Individuality Combined with Entrepreneurial Spirit: Breaking Patriarchal Codes in Prabha Khaitan’s A Life Apart

Writing one’s life is like a striptease act: you are exposed to hundreds of eyes watching you uncover your naked self. This may sound odd but it is also true that most of us take an exhibitionist’s pleasure in doing so.

Khaitan (2013: 261)

Autobiographies or life narratives have progressively become an attention-grabbing genre; they are used as a tool for writing the self and writing about one’s life. Evidently, the “avalanche” of this genre reveals how people, either writers or readers, are respectively concerned about exploring the questions of “autos” and “bios” (Shands et al., 2015: 7). Indian women writers are also not spared from the avalanche of this escalating and multifarious sort of writing to express “their gendered specificity,” without “effacing the very real narrative authority, purposefulness, and perspectival control” (Brueck, 2017: 1) of them in their writings; identical as their voices. While reading autobiographies of Indian women writers, one “must be especially attentive to the language” used in the text as a medium of expression sharing the experiences of their lives, furthermore, “understand how the relationality and collectivity of experience is not accidental or necessarily organic to a woman’s view on her world, but is actively, politically, and consciously constructed in the course of a narrative” (Brueck, 2017: 1). Prabha Khaitan is one such courageous Indian women writer who recounts and shares her life experiences impudently in her life narrative titled A Life Apart: An Autobiography. This chapter explores and cognizes the course of an inspirational and tear-jerking narrative of such a successful entrepreneur and writer who defied the societal codes and asserted against prejudices and hypocrisies prevailing in the male-dominated society.

A Life Apart, originally written in Hindi by Prabha Khaitan as Anya se Ananya (2007), was later translated by Ira Pandey and got published in 2013. Namita Gokhale calls Prabha Khaitan “a woman of extraordinary spirit and determination” (Khaitan, 2007: v) who was born into a wealthy and well-known traditional Marwari business family. Moreover, she is a renowned author of novels such as Chinnamasta, Peeli Aandhi, and Apne Apne Chehre. Apart from being an efficacious writer, she is a true inspiration for Indian women, who “made her own path and forged her own destiny” as an “entrepreneur and an astute business woman” establishing a money-spinning leather business (Gokhale, in Khaitan, 2007: v).

A Life Apart is an unsheathed narrative, where Prabha writes about her life, how she “achieved a well-earned eminence” contesting “space,” constructing her “self” and sustaining her individuality in “an overwhelming patriarchal society” (Gokhale, “Forward,” vi). She also weaves her experiences of leather trading in the international market into her writings since she is intensely versed in philosophy, economics, sociology, trade, and commerce related to the contemporary world. After reading world literature and being influenced by the feminist writings of Simone de Beauvoir, she wrote on the exploitation of women, psychology, and the freedom struggle in Indian society. She wanted Indian women to be independent and respected. Vijay Shinde (n.d.) also advocates about women’ rights and freedom in his blog and expresses that she is appreciated for her knowledge, perseverance, and resolution not only in Hindi literature but also in Indian literature (www.rachanakar.org/2013/01/blog-post).

Being an able writer and a thoughtful woman, Prabha poured her heart and mind out via “graphe” including her “auto” and “bio” on the paper. When her autobiography got published, she was applauded and criticized both for talking about her personal life with such truthfulness and courage. Although she was perceptually prepared for such denunciations, in her narrative, she emphasized the reliability and authenticity of an autobiographer’s life experiences:

The truth lies in the eyes of the beholder on the one hand, and on the other in the reader’s perception of the truth. The strength of an honest bit of writing has its own pull and this is probably why an honest autobiography has a longer shelf life than a work of fiction. One reason for this is that such a work becomes a bond between the writer and the reader and although an interpretation of the text may vary with each generation, the power of its narrative can never dim. (Khaitan, 2013: 261)

Beyond accolades and criticisms, Prabha broke and shattered the frame of a traditional woman set by male-dominated society for its own benefits, yet she had to suffer a lot while doing so. Her autobiography reflects contradictions in her life; on one hand, she was an independent and successful entrepreneur who earned the respect of her peers and colleagues in the corporate world by setting her own business, and on the other hand, she was a “second” woman in a long-term relationship with a married man whom she loved and devoted her life to breaking all oppressive social rules. She starts her story by quoting Sati from Indian mythology:

Sati—the consort of Shiva—is the embodiment of a woman who dedicated her whole life to a single man, and to him alone. I was always drawn to her and today, as I review my long life of over half a century and mentally bow to her, I also salute the remnants of the woman I once was. (Brueck, 2017: 1)

In her 50s, sitting alone on the steps of a store in New York, she recalls her past and has deep respect for the committed woman inside her and what she had been throughout her life after she fell in love at the age of 20 with a married man who was double of her age and father of five children. The narrative opens up with the depiction of an argument and how Dr Saraf left her in Jackson Heights, New York, just because she had purchased a costly canvas bag from Banana Republic to take back to India as a sample for her craftsman to copy to add to her “repertoire of leather exports” (Khaitan, 2013: 2). She “had been toying with the idea of including bags and fashion items to the industrial leather gloves and boots” (Khaitan, 2013: 2) her company manufactured for export, but Dr Saraf scoffed at her doubting her business sense and shouting about it as an arrogant attitude. Furthermore, he “spat out in anger, hailed a taxi and drove off in a huff” (Khaitan, 2013: 3), taking her passport and wallet with him without understanding her passion and dedication for her business. Dr Saraf undermined her corporate interests and capabilities because she was a woman. In the article “Women of the Ultramodern Era as Depicted in the Fiction of Manju Kapur,” M. M. Dhalayat (2012) talks about inferiority of women in the society as “not a biological fact but a created one” (p. 28). Dhalayat (2012) further continues,

Civilization defines what is feminine, determines how women should behave, and perpetuates the oppression of women. The social positions and roles that civilizations have assigned to women have kept them in an inferior position to that of men. It is the patriarchal civilization that relegates women to the margins. (p. 28)

Although an erudite doctor, he also sounds here like a typical man from “the unconscious dawn of the patriarchal India” (Dhalayat, 2012: 28) considering Prabha as an inferior and incapable person who cannot decide what is good for her business. This shows the mentality of people in our society where women are taken as not fit for particular businesses. After all that humiliation Prabha faced in a foreign land, she questions herself,

What did I mean to him, I wondered? Lover, mistress or half a wife? I had spent twenty years of my life with this man but still had no adequate word to describe our relationship. (Khaitan, 2013: 4–5)

Furthermore, she questions the role of a lover in a man’s life defying the acceptable roles of women set in the patriarchal Indian society such as a mother, a wife, or a sister. She feels dissatisfied with inhibiting the roles assigned to a woman and asks why “any woman who does not fall in these neat categories” can only be called “a mistress” even though she is not dependent on that man financially and has “her own income” (Khaitan, 2013: 5). She further says that she was fully aware of his marital status but decided to love him all her life and devoted to him like Sati, the consort of Shiva in Indian mythology whose heart was pure and spirit fully clad with dignity and vigor. Here, these elevated lines truly describe the liberated and faithful lady existing in Prabha, “Being an emancipated and righteous lady/ She can utter loudly with assertion/ That she is not faulty and frail/ And nobody has a right to contradict” (Yadav, 2013: 40).

Prabha persisted, as a strong lady of words who once promised to remain committed to Dr Saraf, truly remained the same for her whole life whatever humiliation and sufferings she had to face throughout her life, she stayed with him till his death. The lines written in the poem “Till the End of Her Subsistence,” adds to the confession and commitment that Prabha made.

. . . a verdict about her love

And put her words with elegance about the man

Who resides sumptuously in her psyche.

Neither she gossips nor does she turn her hands away,

She concerns, loves, and desires to offer him all she can. (Yadav, 2013: 40)

Although all her life she persisted in defying conventions, defying prejudice, and questioning choices, there were times when people questioned about her marriage and children, that she was “steeped in a perpetual state of guilt,” and felt that they “were doomed to live together in a relationship” they could “neither own nor deny” (Yadav, 2013: 12). In such situations, they initially fought “. . . as warriors/ and barked up the wrong tree” (Yadav, 2013: 17) but later rejoined each other. Many times, Dr Saraf tried to handle her with love diverting toward her achievements of good education, successful business, and her writings. Although her personal life with Dr Saraf was principally concentrated upon in the autobiography, yet her life narrative could be divided in the fragments of her business, her writings, and her intimate relationship with Dr Saraf.

Being the new Indian woman, she exposes, questions, and challenges the old-age traditions and prejudices in male-dominated society with her parallel feminine dilemmas, anxieties, and sufferings. She fights for individualism above all her feminine restrictions and tries to “transcend the horizons depicting a revolutionary spirit” standing at “crossroads caught between tradition and modernity” (Dhalayat, 2012: 28). However, in this course of identity creation, Prabha herself admits,

I must devote some time to my business interests as well. Love and its problems takes up so much of our time that if women were to devote as much energy and dedication to their own work, what could they not achieve! (Khaitan, 2013: 13)

Her struggle story had started at a very early age when her own mother called her “Chaumasa,” which means the sultry pre-monsoon season, due to her dark complexion. The little heart of hers started realizing the discrimination at very early age. When she was ten and a half years old, her first periods came and she was not allowed by her mother to attend the annual death ceremony of her father who was a renowned industrialist in Calcutta. She was smuggled to a remote corner of the terrace where no one could be polluted by her presence. In her own words,

Why does my mother hate me, I asked myself? How I wished for a fairy godmother to come and change me into a delicate and beautiful girl! (Khaitan, 2013: 21)

After her father’s death, her family came into trouble. Although initially her mother was in favor of a girl’s early marriage after her husband’s death, she gradually understood the importance of financial independence, and her worldview regarding girls began to change. Consequently, Prabha reached college after her schooling and began to foresee the possibilities of fulfillment of her dreams. She was determined neither to “grow up to become like her Amma nor to be a meek, submissive daughter-in-law” (Khaitan, 2013: 26) like her brothers’ wives. She said that none of her women relatives stimulated her to follow their roles as she found all those women “wallowed in their misery, swimming in ocean of tears” (p. 26).

The Second Sex was treated as Simone de Beauvoir’s foremost theoretic support to feminism, in the 1960s and 1970s, and Prabha also read it in her college days and later translated it into Hindi for local readers. She was utterly influenced by the idea of Beauvoir where she says that no woman is born helpless, society makes her weak. She argued this point at times with her college friends saying it led to the exploitation of women in Indian society which appeared to have a careless attitude toward their growth and treated them as a weaker section of the society. She read a lot about different philosophies, including Marxist theory which she related to the Bengal situations of her time. In her autobiography A Life Apart, she expressed that she enjoyed reading Marx and Beauvoir and could relate their writings to her own life and times. In her article “‘The Great Passion of My Life’: Simone de Beauvoir as a Reader of Women Writers,” Tilde Sankovitch (1993) quotes,

Simone de Beauvoir says in Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter that apart from her school work, reading was the great passion of her life and she went on to demonstrate that love of reading throughout the book, and indeed throughout her autobiographical volumes. (p. 15)

Therefore, these autobiographies of de Beauvoir turned out to be a kind of an instructor or a guide for the shaping of a new type of feminine self, such as the one Prabha Khaitan created through which she resisted the prevailing cultural roles. In the article “Adventures of Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir’s Autobiographies, Women Liberation, and Self-Fashioning,” Curthoys (2000) writes,

Where The Second Sex had intimated that a significant aspect of human liberation lay in women not losing their identity or their sense of self in those of men, it was the autobiographies which suggested and demonstrated in great detail how this might be done. In them, the rejection of conventional marriage and children was no mere slogan, but the foundation of what seemed to young female readers to be a fascinating and challenging life. (p. 3)

Facing the challenges of life, Prabha was drawn to the nascent women’s movement when the rise of liberal Marxism was witnessed in the decade of the 1980s. She felt that she was always on the “wrong side of patriarchy” and had agonized throughout her life due to ”its stifling conduct codes” (Khaitan, 2013: 263). She shows this at very early stage of her relationship with Dr Saraf, a well-established doctor when she met him first time to get her eyes checked. They kissed and came closer in their first tryst. Although Dr Saraf said to her later that they would never meet again, she said, “it is impossible for me to promise you that we will never meet again. I am not afraid of taking risks and nothing will ever intimidate me if you are with me” (2013: 50). She decided to spend a lonely spinster’s life revealing that transgressing “barriers has its own pleasure” (2013: 51). She was bold enough to take the relationship to the next level but Dr Saraf was timid. She shows her assertion when she defined their relationship as an unorthodox relationship which was “not all about desire and body” (2013: 56). She said that Dr Saraf “was reminded of an animal lacerated by the coils of a barbed wire fence he was trying to cross” (2013: 56). However, she was fully aware that he was a married man and that she would never have the love that his wife had; yet she decided to love him all her life. She was a strong lady who could stand against social hypocrisies and stayed firm as a woman of words throughout her life. Furthermore, she detailed about her relationship in such deep painful words, “I had no sense of shame about us whereas he wanted to bury me in a dark, airless space where no one could see us” (2013: 58). She clearly expresses her feelings that about this illegitimate relationship giving her logic,

since I had decided to give this man all I had, and he wanted to retreat into a shell rather than confront the reality of our relationship, we were on separate tracks. He fought imagined shadows whereas I was so deeply committed to him that nothing else mattered. The world was on one side and he was on the other. (2013: 58)

When Prabha became pregnant, Dr Saraf advised her not to utter a word in front of anyone. She muses about that people with patriarchal mind-sets who would never be able to realize what “happens to the women who are forced into silence and doomed to suffer their pain alone” (2013: 78). She needed Dr Saraf’s support at that time in the “cloak-and-dagger life” (2013: 79) situation. Finally, she decided to abort the child though Dr Saraf was not in favor of her decision. In the hospital, while lying on the bed, she wondered what people would think of her who is killing an illegitimate child in her womb. She felt very low at that time. She expresses her grief, “What respect would they have left for me? In fact, I felt lowered in my own esteem that day . . . I was the one who started this relationship, I was fully aware of the pitfalls it would have” (2013: 83). After that abortion, her dependence on Dr Saraf increased and did not remain “just a physical one it was a peculiar kind of sickness” (p. 85) that she considered as “love” (2013: 85). Later, he took his family for a vacation to Shimla for a month and that meant she “sank into a depression” (2013: 85).

No one in this world usually feels the pain of the other woman in a man’s life; usually, everyone has genuine sympathy with the legitimate wife of a man. Therefore, with how much dignity, sensitivity, and audacity Prabha speaks about her inner feelings, the way she felt as the other woman. When she wishes she could be the only woman in her man’s life, her agonizing moods as the other woman could be sensed with these poetic lines:

How ardently I desire to be with you

But I know the fact she is already there.

It doesn’t matter how I feel for you

But I realize your absence everywhere.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

How can I act as if it doesn’t bother?

And literally it’s not so painless to be fair.

I wish for a place to be together

Where I don’t have to share. (Yadav, 2013: 31–32)

She further continues telling, “My present state became a horrible foretaste of what the future would be like” (2013: 85). She could see no happiness ahead. Subsequent to that trip, Dr Saraf underwent an operation and when she went to meet him, she met his wife there for the first time. After returning from the hospital, she realized “what a small and insignificant part of his life” (2013: 85) she was. She wanted to be with him and for that, she was even ready to take up a small job of his secretary in his office with a salary of Rs 300. When she told him that she wanted nothing from him, “no money, worldly goods, nothing” (2013: 86) and just wanted to be near him all the time, Dr Saraf gradually realized that “no one would give herself up so selflessly just to be able to be near him all the time” (2013: 85) and requested her never to leave him in this life. By the loving and respectful words of Dr Saraf, she became mature and confident enough to handle the humiliation and sufferings she was about to face in future life due to the patriarchal mind-set of people toward “second” or “other” woman in a man’s life.

Every time Dr Saraf asked her if she needs any materialistic thing or feels the urge to travel and see the world or wishes to spread her wings for flying high, she assured him, “this is all I wanted” (2013: 89) in the relationship. Furthermore, she told him that she writes poetry and that gives her enough satisfaction, so she doesn’t need any materialistic things like normal women. She just needs love from him.

Being the other woman in Dr Saraf’s life, Prabha had to face “mind games, emotional manipulation, and deceit” (Devlin, 2020: 4) when her illicit romance was disclosed to his wife. While Mrs Saraf threatened her with her friend’s help “to pack her bags and leave within a month” or “to be ready to face the consequences” (2013: 91), she could neither sleep nor eat due to such humiliation and moreover when Dr Saraf tried to justify his silence, she says, “I went off to Pondicherry to the Aurobindo Ashram to get away from the sordid episode and lick my wounds in solitude” (2013: 92). Dr Saraf begged her to return and she too realized that she would have to take the social censure that was bound to follow. She admits, “Ours was not going to be a path lined with roses but I had decided to take the thorns that would inevitably lacerate my feet” (2013: 92). And she kept on contesting for space in Dr Saraf’s life being a second woman. When her friend Shanta warned her to keep the relation secret or to break it as she could go to jail since adultery is an offense in India, Prabha, being unflinching and fearless, quoted the philosophers such as Sartre and Bertrand who also did not believe in the institution of marriage over the supreme feeling of love. She even did not bother about her family and the community, which had the ghetto-like mentality and would never approve a relationship between a man and a woman without marriage.

Humiliation, anger, and misery had become a part and parcel of her life. Prabha cathartically releases her pain in her autobiography, “I had come prepared to be humiliated, to have salt sprinkled on my wounds for his demeanor and attitude had never promised any permanence” (2013: 61) though she had given her body and soul in the relationship with Dr Saraf. Rosy Singh (2015) pronounces in her article, “‘I’ of an autobiography is not a frozen entity but is in a flux with changing existential conditions” (p. 80). Therefore, Prabha keeps on talking about her conditions in life and the ways she kept on convincing Dr Saraf to stay together whenever he tried to be “a coward who runs away from facing the truth” (2013: 63). She describes the relationship with honesty, which she lived throughout her life breaking all social norms and never getting the kind of love that she really deserved. Prabha expresses,

Ours was not merely a physical relationship, although it started with love. Yet gradually, that love was overlaid with other feelings and the sharp sweetness of that first flush of love receded. What remained a sick dependence, a habit and—for me—a security blanket. My life was so completely tied with his that I could not even visualize my existence without him. He became a sort of sanctuary and even though I earned as much or more than him, the prospect of a life without him was so frightening that I turned away from the possibility of his absence. He and I shared a bond that I was never able to make with anyone before or after. (2013: 12–13)

In the techno-advanced era where social platforms are booming, articulating or telling one’s life story either personal or professional is “no longer left to men of letters; it has a mass appeal” (Singh, 2015: 81). Prabha serves up her entire personal and professional life on a platter for the readers with all her fairness and truthfulness that touches the hearts of the readers. Her professional career was triggered when she got an opportunity to go to America. She reached there with just $10 in hand. To earn her daily bread, she worked in the Dupont house and stayed with Dr Dupont’s secretary Eileen.

The sense of estrangement and nostalgia overpowered her at times while she stayed in America. She felt that there was so much she had to learn about that “strange new land and its customs” (2013: 112) as she found its speech cadences unfamiliar for her. Yet she did not intend to assimilate in the new land’s ways of life she resisted becoming like Americans and felt proud of her “own individual cultural identity” (2013: 115). When Eileen called her rustic and foolish, her eyes “filled up with tears of humiliation” (2013: 116) and she swore to herself,

I will show her and people like her what I am capable of. I will learn how to speak like them, have an office of my own but I will do all this in Calcutta, in my own land. I will always remain an Indian, who prefers rotis instead of hamburgers and if rotis are not available, I’ll have bread and boiled potatoes instead. But I will always remain proudly and unchangingly Indian, no matter what. (2013: 116)

Prabha never compromised her self-respect as an Indian woman even during her stay in America. Once when Mareil brought cast off clothes of Clara Brown and told her to keep them saying that she doesn’t have any fashionable clothes, she was outraged by the act and words and told Mareil not to treat her as a beggar who would gladly wear someone else’s cast offs. She further asked in anger,

Who do you people think we are? Our currency may have been devalued and be worth nothing to you Americans but do you think we Indians have no self-respect? (2013: 156)

Prabha wanted to be independent and earn some money of her own; so she did a diploma in beauty therapy from America. Before she left for America, her headmistress had asked her that after a degree in philosophy and the dignified job of teaching, why she wanted to do a diploma in beauty therapy. She said that her society is money-minded and the “worth of a person is assessed on the basis of money alone” (2013: 125). According to Prabha, “a woman’s independence stems fundamentally from her purse” (2013: 126); therefore, she exerted and became a successful businesswoman in her life creating her “self” and that journey is well depicted in her autobiography. While learning the art of beauty therapy, she found a whole industry has grown out of this fad of being “obsessed with the body and beauty culture” (2013: 137). Thereafter, the idea of carrying some body-sculpting machines back to India to start up her own business came to mind. Then, she took a round of health clubs and beauty parlors to pick up some good ideas for a start-up in India. She started a Health club called Figurette after her trip to America. Although people became skeptical when she started it, thinking it would not bring her success, she expanded its size and gained a huge monetary achievement in 1970s.

Figurette gradually became her sanctuary and gave her economic independence whereas isolation became the reason for her freedom day by day. When she started living in the same building where Dr Saraf was living with his legitimate family, her friends counseled her not to live like the other woman in someone’s life but Prabha remained adamant saying that she could and would live as she wanted, not as society or her family wanted her to live. Gradually, she realized that she didn’t need any one to take care of her needs and for her. She writes,

the world was divided into two halves: on one side were all those women who drew their strength and social identity from the man they had married. Their home was their territory, their children their armour. On the other side was I, who had only her work and career, as well some money in the bank, but who had no social respect or protection. There was a deep, unbridgeable chasm between these two worlds yet I was often drawn into a dialogue with the other side. (2013: 176–177)

To fill the gap, Prabha, trampled over her own pride and self-respect and took all the responsibilities of Dr Saraf’s family from “decorating their house to putting together his daughter’s trousseau” (2013: 178) to cooking for the guests and arranging the treatment facilities for Dr Saraf during his ailment, all to please and earn the approval of his family. Although she did everything for Dr Saraf’s family, still she was the lone occupant of her world. She expresses it with pain that whatever success she “achieved in business was negated by this strange social boycott, every personal victory had its sheen rubbed away” (2013: 178–179). She treated her success as “a poisoned chalice,” which brought “tension and complications instead of relief and joy” (2013: 179).

To retrieve her self-esteem and courage, she learnt driving a car treating it as an empowering act for a woman in that period. She further said that it was the frustration and suppressed anger that fuelled her ambition to become a successful entrepreneur. Therefore, she intended to start her leather export business and shared the idea with Dr Saraf. Dr Saraf wanted her to start the business with his son so that he can take up the full charge later. On the contrary, her brothers felt jealous yet she didn’t step back. She surveyed shops for leather items; persuaded “poor artists who lived in the most squalid parts of the city” to understand “the intricacies of the trade” (2013: 201). Dr Saraf with his male mentality, screeched at her that such “localities are not meant to be visit by decent women” (2013: 201) and called his friend to support his argument who tried to demotivate her saying that Marwaris never did leather business. But she broke this taboo also like the other taboos she had already broken giving her logic, “business runs by its own rules. Personal preferences, religious taboos have their place in individual lives, not in the world of trade” (2013: 202). She moved ahead with her idea, scoured the markets for samples, and created her own impressive collection of designs but her sister’s husband dismissed her collection saying that she doesn’t “have an instinct for business” (2013: 203). She wept the whole night after hearing such discouraging words, which was expected, in a male-dominated community where men can’t digest women’s progressive business ideas. However, she didn’t leave her passion and worked hard to set up a small factory. Breaking all Marwari community’s traditional norms, she entered the charmed league of successful exporters of leather items.

Prabha lived her life on her own terms. Equally, she did her business on her own rules. Since there were liberated young women with no unease about sleeping with a man or for being successful on the professional front, Prabha was the one who could be found everywhere in five-stars hotels meeting her foreign clients; draped in a sari maintaining her innate dignity. She learnt about the differences between business etiquettes and meeting gestures of India’s tradition-bound business communities and Western clients’ fraternity, and successfully applied the appropriate dealing strategies according to the clients. She writes,

I had to accept that Indian business women have to be adept at handling all these spoken and unspoken codes . . . Often, I wanted to break free and to smash all the codes that held us in thrall but it wasn’t so easy. They are encased in layers and layers of social history. (2013: 211)

However, people with grudging admiration in their eyes found it difficult to handle her success, but she felt “a remarkable change” in the level of her self-confidence (2013: 211). She created a distinct identity of her own as a businesswoman replacing her “timid, unsure side” of personality with “an outspoken and fearless boss” (2013: 212). Dr Saraf complained frustratingly that she has become like a man when she used to be busy dealing workers’ issues. Repeatedly, he doubted her character when she used to be out or dealt with men related to work, she still remained faithful to him tolerating all the allegations and never left him though she thought to break it many times. He sarcastically commented about her passionate involvement in business matters instead of praising her generosity that she had shared a third of her income with him and created a future for his son, making him a part of her business. She speaks about such men of conservative thinking, she was surrounded with:

What many of them could not accept was the fact that I was a successful business woman, an inability to concede that a woman can succeed in a man’s world was what lay behind all the mean and nasty barbs flung at me. Whether in the house or outside it, a woman’s contribution is never generously acknowledged. She is constantly made aware of her surroundings and kept insecure and nervous. I was beginning to see the sexual politics of all this and it made stronger. (2013: 213)

Prabha writes about achieving success as a businesswoman, embedded with her lifelong relationship of love and dependency on Dr Saraf, in her stirring autobiography A Life Apart with candidness. The narrative shows how Indian women tread the arduous trail between the passion for love, work, and independence and the pull of traditions and family restrictions.

Prabha Khaitan knitted her life narrative with a rare frankness through evocative and thoughtful writing in such a way that one could feel the depth of pain when she speaks of her feelings, her sense of discomfort and unease at not being the legitimate woman; moreover, the struggle she did to defy the traditional codes and family expectations insisting on living her life as a single woman. Although she suffered on both fronts including personal and professional due to social prejudices and patriarchal customs, she could rise above the traumas and inside–outside turbulences to become her own woman. She is a true inspiration for all those Indian women who wish to find their individual identity and respect.