The Maid With Four Daughters
She is dark complexioned, a little on the skinny side and of medium height. She works as a charwoman at our place, coming to work around noon and leaving late in the afternoon when the sun starts dipping in the west. She is probably in her middle forties considering her claims that she was about one year old during the war of independence in 1971. She could be older, who knows, but I tend to believe her since the atrocities of that war never got wiped out of the memories of millions of its sufferers; her mother remembers with vivid imagery, she often claims.
The year of 1971, as Dickens put in his famous novel, was the best of times and the worst of times for the eastern Bengal. It was during that year that the landmass became independent from the tyranny of the big bully brother but at what a horrendous cost! The brutal assault on the land left millions dead and hundreds of thousands of women, both young and old, raped by the enemy. At the end though emancipation came and a golden sun came up, a sun tinged with splatters of the red of blood. The most glorious chapter of East Bengal was etched with the brush strokes that painted everything red. She was a toddler during that
tumultuous year of mayhem.
I see her watching television with our live-in cook, who is about sixty years old. Both of them sitting with plates full of rice and some heavily spiced vegetable or fish curry with the accompaniment of four or five green chilies on each plate; the chilies look fat, vengeful, hot with anger. They watch saccharine soaps on television while munching anger, as if, from the heat of the green serpentine "monsters". They do not show their disillusionment with life while watching the tableau presented to them but they laugh at the folly of some characters, cry sometimes at their demise and they sigh; nobody knows the workings of their minds when they hold a breath longer than usual and then slowly release it, making the exhalation sound like a litany of all the untold grief in a person's mind. They become vocal, at times, to give vent to their assessment of whatever goes on in the television soaps.
The dark complexioned charwoman lives in a shanty, more like a lean-to; her hovel clinging like a parasitic plant on the wall of an empty plot owned by some rich man. The owner of the plot allows her family and three others, with their own lean-tos, to stay with the condition that they take turns keeping an eye on his precious plot and keep it from any illegal intrusions by land grabbers, addicts or other riff-raff.
Her lean-to is a ramshackle arrangement using bamboo, square frames that use cross-stitching of cane fiber and plastic sheeting. How the structure holds on is an engineering miracle of sorts. She lives with her husband and two of her four daughters. Yes, she has four daughters. When queried as to why she has so many children with a husband who pulls a rickshaw, health permitting, thus forcing her to work at two different places as charwoman, she gives a blank stare of disbelief. Pressed for an answer, she states the obvious, "We wanted a son who would keep the 'family name' lit, of course?!" Almost like an unquenchable flame, I thought with dismay and some anger. She kept having babies till almost forty; her youngest is about six years old. The child bearing stopped when her body gave notice after the fourth pregnancy. She looks anemic and complains, often, of an unending fatigue; she has never mentioned the failed pregnancies and miscarriages which seems very likely to have happened in her long quest of looking for the illusive son.
She has married off two of her daughters, thereby incurring heavy debts. We hear eternally of her husband's illness which makes him stay home more often than not. He could be an addict but she never reveals much. Addiction is rampant among the dwellers of the slums. The disappointments of life become too much to bear, at times, with a mind that is too sober to process the heartaches and hence the false colours of drugs are eagerly sought. Poverty, social conditioning about the family structure, the resulting disappointments, the inability to cope and the relatively easy availability of drugs form a vicious circle.
She comes to work sometimes with a fat lip or a blackened eye; her eternal excuse is that she fell and hurt herself. On these days she is found working with a face grimmer than usual; she gives the mother-like cook lashes of her acid tongue without any provocation. It is obvious that once again a fight has ended with her 'sick' husband resorting to his 'masculine prowess'. Men are often wont to do just that in the slums. The workings of the minds of the "social animal" remain a big mystery to many.
On the days that she fights with her neighbours, she is extremely vocal; extolling the virtues of the ones who stood by her during the fight and damning to eternal hell the ones who locked horns with her. Strangely, I find that she seems to be in a better mood, after the initial vocal display, she likes the vent of frustrations that these fights provide; probably she would feel better if she could take a machete to chop down her adversary.
She keeps watching the never-ending saga of an urban family, living in a different city, different country, following a different religion, and a backdrop she finds foreign yet fascinating. The soaps they watch are from the West Bengal province of India. She delays going home as much as possible; she even falls asleep. She does not want to face the life waiting there but the inevitable remains unavoidable. The cook falls asleep too, as if, in empathy maybe in sympathy. The cook has a son who has married recently. She has been slaving to provide him for his upkeep and education; he hardly calls to ask about her well-being any more.
Is that a sigh I hear from the two sleeping women? Simultaneously?
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