A maid’s smile
Gowtami is a young maid.One of four
children, this 13-year-old has a hectic day.
She gets up early in the morning and
goes to three houses (one of them being mine) to do the floors and clothes and
then helps her mother cook and pack lunch and is off to school at 11. Back at 6
in the evening, she takes the kids of the memsahib in whose staff quarters they
stay, to the park. Then, it’s time to help her mother cook and by 10 in the
night, she’s so tired that she drops off to sleep in a crowded corner of their
one-room chawl.
Despite this, I’ve never seen her frown;
a cheerful shy smile lights up her face and she hums to herself as she goes
about her chores.
One day, her usual smile was missing. I
put it down to the bad weather but when I noticed the same look of dejection
persisting, I decided to ask her the reason for it. “My mother has banned me
from going to school” she cried, “I want to study. I want to become a typist
and work in a big office. But now, my mother has put me on to full- time work
in a house”. I felt sorry for the girl and promised to speak to her mother.
“Memsahib,” reasoned the mother when I
asked her why she stopped Gowtami from studying “we are maids, and maids we
will remain. If I send her to school, where will I get the money to fund her
books, etc? She must also help her brothers to come up in life. It is more
important to make them study than her. She is only a girl and has to be married
soon. So why waste time in a school?” There was no way l could change her mind.
A month later, Gowtami, looking tired
and defeated, announced that she would not be coming to work any more as she
was getting married! At 13! I was shocked! The girl would become another
breeding machine like her mother and the cycle would continue.
Again I came up against the mother’s
down-to-earth reasoning. “If I don’t get her married now, no one will marry
her. Our relatives will think there is some defect in her and later, even my
other daughter will have a black mark on her name. Leave us to our fate
memsahib. This is the life we know. It is better for us to continue like this”.
Gowtami came with her husband, mechanic in a garage and touched my feet in
farewell. One more sheep to the slaughter house, I thought, as I blessed her.
How is it we have no feasible solutions for
the Gowtami’s of this society? You want to help, but they don’t want to be
helped .A girl’s best well-wisher is her mother and if she decides what is good
for her child, how can you interfere, however good your intentions?
Are we ‘memsahibs’ to blame for this
situation, employing such young girls to do physically taxing jobs? If we don’t.
Perhaps they will resort to beggary to fill the abnormally bulging bellies of
their brood of siblings. We are at least providing them an honest means of
survival. But where will this lead us?
Our only hope is in the very Gowtami’s
who have been repressed. Perhaps, they will let their children step out of the
boundaries which hemmed them. Perhaps they will visualise a better future for
their progeney. Perhaps...
No comments:
Post a Comment