A tale of two women. A tale of two cities.

Rama and Rupa.

When I met Rupa, I had this uneasy feeling in the stomach. Stomach. Not heart or head beacuse I met her over lunch. Maybe that was my gut feeling.
So I met this 19 year old on a street in South Mumbai. I was waiting for her in her home, the pavement. She lives on this pavement with her mother, 4 aunts,7 cousins and grandmother, all of who were born on the same pavement, except the grandmother. The story is too common to be retold here...the beginning at least. Old lady moved into this street with her husband in their poverty stricken young days from another part of India.They came here to ride the famous rags-to-riches waves that brush the shore of Mumbai regularly. Only the riches never came. While the old lady had 4 daughters, old man drank himself to death. The daughters sat by their mother's side as she spent days, weeks, months, years eating what poeple gave her, sleeping when there was no food to be cooked or eaten. They begged to survive the day and waited for that wave to come and sweep them off the pavement to a life more comfortable, secure and meaningful. Youth came to the daughters but unlike for many of us, it did not bring ambition, or aspiration or that fire-in-the-belly to change their plight, to them. Their youth got them husbands, also from the street. 4 girls with 8 hands did not consider putting them to any use beyond holding them out waiting for food/money/luck to drop from the heaven. It didnt.The husbands drank themselves unconcious keeping the family tradition alive. The daughters had more daughers and some sons, no work, no income. Rupa is one of them.
Could it be possible that able bodied people find no work in a city hungry for hands for a full 40 years? The pavement leads to many homes, shops, mills and now malls. None of the daughters thought it worth a walk to any of these just to check if they fit.
A job was offered to one of Rupa's aunts, as domestic help in a nearby high-rise. She was bringing up a child on that pavement at that time so the opportunity meant money and contacts. As is often the case, one home becomes 2 and then 3 and soon you have a full 1000 rupees in the purse on the 1st of every month. Pocket money for many but a good foothold for those who could not be worse off. Yes it meant hard work, honesty and courage to keep going untill you get there. But for this daughter of the old lady cleaning a whole home for 300 rupees a month seemed too much. Gave it up in less than 30 days. Back on the pavement, saying she is better off sitting there 24 hours doing nothing, watching her child do nothing. The kid is growing up all right, just as she herself did, right there, with no education and no idea about what is, what can and could be.

Rama wakes me up with the doorbell at 7 am. She makes me a cup of tea even as she helps herself to one with an extra spoonfull of sugar. She needs it, certaily more than I do. Rama helps me run my home, while I help her run her's. But as my day begins with her doorbell, she is already a few hours through her's. She wakes up at 4 am, cooks for her family of 4 women, packs off her daughters to school and college, puts everything her ill mother-in-law whould need in order, and then travels a full 45 minutes by train to shake me off my bed. Married into the city as the second wife of a widower, she is the pillar of a family waiting to collapse after her husband died a decade ago. Left with a daughter,a step daughter,and a mentally unstale mother-in-law Rama stepped out of thier shanty after her husband died. With no education to back her, she took on what came her way and what she had hoped to do all her life, albeit in her own home. She cooks, cleans and does everything I need her to do, so I can do what I want to do. And mine is not the only home she helps keep in order.
Rama is now worried. Her step daughter needs to take up a job so she can support her in keeping them going. She asks me to counsel her on what to do. I offer to pay her fees so she can study further. Rama refuses. She must work and study, since she is now 18. Is she not worried about her daughter's marriage, I asked. No. No marriage untill she is capable of making it on her own. What if her husband dies like her father did. Will she wash utensils then? Anyway, the men who live in our locality and belong to our community are alcoholics. No point depending on marriage.

Rupa was lucky. Someone put her in a convent where she grew up away from the pavement. With shelter and food and education untill she passed class 12, Rupa returned to her birthplace with new hope, for me. Now, I thought, comes the moment of realisation. This family is now set to finally begin the journey to a hard but good life. To vindicate the promiss of Mumbai. She managed to get a job at a call centre. A full 10,000 rupees a month. Night shift, so better opportunity for a double income. Office pick-up and drop so no overheads. This is it, I thought. It cant get better. I didnt.
Rupa quit in less than a month. Night drive to office in the office cab, was not safe she told me. But hundreds of girls are falling over each other for these jobs,I told her,and all of them travel at night, even I do. No, she insisted, her family didnt think it was safe. Her family that sleeps under the street light, on an open road didnt think a call centre job was safe. And Rupa who grew up on charity in a hostel in another city agreed. But the job could get her a room in a slum at least, I argued. No, she argued back. Home means rent. And deposit. The street is free. And they are too many to sleep in one room anyway. So what do you want really? I asked.
'Someone should come to help us. The government maybe, or the rich people who live around this pavement. We have been here for decades now, how can they not feel for us'. How can I help I asked. 'Could you help us get the free food on the homeless card we have?The ration shop does not give us anything on this. We even met the corporator of this area...he said....and then...' I lost the rest of the conversation.
Back home Rama is worried again. She has realised that soon she will get old and her hands may not be of much use to her. She wants to know if it is too late for her to learn English.

- Prachi Jawadekar Wagh
May 18, 2008
The struggling poet says:
I took pity, gave a fourth of my wealth in charity
duty done, my place reserved in heaven
for someone I helped heal
I didnt know I would meet in Hell, those who I helped steal