Single is not solitary, says craft and textile expert Laila Tyabji

An excerpt from Tyabji’s essay in the book, Single by Choice: Happy Unmarried Women!, edited by Kalpana Sharma.

A trailblazing icon for any adolescent, was my father’s younger sister, Kamila… She then settled in London to practise law… [was] much courted by many, including a Sinhalese prime minister, she remained resolutely single, with a lifelong attachment to an eccentric Sri Lankan with whom she and a group of equally unconventional friends—artists, actors, and other professionals—shared a home for over three decades.

My mother predicted from my infancy that, ‘Laila is going to be another Kamila’. Certainly, my first conscious view of this glamorous aunt in London, when I was 10, made me her lifelong fan. Six-foot-eight, dressed always in flamboyant saris and jewellery, witty and successful (Sean Connery was one of her clients), a wonderful speaker, but also a superb cook and seamstress, casually writing a landmark book on Muslim law in her spare time, she seemed such a fun role model. Although I never had her self-confidence and brilliance, the exuberant assurance with which she lived her unconventional life certainly inspired my choices... were there moments of insecurity and loneliness? My early 30s, with my mother no longer there as a supportive buffer, all the desirable seeming men married, and all my friends absorbed in parenthood, had their spasms of self doubt.

Was I always going to be the singleton, the odd one out? The one who drove home alone on my motorbike, while others got into cars with their husbands?... This sounds shamefully feeble, but I think it would have been much more tedious if no one had ever wanted to marry me! The confidence of having been wanted tided me over the trying times dealing with curious impertinent queries of, ‘So when is it your turn?’ or ‘How come you haven’t married…?’ or even more crassly, ‘It’s not that you’re bad looking…’ The implication always was that anyone who could marry, would. It’s a rare married woman, however unhappy herself, who can believe a single woman doesn’t pine to be married. I sometimes fantasised about a T shirt emblazoned with the message—‘I’ve had 15 proposals. I am single by choice!’

(Excerpted from Single by Choice: Happily Unmarried Women! Edited by Kalpana Sharma, published by Women Unlimited)