The objectionable servant

For CSA Awareness month: A real life story with names changed

Bela was newly married. Besides her and her husband there was only her widowed mother-in-law in the family. Her husband’s sister used to leave her fifteen month-old daughter with her mother on her way to work every morning and collect her on her way back home every evening. There was a fourteen year-old male servant in the house who helped Bela with the housework and her arthritic mother-in-law with childcare, heating the baby’s milk, fetching and carrying, etc.

As the baby grew older and more active, it became more and more difficult for the grandmother to cope with her since both Bela and the child’s mother were out at work the whole day. She gradually began to let the servant take care of more and more of the child’s needs. He used to rock her to sleep and pace with her whenever she was restless. Soon she let him take her out into the colony, or on the terrace to show her the birds and trees whenever she was troublesome. And after some time she even started letting him wash the child whenever she needed to be changed.

Soon Bela became pregnant, and was ordered bed rest for the first twelve weeks due to low hormone levels. It was when she started staying home that she noticed the servant’s peculiar behaviour with the child and the objectionable way he would fondle her. Then she realized that the servant was even washing the child when she dirtied herself, and that she would scream in pain every time he washed her. Bela alerted her mother-in-law, who chose to turn a blind eye to the matter, realizing that she would have to stretch herself beyond her physical capacity to take care of the child herself if she paid attention to Bela. Next Bela alerted the child’s mother, but she too chose to ignore the matter, since to take remedial action would have disrupted her well-ordered professional life.

Bela couldn’t believe that a child’s mother and grandmother could be so callous towards her welfare simply to avoid disrupting their everyday lives! She then broached the matter with her husband. He discussed it with his mother and sister, but they snubbed him too, telling him that his wife had too active an imagination and that they would have known if the servant really were acting objectionably. But Bela’s husband was very disturbed by all this and took two days’ leave from office to judge matters for himself. What he saw made him realize the truth of his wife’s story and he fired the servant immediately.

The child’s pubic area remained extremely sore and painful for a few years after this. However, she is now sixteen, and a lovely, confident young lady, and hopefully, has no memory of these incidents of her infancy.