The Lady of Many Smiles

Let us reflect for a moment on the lot of a widow in India in the 1930s. There were few worse fates that could befall a woman at that time. It was a form of living hell, a mockery of a life lived in the shadows, one of shame, guilt, sorrow and humiliation, utterly stripped of dignity and joy. The widow was shorn of all adornment and color, and had to dress in old rags, without even a blouse to protect her modesty. Her hair, that symbol of beauty and luxuriance, was shaven off, roughly and crudely. She had to depend - for food, shelter, just the basics - on the usually undependable and non-existent kindness of family members. She was looked down upon as the harbinger of bad luck, a dark cloud, ominous and inauspicious, choked by the miasmic vapors of calamity and doom. She was considered lucky just to be alive.