Today my house-help, I call her my Woman Friday, came to work looking wan and listless, quite unlike her usually chirpy self. Though she carries a heavy burden on her back, and has been since the age of ten when her mother passed away, I have noticed that she never whines and even her woes are conveyed with laughter thrown in.

Her story is one full of tragedy as are the tales of most of those who work for the more well placed ones in life. Soon after losing her mother, the father took ill and had to be hospitalised for a couple of months. The ubiquitous relatives who always come forward in such cases, stepped right in, ostensibly to ‘help’ the three children, two girls and a boy, and did the unthinkable. They took the girls – the boy was let off, afterall everyone knows boys need education – off school and put them to work in nearby houses.

Their motives were rather clear. They did not expect the father to survive his heart attack and didn’t want to be saddled with three orphaned children and their expenses. What better way than to let said children to earn for themselves?

The father was heart broken when he came out of the hospital and found his children working. But I wanted you girls to study and become something better than us, he is supposed to have said and cried in sheer helplessness. But by then the older girl who hated studies anyway had got used to the routine. She didn’t want to go back to school, she stated. Besides, the father was still in very poor health and was in no condition to get back to work. They needed money to survive, for the medicines. So the second one (my house-help) also quit her dreams of getting back to school.

The extended family weren’t done with her though. She was barely seventeen when she was married off to a man much older than her. What? You need a husband. And now that your father is gone, who is going to care for you? Never mind that the daughters were the ones taking care of the bed-ridden father till the day he died. How could a woman survive without a man to take care of them? (By this time the elder girl was already married.)

So this drunkard stepped into my Woman Friday’s life …to make it hell. Everyone else though was happy. Society’s unwritten rules had been followed to the letter. She was now with a man as a woman should be. Who cared that life was full of beatings and missing teeth or broken bones? A woman needs a man and that’s all that matters to everyone. Two children later, and she still in her twenties, the husband met with an accident and died. The family rallied around, and once again foisted a ‘man’ on her. As if one hadn’t been enough, she said to me.

Luckily, the second time around she found herself luckier. The man was of a better disposition. He didn’t actually care for her financially, she was earning as a house-help wasn’t she, but he was kind to her and was better company. That was okay by her, as long as he didn’t bash her up, everything was fine. Except of course everything wasn’t as it appeared. It was soon revealed the man already had a wife back in his village, and children too by his first marriage. Her well-wishers had ‘gifted’ her a bigamist.

In her mid forties now, she has two grown up children and three grandchildren too. Her so-called ‘husband’ spends most of his time with his ‘first’ family, drops in now and then in true lordly fashion. But he takes her out and gives her a taste of good life when around. She has saved money up and even bought some land in the interior part of the city. Some day she hopes to build a house there. Her children (and their spouses) and her grandchildren meanwhile continue to feed on her like parasites.

Yes, the story is not over yet. The daughter wants expensive clothes, a gold anklet, money. The son in law is shacking up with another woman while the daughter tries to entice him back with expensive gifts (an iPhone for example). The son and daughter in law have moved in with their mother (“We want to take care of you!”) and now are living at her expense. My Woman Friday’s savings has evaporated and with undue pressure tactics from the son, she has even bequeathed the land she owned, to him.

As of now, she has nothing. No savings, no land. Only what she earns each month from the houses she works. She isn’t fazed. At least it had all been for her children, she reasoned. I can care for myself. But recently she had to move out of her house (rented by her where she stayed with her son and family) and stay in the house of a Good Samaritan for whom she worked.

That too she took in her stride. He’ll see reason, she said of her son. Eventually. What happened was that the son one day got into a big fight with the daughter. The brother beat up the sister badly and put her in the hospital. People are advising my help to file a police complaint against the son. She wants to do justice to the daughter, but she doesn’t want the police to haul her son away. A mother’s dilemma.

Wan and listless. Do you need anymore reason to be so?

When she came to work for me last year and heard that I write fiction, she laughed her infectious laughter and told me, ‘I can give you material for so many stories Chechi (Elder Sister), a novel or two even!’ Yes, she is right. This here is nothing, I am sure she has more stories of suffering beneath that cheerful facade of hers.

I only hope her children will learn to stand on their own feet and not prey on her and otherwise make her life hell. She has the grit to face life on its own terms and come out a winner to this day. But her children are taking her dignity away from her. Instead of being her strength, like she is to them, they are pulling her down and making her fall again and again. She keeps getting up, trying to stand up again. But for how long can this go on?

©️ Shail Mohan 2024