Walking Towards Ourselves

by Catriona Mitchell

  Sometimes I wonder if I’d be a better writer if I ran into more female professionals. Would it make me bolder? Would I have deeper, more spontaneous conversations with strangers? Would I give out my phone number more easily? What stories would I tell if the auto-rickshaw driver, bus driver, mechanic, cobbler, plumber, packer and mover, deliverer of newspapers, fixer of gadgets, mason, gardener, carpenter and house painter were women? Would there be stories of pretend-talking on a mobile phone and pepper spray? And would I finally stop looking over my shoulder?

  * * *

  1. Approximately US$75

  2. The Hindu or Muslim system of sex segregation, practised especially by keeping women in seclusion.

  3. The part of a Hindu or Muslim house reserved for the women of the household.

  HOME GIRL: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMALL-TOWN SOCIAL WORKER

  ANJUM HASAN

  Manjula’s daily work is to care for abused women and abandoned girls, and it is the attitude with which she does this that most attracted me to her. This young woman’s tough pragmatism and wry affection for the strangers she meets and befriends every day made me curious about her background, which turned out to be very similar – in its traditional poverty and slow, tenacious journey out of it – to those of the women she works with. The oppression of women (as well as men) is a fact of life for Manjula. She is neither evangelical nor a harsh critic of her society but someone who has made the best of her limited opportunities and who uses the structures provided by the government to help the women around her. I had extended conversations with Manjula over the space of six months, observing her at work and at home, travelling with her and meeting her family. The following story is based on my many experiences, over these months, of seeing the world through her eyes. I’ve taken the liberty of using Manjula’s name, with her permission. All other names have been changed.

  Manjula wakes at dawn to a torrent on the roof, feeling the small body thrashing next to her. Four-year-old Rani has been running a temperature the last two days. Manjula gives the girl a drink of water, then pats her warm body back to sleep.

  It’s been a monsoon-soaked August and most of the thirty-odd girls at this government-run home have coughs and colds. They walk to and from school, their slippered feet sloshing in puddles and rain lashing at their bare legs. They’ve lined up twice in the past week for the visiting doctor. The youngest of the lot is the girl in bed, who’s ravenous for affection. This scrawny thing and her solemn older sister were abandoned by their housemaid mother after their father died and she remarried. Their mother’s brother took them in for a couple of years but he’s getting married soon too, so he decided to drop them at the home. The mother hasn’t been to visit since. The sisters look set to spend their childhood here. Still, in not having known life-altering catastrophe, they are better off than many of their companions, whose curriculum vitae feature mostly horror: father burnt mother to death in a fit of rage and went to jail, daughters sent here; parents alcoholics and beaters, daughter rescued and brought here; father married another woman, mother allowed daughter to be repeatedly raped for money, girl brought here by neighbours. The home, run out of the spacious premises of what was once a jail, shelters girls up to the age of sixteen. They go to school, play badminton and cricket in their free time, speak to a resident counsellor about their troubles, devise programs of dance and song for festivals, do yoga, and read picture books in English with a volunteer who visits a couple of times a week. After sixteen, they will be sent to the bigger town of Udupi to stay at a home for older girls, while they finish college.

  When Manjula wakes a couple of hours later, the little girl is fast asleep, her skin cooler, the wrinkle between her eyebrows gone. Manjula bathes and dries her hair, her movements brisk and efficient, her mind always on the next thing. It will soon be time to go to the Women’s Welfare Cell attached to the local hospital, recently set up to handle rape cases, where she spends her mornings. She is a social worker under the government’s Department of Women and Child Development, which is responsible for both institutions. Manjula divides her time between the two. A girl came in last night, she and her family brought from a nearby town by a couple of policewomen. The doctor at the cell, a specialist in forensic medicine, has already examined her and taken samples, as has the gynaecologist, who would have given her emergency contraceptive pills.

  ‘Done your maths problems, kanno?’ Manjula asks ten-year-old Babita at breakfast. ‘Namaste, madam,’ the roomful of girls yell at her through stuffed mouths. They are dressed for school, wolfing down their mounds of vegetable and semolina uppittu and lukewarm milk. Manjula devotes her afternoons and evenings to them, supervising homework, helping them tinker with the computers, watching TV together. Babita smiles ecstatically, even though the older girl knows maths is her great stumbling block. But in every other subject she is almost at the top of her class. Manjula has heard how someone called the child helpline about Babita and she was picked off the streets, begging. She had more lice than hair, sores all over her back, an attention span of a few seconds in class, after which she’d nod off, and no idea about using a bathroom to pee – she would just squat wherever. In four years Babita’s become a new person, a quick-witted girl who loves to dance and authoritatively whacks the younger kids when they annoy her.

  Manjula chats with the warden about Rani, who’s still asleep in her room, then sticks her umbrella into her handbag and steps out. It’s a ten-minute walk to the hospital. Rain-flecked cars cram the roads, driven by parents taking their children to private schools around town. Not for them the government school where the home’s girls go, with its leaking roof and teachers armed with wooden rulers. Her phone rings, a cheap black Nokia that is welded to her palm; she tells her colleague Divya she’s almost there.

  At the hospital, a three-storey building of mildewed pink concrete, Manjula runs up the stairs to Room 26. A child who can’t be older than fourteen sits poised and expressionless on one of the shoddy plastic chairs. Examining the posters on rape trauma syndrome and stress management are the two police officers and, huddled to one side, the girl’s parents. One look at their weathered faces, sun-blackened complexions, rounded noses, the wrinkled hands and ancient eyes – all of which, she’s well aware, belie their ages – and Manjula knows they’re tribals, probably daily-wage labourers on one of the many coffee estates in the district. Divya, the counsellor who just called her, is writing in a file.

  ‘I’m the social worker,’ says Manjula to everyone in the room, and then, gently, to the girl, ‘What’s your name?’

  The girl looks to her parents and the taller of the policewomen speaks. ‘They came to us yesterday evening when she didn’t get back from school. We found her and the boy on the estate. When does the lab open? We’ve been told she needs some tests done.’

  ‘It’ll open any minute,’ says Manjula soothingly, then again asks the girl for her name.

  Eventually, Manjula accompanies the still unspeaking victim, whose name, it turns out, is Maya, to the lab for blood tests that will determine her haemoglobin levels and HIV status. When she deposits Maya back in Room 26, Divya says she’d like half an hour alone with her, so the policewomen step out and Manjula takes Maya’s parents down to the canteen for coffee.

  She learns that their stick-thin daughter is sixteen and the boy in question perhaps eighteen or even twenty; they’re not sure. They have three other children. Maya studies in class eight; she has known the boy for the last three years, was often on the phone to him. The police immediately looked in the coffee estate where the family works. The boy was picked up, denied the charge, was beaten, confessed. The parents filed a First Information Report at their local police station and the boy’s in the lock-up. Manjula gives them her number; they are to phone her if they need legal help with the case. There’s a government advocate attached to the cell and on call.

  ‘Maybe the best thing is to get them married,’ says Maya’s mother.

  ‘Useless, horribl
e boy,’ blurts the father. He has the whole time been looking much more distressed than his wife.

  ‘No!’ says Manjula, raising her voice without meaning to. ‘Don’t you know that you could go to jail for marrying off a girl under eighteen and a boy younger than twenty-one? The same police who have arrested the boy will arrest you.’

  It turns out that they didn’t know. They go quiet then, nervously sipping their tiny tumblers of coffee, only breaking off to say that they have to get back to the estate soon; they can’t both afford to lose a whole day’s wages.

  Manjula joined the Women’s Welfare Cell when it was set up in February 2015 in this small town in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Each new encounter makes her reflect on previous ones. Seven months and twenty-eight cases down, she’s starting to see patterns. Most cases that come to them only ostensibly involve rape. Love, instead, is the issue. Teenage couples across communities and religions elope and the girl’s desperate parents file police reports accusing the boy of rape. When found (if not in the coffee fields, the couple is usually camping out at the home of a relative in the nearest town), the girls, sometimes as young as thirteen, are brought to the cell to be examined. If it’s a case of underage sex, the boy is sent off to a detention home in Mysore or, if he’s older than twenty-one, to the police to deal with.

  Divya, tidying up a ledger of handwritten reports, recounts one of their earliest cases – the rich girl who fell in love with a house painter, obviously grossly unsuitable in her parents’ view. She threatened to kill herself if she couldn’t have him. The two ran away and when the police caught up with them, the girl refused to go back home. Her father and all the family’s well-placed relatives – one a police officer, another a press reporter – did not let up, and even promised to consider the house painter.

  ‘You think they would?’ asks Divya.

  Manjula nods emphatically. ‘She’s young. She’ll feel differently in a few years.’

  ‘She was afraid to go back home, said she’d be beaten,’ says Divya.

  ‘These girls,’ says Manjula, calm and yet exasperated. ‘They watch films, they watch TV and get the idea they can run away. They have no idea what will follow.’

  Their talk turns to Maya and the harsh lives of the tribal workers on the estates. Manjula herself is tribal; she was raised for some years by an aunt and uncle who worked on the estates, and her brother-in-law is now a labourer too.

  ‘What about older women?’ asks Divya. ‘We don’t get any complaints from them.’

  ‘It’s not like they’re never abused by their employers. But they don’t open their mouths because their jobs are on the line. They just want to work and get their wages so they can eat,’ says Manjula.

  Manjula is a Yerava, one of several tribal communities based in this region, though her pale skin and slim frame don’t necessarily give this away. She wears rectangular glasses on her small round face, long fingernails painted maroon, delicate anklets on her feet. In this season, she has a zippered sports jacket over her salwar kurta. She’s twenty-eight.

  Her parents’ home – or rather her mother’s, because her alcoholic father died when she was five months away from being born – is a three-hour bus ride and two-kilometre walk south of here. She comes from a tribal settlement of sixty-odd houses. Some of these homes are mere tepees – plastic tarp thrown over bamboo sticks. Her mother’s house, built two years ago to replace a smaller one, is hardened, cow dung–slathered mud over a wooden frame, topped with a roof of terracotta tiles. Its three rooms and kitchen make it one of the largest homes in the village. Manjula allows herself to lapse into homesickness today; she’s heading there on a monthly visit once work is through, and she hopes to make it before dark and the inevitable stampeding elephants.

  Manjula’s mother, Sidamma, dispatched her daughter early to study in schools and colleges further and further away from home, with the result that Manjula is now the most educated girl in her haadi, or settlement. She’s also the only one who can chatter away in English, in addition to her Yerava tongue, and Kannada, the state language.

  A little before one o’clock, Manjula walks back to the girls’ home, looking forward to a hot lunch and a quick nap before she starts getting her things together for her trip home.

  Manjula takes a new, milk coffee–coloured, hand-knitted cardigan out of its plastic wrapping and holds it to her face for the texture. She went shopping yesterday and this is for her mother. Though she quietly accepts the money her daughter hands her every month, Sidamma never agrees to presents. Her standard reply, when Manjula asks, is: ‘Get yourself something nice to eat instead.’ But she relented yesterday. This was the best Manjula could find, and cost almost 500 rupees, a fortune relative to her monthly salary of 6000. Along with it, she’s packing a tiny, frilly pink skirt for her cousin’s toddler. She also bought a box of sweets, chocolate biscuits and some savoury namkeen. Her college-going nephew will head straight for her bag when he sees her. And relatives drop by all the time; Manjula enjoys offering them some town-bought titbit with their coffee.

  By the time she’s packed and changed, the girls are back from school, getting into their pyjamas. Not all of them have enough sets of day clothes so nightwear must do. There’s kadle – horse gram – for afternoon tiffin today, along with bananas and coffee. They get free lunch at school but by this hour they’re worn out and hungry. Manjula warns them to be well behaved as she says her goodbyes, then stops in the lobby on her way out. A woman is handing over a baby to two others while the staff of the home crowd around. This woman walked into a meeting of the child welfare committee yesterday, which comes together every week to discuss the case of each new girl needing rehabilitation. It turned out she wanted the home to take in her child – an eleven-day-old infant she doesn’t want.

  ‘What about your husband? Doesn’t he want her either?’ Manjula had asked.

  ‘Definitely not. We get by on a small piece of land, that’s all. We already have two girls. We can’t raise a third.’

  What about your parents-in-law, Manjula wanted to add, but didn’t, for she was sure they were highly encouraging of the plan.

  The woman said the nurses at the maternity ward had tipped her off about the home and the committee’s weekly meetings. Her husband was with her till the baby arrived, then went back to the village, leaving behind instructions to get rid of it. The committee folks had called up a rehab home for abandoned babies in a nearby town. It is their representatives the baby is going over to now – two serious women in bright nylon saris. The cooks and cleaners on the staff coo over the child as she is bundled into a blanket and Manjula is suddenly crying. She held this baby yesterday, all wrinkled and new, and wondered what it might feel like to discard someone so utterly blameless. She opens the door to leave, and looks back once more at the mother. Her face says nothing.

  In the town centre, Manjula finds a run-down private bus, blasting a jubilant film song, going halfway to her destination. The town is quickly left behind, replaced by silver oak–dotted coffee estates and forests of acacia and teak. Hidden away behind them is the world she came out of – small holdings on which poor peasants like her mother toil, growing paddy once a year and then leaving the land fallow the remaining months because there is no irrigation other than the monsoons. It is transplanting time right now, the tender green shoots of rice evenly sown into the mud of the fields, which will be their home till the winter. She is still thinking of that scrap of a baby when her phone rings. It’s the superintendent of the girls’ home calling about fifteen-year-old Shahana, whose case is the most nerve-racking rigmarole Manjula and her colleagues have ever been involved in.

  A rich local businessman called Adnan had apparently, over the past year, been running an elaborate hoax to blackmail tourists. Young men from the adjoining state of Kerala, interested in coming over to find brides, would be invited by a middleman to stay at one of the small guesthouses in town that Adnan owned. But instead of prospective brides,
an older woman and a young girl, both in a state of undress, would turn up and attempt to seduce the men. Before they had made much progress, police would arrive on the scene armed with cameras, and confront the Keralites. They were to pay up for having illicit sex else their pictures would be in the following day’s papers. Only this wasn’t the police at all but Adnan and his friends incognito. They were said to be raking in hundreds of thousands of rupees.

  One of the men from Kerala had seen through the lies and complained to the police. Along with Adnan, Shahana and her mother were taken in. It turned out that Adnan had promised to build the family a luxury home if they went along with his plan. Manjula didn’t know if the house existed but she did learn that the girl had told the police the following: Adnan had raped her, several times, and threatened to fling acid on her face if she let on that it was him; Shahana’s younger sister was an unpaid housemaid for one of Adnan’s married daughters; Shahana’s mother had received money for keeping quiet; and her father seemed to be mentally disturbed.

  Shahana is in the girls’ home for the time being. And now, the superintendent tells Manjula on the phone, she is threatening to kill herself unless she’s released; she seems certain that Adnan is planning revenge and worried about her parents or sister being murdered because of her revelations to the police. Manjula groans and the two women can’t help but marvel at the mess. Then they worry about how all this will end for the traumatised girl.

  As soon as she rings off, there’s another call. It’s her best friend Bhim, checking in, as he does a few times every afternoon. She tells him about her day and he says he’ll wait for her at the bus stop and see her into the next bus. He happens to live in a village on this route. She’s brought a couple of Kannada magazines for him, her young farmer friend who loves her and whom she thinks she loves back. But it’s not romantic. They don’t allow their thoughts to run in that direction; at least Manjula doesn’t. She sometimes feels she’s fine as she is – carefree and single, unlike the other girls in her community, who all marry early. She wants to find a better-paying job and is willing to move town, even leave the state; she enjoys being surrounded by people, working with and for them. Marriage will tie her down, she’s certain, unless she meets someone who is not insecure about her leaving the house. Someone like Bhim, that is, who cares, calls her every single day, tries to help whenever she’s in any kind of trouble or need. He’s a friend of the family too, particularly of her nephew, and he’s visited Manjula’s village. They’ve all taken to him. The problem is that he’s a high-caste boy from a well-to-do family who’s given up his studies to manage the family lands, and she a tribal girl from a dirt-poor background who has risen in life but still just about gets by. There’s little they don’t share with each other, and yet they’re tragically incompatible – there’ll be trouble for sure from his family if they consider marriage. Her relatives might have things to say too. So they’ve both decided to put the idea out of their minds. He’s told her, jokingly perhaps, but with honest intent, that he’s on the lookout for a groom for her.