemed barely able to finish a sentence. When I asked her about the gifts she had brought back from the Middle East, Ramesh declared that Rukmini had given him a shirt but that he had gotten his sarong for himself. She replied that she had given him a shirt, shoes, and cigarettes. The full story explained Rukmini's barbed remark. Rukmini had given Ramesh a new pair of sandals, a pack of prestigious foreign cigarettes, and a new shirt. But when the police raided the illegal coconut beer brewery where Ramesh had gone to drink, he ran through a drainage canal toward the ocean. The canal muck claimed his new sandals, and the salt water ruined the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. Rukmini mentioned that she had also brought her husband twelve beers and two whiskey bottles, all of which he had already consumed. But even if he drank, Ramesh retorted to Rukmini, at least he saved her clothing. Siri, Sita, and I assume that he was comparing himself favorably with the husband of another village migrant, who had sold his wife's dresses during her absence. When Siri had persuaded Ramesh to walk in the garden, I asked Rukmini if she planned to go back to the Middle East. She intended to go back "no matter what," Rukmini replied. She said she was fed up with her husband's habits. There was no use earning money when he was drinking, she lamented, speaking very quickly. Some of the money Rukmini had just brought home had gone to settle Ramesh's debts and to finance drinking and gambling binges. Although she liked to come home to see her daughter, problems with her husband "unsettled her mind." Ramesh never listened to her, Rukmini complained, instead "he breaks things and wastes and drinks." Her variation on the common trope—"He sits idly, drinks, and wastes" — emphasized her dismay at Ramesh's destructive behavior, which she judged worse even than indolence and dissipation. Ramesh returned to the porch. Reaching for a neutral topic, but inadvertently stumbling into a minefield, I asked Rukmini what had been the worst time in her life. It started after she got married, she replied. Ramesh exclaimed, "Really?" They talked heatedly about a fight several years earlier that had ended with both of them filing separate complaints at the police station at the junction—a common conclusion to serious village disputes. Ramesh accused his wife of abandoning their daughter and neglecting her wifely duties. Silenced, Rukmini picked up an umbrella from the table, examining it with great care. Center stage and unchecked, Ramesh delivered a monologue about himself and how hard he had been working for the family's sake. Siri and Sita made no effort to translate his tirade, and I stopped taking notes. Rukmini slouched low in her cane armchair, turning slightly away from her husband. I caught her eye and winked. Suddenly she sat up straight and relaxed physically, telling Ramesh to go home so that she could answer my questions. I am not versed in the cross-cultural connotations of winking, and this was my only use of the wink as an interviewing tool, so I can only guess how Rukmini might have interpreted my gesture. I think she might have worried that I would accept at face value everything I heard about how she had neglected her family and about how hard Ramesh had worked to make up her shortfall; maybe my wink positioned me with many local women, who listened to men talk without interrupting or contradicting them, but also without believing all they heard. Aware that Ramesh was drunk, but also recognizing his male prerogative to dominate the conversation, no one on the porch that afternoon directly challenged his assertions beyond Rukmini's initial protest that her married life had been hard. Perhaps Rukmini, caught between the desire to defend herself and the embarrassment of arguing with her drunken husband in front of a foreigner and two higher-caste villagers, chose silence as her best defense until my unvoiced support assured her that none of us took Ramesh's drunken ramblings seriously. That leverage allowed her not to confront his representations directly but to ask him to leave. (In other situations where men or more powerful people dominated conversations, I often found that others approached me later with contradictory information they had not wanted to voice in public.) Although for the most part they accept men's right to dominate the public transcript, women make ample use of other opportunities to communicate their opinions.5 That afternoon on the porch, Rukmini and Ramesh each attempted to control the narrative, influence judgments, and shape appraisals. Theirs was a struggle over meaning in the making, as each attempted to define his or her own agency, identity, and self-worth with respect to the story of their family's failure to prosper. By including himself in my invitation to talk, and by excluding Rukmini from the conversation when he could, Ramesh sought to prevent his wife (and me) from portraying Rukmini as the household's decision-maker and breadwinner. Ramesh wanted to be thought of as part of a team, even as a leader, instead of as deadweight, or as someone who "sits at home idle, eating while his wife works." In his monologue, he sought to retell the story of what happened to all the money Rukmini had sent home, simultaneously reworking his own image in my eyes and in his own. Three years later, Sita and I crowded into a trishaw (a covered, three-wheeled motorcycle) with Hema and her nephew so that Hema could show us the way to Rukmini's new house in a village ten miles from Naeaegama. Some months after the interview related above, Rukmini had gone to work abroad again, this time in Jordan, where she stayed for about a year. When she returned, she and Ramesh bought land and built half of a house. Deciding that they would rather live elsewhere, they sold that property and bought a different one. Their second house, much smaller than the one they had first started, had two rooms and a tin roof. Rukimini had spent Rs 5,000 to add a toilet to their tiny land plot. Bouncing her one-year-old daughter on her lap, Rukmini said that she would like to go abroad again, but neither her mother nor her mother-in-law would look after the girls, because their father would "come fighting" to the house, causing trouble, as he currently did for his wife. Rukmini had asked a doctor for medicine to stop Ramesh's drinking, but the doctor would only write a prescription to Ramesh himself. Hema suggested asking the alcohol distributors not to sell Ramesh liquor. Although Rukmini still had some money in the bank (and she and her baby both wore gold necklaces), she said that the family had trouble making ends meet on Ramesh's earnings. She did not want to dip into her savings for daily expenses because she wanted to have a large coming-of-age ceremony for her oldest daughter. Fanning herself and her baby under the hot tin roof, Rukmini said that sometimes she thought she would have been better off not going abroad at all; if her husband "had a brain," she could have "brought the family up," but Rukmini wondered if her small plot of land and modest house were worth eight years of hard work abroad. Back in 1994, I had asked Rukmini how she envisioned her life in another ten years. She said that she would like her whole family to live in a nice house of their own. My research associate greeted this aspiration with skepticism. In 1997, however, villagers voiced different opinions. Despite adversity and a wasteful husband, Rukmini did indeed live in her own home. Although small, the land and house counted as improvement in the eyes of the Naeaegama villagers, and they demonstrated that despite his heavy drinking, Ramesh had not wasted all of the money his wife earned abroad. ## Women's Work Migration has forced men and women in Sri Lankan villages to renegotiate gender roles regarding not only whether a woman can respectably work abroad but also who will take care of a migrant woman's duties and responsibilities in the home she leaves behind. Despite the large number of underand unemployed husbands in the village, only four or five families of around ninety I interviewed admitted that men had taken over more than the bare minimum of housework. In all but one of these cases, the men in question held other jobs as well, and they shared the domestic duties with female relatives. In Sri Lankan villages, the gendered division of labor clearly marks child care and cooking as female activities. Most men would feel their sense of masculinity threatened if they took on household chores or cared for young children. Carla Risseeuw writes of a rural Sri Lankan village near Naeaegama: > Men cannot "stoop down" in the widest sense, without experiencing severe emotional stress... The principle that he is "higher" than a woman, and more specifically his wife, permeates the actions, thoughts and emotions of both men and women. Handling dirt, feces, cleaning toilets, being impure, doing repetitive, relatively less prestigious work, which often lacks the status of work as such or "prestige" of the proximity of danger, is the female expression of the principle of gender hierarchy. 6 Most of the men and women in Naeaegama accept this division as just, and they judge themselves and others according to it. Migrants generally told me that they left their children in the care of their mothers or mothers-in-law, but in my daily interactions in the village, I noted more male participation in child care than people reported Priyanthi, the Naeaegama migrant introduced earlier, left her four sons in the care of her husband and his father while she was abroad. Such men and their families often glossed over men's housework in order to preserve a masculine image. Since Priyanthi's husband, Ariyapala, held a well-paying job at the hospital, he was somewhat sheltered from village ridicule when he took on his wife's work. But in an interview, Ariyapala somewhat defensively explained his assumption of domestic duties as a pragmatic solution to Priyanthi's absence. Ariyapala's heavy drinking also reaffirmed his masculine identity. The few men who did take over their migrant wives' domestic chores both challenged and reaffirmed older gender roles. ## Joker, Simpleton, Freethinker: Lal Indrani and her husband, Chandradasa, belonged to a new elite in the Naeaegama area. They were considered one of the most successful village families involved with the migration of labor to the Middle East. Indrani worked for the same family in Doha, Qatar, for twelve years, earning a very generous salary. Chandradasa worked as a security officer at a hotel near Colombo, returning home for two weekends a month. The couple saved and spent both spouses' salaries wisely. In Indrani's and Chandradasa's absence, Chandradasa's mother and brother took care of their five children and supervised the construction of their new house. Although Indrani named her mother-in-law the primary guardian for her children, the older woman's arthritis severely restricted her movements. The children's uncle Lal, a colorful village character, did the lion's share of the cooking and housekeeping. Lal lived across the road from Siri's house, where I stayed, and he drew drinking water from the well in our garden. Members of our household replied to the greetings Lal called out every time he entered the compound with teasing comments and questions. About the state of the meal Lal was preparing, Siri invariably asked, "Is the [cooking] course over?" For a man to study cooking in school would be only slightly more astounding than to find him cooking at all. In a world of simple structural reversals, when the houseworker leaves to earn a living, one might expect the former breadwinner to do the housework. In Naeaegaıma, however, in most cases other women, not men, took over "feminine" chores, with grandmothers and aunts looking after the children. Lal, a man who for the past twelve years had cooked, kept house, fetched water, done laundry and shopping, and taken care of children, was the source of some astonishment and amusement in the village. Many villagers associate full male adulthood with having a wife and a stable job. Lal had neither. At his mother's insistence, Lal had reluctantly married some years before I met him. His beautiful wife asked him to move to her relatives' home in the capital; when he refused, she found work in the Middle East and never returned to the village. Although he was fairly sure that she had come home safely, Lal had no desire to visit her relatives in the city or to see her again. Lal had worked as a laborer and as an office clerk, but he had not held a job since he was hit by a van while walking on the side of the road a number of years previous. He had no wish to return to work and no ambition to start a business. His mother, who had persuaded him to marry in the first place, thought that he should do so again. Quoting a proverb, Lal said, "The man who is hit with the firebrand from the fire is afraid even of the firefly" (the local equivalent of "Once bitten, twice shy"). When his mother died and all of his family duties were fulfilled, Lal figured, he would become a priest. In the meantime, when his sister-in-law Indrani left for Qatar, Lal and his mother moved in with Chandradasa to look after the couple's children. The fact that Lal was single, lacked a salaried job, and devoted attention to chores often thought of as women's work caused a number of chuckles in the village. Curious about Lal's sexuality, two village notables arranged to question him informally. One afternoon Lal, who was nearly illiterate, asked Siri's father, the local Justice of the Peace, to help him write a letter to the Graama Seevaka, the local government administrator, asking to be put on a list to receive aid from a local nongovernmental organization. In jest, the Justice of the Peace wrote a completely unsuitable letter, telling the Graama Seevaka the stark truth—that Lal lived in a good cement house with electricity and a television set. (Lal's official residence, a collapsing clay hut, formed the basis of a subsequent, successful application.) Unable to read the letter, Lal took it to the Graama Seevaka, who laughed and said, "This won't do at all," and suggested that he and Lal both go talk to the Justice of the Peace. Siri overheard the conversation. The Justice of the Peace and the Graama Seevaka teasingly but somewhat cruelly peppered Lal with questions about his long-absent wife, asking if he had sent her cards and sweets in the Middle East. They also asked about Lal's sex life. In a village where everyone knew everyone else's business, there was not even the hint of a rumor suggesting that Lal might be actively homosexual; several other men were known to be so. The Justice of the Peace and the Graama Seevaka merely determined that Lal did not know "which end was up." Having satisfied their curiosity, the Justice of the Peace wrote a suitable letter for the Graama Seevaka and gave it to Lal, who went home to start the evening meal. Lal's calm, slow, joking manner made him a hard target for teasing. He was the only male recipient of government aid who waited in line with the women to collect food at the local cooperative store. When villagers mocked his feminine behavior, Lal regaled them with humorous stories about his finicky taste in groceries; those who attempted to laugh at him found themselves instead laughing with him about the dead gecko in the rice bag and the dried fish so smelly it must have been fertilizer. He met comments on his domesticity with exaggerated stories about the latest crises in the kitchen, the rough quality of a new soap, and the price of beans. His complaints were uniformly within his domestic role, not about it. He created an ambiguous self-image, as something between a simpleton with no understanding of his failure to fulfill a man's proper role and a freethinker, impervious to criticism, who held a singularly different set of values. That opacity, along with his nonstop wit, allowed Lal to carve out a unique space for himself as a man whose sole job was women's work. The good-humored probing of the Graama Seevaka and the Justice of the Peace indexed at once the community's awareness of Lal's unusual behavior, and its baffled but amused acceptance. When I spoke with Lal in 1997, he expressed some ambivalence about his domestic role. At one point he said that he needed to be "bailed out of jail" and set free from the kitchen; a little later, he noted with pride that his family preferred his cooking to Indrani's. When Indrani cooked, Lal recounted, Chandradasa and the children could tell. "Bappa [uncle] didn't cook this," the children would say, with gestures that indicated that they did not like the food. Lal said that his sister-in-law made coconut milk by machine; he scraped coconuts the old-fashioned way, generating a richer milk. Her curries had a foreign taste; his had a better flavor. Neighbors had asked Lal why he still cooked when Indrani was home for a visit. He said that he would like to find a job, but Indrani and his mother had asked him not to leave. If he no longer took care of the family, Indrani would have to give up her job and look after her mother-in-law, a prospect neither of the strong-willed women viewed with pleasure. I asked Lal if he were ashamed or shy (lajja) about the work he did. Suddenly completely serious, he held his head up very straight and said that one should never be ashamed of the work one does to eat or drink. He took care of his mother, the house, and the children, and he did not try to hide what he did. He said he was ready to do any job that came his way, either men's work or women's work. He was not ashamed. While Indrani's migration had changed household gender roles for both Lal and Chandradasa, only Lal's behavior drew extensive village comments Although Chandradasa took over some of the household chores during his infrequent visits, for the most part his job as a security guard kept him out of the domestic sphere, at the same time reaffirming his breadwinner role. In contrast, Lal's daily routine included many activities commonly thought of as women's work; he lacked any other form