The Woman Who Chose Herself: Single Women, Society's Venom, and What 'Maa Behen' Made Me Remember

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There was a woman in our neighbourhood. She lived three lanes down from us in a house that always smelled of fresh flowers and agarbatti. She had two daughters, a steady job, and a life she had built with her own hands. She also did not have a husband not because he had died, not because he had left her, but because she had left him.

He had taken a second wife. She had packed her daughters and her dignity and walked out the door. And for that single act of self-preservation our neighbourhood never forgave her.

The whispers started at the water pump and never really stopped. ''Kuch toh kami hogi usme." There must be something wrong with her. Why else would he look elsewhere? Why else would a woman choose to be alone? She wore her sindoor until she chose not to. She wore sleeveless blouses in summer. She laughed too loudly, lived too freely, and committed the greatest sin a woman in 1990s India could commit: she seemed perfectly fine without a man.

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I used to go to her house every Navratri for 'Kanya Puja'. I was one of the little girls invited to be worshipped as a form of the Goddess. I remember her house like I remember a favourite song warmly, completely. The floors were swept clean. The rangoli was precise. The kitchen smelled of halwa and ghee. There were no signs of lack, no shadow of incompleteness. The house hummed with the energy of women who ran everything themselves, and ran it beautifully.

I was fascinated by her. I didn't have the language for it then. Now I do: she was a badass. And society hated her for it.

The 1990s: When a Woman Alone Was a Woman to be Ashamed Of

The 1990s in India were a decade of strange contradictions. Doordarshan was giving way to cable TV. Liberalisation was cracking open the economy. And yet, for women particularly women who stepped outside the narrow lane of wife-and-mother the social contract had barely moved an inch.

A single woman was not just unmarried. She was a problem. A question mark. An accusation waiting to be answered.

The cultural narrative in India has long equated singlehood with incompleteness, especially for women. Independence, when it came, arrived alongside shame, social abandonment, and anxiety burdens that men carrying the same marital status were almost never made to bear. A widower was a man to be pitied and helped. A widow was an omen. A divorced man was simply a man who had moved on. A separated woman? She must have done something to deserve it.

Photo Credit: Image is AI-generated

The labels were vicious and plentiful. Witch. Bad influence. Characterless. Available. The woman who left her husband's house regardless of why was written off before she could write her own story. Nobody asked whether she had been wronged. Nobody applauded her courage. The neighbourhood gossip machine didn't run on facts, it ran on fear the fear that if she could choose herself, so could someone else's wife.

There has always been a historical underpinning in Indian society that a woman is weak and nothing without a man a belief troublesome not just because it denies women their humanity but because it treats dependency as virtue. Women who disproved this narrative were not celebrated. They were punished for it.

Working made it worse, not better. Working outside the home was historically considered a stigma or a low-status activity for women in India. In that cultural climate, only the poorest women worked out of necessity, and once family income rose, women were expected to quietly withdraw from the workforce. So a woman who chose to work, who built an income not out of desperation but out of want was threatening the social order twice over. She wasn't just refusing marriage's protection. She was proving she didn't need it.

The House She Held Together

What I remember most about that woman's home was what it didn't feel like. It didn't feel broken. It didn't feel like a house waiting for a man to come home and make it whole. It felt lived in, deeply and deliberately. Her daughters did their homework at a proper table. There were fresh curtains on the windows. There were books on the shelf. There was a calendar with appointments circled in pen school meetings, a dentist visit, a festival.

She managed the landlord alone. She handled school admissions alone. She negotiated salary increments alone. She sat at parent-teacher meetings in a plastic chair and answered questions about her daughters' progress without the buffer of a husband beside her, without anyone to split the weight of the world.

Photo Credit: Image is AI-generated

Housing itself has long been a significant challenge for single women in India. Landlords frequently assume they are promiscuous. Neighbours watch their comings and goings with suspicious eyes. Society offers no real infrastructure for a woman building a life on her own terms.And yet she built it anyway curtains, halwa, daughters and all.

Maa Behen: A Film That Knows Her Name

Last Friday I watched Maa Behen on Netflix, the new dark comedy-thriller directed by Suresh Triveni, starring Madhuri Dixit, Triptii Dimri, and Dharna Durga. I wasn't expecting to time-travel. I wasn't expecting to end up sitting in my living room with faded memories suddenly vivid again, smelling agarbatti and halwa from a decade I thought I had mostly forgotten. But that is exactly what happened.

The film centres on Rekha, a widow played by Madhuri Dixit, whose second daughter was born to an unknown father after her husband's death. The women of her colony apparently inspected the newborn to check whether she resembled any of their husbands one of many precise, devastating details the film uses to show how a woman living outside convention is treated as a communal threat. Rekha wears sleeveless blouses. She wears glamorous sarees. She works. She laughs. The neighbourhood decides she is a Black Widow and never moves on from that verdict.

Her older daughter Jaya, played by Triptii Dimri, has had to fend for herself all her life, married into a patriarchal family where she toils to serve the men of the household. Both women are considered "trouble," outcasts who have always had to look out for themselves while suffering at the hands of others.

The film's title itself is a sly linguistic flip taking words usually used as insults in Hindi street language and reorienting them to centre women instead of making them targets of degradation. It is a small act of reclamation. It is also, in its quiet way, exactly the kind of gesture that woman in my neighbourhood deserved and never received.

Neena Gupta: The Real Woman Who Refused the Script

If Maa Behen gave me a fictional frame for what I had witnessed as a child, then Neena Gupta has always been the real-world proof that the fiction is not exaggeration.

In the 1990s, Neena Gupta did something that Indian society had no vocabulary for, and even less tolerance of: she chose to have her child, her daughter Masaba, outside of marriage. When she became pregnant, she faced an agonising dilemma whether to terminate the pregnancy or raise the child as a single mother in a conservative Indian society. She chose the path less travelled.

At a time when single motherhood was deeply stigmatised, especially without the validation of marriage, Neena's decision was revolutionary. She was subjected to relentless gossip, unsolicited advice, and judgment from all quarters. In her autobiography 'Sach Kahun Toh', she reveals she was even advised to marry a gay businessman to avoid scandal a suggestion she flatly refused.

She chose to live her truth instead. And she paid the professional price for it. The industry's biases meant she was often sidelined for significant roles. For years, she balanced television work with occasional film appearances, struggling to get the kind of roles that did justice to her talent. She even had to shoot a television show to pay her daughter's school fees.

What she said about this period of her life stays with me: "I was already doing the housewife thing but without the husband." She described how looking after a baby alone while maintaining a work schedule was gruelling in a way that had no name and no support system. Looking after a baby alone and working at the same time was very tough. There was no comfortable life, no parallel, no one to share the load.

And through it all, society kept its tab open on her. She was talked about. She was labelled. She was the cautionary tale and the scandal in the same breath. She persisted anyway.

The Threat of a Woman Who Needs Nothing From You

Let us say what has always been quietly understood but rarely spoken aloud: a self-sufficient woman is not a social problem. She is a social threat.

She threatens the economy of obligation that marriages particularly unequal ones run on. She threatens the gossip network that survives on other people's disasters. She threatens every woman in the colony who stayed in something she should have left, because her existence asks the question that nobody wants to hear answered: 'What if you didn't have to?'

This is why the labels exist. Witch. Bad influence. Available. Characterless. They are not descriptions. They are warnings keep away from her, or you might start thinking like her.

The stigma attached to being single can also be internalised, leading women to view their own situation as inadequate, increasing isolation and shame. The cruelest thing about this social architecture is that it doesn't just come from the outside. It gets inside. Women police each other. Daughters are taught to fear becoming her. And the woman who has simply chosen to live on her own terms is made to carry the weight of everyone else's discomfort with that choice.

At the workplace, the stigma compounds further. Unmarried women are often considered less committed or 'too available" a double bind that punishes them whether they throw themselves into work or step away from it. She cannot win in a system not designed for her to win.

But She Wins Anyway

What I know now watching Maa Behen with thirty years of living behind me is that the women who chose themselves were not the cautionary tales. They were the blueprints.

The woman from our neighbourhood raised her daughters in a house that felt whole. Neena Gupta raised a daughter who built an empire and a mother-daughter relationship that became, beautifully, a Netflix series of its own. The fictional Rekha in Maa Behen raises daughters who learn, through fire and chaos and dark comedy, how to protect each other.

They all got called the same names. They all built the same thing anyway. The names were just noise. The houses were real.

Maa Behen is streaming on Netflix now. Neena Gupta's memoir 'Sach Kahun Toh' is available in bookstores and online. The woman from my neighbourhood never got a film made about her. But she got two daughters, a clean house, and the last laugh and I have never forgotten the smell of her halwa.

Some women choose themselves. The least we can do is remember their names.