Happy International Women's Day

I should love to continue the uplifting tone of our previous post for a few more days. I cannot though, because she has been crying. She cried yesterday for the one hour or so she spends with me, and she cried today before she stepped out of my home. I have known her for a year now and I have seen her broke many times before. I have never seen her broken though. She never said before that she wished she were dead, not even when she lost the only man who remembered how she had looked as a child, a ten year old bride. She grieves for him though he had taken to drink and beaten her with a stick reserved for the purpose every night, when he was smashed enough. Her health and that of the other three people of her household is failing rapidly. A teenage son who labors at breaking stones in the killing heat of the Hyderabad afternoon, a daughter who is young enough to be amused with fancy hairpins and works with her mother as a maidservant, a three year old grandson – the only memory of the deceased elder daughter who succumbed to medical negligence in her pregnancy two years ago.

My maid has been crying because all her children are suffering from some ailment or another and she is helpless. Her son has been running high fever for some time now; the doctors say he cannot stand the heat and the strain of such inhuman labor. Her daughter suffers frequent belly cramps, and then she cannot even sit up, much less keep her morning appointments at the several households that wait for their dishes to be cleaned.

They have already pawned all the silver she had saved up for her daughters wedding, which must happen sooner than later, because when you live in a slum where broke men come back home drunken in the nights, a teenage daughter is heavy responsibility.
Yet she says, it’s not about the money, as long as my children are well.

None of them can read or write in any language, thus reducing their chances for any other kind of indoor work next to nil. Every rupee spent on hospital expenses or medicines means a rupee taken away from weekly rations of food and travel fare. They still laughed and joked about many things till last week, not anymore. The burden is too heavy now. Yet they give another dimension to honesty when they hand back my gold earring fished out from below the dresser. Loss of that earring would have meant a little heartache to me, no more. Its value is enough to pay for her daughters pawned silver anklets, which is a shameful reminder of helplessness to her.

I don’t know what to feel. Giving her some money to tide the times over is always an option. It makes me feel gracious too. But when that money is gone, and the little child falls sick with Chikunguniya, she will be worse off than now because she still has a remnants of pride that wouldnt allow her to borrow anymore from me.
I don’t know how this will change. I have been thinking a lot about her now a days.
Let me know if you have any “teach them to fish” ideas.
In the meanwhile let’s celebrate the international women’s day.