A woman who was married for 11 years to a man who beat her when she disagreed with him, and she learned early not to do that. She had a law degree that she never used. A sister in Toronto who gave her a ticket for the plane each year, and it was like a subscription that they both didn’t want to cancel. For 11 years, she did not have permission. Not from her husband, but from an aunt who was three houses away, at every marriage, she asked quietly whether all was “getting better”. That question, with a sympathetic tilt of the head, kept her in that house longer than he could ever.
Log kya kahenge isn’t a proverb. It’s an enforcer. A never-ending jury.
We laugh it off every time someone proposes a career change or divorce or says they’re in therapy, and someone says “sochein, log kya kahenge?”, which is as sarcastic as it is a statement. We laugh. Then the individual puts the decision aside in silence. This has happened so many times that we no longer think of it as a loss. We began to refer to it as prudence.
It isn’t prudence. Prudence considers the possibility of both risks and rewards. What “kya kahenge” does is not the same; it looks at your life and compares it with a rumour that’s not said yet, that might not be said ever, and if it were said, would cost you nothing. People persist in jobs they dislike for years because they think of some little sentence: What if I quit today? What would they think? What would they say? The audience for whom one is performing does not exist. We assemble the cage ourselves and then forget to check whether it has a door.
The mechanism is better illustrated by second marriages, where the resistance is usually not against the marriage itself. A widow in her 50s, well off financially, with kids all grown, would like to remarry so she doesn’t have to dine alone for the next 30 years. Her children aren’t worried about her happiness. They’re afraid of what people will say at the next wedding, and the story could get passed from one drawing room to another, picking up forms throughout. She falls victim to a conversation she will never hear. She remains alone anyway so that she doesn’t have to hear a sentence that never needed to be said.
The same reasoning applies to therapy, except that there are no decrees, but a diagnosis. People don’t opt out of treatment because they don’t think it is effective; they opt out because it means that they are admitting that there is a problem. For years people can live with a panic disorder in a car park or a quiet corner; they can call a therapist they found online because a parent, not unkindly, said that people would think they were “pagal” if they knew. The illness was never the secret. The phone call was. The number is saved under a false name, a falsehood so uninteresting that no one cares to ask questions.
It’s so hard to fight because it often comes in disguise. No one will tell you not to move on, not to remarry, not to change your career. It comes to you as a gentle question, right when you’re at your weakest. “Have you thought about what people will think?” is never really a question? It’s a “question mark” in disguise.
The part that should shame us is that the people we fear judgement from rarely are worth the fear. They won’t pay your rent if you have a job you don’t like. They don’t stay and sit with you at 2 a.m. when your husband raises his hand again. They will send an awkward message, perhaps, then return to their own compromises, the same that you are about to enter into. We don’t fear those who matter. We’re afraid of the ones who don’t, and still let them write the terms of our lives anyway.
Ultimately, ambition is just a desire to be discussed. Whether it’s a career shift, a late marriage, a divorce, or a reinvention, you have to take on the role of a topic for a while. The people who live unusual lives have just come to terms with the fact that they will be talked about by strangers who never had the right to such discussion, let alone to the full story. All others live their lives small and safe, believing that silence equals safety.
The losses that come from this fear are seldom proclaimed. A girl who sings the way people said Noor Jehan sang records nothing, as a recording is permanent, and permanence invites comment. A woman takes a year to make a speech, then fails to deliver it, because a woman that directs in the presence of strangers is called “bold” in a tone that was not meant as a compliment. None of them fails. None of them tries. Once the dream is no longer talked about, it ceases to exist.
This is the actual cost of log kya kahenge. People eventually talk about the marriage that ended a decade later, a career that doesn’t turn. The actual price is more subdued. There is a date for a divorce. There’s a last day for resignation. But no one can say on what day someone decided not to sing, not to speak, not to begin. It takes years for the dream to fade, and no one, not even the one who let it go, can say when. We don’t crush these dreams. We bury them alive, in the name of what people might say.