Travels to Homeland - Part V

The last few travel essays have featured consumerism and the increasingly luxurious and Westernized lifestyle of India's burgeoning middle class. This has led to reactions from my American-born friends that ask upon reading my memoirs about whether I find everything back home perfect or are there things that I don't much care for? My response to them is that just like everything else that has two sides, India is no exception. Of course, being so far away from one's roots and for so long, nostalgia tends to make one view the past through rose-tinted glasses...

But make no mistake, India is far from any kind of Utopia-very far.... It has got some serious socio-economic problems that are so deeply ingrained that it is going to take a lot of determined effort on many levels to uproot them from both real life and mass-psyche. As is well-known and also well-expounded in many Western forums, Indian masses live very poorly and there is an urgent need to address consistently and persistently, I may add, India's problems of poverty, ignorance and disease on a number of fronts. Undoubtedly, the rich-poor gap is very very wide.

Since I am a city girl, I plan to talk about the people who were a part of my life in that they worked for my parents, many of whom were still working for my family during my many visits home. I am going to show here pictures of real people in the cities who labor hard, day in day out to make ends meet, while at the same time trying to provide a better future for their kids. Hopefully, the human stories behind each of these pictures will provide a flavor of the lifestyle of the urban masses better than mere numbers and statistics.

And hopefully, my friends and family, who complain about the rough deal given to India's image in the West, will forgive me for my honest reflections and still invite me into their homes in Delhi.

Standing below is a mother with her two young daughters - they are standing in the back alley. Most hired help back home typically uses the rear entrance to enter straight into the work area which includes the kitchen, courtyard etc. This lady used to wash the dishes, clean the house and perform other chores in my family home. She was very protective about her adolescent daughters and would bring them to work with her and not leave them out of her sight for a minute.

The dowry system though legally banned is still rampant to a greater extent among the poor, so the parents start collecting their daughters' dowry when they are very young - which essentially means that the economic burden of making ends meet is further heightened by the dowry pressure without which a good match is literally impossible. And nothing could be worse in their limited world than an unmarried daughter who would then definitely be considered a lifelong burden!!!
Here is another picture of the two sisters barely fifteen and sixteen, who am sure had never attended school or if so, probably only for a year or two before they were pulled out to accompany their mother either due to her well-justified fear of leaving her young girls behind, alone in the unsavory living conditions or just because of their plain need for money. The daughters were to be married off shortly and sent to their husbands' homes where they would take care of the in-laws and become part of the extended family, have many kids, work to make ends meet and on and on, getting further steeped in drudgery. Thus starting the vicious cycle of struggle all over again. These women typify the rural workers who come to the cities for jobs, but still have families in their villages where, most likely, these girls were going... One could write a book on the socio-cultural mores, so I will limit it to the basic details. This family is originally from the state of Bihar in Eastern India. Unmarried girls generally dress quite modestly contrary to the half-naked beauties that are a staple of the Bollywood fantasy.(In the background, one can notice the original Indian car, the Ambassador, before the advent of the modern Maruti.) I remember vividly how mom, who was way ahead of her times, would chide and lecture all the domestic help that came to our house over the years to send their daughers to the free schools that the government had started for the lower-income families, but to no avail. Mom was such an idealist, she would buy notebooks and pencils and offer to teach the girls, the basic three Rs, but of course the working mothers would insist that the entire family had to get jobs to survive. Frustrated and bowing to the deeply entrenched traditions, mom would ultimately try and help by by giving our maids new clothes and household goods etc. to help financially with the dowry preparation... I must say, mom was not unique in this respect, as other educated families in Delhi tried to help by such means, especially if the ties were old and strong... Clearly while noble, these random and isolated acts of kindness are not enough to address the problem of all pervasive poverty...

Now let me introduce you to our other help - this time to perform janitorial responsibilities, primarily the cleaning of the bathrooms etc. (Yes-it is true that I cried the first time I had to clean my own bathroom when I started living in the US!)This woman- a city slum dweller was my favorite. (Note her subtly bolder dressing style and stance compared to the rural-urban women above.) She was feisty, proud and a feminist in her own way. I suspect that she did not have a very supportive husband-that she was married is evident from the red dot and general attire. A happy soul, an optimist whose family was totally settled in the city for years, she was always ebullient in spirit.
At this point I have to admit, I am ashamed of this part of our culture where we had what is called the "untouchable" class in India. Even though, the prime focus of Gandhiji's philosophy was the elimination of this hateful concept and the government has been taking affirmative actions for their upliftment, many folks back home still will not allow someone doing this job to come into the interiors of their homes beyond the bathrooms, which had a separate entrance for this purpose. Again, I am proud to say, my parents did not give a damn for this nonsense and this lady, Shanti Jr. (as we called her after her mother) was given full respect in our home. She used to come right inside our home and unburden herself before my wise mother who would again plead with her to send her kids to schools over a cup of tea. Mother just never gave up...

This happy soul who cleaned bathrooms in many homes, would change her work clothes at the end of her workday and dress up for going to the bazaar (market) to buy nice trinkets for herself. (She specially asked me to take her picture in her fresh change of clothes). Below is a picture of a lovely teenage Afghan girl whose Muslim family had fallen onto hard times when their business failed in the recent years after India's partition. (Despite the partition many Muslims remained in India and did not migrate to Pakistan.) They had come to dad, a lawyer, for help and work. At a time when there was lot of tension between the Hindus and Muslims as well as religious and dietary taboos especially from the Hindu side, my parents sort of adopted this Muslim family. Three generations worked for us almost like family members. They were the best cooks we have ever had. Proud and loyal, this family would not accept any monetary help, if they could not pay for it. They served mom till she passed on, especially the little girl who used to sit by mom while she was ailing, refusing to move even when mom told her to go take a nap...

This charmingly shy girl (she wouldn't even look at the camera)was the grand-daugher who stayed at our place while her mother went to earn her livelihood by cooking in other homes. Barely, twelve or thirteen, mother was very upset that her mother was planning to find her a groom in a year, so she sort of chaperoned her during the day and took it upon herself to teach her basic reading and writing. In other words, mom and this kid "hung out" together till her mother came to pick her up in the evenings.
Finally, here are pictures of this lady who was a sort of housekeeper at our place during the last few months of mother's life. This lady belonged to what is called a lower-income family where folks are educated to some extent, but are not professionals, so they walk a fine line between poverty and basic living standards.
Now this lady had completed high school, had a husband who was not earning much for whatever reason, so she put food on the table by doing two jobs so that she could also buy a proper dowry for her daughter. Apart from a better living situation, the key difference between this woman's family and the others I have discussed is that there was enough awareness at their end about not perpetuating this setup any further, so the kid in the picture is enrolled and is thankfully going to a government-subsidized school.

At this point, I have to show you a picture of a bazaar that is held in different parts of the city on different fixed week-days when vendors from small-scale industries come to sell their wares at low prices targeting the lower-income consumers in urban Delhi. My cousin and I were so enthralled by the beautiful ethnic jewelry that our domestic help was wearing that we insisted on going with her to the market where she bought it. So here we are at bazaar which is set up on the lines of a Farmers' market in US. As you can see from this picture, this bazaar was unbelievably packed. It was heartening to see that however stressful their daily-life struggles, these women took immense pride in their appearance and their feminity as was apparent from the kind of unbelievable variety of costume jewelry, clothes and make-up, we found there. Needless to say, we went into a shopping frenzy...

An interesting social norm that I observed among the extremely poor urban classes was that they don't have the time, inclination or means to bother with troublesome formalities like filing for divorce etc. Also the women are strong with a sense of great pride coupled with a no-nonsense manner. Due to a pragmatism borne of an exceedingly difficult life full of daily vicissitudes, they just take charge, and often throw out the man if he doesn't deliver and find another one who does. (Of course, I am being a tad facetious here, but the point I am making is that I noticed that these women move on very fast if their husbands abandoned them or they will have no qualms in leaving the ineffectual men in their lives and moving in with another, if their needs are not met.) Societal approval be damned! No questions asked - after all the women are also breadwinners. These women,feminist in their own right, were certainly not victims of middle class morality and affectations. Growing up, I always marveled at their rules based on practical morality and justice. I still do.

Further, despite their daily struggle for existence, consumerism has touched the lives of the urban working classes also in terms of owning TVs and other appliances which were earlier, both foreign and totally beyond their reach. Even if they cannot own these luxuries themselves, hired help in the cities avoid working in homes where such amenities are not accessible to them. Here is a picture of this young lady who was hired by my niece to baby-sit her daughter. This girl, who arrived from a village to the city, had become very adept at using all the modern appliances and addicted to the Disney channel. In short, she had become used to living in the lap of luxury, but by sad irony was heading back to get married in her native village where there was most likely no electricity or running water... But she would adjust to her lot and live a life of a dutiful wife procreating hopefully many sons... Clearly, even among the urban poor, there are different levels and types. One the one hand, you have the rural folks who have migrated to the cities to earn their living and who still try to cling to their simple customs of an agrarian lifestyle, and are generally among the poorest and on the other are folks who are almost totally rooted in the city having lost their village ties completely over the years. And then there are those in the lower-income group who are semi-educated-just enough to escape abject poverty, but not completely and thus are caught in the twilight zone between the two worlds of haves and the have-nots. Interestingly, in terms of morality, this economic class veers actually towards acute conservative values in sharp contrast to their more poverty-stricken brethren who have their own moral codes.

The portraits I have drawn are only to illustrate the fact that undeniably, there are two different worlds-the rich and the poor- existing in India side by side and that a lot has to be done before true progress can be claimed...