We employed child workers - 1
During the years from my eighth grade through college, a series of little girls worked in our house. I always try to lighten the impact of that statement by adding qualifiers when I tell people about it. "My grandmother lived with us you know. She needed someone to run errands for her", implying that they just did occasional light tasks such as fetching her ball of wool and knitting needles. My grandmother might have been the original reason for employing a full time child in addition to the part time adult daily help, but those kids did anything that was needed - washing dishes, cleaning the house, making tea.
We thought we were good people because we were mostly kind to them and gave them enough food to eat and joked and laughed with them. After all, the common wisdom went, in their villages they would have starved. Here we tried to teach them to read and write and they were dressed quite nicely in hand-me-downs. Whether they should have been sent to school, whether it was fair to treat different children in the same household (me and them) differently, were questions that never entered anyone's head. In fact, although I, as the recipient of special treatment, occasionally felt a mild discomfort, the fundamental injustice of the situation did not really hit me until many years later when my U.S.-born five-year-old was shocked that we had hired a 12-year-old, Gauri, to "play" with her and her brother. She could not wrap her head around the fact that this girl did not go to school, that she could be asked leave play any time to carry water or wash tea cups.
There used to be another Gauri at our house in the 70s. She was small for her age (probably malnourished) and very talkative. My mother used to say, "Gauri, when I die make sure you get some money from baba to buy a new sari to wrap me in." Gauri would jump with enthusiasm into the discussion, "What do we need a new sari for, you have an almirah full of saris, we will just pick a nice one from there. Also we have to take print of your feet with alta, don't we have to remember how you used to be?" We would tell this like a cute story about a kid and listeners would join in with laughter, helping to draw a veil over (or bring into sharper grotesque relief?) the reality that this was not really a cherished kid of our household but an underage worker whose wages were paid to her guardians in cold cash, that the only way she knew to remember people was to take footprints in alta since her family was too poor to own a camera or have pictures taken in a studio.
There was another girl name Noni. Her later story is so tragic that I almost didn't want to write it here, in a blog where I mostly share light-hearted, happy stories. But there is no way to write about the child workers in our house without Noni. There is no way to write about my past life with my family without, at least in one post, mentioning the child workers. I had to write this at least once and get it over with, tell myself I'm done, give myself permission to forget (how easy that is for those of us well trained in the art), and move back to mostly happier tales. She worked in our house when I was in college. So I didn't know her so well (maybe saying that is a way for me to create a distance with her story and an excuse for the fact that I never felt any deep sorrow beyond a mild sadness and regret for someone, a child, who actually used to live in my house.) When she lived in our house, she used to be a bright, perky kid like Gauri. While Noni was making the tea, my mother would say, "Noni, can you work faster and give us the tea already?" "If I work faster will the fire work faster?" she would counter. My mother would laugh and tell everyone the story. Did Noni feel proud to have a story told of her smartness? Did Noni have some happy, comfortable times at our house? Maybe compared to the horror that unfolded for her afterwards, she did.
That story can be told in a few lines because I don't know the details anyway. When she was 13 or 14 her family took her home to marry her off. Apparently she visited one time after her marriage (I was away in college). Someone said, "Noni, we heard your husband is a thief, is that right?" "No no," she answered, "he's not a thief, just a pickpocket." (You can imagine the laughter this story evoked, everytime it was retold, among those who never had to figure out how they could stay alive and still salvage some dignity by being a lesser kind of thief). Was this pickpocket husband, whom Noni so touchingly tried to defend, ever kind to her? His family certainly wasn't. Her story, like that of innumerable other young women abused by their in-laws, ended shortly afterwards. A couple of years later I heard that Noni was dead. She had killed herself by taking the insecticide Folidol. I can imagine that, the day our neighbourhood heard this news, there was some genuine sadness, some discussion about how terrible it was that ignorant people (not poor ones with their hands tied) married off their daughters so early to unsuitable men, some retelling of funny stories about Noni. Then someone would have come out with a long sigh, said "oh well.." and, changing the topic and uncomfortable atmosphere, called for the next little girl that had replaced Noni to get some tea for everybody. And to do it fast.
We thought we were good people because we were mostly kind to them and gave them enough food to eat and joked and laughed with them. After all, the common wisdom went, in their villages they would have starved. Here we tried to teach them to read and write and they were dressed quite nicely in hand-me-downs. Whether they should have been sent to school, whether it was fair to treat different children in the same household (me and them) differently, were questions that never entered anyone's head. In fact, although I, as the recipient of special treatment, occasionally felt a mild discomfort, the fundamental injustice of the situation did not really hit me until many years later when my U.S.-born five-year-old was shocked that we had hired a 12-year-old, Gauri, to "play" with her and her brother. She could not wrap her head around the fact that this girl did not go to school, that she could be asked leave play any time to carry water or wash tea cups.
There used to be another Gauri at our house in the 70s. She was small for her age (probably malnourished) and very talkative. My mother used to say, "Gauri, when I die make sure you get some money from baba to buy a new sari to wrap me in." Gauri would jump with enthusiasm into the discussion, "What do we need a new sari for, you have an almirah full of saris, we will just pick a nice one from there. Also we have to take print of your feet with alta, don't we have to remember how you used to be?" We would tell this like a cute story about a kid and listeners would join in with laughter, helping to draw a veil over (or bring into sharper grotesque relief?) the reality that this was not really a cherished kid of our household but an underage worker whose wages were paid to her guardians in cold cash, that the only way she knew to remember people was to take footprints in alta since her family was too poor to own a camera or have pictures taken in a studio.
There was another girl name Noni. Her later story is so tragic that I almost didn't want to write it here, in a blog where I mostly share light-hearted, happy stories. But there is no way to write about the child workers in our house without Noni. There is no way to write about my past life with my family without, at least in one post, mentioning the child workers. I had to write this at least once and get it over with, tell myself I'm done, give myself permission to forget (how easy that is for those of us well trained in the art), and move back to mostly happier tales. She worked in our house when I was in college. So I didn't know her so well (maybe saying that is a way for me to create a distance with her story and an excuse for the fact that I never felt any deep sorrow beyond a mild sadness and regret for someone, a child, who actually used to live in my house.) When she lived in our house, she used to be a bright, perky kid like Gauri. While Noni was making the tea, my mother would say, "Noni, can you work faster and give us the tea already?" "If I work faster will the fire work faster?" she would counter. My mother would laugh and tell everyone the story. Did Noni feel proud to have a story told of her smartness? Did Noni have some happy, comfortable times at our house? Maybe compared to the horror that unfolded for her afterwards, she did.
That story can be told in a few lines because I don't know the details anyway. When she was 13 or 14 her family took her home to marry her off. Apparently she visited one time after her marriage (I was away in college). Someone said, "Noni, we heard your husband is a thief, is that right?" "No no," she answered, "he's not a thief, just a pickpocket." (You can imagine the laughter this story evoked, everytime it was retold, among those who never had to figure out how they could stay alive and still salvage some dignity by being a lesser kind of thief). Was this pickpocket husband, whom Noni so touchingly tried to defend, ever kind to her? His family certainly wasn't. Her story, like that of innumerable other young women abused by their in-laws, ended shortly afterwards. A couple of years later I heard that Noni was dead. She had killed herself by taking the insecticide Folidol. I can imagine that, the day our neighbourhood heard this news, there was some genuine sadness, some discussion about how terrible it was that ignorant people (not poor ones with their hands tied) married off their daughters so early to unsuitable men, some retelling of funny stories about Noni. Then someone would have come out with a long sigh, said "oh well.." and, changing the topic and uncomfortable atmosphere, called for the next little girl that had replaced Noni to get some tea for everybody. And to do it fast.
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