In a nut shell

To multi-task is a woman's destiny.Her destiny is not her femininity, which is altogether questionable. It is not her sexual identity, which is complicated. It is not related to the choices that she makes in life. The choices she makes are imagined. She has no choice.

And yet, she has to multi-task. Not so that she can fulfill all her responsibilities or because, as a modern woman, she has multiple roles to play.

Multi-task or Perish. That is why it is her destiny.

Of course, some may say that some women have it nice. They merely have to wave a hand in the air and this or that is done! Those women don't exist. They are fanciful creatures in our envious and our men's lethargic imagination.

I walk a winding path from the back gate of the Institute to its shrouded center. It is a quaint little jogger's path, reminiscent of University greens colonized by students, dogs and families who sprawl, read, listen to music, talk or just watch others walk by. It only reminds me of other spaces. There is no such communal activity here. Only the Institute's self sufficient internal organization symbolized by women behind vegetable burdened push carts calling on other women who step out briefly for the ordinary potato perusal- to go back to scanning the weeks' The Economist.

Or perhaps they are also busy coordinating their lives so that it makes sense to an outsider like me looking in through the windows. Perhaps they are checking in on babies, on pots on the fire, on the spot on the floor, turning a blind eye to the laundry, sighing after the speck of dust that resolutely clings to the edge of the table. They are, like the rest of us, barely managing to put themselves in order to go out and battle a world that has sized them up and told them what to do or what not to do. They trail in surreptitiously late and leave early, to catch up with the thoughts they left behind at home.

The woman who comes to sweep and swab my house has aged with the cunning she has had to exercise to barely survive a drunkard, five children, two grandchildren and a decrepit everyday life. She is old at forty and shrewd for her years. She keeps the tabs on the ways of the well to do. She tells me which keys turn for which door and how to keep to keep the stair railings shining.

What happens when one day the rationale for such an existence disappears out of the window? When the centers we had thought we had established for our lives disintegrate or just move away? What happens when there is simply no need to do what one did everyday grumbling, muttering but purposefully?

Will we be able to find the courage to stop, stand and stare? Or will we raise swords, imagining that the point is not lost after all, those centers of our lives have not crumbled away?