{"id":43,"date":"2016-07-05T17:21:01","date_gmt":"2016-07-05T17:21:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/13.201.39.237\/?p=43"},"modified":"2016-07-05T17:21:01","modified_gmt":"2016-07-05T17:21:01","slug":"widowed-by-english","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/13.207.105.184\/?p=43","title":{"rendered":"Widowed by English"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cK<\/span>oi discount nahi milega, ji? Yeh mera third time hai, aapke yahan\u2026\u201d\n\nThe\u00a0petite young woman peers\u00a0over the tall help desk of Touchstone English Coaching Centre in Patiala, hoping to get a markdown. Jashan Waraich, with her long hair plaited\u00a0into a Punjabi guth and a yellow salwar kameez, is a cheerful sight. But her voice is tinged with disappointment. She waits for a response but all she gets from the receptionist is a finger pointed to a large red-lettered sign. It says, \u2018English Only Zone.\u2019 Unable to meet the unspoken imperative, she walks away. It\u2019s not the prospect of forking over cash for yet another test that\u2019s bringing her down. It\u2019s the fear that tomorrow, on her seventh attempt at IELTS (International English Language Testing System), she might fail once again.\n\nJashan is a regular at English coaching centres. After trying a few in\u00a0the\u00a0tiny town of\u00a0Dhuri, she came to the institute in\u00a0Patiala with great hope. They\u2019d promised her a pass. This was to be her chance to\u00a0sail straight through to the shiny, resplendent shores of Calgary, Canada, where her husband of two years awaits her arrival.\n\nJashan has waited, prayed, trained, and tried for the reunion. One-on-one tuitions, coaching classes, even immersion modules at \u2018guaranteed results\u2019 centres, she has done it all. Her institute is one of the thousands of coaching franchises which mushroomed to meet the demand of a 2011 amendment, making an English test compulsory for\u00a0those applying for a\u00a0spouse visa to the UK and USA. Their huge hoardings, of shiny brunettes with light eyes and American teeth, dot the highways of Punjab, promising a life in the \u2018promised land\u2019.\n\nAs a student at the local Punjab School Education Board elementary in her hometown of Patran, Jashan was introduced to her now nemesis in Standard 4. \u201cTab jaake maine A,B,C dekhi pehli baar. Par\u00a0paanchvi class tak mujhe English main naam tak likhna nahi aaya,\u201d she says, turning the pages of her phonetics guide. To live with a husband she\u2019s barely gotten a chance to know, she now has to prove her proficiency at the language.\n\nJashan got married in the winter of 2013. Her husband returned to manage an Indian restaurant in Calgary, and she got to work on accents and syntaxes at a class in Dhuri, her married home. The matrimonial bond has since been sustained via a smartphone (her mother-in-law tends to monopolise calls made to the landline). Jashan\u2019s was an arranged match and she was ready for the challenges of that. What she had not prepared for was a final scoreboard that read IELTS \u2013 7, Jashan Waraich \u2013 0.\n\nEven as she prepares for her next\u00a0attempt, Jashan\u2019s hopes of ever re-uniting with her husband have withered. In a world where there are football widows, golf widows, Jashan and a thousand women like her are Punjab\u2019s English widows.\n<\/p>

***<\/p>\nOn the day of the dreaded test of IELTS (pronounced as I-lets, to rhyme with the Punjabi pronunciation of toilets) Jashan joins the lines at a three-star hotel with the other hopefuls, passports in hand, hours before registration begins. The new brides are recognisable by their chuda-laden arms, their ceremonial henna still vivid. Then there are the veterans \u2013 the ones whose many failed attempts have made their plight an in-joke among invigilators.\n\nOver 10,000 aspirants sit for the exam every month in the state. Patiala is the hub of this cottage industry in southern Punjab with more than 130 IELTS coaching centres. And the queues outside the exam halls have more and more women. These women do not understand Hindi, let alone English and the familiar faces have stumbled over a dozen times. Even if they luck out and clear the first level of multiple-choice questions, they fail the listening and speaking tests.\n

\u201cOur young women have stepped up to the challenges. An NRI daughter can change the family\u2019s future, just like a son. Once a sibling is settled abroad, the others too, follow.\u201d\n\nJashan<\/cite>\n