Amma and the women who enable women
With the death of my Amma last week, I joined the hundreds of thousands of Indians coming to terms with grief and loss. Still, I guess, she was one of the lucky ones who managed to get not just a hospital bed but, crucially, oxygen and intensive care unit support.
She put up a fight for eight days before slipping into unconsciousness. My daughters would call her on the speaker-phone and Nirmal, her son, told them she would respond to the sound of their voices.
Her passing became for me an occasion to reflect on our 27-year-long relationship. I had just given birth by C-section to my elder daughter, when Renubala Das came to the hospital for an “interview” — swiftly resolved with just one question, the answer to which was that she had worked in her previous job for 16 years. She became a part of our home right then.
She was solid that way. A widowed, unlettered refugee from Bangladesh who remained unsure about her age, she had come to Delhi with two young sons, acquiring employment, a bank account and a property in what was then called the East Pakistan Displaced Persons Society, now Chittaranjan Park. On the bedrock of her nononsense stoicism, I built my career as a journalist.
Like so many working women, I depend on the labour of an army of cooks, cleaners and nannies in a lopsided relationship where a privileged employer pays a salary to a lessprivileged employee. The hierarchy extends to domestic work where the better-paid jobs of driver and cook go to men while women do the more poorly-paid jobs of cleaning and childcare. Finally, there’s the issue of housework itself that, no matter how deep your privilege, remains the business of women.
Underpaid and unregulated, domestic workers are bearing the brunt of Covid-19. Yet, to recover from the pandemic’s 2020 avatar when they were disgracefully shut out of housing complexes and laid off work, many now have been “left stranded without jobs or food stock, face severe discrimination and stigma and are combating coronavirus itself,” says Nandita Bhatt, director, Martha Farrell Foundation that works with domestic workers and is seeking to raise relief for 15,000 workers, most of them single mothers, just like Amma.
We considered Amma a part of our family, and for my daughters especially, her passing has been impossibly hard to process given that we are still under curfew, still in an age of social distancing, still gripped by fear and anxiety, wondering who this dreadful disease will fell next.
Despite the disparity in our incomes, Amma and I were both working women. But only one of us was able to get to work because the other was watching out for her children. Only one of us could put in long hours in the office because the other was putting in longer hours at home. I paid her a salary, but she gifted me the freedom to follow a profession. I regret not telling her how much that meant to me.