With reference to Bina Shah's article “Walking Beneath a Weight,” (March 19) the Sindhi woman is a fiesty survivor. In most cases, at least in the context of the rural poor (the majority), she is the breadwinner or the member of the workforce. She works 12 hours a day in the scorching fields, harvesting wheat, sowing paddy, picking cotton and in between the seasons of the major crops, traveling to neighbouring fields to pick red chilies. She works those 12 hours for 40 rupees a day.

Then she returns home to cook, clean, serve. Her own clothes are threadbare as she does what she can for her family. Her own health is neglected; if she has the few rupees to spare, she'd rather use it to get the bus to the nearby town and get medicine for her children or husband. Her own nutrition is irrelevant. As it is, the family survives on a diet of wheat flour and onions.

She must walk several kilometres a day to fetch water, which in some desert villages, won't even be sweet. She must cook out in the open sun, collect dung and pat it into cakes to use as stove fuel. She suffers from many problems. Her open home has no toilet and the fields often offer little privacy. And when she has a moment or two to spare, she must wear her fingers ragged and her eyes sore to stitch the beautiful rillis for which she'll make a few hundred rupees and we'll spend thousands to buy.

The men while away their days at the tea stalls, spending from what she earns, watching endless films and increasingly, developing habits of gambling, drinking, doing drugs, thieving. She struggles to send her son to school, hoping he will ease her burden where her husband could not.

She gets past matriculation and then is too ''good” in his own eyes to work the field. He doesn't get a job because he's not educated enough to compete with those who are or influential enough to bypass the system. So he deems himself superior and whiles away his time too. Now, she must feed him too and cater to his demands for better clothes and a better lifestyle to befit his higher status.

Yet how is it that in the face of such adversity, the Sindhi woman is always full of humour, hospitality, and warmth? She'll never miss the chance to crack a joke, warm the day with her loud, open laughter or greet you with a hug, and an insistence that you sit on her rilli and drink her tea. She's neither bitter, nor resentful, nor jaded or without hope. If you teach her how to read the time or recognise money or sign her name, she'll suck it up like a sponge and relish the knowledge. She is the Sindhi woman, resilient and brave.

NAWEEN MANGI
Karachi