“Mardon wala kaam kaise karogi?”

The kids “aunty” Khairunnissa Shaikh,
ferries everyday on her bus are too young to realize the importance of
the work this almost frail, bespectacled, burqa-clad woman performs. It
may not be uncommon to see women driving cars, even rickshaws and cabs
these days. But when was the last time you saw a burqa-clad Muslim woman
driving a bus, even if it is a school bus?

Nagpada resident
Shaikh (39) epitomizes a silent, liberating change blowing through
Mumbai’s Muslim streets. When she first decided to take up driving
school bus five years ago, Shaikh faced opposition, the biggest from her
mother-in-law. “Mardon wala kaam kaise karogi (How will you do a man’s
job?),” the annoyed mother-in-law asked. “I wanted to prove her and other
critics in the neighbourhood wrong,” says the woman even as her husband
Zahir looks on.

A decade ago, Zahir and Khairunnisa would walk
some students to school and make an earning. Then Zahir bought a mini
bus, but was soon diagnosed with serious heart ailment and declared
unfit to drive. “Starvation faced our family as Zahir stopped working.
There were two options to me. Either do something myself or live off
charity. I chose the former,” says the mother of two.  In her fights
against odds, she says, two persons helped her immensely. While
Nagpada-based advocate Rahman Kazi helped her financially to ensure that
her two sons continued their education (now the elder is studying
engineering while the younger is in an ITI course), Sunita Bhogle,
another bus driver at the same school, encouraged Shaikh to learn
driving.

When told that the Wahabism-influenced Saudi Arabia
has still not allowed women to drive, Shaikh says: “If women can fly
planes, why can’t she drive cars?”