Her claim to dignity

This is an essay I had to turn in for our writing course. We had to draft it based on our takeaways from Amitav Ghosh's essay 'Tibetan Dinner'. 
Click here for the original essay by Ghosh

You may struggle to make a living but you have an undeniable right to dignity. Reading Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Tibetan Dinner’ brought home the point. I was moved not by the stories of the struggles the Tibetans faced, but the resilience with which they pulled together their scattered existence. It reinforced my belief that people who dare to struggle don’t need our pity or charity. One may offer a silent acknowledgement of their honest endeavors though.

It further brought to me a recurrent image that belongs to an old but agile woman I know from my childhood. She was called Lalmani and worked as our domestic help. She must easily be in her seventies now and it’s been almost a year since I saw her last. Chances are dim that I’ll ever set my eyes on her again.

I was never all that fond of her when I was growing up, to begin with. I deeply resented her noisy and dominating presence around me. I grew up watching her go about life with an unnerving swiftness. I remember staying perpetually intimidated, as a child, by her hawk-like sharpness that was disturbingly accentuated by her ridiculously petite appearance. I grew up watching her squabble with whoever was in sight – my mother and the others in the neighborhood she worked for over timings and wages, with the hawkers who passed by and her relatives who dropped in every now and then. I remember disliking her for not letting me have my way with her prized collection of chicks and ducklings. She never quite enjoyed spotting me chase them around the garden, trying to get hold of their podgy bodies. Infuriated, she always took the news to my mother with a diabolical consistency. I then had to endure the scolding that followed, swear not to indulge in the ‘unclean’ activity and redeem myself with a Dettol bath.

The only time Lalmani approved of me was when I spoke of Jesus. I used to sing for her all the new prayers I learnt in the convent school I attended. She didn’t know a word of English but loved the prayers and reciprocated with rhythmic claps and swaying shoulders. When in the mood, she joined in with a prayer or two in her croaky voice. On Sunday mornings, she went to the very chapel that stood in our school campus. Once, when I played an adolescent Jesus in the nativity skit in school, she swayed and trembled and cried with awe and told my mother how moving my two-minute long performance was. When I grew a little older and began to understand my surroundings better, I asked her why she never bowed to the Hindu deities we worshipped while I always spoke of her Jesus with such fondness. She responded with an acidic gruffness, telling me that it was Jesus and not my gods and goddesses who came to her rescue when her son fell ill and was at the verge of death. My newly acquired rationality hurt, I tried to reason with her but it only strengthened her rigidity. And that was when my resentment towards her subsided, giving way to something more powerful – contempt.

Lalmani belonged to Odisha. She migrated to this part of Madhya Pradesh in the sixties when the paper mill my father worked for was being constructed, tagging along with her husband who had come to work as a labourer. They stayed on after the construction was over and the unit was up and running. It was located in the middle of nowhere and the staff and administration lived in the residential colony that came up next to it. The bungalows stood neatly along symmetrical lanes, with their backs against each other. Between them ran a narrow street where the servants’ quarters opened. Lalmani lived behind our house. She worked for four different families living close by and occupied four servant quarters that faced each other, living quite comfortably with her children. She cultivated a patch of our kitchen garden that took care of her minor needs. Her poultry products were much in demand too.

She was incredibly consistent with her routine. She would wake up at sunrise and take a round of our garden, banging on our bedroom window when she reached it. This worked almost like an alarm for my mother: they started the day like a team! My mother would make her some tea to charge her up, sending her racing to do her chores. My mother worked as a teacher and needed to be out of the house and on the school bus by seven in the morning. This meant that she usually had a little over an hour to wake us up, cook, bathe and leave. Lalmani acted deftly, doing the washing and cleaning as my mother ricocheted from one corner of the house to the other. After her bus plied off, it used to be Lalmani’s job to wrap up the work, lay out the breakfast and remind us to lock the house well before we left. The routine remained unchanged around the year. While I struggled to wriggle out of my warm quilt on winter mornings, she cleaned the wares in the courtyard, with just a tumbler full of lukewarm water at her disposal, a flimsy cardigan her only defence against the cold.

As I grew older, I learnt more about her personal life. And the more I did, the more pity I felt for her. She was abandoned by her husband for another woman. This was surprising because I’d always taken her for a widow. I was amazed to observe how seamlessly she had managed to subtract his existence from her life. I never found her as much as mentioning him, let alone brood or lament over his deceit. She had earned much of what a woman needs a husband for – a livelihood, a sense of security and a social standing. She couldn’t be bothered with his whereabouts! She had a life of her own which she lived with much aplomb! I will never know if it was that easy for her as I’m making it sound; if she ever craved his presence, his warmth, his proximity, she never showed it.

She had three children – a son and two daughters. Her elder daughter was married off at a suitable age, but she was soon returned because she had turned insane. She charged at random people, sprayed spittle on them and made strange growling noises. People advised that she be kept locked up in one of the servant quarters, but Lalmani decided otherwise. She ran from town to town and doctor to doctor, determined to get her daughter treated. The girl could never go back to being the same person, but she at least stopped being a violent wreck and, gradually, even started helping her mother run the house. But this took a long time – a spine-breakingly long time. My sense of pity turned more intense. Her son was a proactive and worldly wise sort of character and was expected to dispel her financial woes once he reached the right age. But soon after he started earning, he eloped with a married woman many years his senior, only to resurface much later. Lalmani refused to receive any sympathy. She spat on her runaway son’s cowardice and went about her life as usual. She took it upon herself to get her younger daughter married and found a suitable boy for him. The last I saw of her, before my family shifted from the place, she was still working for four families and bringing up her grand children with the same deftness and agility that I remember about her the most.

Her struggles didn’t cease to exist but nor did her resilience. When I look back at her life – or whatever I had seen of it – I feel, mostly, a sense of awe. Respect. Bewilderment. Here, we have a woman who refused to break or give in, come what may. She aspired not to survive on charity but lock horns with every adversity that hit her. Her story, for me, is just as glorious as those of the Tibetan refugees who refuse to be bogged down by circumstances but, instead, thrive on their undying perseverance wherever they go.

When I look back at my growing up years, I realize that Lalmani deserved neither the resentment my puerile self once harbored towards her nor the contempt that my arrogant adolescence had conjured for her rigidity. Least of what she required was the pity that oozed out of my freshly acquired ‘mature’ disposition. I wonder if she would’ve offered resentment, contempt or pity for my outlook!

Lalmani may have considered discussing her story with me, I hope, and nodded indulgently at my silent salutes, but she wouldn’t have thought much of my endorsing her life through this essay. What good will it do her, I want to find out. Am I not marketing her struggles? Am I not selling her story? Am I not trying to narrate a patronizing version of her arduous journey? That, too, to an audience that has never known her, has no stake in her sorrows and will never be able to alleviate them. It’s only I who has seen her move about the courtyard on those wintry mornings, sheathed in a shawl, washing the ice cold floor, staying apace with life all the while. And I’m not even sure if I’ve marketed it all well enough!