Gender Gap
by Mia Molvray
Illustration by Darryl Elliott
Palanniappam Veenda bowed his head and tried to meditate as he walked to Siva Settlement. Instead he saw only a woman’s face. His gentle, patient mother had steadfastly refused to leave her family for the Settlement, even after she had almost been kidnapped. But she had been the last. Since she had died three years ago, Pala had not been alone with a woman except in his dreams.
Sometimes, in one of his many moods of self-doubt, he worried about his unattractiveness. He had pleasing features that could have been designed by a sculptor, but his beauty was of a fine-boned sort not much admired in men, and he was rather thin and short. He was too intelligent, however, to really believe that lack of size or muscle made him uninteresting. He knew what the problem was. It was lack of money.
Dry grasses jostled in a faint breeze, as if they were elbowing each other to get to a place with rain and flowers. Pala raised his eyes and idly wondered why the breeze couldn’t make itself useful in the stifling heat. The breeze finally brought him the smell of cooking fires near the stream where he could see beggars setting up camp. They were burning aromatic branches of neem and acacia, and anything else they could pick up. The overtones of burning garbage were not so pleasant. Pala sighed.
He walked by a temple and bowed like the good Brahmin priest he was, but his mind took no part in his body’s respect. It only looked sarcastically at the lingam, symbolizing male creativity, which decorated the roof. Male creativity! What exactly had it created? A land without women. A land that was going to grow old and die.
Soon, with the familiar pit of nervousness in his stomach, Palanniappam Veenda rang the bell at the Settlement’s massive outer gate. Once every three months his turn came around, and had been coming around for the last twelve years, always to no avail. However, he continued to inflict himself on the tea parties through a stern sense of duty since they were his only chance of ever finding a woman to share his life.
The huge Punjabi guard at the gate checked Pala’s retinal scan against the records, even though he recognized him, and then let him through. One dog was ordered to escort him so that the other dogs would not attack. Abductions of women may have been a problem in the past, but Pala had no trouble seeing why they had stopped once the Settlements became customary.
At the door, the house matron greeted him and indicated the same door of the same lounge where he had participated in so many of these dreadful, stilted events.
“We are very happy you could join us, Shri Veenda,” said the gentle voice of the aged chaperone. He bowed his head. “I would like to introduce you to a new member of our little circle,” he looked up with too much interest, “Indira Tal.”
She was a pretty young slip of a thing. She was also obviously bored with the old geezer being introduced to her. Pala dropped his thirty-year-old eyes back to the carpet. “So pleased to meet you,” he mumbled, and moved off to help himself to some samosas on the sideboard. Figuring out what to do with your hands was always the most difficult thing at these events.
He busied himself staring at a school of bright blue and red fish, swimming around the aquarium at the center of the room, while he took small bites out of his samosa, and threw furtive glances around the room. It was not the first time the tragicomedy of his situation had struck him. Here he was, the man who lay awake nights consumed by longing for a kindly, understanding female to share his life. It was more than sex, much more. He had never had sex with a woman, and had long since discovered how to take the edge off that particular need by himself. Nor was he the sort of man who could find satisfaction with boys, as so many did these days. No, it was a woman he wanted, full of that indefinable, magical femaleness. It was a woman that he wanted until his soul hurt, yet he could not even talk to any of the specific women in this specific room.
“Pala, Pala, I keep telling you. You have to mix,” said a quiet woman’s voice next to him, her tone and her poke in his ribs making it clear that she was sharing an in-joke.
He turned and a smile lit up his face. “Saira! I’m so glad you came. I was already afraid you weren’t going to be here today.” Her large laughing black eyes answered his smile. She had an air of complete confidence Pala secretly admired. Standing arrow-straight in a glorious blue and gold sari, her black hair arranged in an elegant twist, she could have been a Maharani from days long past.
“Oh, Pala, I keep telling you, there’s no point mixing with me. I can’t marry you.”
“Well, at least I can talk to you, which is more than I can do with anyone else.” Maybe today he would finally ask her why she was always saying that.
“How is your respected father?” she inquired politely.
“Much the same. But something really wonderful has happened.” He paused, enjoying the pleased anticipation in her eyes as she lent herself to sharing whatever he felt. “I just got an invitation to speak at the conference in Amsterdam!”
He pulled a fat envelope from his pocket. Thirty-fifth World Religions Congress it said on the envelope. “They accepted my paper.” He pointed excitedly at the title, “Adaptations in Hinduism to the Realities of Gender Imbalance.”
“How wonderful for you! I’m so glad!” Saira beamed with delight, making Pala feel that his own joy was finally real.
“Mainly I’m going to be discussing the changed position of women,” he explained, talking quickly to keep himself from hugging her, “the destruction of the caste system, the ability to marry across castes. It’s such a recent development, yet now we priests are all convinced that this is ancient and venerable tradition. A lot of my paper is about the cognitive psychology of rationalization.” He smiled apologetically. “I thought I might bring you a copy, but then I thought it wouldn’t be very interesting for a genetic engineer.”
Saira laughed and swatted him. “Send it. Next time you come I’ll tell you everything that’s wrong with it. So when will you be going? Where exactly are they holding it?”
“Wrong with it?” he asked with some trepidation. “What do you mean, wrong with it?”
“Pala, Pala, I’m just joking. I’ll bet you spend all your time on how women can marry anyone. What about how we can’t live anywhere?”
He remembered a conversation decades ago with one of his most crotchety aunts.
“Are you angry with me?” he’d asked her timidly.
With a little puff of scorn and a shake of her head she’d said, “No, child, no. But how would you like to be born free, and end up caged inside your own house?”
Pala glanced toward Saira sorrowfully. “I never did decide whether you are freer being shut out or shut in.”
For a moment Saira was silent, and then she said quietly, “That’s what I like about you, Pala. You understand things.” She continued in a more conversational tone, “Anyway, you still haven’t told me: where and when?”
“Next month before the fall trimester starts. It’s being held at the big Amsterdam Ko—” he looked at the envelope and spelled out slowly “Koninglijke Hotel.”
“Next month?” she repeated as if calculating something. Then, more absently, “The old Koninglijke Paleis? That’s a beautiful, seventeenth-century palace right in the center of the old town. I wandered through the public section for hours and hours.”
“You’ve been there?” he asked with some surprise. “I thought you’d gone to university in England?” It was hard for him to say it blandly. He himself, like almost every other boy, had received the polite form letter. “…Due to repeated incidents involving male students from your country, we regret that our policy does not allow us to consider your otherwise excellent application…” His brilliant academic record, his perfect behavior, the venerable Brahmins who wrote supporting letters for him, it all counted for nothing.