We employed child workers - 2
I really only planned to write about Dolly, the girl who sat in the kitchen with thick books. She's the one that's stuck with me the longest. She's the one I've agonised over and felt guilty about the most, maybe because, as a book lover, she was the most like me and it was impossible to resist the comparison between us and put her out of mind as someone belonging to a different world, living by different rules. My plan had been to mention Gauri and Noni only in passing, but they took up an entire post. This one will be about Dolly, but first, I have to mention a few others.
There was an older girl, Tulu, who was there only for a few months. She was a motherless girl from a "respectable" family (indicated by her Dad's and sisters' good clothes and the fact that they sat in the living room on our chairs when they brought Tulu over.) She got involved with a boy in the neighbourhood and was promptly sent home.
Then there were the two little sisters in my in-law's house soon after I got married. It was their mother who was actually the employed help, they came skipping along with her to help and to get trained in the business. Two such sparkling, joyful beings I have seldom seen. The younger one, scarcely five or six, especially, thought it was great fun to wield the broom or wipe the floors and to run errands. The older one used to talk to me sometimes. (As a new bride in the family I was an object of interest and curiosity to them.) We had a sort of friendship. Then, one day, in a moment of carelessness, I broke the fragile connection between us or rather, revealed it to be a hollow meaningless connection between unequals. I had just taken a bath and stepped out of the bathroom and the older sister was wiping the floor in front of the door. She looked at me with a big smile and said, "Wasn't the water really cold today?" "I took a bath with hot water," I said, realizing too late, even as I uttered the words and watched the smile fade from her face, that I had instantly destroyed the camaraderie she had assumed between us. I don't remember whether we had any more friendly conversations. It's likely that I soon went off to my mother's house, and from there, back to the U.S. The next time I visited, someone else was working as the maid in my in-laws place.
My mother tried to get every little girl that came to work at our house to learn to read and write. Most of them were not interested and didn't get very far. (Maybe it was too much to ask a kid who had worked all day to sit down with books in the evening.) The only exception was Dolly. Dolly already knew the basics of reading and writing Bengali. Her uncle, who had been to school, had taught her at home before she came to live and work with us. Her grasp of the letters was still quite rudimentary as she painstakingly spelled out words or formed the letters on paper but her enthusiasm was unflagging. She was quite excited when we bought her notebooks and pencils and immediately got to work when we asked her to write a few sentences about the topic "Cow". Every school child knew that you had to write about the general characteristics of the animal and the uses it could be put to by humans. But Dolly was not a school child, so what she wrote was completely original. আমাদের বাড়িতে কেনা গরু নেই, পোষা গরু আছে। "In our house, we don't have a cow that we own, we have a foster cow. If you ask me, why do you not own a cow, I will say...." and she went on to explain that they looked after someone else's cow because they were too poor to own their own cow. Once she had access to writing materials, Dolly was often seen in her spare time, writing away in the notebook on her own. Sometimes it was a few sentences about a daily occurence such as my aunt visiting, at other times she opened Rabindranath's song collection গীতবিতান and copied songs from it word for word. This she did quite regularly. What beauty did those words possess that they spoke to her even through her shadowy comprehension? Or maybe the question is, what quality did her mind and heart possess that they grasped the beauty of those words even without fully understanding what they meant? Once I found her in the kitchen bent over a book by my uncle, the Tagore authority Abu Sayeed Ayyub, called পথের শেষ কোথায়, a collection of philosophical essays written in difficult, Sankritized Bengali. There was no way she could have grasped even a fraction of what the book was saying but it unmistakably gave her intimations of the worlds beyond worlds that existed in those little black marks on paper bound between covers. Would we have done anything to help this extraordinary child find her way to those worlds if she had stayed with us longer? We never had to answer that question because, when she was twelve, Dolly's aunt, who worked in the neighbourhood and had originally brought her to our house, took her away to get her married. I never found out what happened to her afterwards.
For the longest time, this felt like the saddest story to me. The story of an amazing child who never got the chance to fulfill her potential while other spoiled and fat kids (like you know who) got all kinds of opportunities and squandered them all. And then I think of her bright face and confidence, the fact that her uncle was educated and the fact that they had some kind of cow (owned or not) and think that maybe she managed to beat the odds and was married into a better, more prosperous family than Noni. Maybe she was able to educate her children, maybe some of them even went to college and, with her insatiable love for the written word, maybe Dolly kept reading, reading and reading and was finally able to read well enough to understand and enjoy the books her daughter brought back from the college library. And although she herself never went to college or became a professional scholar, she was able to drink her fill of the bounty that books offer and travel to worlds of imagination. Maybe right now, Dolly, a grandmother (she was 2-3 years younger than me), is lying next to a sleeping grandchild, awake late into the night, reading away or writing down her memories in a notebook, in her own inimitable style.
There was an older girl, Tulu, who was there only for a few months. She was a motherless girl from a "respectable" family (indicated by her Dad's and sisters' good clothes and the fact that they sat in the living room on our chairs when they brought Tulu over.) She got involved with a boy in the neighbourhood and was promptly sent home.
Then there were the two little sisters in my in-law's house soon after I got married. It was their mother who was actually the employed help, they came skipping along with her to help and to get trained in the business. Two such sparkling, joyful beings I have seldom seen. The younger one, scarcely five or six, especially, thought it was great fun to wield the broom or wipe the floors and to run errands. The older one used to talk to me sometimes. (As a new bride in the family I was an object of interest and curiosity to them.) We had a sort of friendship. Then, one day, in a moment of carelessness, I broke the fragile connection between us or rather, revealed it to be a hollow meaningless connection between unequals. I had just taken a bath and stepped out of the bathroom and the older sister was wiping the floor in front of the door. She looked at me with a big smile and said, "Wasn't the water really cold today?" "I took a bath with hot water," I said, realizing too late, even as I uttered the words and watched the smile fade from her face, that I had instantly destroyed the camaraderie she had assumed between us. I don't remember whether we had any more friendly conversations. It's likely that I soon went off to my mother's house, and from there, back to the U.S. The next time I visited, someone else was working as the maid in my in-laws place.
My mother tried to get every little girl that came to work at our house to learn to read and write. Most of them were not interested and didn't get very far. (Maybe it was too much to ask a kid who had worked all day to sit down with books in the evening.) The only exception was Dolly. Dolly already knew the basics of reading and writing Bengali. Her uncle, who had been to school, had taught her at home before she came to live and work with us. Her grasp of the letters was still quite rudimentary as she painstakingly spelled out words or formed the letters on paper but her enthusiasm was unflagging. She was quite excited when we bought her notebooks and pencils and immediately got to work when we asked her to write a few sentences about the topic "Cow". Every school child knew that you had to write about the general characteristics of the animal and the uses it could be put to by humans. But Dolly was not a school child, so what she wrote was completely original. আমাদের বাড়িতে কেনা গরু নেই, পোষা গরু আছে। "In our house, we don't have a cow that we own, we have a foster cow. If you ask me, why do you not own a cow, I will say...." and she went on to explain that they looked after someone else's cow because they were too poor to own their own cow. Once she had access to writing materials, Dolly was often seen in her spare time, writing away in the notebook on her own. Sometimes it was a few sentences about a daily occurence such as my aunt visiting, at other times she opened Rabindranath's song collection গীতবিতান and copied songs from it word for word. This she did quite regularly. What beauty did those words possess that they spoke to her even through her shadowy comprehension? Or maybe the question is, what quality did her mind and heart possess that they grasped the beauty of those words even without fully understanding what they meant? Once I found her in the kitchen bent over a book by my uncle, the Tagore authority Abu Sayeed Ayyub, called পথের শেষ কোথায়, a collection of philosophical essays written in difficult, Sankritized Bengali. There was no way she could have grasped even a fraction of what the book was saying but it unmistakably gave her intimations of the worlds beyond worlds that existed in those little black marks on paper bound between covers. Would we have done anything to help this extraordinary child find her way to those worlds if she had stayed with us longer? We never had to answer that question because, when she was twelve, Dolly's aunt, who worked in the neighbourhood and had originally brought her to our house, took her away to get her married. I never found out what happened to her afterwards.
For the longest time, this felt like the saddest story to me. The story of an amazing child who never got the chance to fulfill her potential while other spoiled and fat kids (like you know who) got all kinds of opportunities and squandered them all. And then I think of her bright face and confidence, the fact that her uncle was educated and the fact that they had some kind of cow (owned or not) and think that maybe she managed to beat the odds and was married into a better, more prosperous family than Noni. Maybe she was able to educate her children, maybe some of them even went to college and, with her insatiable love for the written word, maybe Dolly kept reading, reading and reading and was finally able to read well enough to understand and enjoy the books her daughter brought back from the college library. And although she herself never went to college or became a professional scholar, she was able to drink her fill of the bounty that books offer and travel to worlds of imagination. Maybe right now, Dolly, a grandmother (she was 2-3 years younger than me), is lying next to a sleeping grandchild, awake late into the night, reading away or writing down her memories in a notebook, in her own inimitable style.
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