I just read the book ‘The Help’ by Kathryn Stockett .About
Mississippi in 1962. ‘A vanished world,
where black maids raise white children but aren’t trusted not to steal the
silver’.
India in 2011, and we aren’t very different. We may not use
the words ‘black’ and ‘white’, but the boundaries are clear as ever. The ‘them’ and the ‘us’.
The book revolves around the lives of three women, Skeeter,
one of the three main protagonists, a young educated white woman , decides to
venture on an untrodden path and write a book about coloured domestics in
Mississipi, helped by Ailbileen and Minny, two maids working for their
unreasonable and eccentric white employers. The book is very real, with the
story being richly described by the three protagonists in turn, three points of
view, and the reader being transported into each of their contrasting worlds
with each narrative.
The incident that led to Skeeter and Aibileen take on this
daring task is something that happens everywhere today- Aibileen’s employer
decides to come up with an initiative where separate toilets are installed in
garages of homes for the coloured folk, as they carry diseases that are fatal
to white people if there was sharing of toilets. In how many of our homes today do maids get to use our bathrooms ? We may not treat them as untouchable any
more, but the lines are very much there.
Do our maids ever sit on our furniture? Eat at our tables?
Use the same dishes and glasses we use? We may talk to them as almost equals,
leave aside food for them, give them not-so-old clothes, pay their children’s’
school fees, but yet will they ever presume to helping themselves to a glass of
water with the very cups that they wash ?
If a maid dresses well, she is considered conceited. If a
maid tries to stand up for her rights by forming associations and demanding
minimum wages, she is considered a trouble-maker. If she spends a little extra
money in sending her children to an English-medium school, she is considered
something of a squanderer.
They work seven days a week. They do not get sick leaves and
pensions, almost like the house-elves in Harry Potter. They do not presume to
ever look at an employer as an equal.
Like the coloured domestics of 1962, they raise the children
of working mothers. Who make sure their jewellery is safely locked up before
leaving them with their toddlers . The children call the maid by their names.
Why ? Would they ever call a mother’s friend by name ? But the rules of respect
do not apply to fifty year old domestic helps.
Yes, maybe some of them steal. Some of them may lie, some may
be immoral. But as quoted by Atticus Finch in 'To Kill a Mockinbird', this
is true of all human beings. Not to
the labour class alone.
Decades have passed since civil wars and fight for human
rights. But most maids in India have the same story to tell.
Husbands who beat
them up in an inebriated state. Small incomes that barely get them the
necessities of life. Desperately putting children through school so that they
don’t suffer like their mothers. Coming to work even when sick because
otherwise the employer cuts their salary. Small makeshift houses that leak
during the rain. No proper water supply and electricity. Living in squalor.
We may boast about women power, about having a woman
president before the mighty USA.( A president whose voice we rarely hear, but
that's a different matter.) That we have famous women reporters and writers and entrepreneurs.
But has this in any way changed our
attitude towards our maids ? When will we
change ?
