Sonia Faleiro

"Driven by Dreams. Fighting the Odds.
Education was a luxury they couldn’t afford, earning a living a forced choice. Now, although they have joined the better-off among domestic workers, nothing has changed for them. Tehelka tracks two die-hard spirits.

The ecosystem of domestic workers, within which they labour and survive, is headed by the driver. Not only is he better paid—with an average starting salary of Rs 4,500 a month as opposed to Rs 3,500 for an 8-hour housekeeper, his status amongst the domestic workers is significantly better. This is partly because of his salary, and because he is accorded relatively greater courtesy that his colleagues, since he is in safekeeping of lives, and a prized possession. He is less liable to be fired over a minor infraction, and often merits a uniform distinguishing him from other help. In India, drivers are male, contributing to their distinctive status in a workforce of female housekeepers, cooks, and cleaners. Also, in line with the Indian tradition, they marry later (28 versus 18), have children later, and may have fewer mouths to feed during the first two decades of their work life, which usually commences at adolescence.

Despite the surface advantages, a driver’s life isn’t dissimilar to that of other domestic workers. The challenges that poverty, poor nutrition, and minimal education throw up, remain the same. The proximity to expensive objects and beautiful people, to lives so far removed from their own they could be a mirage, is identical. C. Karthik, 24, and P. Pattuswami, 21 vouch for this. They are first cousins, drivers and neighbours, in suburban Andheri. Karthik earns Rs 6,000 a month, Pattuswami Rs 5,000, making them amongst the highest earners in their slum of domestic workers, manual labourers, and unemployed alcoholics. While they take pride in the fact that they have achieved more than their parents, as they look around they realise that little has changed since they were children.

Pattuswami’s one room home, rented for Rs 1,200 a month, is a hasty construction of stone walls, a tin roof with a five-foot long gnash; and a floor damp with fungus. During the monsoon, water wells up to three feet in the room. He says the entire family crouches in the driest corner, within a plastic sheet. He stands all night, and at 4 a.m reports to work. The rooms are separated by a slim corridor not big enough for a portly man to walk through. Turning right from his entrance door leads to the communal alley where women wash clothes, men smoke and sweet and toy sellers make their rounds. Out through the left leads to the bathing area—a shack of bamboo poles and plastic sheets, where one woman washes dishes while another shampoos her hair, infusing the air with a lone sweet smell, which is quickly suppressed by that of a child defecating on a pile of garbage. One pile amidst thousands in a garbage disposal area which makes do as a toilet for the residents of the slum and as a residence for hundreds of famished rats. The smell of excrement clings to one’s being. Music from a radio, the screams of excited children watching a televised cricket match, hostile sounds from a main road engulfed with rush hour traffic make coherent thought and speech difficult. It is this persistent invasiveness that Karthik and Pattuswami return to each night.

The cousin’s lives have followed a similar path. Their parents migrated from Tamil Nadu to this predominantly South Indian slum, when the boys were infants. They left because the land was parched and there was no employment. Now their mother’s are domestic workers earning approximately Rs 2,000 a month. But while Pattuswamy’s father is a daily wage labourer earning Rs 1,500 a month, Karthik’s father stays at home. When they were children, Karthik says, their parents wanted better for them; they wanted them to achieve the promises of migration, which they never saw. But after only four years of study, starting when they were 10, the boys voluntarily walked out of the school gates for the last time. “They would say ‘don’t remain illiterate like us’,” recalls Karthik. “But every day there would be a new expense. A notebook, a pencil, exam fees, all of which would have fed our family for a week. It became impossible for me to ask my parents for more money. So I started earning instead.”

At 15, they began working as manual labourers transporting stones and mud in a basket on their head. But unlike many of their elders, who remain there, working harder but earning less with age, Karthik and Pattuswami moved up quickly. They were dish washers at a hotel (Rs 15 a day), before a friend offered to teach them how to drive, during late-night sessions. Once the boys acquired their license, their lives changed. They were hired first in separate households to drive the family car—a Maruti 800, and a Fiat. But since both their employers were in the construction business, within months they were put at the helm of heavy duty vehicles.

Now Pattuswami drives a garbage truck for the Brihanmumbai Corporation (BMC). He awakens at 4 a.m., takes a three-wheeler to Gorai, picks up the truck and returns to Andheri West where he helps three men empty dozens of garbage bins. He makes three round trips, never returning home before 7.30 p.m. If it’s a slack day, his employer may ask him to stop by his house. Pattuswami says, “The smell of garbage makes me vomit. I get dizzy, making it hard to drive. Driving Seth’s car is better. It’s air conditioned, and the distances are small. Sometimes I just have to sit, waiting.” Three years ago, Karthik gave up his job as a private driver for a better offer made by his employer. He now works on the BMC pipeline, navigating a bulldozer from Malad to Kandivali. He too is expected to fill in as the Seth’s family driver. He says, “My salary is cut for every holiday I take, and when I return from Tamil Nadu after attending Pongal for 20 days, I need to find another job. But while many people can drive, a bulldozer is a different matter. As long as I’m polite to Seth, he’s polite to me; we get along, and he finds me other work.”

At the end of their seven-day week, the boys sometime take a break. They may visit a relative, or hitch a ride to a suburban cinema screening Tamil films. Karthik likes to chew Goa gutka, while Pattuswami collects photographs of expensive cars. He cuts them out from discarded newspapers, and creates a wishful collage on the face of his steel cupboard.

Despite their frugality, the strains on their life are primarily financial. Pattuswami lives with his parents, and their collective income is Rs 8,500. Of this, Rs 2,000 is sent to their village monthly to help pay for the education of his two younger siblings. The rest is consumed by rent, rations (Rs 2,000), water (Rs 200 for two months) electricity (Rs 150 per month), and medical expenses. The family has neither a radio nor a television, and closed their bank account five years ago. “We had nothing to put into it,” shrugs Pattuswami. Sometimes, he says, he saves Rs 10 a month. Karthik’s economic situation is possibly worse. He lives with five family members in a handkerchief square of space. Their collective income is Rs 10,000, of which Rs 3,000 is spent on food. And what do they eat? For breakfast, nothing. For lunch, biscuits and tea if the boss has tipped them. If not, nothing. For dinner, boiled rice. This scant consumption is mirrored in their neighbours’ homes. Tea and glucose biscuits, which cost Rs 4 for a pack of 20, for breakfast; then a corrosive gap until dinner when the aroma of rice boiling is the only succor available to the 500 inhabitants of this slum. And these are better days. During the floods of July 26, 2005 the slums dwellers relocated to a building under construction. For three days they ate glucose biscuits dipped in rain water.

For a minimum of two months a year, when construction work comes to a halt during the monsoons, the drivers are grounded without pay. To compensate, they rent a three wheeler from a friend. Vanilla Odiyar, the mother of 23-year-old rickshaw driver Raghu, explains: “A rickshaw driver will drive his rickshaw from early morning until 4 p.m. He then rents it out until 11 p.m., for Rs 150 a day, petrol extra (Rs 50-60). Anything earned over this amount may be kept by the renter.” While the idea of owning their own rickshaw occurred to Karthik and Pattuswami, the down payment of Rs 70,000, and monthly payments amounting to Rs 1 Lakh, is more money than they have seen in their lives. Pattuswami says, “We don’t have money for dinner, never mind a rickshaw.” The physical trauma of so much driving, however, is something they experience regularly. Twice a month, the cousins go to a local doctor for an injection or a dose of antibiotics for back pain and foot ache brought on by hours of driving.

Karthik’s neighbour, 21-year-old Kamala, who has left behind three children in a school in Tamil Nadu, says: “Our life is worthless. Sometimes we wonder why we continue living. But for Karthik, every step forward is one closer to a better future. “Whatever it is, it’s the best we can do,” he says, solemnly. “If not driving, it would be labour. Picking up night soil. We’ve done better than our parents. They earned Rs 1,000, we earn Rs 6,000. Neither they nor we got a chance to study, or to enjoy life even a little. But because of our efforts, our children will."

Tehelka, March 16, 2006. Photo: Sonia Faleiro
Read the rest of the series:
The Other Half 1
The Other Half 2
The Other Half 3

Labels: Profiles

Your writing is so completely brilliant. You get to the heart-and-entrails of the matter and put it down in such lyrical prose... Am a big fan!

You have done it again. Great article.

Rayan Felix Coutinho
http://www.rcoutinho.com

Great post!

This is India Reality ... more real than India Shining/Rising/Incredibling!

this hope, die-hard spirit is vital. i know this very senior driver of a friend. one late night, he dropped us to the farmhouse and it was pouring. i asked him how he would go back home. he proudly showed me his scooter, told me how he broke his back to earn, educate his children and give them a better life than his own. it is a story of grit and the spirit of never to give in.

Shruti, Rayan, and Puru thank you for your support. Makes it all worthwhile. :)
Bem, I've left a comment on your blog about your experience with the scooter driver. Terrifying for you, but you were so brave! Good luck navigating those roads and those kinds of drivers, again. (And carry pepper spray).

Sonia,

Another outstanding article. I really enjoyed reading this. Good work.

Sonia,

This was an excellent article. I really enjoyed reading it.

Riveting, as always.

Very clear writing! But you start and end with the theme of education in their lives, it may probably serve better for an informed reader to have knowledge of the schooling )not education) options in their lives.

I hate stressing too much analytical thought in a writer's expression for it robs spontaneity. But it is worth having a flavor of what an informed reader expects on these issues which may be something like this. http://mymercatus.blogspot.com/2006/03/researching-schooling-real_114127638090322579.html

Again, your article elucidates on their state of poverty, which may be your original goal. But if you want to understand and write why they are poor it may require more homework.

Naveen, you appear to miss the point of the profiles. They're an attempt at giving readers an insight into the lives of those we see every day, work with every day, and yet know little about. They're profiles on domestic workers.

They are not thesis' on the education system, or a history of poverty in the Subcontinent.

Certainly, there must be many readers interested in such depth, detail and pontification, but to expect that from this series is misguided, misses the point of my writing and research entirely.

Hmmm...if raising sensitivity for domestic workers is the objective, then no qualms.

Incidently there have been efforts to organize the domestic workers for minimum pay, paid holidays, rights etc.

(one such report ...)
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1006729

would you have any thoughts on that ?

thanks,
- puru

oh btw, I do think that some of kind of worker right's legislation is great, but would be very difficult to formulate and implement.

Nice reporting, deeply touched so?

Look Sonia, the problem is in a poor country drivers/houskeepers will never be paid a large sum of money. If an average software professional makes 20 grand, do you think she can afford to pay 10 grand to a housekeeper?

The market will decide the price, here in US, no one except the super rich can afford a housekeeper because of the simple demand and supply ratio. We simply have too many hands for too small a pie.

If one legislates too much, then they will simply be priced out of the market and even this alternative will not be open for them.

Another thought, when I was India recently and I asked my mom how much she paid our housemaid, she said roughly the same amount which she used to pay 5 years back. Why? Constant cheap labor migrating from poorer states and illegal immigration from Bangladesh.

Till this demand and supply ratio remains skewed, their lot will not improve.

regards

hi,sonia after going through various magazines, newspaper abt ur work , i was verymuch fascinated by the work u r doing, u r trying to wake up the spirit in the youths of today, who with the talents hidden inside do not know how to come up with , i suppose you have become the inspiration for many, as like u have become for mine, and im going through your works like a snail, so that i could learn the inner feelings, thoughts that is with in you. just now i have started creating my blog.i would surely furnish those incidents i had come across in my life, i would surely start with the bravery of the fire department, during the tsunami, as i have witnessed that incident and i have been there witnessing 100 of dead bodies in front of me, do try to visit my blog, iam collecting details& working of "THE BANYAN " which works for the mentally challenging orphanaged womens in chennai,carry on with ur work, u shall reach the pinnacle of the world, with nothing but the mighty sword called pen. and lets try to bring out the reality, do visit my blog;;; softykid.blogspot.com

This is India Reality. Crash dreams...