Through Fire and Flood

‘Amazing’ is the word that comes to my mind when I think of Omwati. Her life as a woman estranged from her husband and bringing up three children in a highly judgemental society has been anything but easy, but her dignified handling of harrowing, often sordid, and always difficult circumstances has been exceptional, to say the least. She has been working at my parental home for the past twenty two years as domestic help or ‘mai’. Her home, a bedsit on the outskirts of Delhi, shelters her married son, his wife and two children as well as her younger, unmarried son, and a year ago she managed to get her daughter married to an ‘educated’ industrial labourer.

Dark-skinned and reed-thin, Omwati carries herself with an air of aloofness and dignity, even in her cheap, well-worn sarees and handed-down rubber slippers. The wife of an impoverished agricultural labourer from Eastern UP, Omwati migrated to Delhi twenty two years ago, with her husband, their two sons aged four and two, and their newborn daughter. She started working as domestic help in a few houses in our colony and her husband became an itinerant vegetable vendor. Like all other mais of that time, she lived in a jhuggi in Madipur village; like all of them, she had the bulk of her earnings snatched and gambled away by her husband; and like all of them, she was beaten black and blue almost every night when her husband returned home drunk, the welts showing clearly, even on her dark skin. However, unlike most mais, her spirit remained undaunted by the sordid reality of life on the fringes of a big city, and her eyes remained firmly fixed on her ‘immigrant dream’ of a better future, if not for herself, then at least for her children.

Extremely quick to imbibe progressive thought, Omwati was struck by the common sense behind birth control, in an era when the concept of family planning was struggling against the ‘cultural mores’, even amongst the educated classes in India. When her husband refused to cooperate with her wish to have no more children, she had an overiectomy at the nearby public health centre and stoically bore the odium from her family and peers for taking such a step.
She saw education as the path to her children’s progress and enrolled them in MCD schools. She would skimp and save to buy sweets for them, as incentive for regular attendance and good performance. However, when she proudly brought her ‘class topper’ eldest son to my mother, she discovered that he had not even acquired basic literacy, in the best ‘sarkari school’ tradition of that time! My mother appreciated her spirit and taught her children to read and write.

However, Omwati needed to save for her children’s secondary education so that they would be able to become industrial labourers at the very least. For this she needed to keep her earnings away from her husband’s clutches. On my mother’s advice she opened a bank account, operating it with Ma’s help, depositing the bulk of her earnings in it every month and keeping her passbook secure at our place.

She was made to suffer for her ‘progressive attitude’, not only by her peers and neighbours (who virtually excommunicated her), but also by a number of women she worked for. How could they tolerate a mai getting so much above herself as to have a bank account of her own – something even most of them didn’t have in the early 1990s?

At home, her husband decided to ‘teach her a lesson’ and brought home a woman from a brothel. The two of them made it a daily practice to heap verbal as well as physical abuse on Omwati and her children. Omwati had expected retaliation from her husband’s thwarted ego and was initially determined to weather out the situation, hoping that things would revert to normal, sooner or later. However, things just went from bad to worse over the year that followed, and she saw her children bearing the brunt of their father’s and his mistress’s frustration at their inability to beat her into submission.

Finally, recognizing a lost cause, she made enquiries and got a ration card in her name, rented a room in another locality and moved there with her children. When her husband tried to force himself upon them, she made it clear to him that he would have to give up his mistress and lead a decent, self-supporting life as a responsible householder. He, however, refused to accept her effort to ‘wear the pants’ and left her, probably trusting in the Indian society’s chastising attitude towards ‘left’ women to bring her to her knees. He was to learn his mistake, as she bore all the brickbats aimed at her from all sides, and with her eyes firmly fixed on her dream for her children, continued to work and save tirelessly.

Ever since they were toddlers, she had encouraged her children to work for what they wanted, do chores for people to earn spending money, and save part of it to buy ‘something big’. It was a tribute to her exemplary upbringing that by the time he was ten, her elder son had saved two thousand rupees to buy a second hand black-and-white television!

Over the years, Omwati has managed to acquire the trappings of a ‘basic, decent’ lifestyle: beds for everyone, a fan, an air cooler, a gas connection and even a small ice-box. Both her sons, having passed higher secondary school, are working in factories. Her daughter-in-law stays at home because ‘her son is earning enough to support his family’ and no more women from her family need go into the domestic labour market. Grandma Omwati, however, continues to work, as always, determined to be self-supporting to the very end, and a source of inspiration to all who come in contact with her!