The Disrespected Wife

The Disrespected Wife

(pic courtesy : Google images. Homes painted this way in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan)

 

Scene: at a Mother-Infant Center. An immigrant couple come to visit a gynaecologist. The woman is pregnant. She uses the opportunity to ask the doctor some questions. To one of her questions, the doc replies:

"Yes, you can definitely avail for the free maternity hamper that includes many essential things a new Mother would require, like some diapers, baby bottle, milk for baby etc. But please be aware that this hamper box is only for one time, you can't expect to receive it free every month."

The immigrant pregnant mother immediately dropped her gaze to the ground. She felt shame. She had indeed expected to receive it free every month. Her husband had told her so. Obviously he had been misinformed. Again. Her husband avoided looking at her. He looked cowed-down and helpless. Yet again..

"How different my husband is to my eyes now compared to the time I got married. My regard for him drops more and more now that I am here in France with him. Before moving here, we were constantly messaging each other. He filled my eyes about coming to live in Paris. I, who have never been out of my country, coming to live in France was a dream I couldn't believe would come true. I looked forward to that magical life. Alas, my dream has turned to a nightmare. Shame and Disrespect is what I have to live with every day now. Back home, I came from an educated and well-off family. My head was held up high, I was even known to be arrogant. My family had money and education, we never had to beg for anything. Surrounded daily by friends, going places easily with my parents and siblings, my conscience was light and clear. I wasn't troubled about my future. Here, I am stifled under the weight of Loneliness and Insecurity. "

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Sharing my thoughts: 

This is a scenario I encounter often. Immigrant men who have successfully got the much-awaited status to remain in France for a while. They immediately arrange to get married back home. Using their "legal status to live in France", they lure and bait women from their community who are much younger, better looking and better educated than they themselves to come and live overseas. When the women arrive freshly in France, I see them looking innocent yet proud of their husband's "accomplishments". Slowly when the truth starts seeping in, that the husband always has to turn to the state for freebies because on his own he can do very little to support himself to have a decent life, do the new wife's eyes start opening. She sees the many cracks in the promises. Often, I see hate between husband and wife, separation and divorces. It's sad but rarely do I see an immigrant couple who genuinely have affection for each other. In their generally stifled lives, they have no time to explore their "friendship". Often many of such women, unable to return home, live a life simply locked up in their homes, a sign of having given up. 

Why did I start this blog?

 I am writing this blog because I have ten thousand thoughts to pen down simply. For me as an Indian, to discover this side of France, the thousands of people who have immigrated to France from many countries, and to be involved up close and personal with them is a fascinating experience for me.  I am already active on other social media platforms: Instagram and Youtube but somehow I did not feel they were right for me. Instagram is only to see life through rose-colored glasses and Youtube involves too many edits, unless you are a very confident speaker and happy with how you show yourself on video.

Pic taken at the 13th arrondisement in Paris

As an Indian who moved to France, who NEVER had a single notion of entering a country through any other way apart from with the right papers, I find it mind-boggling that there is such a huge community of my own compatriots who arrive and continue to live illegally in France. To arrive France without papers (illegally) and then being granted the refugee status is seen as an honorable thing, you can lift your head up high and shout to the world that you are a refugee. But what about the huge multitudes who applied too for the refugee status but got turned away and who continue to live illegally in France? We simply never hear about them. Through the course of time maybe they were successful to obtain papers but they would always tell the world (untruthfully) that they got the refugee status because the truth is shameful. Why are they never discussed? Especially when they constitute a huge part of the Paris region population? 

I want to make it clear that of course, there exists a community of Indians and sub-continent Indians who arrived legally, and since they have a profile that speaks of higher education and financial strength, they have adjusted better with the French society. I must point out here that not all Indians wish to stay in France once they have tested the waters. I have met and heard of many who come for a few years, get shook and depressed with the difficulty of adapting to European life, and in the end decide that they prefer to return either back home or move onwards to an English-speaking country. This is another big difference with the 'sans-papier' community. The ones with education and money have the choice to move out and away from France. They can afford it and thus do so. The illegal ones are stuck here in this new and alien country, and come isolation, depression and great suffering, they have no choice but to stick it out for life. They don't have the financial means to start life anew and have mostly become too addicted to the social welfare.

I am writing this blog because when I started my work as a translator, I realised with shock that up until that point in my life, I had no idea that people of my region could live like this in a European country. After having met almost 500 individuals and families who arrive without papers, I think it's time that other fellow-Indians became aware of their lives. 

 How little we Indians actually know of how our compatriots are living in a foreign land! The illegals are equally shocked when they ask me how did I enter the country and find out that a 'legal' way even exists! My main aim is to bring about some understanding of this community. But what do we do after having this knowledge you wonder. 

We Indians love to talk about the success and achievements of our community (like every other community of course), we want to be associated with Indian expats and crowd our minds only with success stories. Even back home, this is usually the mind-set. Little thought is ever given, almost no discussions in daily life of how the poor fare and if any, how can we alleviate their conditions. There is massive class distinction that causes this wedge of separation mentally. Those who work in NGO's are almost considered with pity or as failures for not having secured well-paying corporate jobs etc. You get the drift. So now, when the poor of our country arrive in droves to Europe (for my blog I will mention just France), it is the French man and woman who are observing the Indian community, this special community who are living a little hand-to-mouth. 

This particular community is much more traditional than their well-off compatriots, their education is negligent, and since our community has not yet got the strength to settle and establish themselves properly (unlike in the UK or US) they can't lend helping hands to each other as a community to bring themselves up. The French are seeing a floundering brown community where there is a sharp clash of cultures. 99% of the Indian-subcontinent women I have met don't work, and have little inclination to work (just like the many traditional mindset of women back home) and this point already is a sharp contrast to the French mind where a woman is considered on equal par to man and must work.

The aim of my blog is certainly not to bash the less well-offs who have arrived in France. But since they are the ones who are the largest in numbers and influence the minds of the French society of what Indians are like, it is interesting to observe how the community is settling down. As of now, I see mostly the first generation who have come trickling in. I have seen enough of the second generation to come to the conclusion that life isn't so rosy for them as yet. Hopefully, things will start looking brighter for the coming generations. 

If this blog post interests any of the well-off Indians, you can visit cities like Aubervilliers, La Courneuve, Saint-Denis, Drancy etc to see neighborhoods of Punjabis, Gujaratis, Tamils and Bengalis. Perhaps you could move among them and start to feel comfortable. Through a voluntary willingness to move among them, maybe associations can be formed where Indians can come forward and just speak to their country people. They don't lack food or accommodation but they greatly lack the human contact. I shall speak of this more in a separate blog post but I hope for now I have clarified my interest to start this blog.

An Indian-subcontinent paperless immigrant in Paris

Why Indian subcontinent immigrant? Only because they are the ones I am most familiar with through my work as a translatoe. Why Paris and nowhere else? Because I operate in the Paris region and this is where they (immigrants) are the most concentrated in numbers.

To find a way/reason to come and live in France is not easy. The immigration process is generally strict and limited to very few valid reasons. This makes it difficult for citizens of other countries to try and find a way to come and live in France. The living conditions in the Indian-subcontinent countries is very hard even now in the 21st century when compared to western Europe. Only the privileged can enjoy a decent standard of living while the vast majority suffer from a lack of infrastructure, education, social structures, highly corrupted politics, even poverty, uncontrolled human population etc. As a result, people of such countries want to move away to Europe where a better future will be secured for their children and the next generations. This is how most people consider becoming immigrants.

There are two types of immigrants who enter a country (I shall concentrate just on France). Those who apply for visas and enter it legally with passports, official papers etc and those who, with no official papers, enter the country illegally through the country's borders, in other words clandestinely. They won't have their passports on them and will barely have any identity papers at the time of crossing. 

The ones who do things legally will have had to undergo an arduous process of finding the right reason to travel to the country: tourism, studying, staying with a family member who is an EU citizen etc. Such a person  will have to have some funds to cover basic costs like food, accommodation, sightseeing, course fees etc. as he is not expecting to receive anything for free and plans his budget well in advance. An immigrant crossing illegally will barely have any money, mostly because he/she has been informed (by some villains called agents or 'passeurs' in French) that accommodation and food will be taken care of by the government. Such a person will also have to rely heavily on the goodness of his/her own compatriots who will initially share their living space and food with them.

The illegally entered are the ones who will go on to try and obtain the status of refugees. This is where the  meaning of the word 'refugees' gets corrupted. Asylum is granted by the authorities only after a lengthy process where the immigrant has to answer many questions. The seeker has to be able to convince the authorities that there is real danger to his/her life if he were to return to the country. The majority of the immigrants fail to obtain the refugee status after which they try to live in the country in an illegal manner. Thus begins a life with huge uncertainty. Though there is accommodation provided (a small living space in the city suburbs) either by the government or they pay the rent but this takes up everything they earn through social welfare, the quality of life for the immigrant gets diminished due to not knowing the language, the culture, social mores, education system for their children, their own cultural values that would hinder them to progress etc. All of these differences could be alleviated if the immigrant has a solid education himself, but in the majority of the cases I see, the immigrant is not even fluent in his own language as they discontinued school much too early in their childhoods. They have difficulty in being articulate, difficulty in writing and reading their own language. 

The biggest lack is the lack of a strong community who can help the immigrant. The Indian-subcontinent immigrants generally have always gone towards the English-speaking countries as the language is more familiar to them (thanks to the 90 years of British rule ) so the ones who do come to France are handicapped by the language and very unheard-of and foreign culture. As a result, the community as a whole have not progressed enough to give lending hands to each other.

This was a brief introduction to the profile of the Indian subcontinent illegal immigrant living in France. They outnumber (greatly) those who did enter the country legally and continue living legally. The ones who entered and live legally are the ones who also make progress in their lives. Their children certainly go on to have bright futures. Unfortunately the illegal ones cannot take pride in their following generation of children. Of course there are exceptions but it is the average Indian subcontinent immigrant who has not been able to make a success of life.

Through my following posts I will explore deeply into the reasons why this is the situation. Why does not the "failed" immigrant return home? With what promising thought and plan had he set out his journey to come to Europe? What future do they see for themselves when they get old one day and still without French passports? How are the other immigrant communities faring? How do the French see the Indian-subcontinent group? So many questions, so many uncertainties! This is the first ever blog of its kind. If anyone is interested to leave their own thoughts in the comments, you are more than welcome!