Mucking About!

It is just a few days to my mother’s 83^rd birthday. For the last three years she has spent her time between her bed and a wheel chair. Seeing her now, so helpless and weak, it is hard to believe how active and enterprising she used to be when we were young.

When I was around 6 years old, we moved into the ground floor of one of the lecturer’s quarters in IIT Powai, Bombay. There was ample space around the house, so my mother got a man to put a fence of wooden posts and barbed wire around it and proceeded to grow a vegetable garden. Initially, a man was hired to clear the space and dig the ground. In one corner of the garden she got him to dig a compost pit. But after that we were on our own. She would work in the garden a little bit every day and little by little it began to take shape. Of course, my brother and I got involved in this interesting enterprise. Initially we had to pick up the stones that she dug out from the ground and carry them to a pile in a corner. As the beds began to take shape, she would let me rake and break up the clods of earth with a fork and then showed me how to use a small digging trowel to make rows in the bed to plant seeds. My brother was still too small to do any real ‘work’, but pottered around alongside us.

My mother believed in using natural fertilizers and there was an abundance of it all around us. There were cows, buffaloes, donkeys and goats wandering about the IIT campus in plenty. Since she couldn’t possibly go around collecting the stuff herself, my brother and I were recruited for this important job. We were too young to know enough to be embarrassed by this assignment and, fascinated by the different types of droppings left by the various animals, we willingly agreed to go. Armed with a bucket, a trowel and a dustpan, we set off in search of the desired commodity. Every time we spotted a dark pile on the ground, we’d rush to it with cries of glee, shouting “cow!” “goat!” “donkey!”, scoop it up triumphantly and put it in the bucket. When there was enough in the bucket and it was too heavy for one small child to carry, the two of us would take the handle together, and singing, “Jack and Jill went up the hill” at the top of our voices, march back home with our precious booty.

We were soon spotted by other kids playing around in the vicinity. Noticing that we seemed to be having fun, they came up to investigate and quickly got involved in the project. Spreading out with eyes glued to the ground, they would shout whenever they saw a pile. Soon, it developed into a “Who can spot the dung first” competition. We showed them how to identify the different kinds of droppings – the large, flat cowpats, the lumps of donkey dung and the black marble-like goat droppings. What a jolly game this was! The bucket was full in no time and the band of us made our way back to our house, arranging to meet again the next day.

The following day so many of our friends turned up, that my mother had to find us another bucket. She didn’t complain. She mixed some of the manure into the soil in the beds she was preparing and then added the rest to the compost pit. As we brought her more manure, she filled the pit gradually, interspersing it with layers of soil, leaves, grass and kitchen waste, until in a few short days it was full. She then covered it with earth and we forgot about it for a few months. When enough time had elapsed, she dug it out and used it in the garden.

My mother did all the real work of building and planting our garden, but we got to help water the growing seedlings with a watering can and watch with fascination as they sprouted leaves and grew bigger and bigger. Soon I graduated from the trowel to the spade and then the pick and did some real, hard digging and gardening. It was fun to wander in the garden every day and see how the plants were doing. I soon learnt to identify the various kinds of plants by the leaves. We grew spinach, ladies fingers, brinjal and tomatoes, as well as coriander, mint and green chillies. Just outside the kitchen window, my mother planted a curry leaf tree. On our verandah grill climbed vines of marrow, cucumber and ridge gourd.

Very soon, the vegetable garden began to yield and we would go out in the mornings to pick the ladies fingers or cut some spinach leaves, green chillies and coriander or mint leaves. Eating fresh vegetables from our own garden was a wonderful privilege. We happily ate everything that grew and it never occurred to us to fuss or complain that we didn’t like a certain vegetable. My mother planted pumpkin seeds, which she saved from the vegetable we bought from the market. We loved the preparation she would make with the tender leaves and flowers of the pumpkin creeper. She would exchange notes with other garden enthusiasts on the campus and would often return home happily carrying some seeds or sapling they had given her.

My mother learnt that chicken manure was an excellent fertilizer, and banana plants love it.  So one day she and my Dad went to a farm exhibition and returned home with eight White Leghorn chicks. They built a large cage in the garden against our verandah and covered the floor with sawdust. The cage had a door through which we could enter. My Dad made a large sieve with wood and wire mesh. Every few days, we would rake up the sawdust, sieve it, spread it back on the floor, and add the chicken muck to the compost heap. This also became one of my regular chores.

Soon there were a couple of banana plants and a few papaya plants growing in our garden. We kept one male and one female papaya tree and removed the others. The banana was of the “Elchi” variety – small, yellow and thin-skinned. But the bunch that grew in our garden had about a hundred fat and delicious fruit, larger than any we had ever seen in the markets. My dad cut the bunch of bananas and hung it from the ceiling in our dining room and as they ripened, we ate them and gave them away to friends and neighbours. We got a lot of delicious papayas too, and during the days when seedless papayas were unknown, we were delighted to find ours had hardly any seeds.

Sadly, we moved to Delhi when I was 10 years old and we moved house so many times, that my mother never got up the energy or time to start another kitchen garden. Most of the time we lived in flats on the first or second floor. Finally when we moved to the Jawaharlal Nehru University campus, she was much older and had learnt Russian and was spending her free time doing translation. We had a patch of garden in front of the house, but by then we had a gardener coming once a week to weed and clean and plant and dig when necessary. We grew mainly flowers and our role was reduced to just watering the plants every day.

However, this part of my childhood is forever etched in my mind because of the kind of life my parents gave us. One of my main regrets is that we were not able to do this for our children, since our circumstances were so different. However, if and when we are fortunate enough to have grandchildren, I am very keen that we should be able to offer them similar experiences, because I know that this is the stuff treasured childhood memories are made of.

The Dignity of Labour

One of the good things about having been brought up in a middle class family in India was that I learnt  to be self-reliant. 

Like I said earlier in my post “A Happy Childhood”, we didn’t have much money when I was growing up.  My Dad was a lecturer in Russian at IIT Powai, Bombay, and we lived in the lecturers’ flats on the campus.  My mother managed the home without any domestic help, so I learnt to help around the house.  Dad was a handyman - he just liked to fix things.  We hardly ever gave anything to be repaired as far as I remember.  He had a set of tools at home to do practically anything, and weekends invariably saw him sitting at the table taking apart some gadget (not that we had many), or fiddling with the plumbing or electricity in the house.  Dad didn't differentiate between my brother and me on the basis of gender and taught us both the same things.  At an early age, I learnt what a hammer, screwdriver, drill (the manual one), saw, pliers, chisel, etc. were and what they were used for. 

We had tape cots and cotton mattresses in those days, and every once in a while, when the bed began to sag, he would get set to tighten the tapes, or, if they were worn out, to change them.  We children had an important job to do then – we were stationed on the opposite side from where he was working, and we had to brace our feet on the edge of the cot and pull the section of the tape that he passed us with all our might.  We did the long side first and then the broad side, where it was fun to weave the tape in and out.  It was tiring work and we were quite small, so we had to take it in turns to help.

During holidays, he would decide to build something or paint something and my brother and I enjoyed working with him.  He started with small stools, which he cut and built from scratch.  During that part, all we could do was to fetch and carry for him and sweep away the sawdust. But when it was done, then we had the privilege of helping with the sanding and the fun job of painting. We learnt about different grades of sandpaper and how to make the surface smooth and nice, how to dip the brush in the paint, wipe gently on the side to remove the excess paint and paint with smooth strokes.  We were all proud of our handiwork when the stool was ready and was being used.

When I grew up some more, I knew how to change bulbs and fix a loose connection in a faulty plug.  I could fix a leaking WC cistern and have even taken apart the trap under the bathroom sink to rescue the tiny ruby earring that slipped and fell through the drain holes – what a tremendous relief it was to see the red stone glittering through the muck. My maternal grandmother had given them to me when I was a toddler and my mother would have been furious if I had lost it.  I never thought of all this as unusual.

So when I got married, it was a tremendous surprise to me that my husband didn’t do any of these things.  If anything needed doing, it had to be done by me, or it wouldn’t get done.  I couldn't understand it - I had thought all men were like my Dad!  When I was expecting my daughter, I went to stay at his parents’ house for a few weeks, and I understood why.  His parents were used to having helpers do all the manual work.  I stood amazed while his father called their local handyman to change a bulb!  Though my father-in-law was a university teacher just like my Dad, they had a woman to clean the house, another to cook, a man to take care of the garden and someone who came on call to do odd jobs!  It was all very alien to me.  I later realized that I was seeing them when they were quite old (they were at least a decade older than my parents) and no longer comfortable with physical labour.  Being the youngest of five children, my husband had grown up when they were aging and perhaps able to do less on their own.  Besides, my mother-in-law had gone through a serious surgery to remove a brain tumour when he was barely a toddler.  The operation had caused her to lose the function in one eye and one ear.

But it was also true that my in-laws knew how to manage workers.  My mother-in-law was a very patient woman and able to put up with faults of people, whereas my mother was quite intolerant and so couldn’t keep a helper for long.  The result of this abundance of domestic help was that my husband grew up not having to help much around the house or think about any of the domestic chores or responsibilities.  It may have also had to do with socially acceptable roles of boys and girls in those days – girls had to help in domestic chores, but boys were not expected to do much and were allowed to play when they were not studying. 

Being so independent and self-reliant sometimes worked to my disadvantage, as I would automatically take on everything that needed to be done and exhaust myself.  To avoid being a drudge, I had to keep domestic help.  Also, our circumstances were such that I was totally consumed by the task of looking after an extremely hyperactive and dysfunctional younger son, so I just couldn’t cope without someone to help me. 

The result was that our daughter also grew up with other people doing everything that needed to be done, so there was no need for her to help around the house.  Because of this, when she was old enough, I looked for an opportunity to send her abroad to study.  This was not because education was better there, but because she would learn the dignity of labour and get an opportunity to learn to manage multiple activities like work, study, housework, cooking and managing finances.  She was also very possessive about her privacy, since she had to protect herself constantly from her intrusive brother, so living with other housemates taught her tolerance, cooperation and better interpersonal skills.  She got a part time job in a retail chain and held it for a year and a half, learning to work hard and speak politely to difficult customers.  She also learnt to be responsible and to value money, since she knew how tough it was to earn it herself.  The expense of studying abroad was huge, because she was there for three years. However, in the experience she gained on how to manage on her own, I truly believe it was a wise investment, given that she was learning life skills I had not been able to teach her as she was growing up.

Westerners reading this will not quite understand the Indian context and will be quick to judge us.  In these countries, people are geared to doing their own work and public systems support this lifestyle through the conveniences and facilities provided by the government as also by public and private enterprises.  Most young people work at part time jobs to pay their way through college.  Learning these skills is necessary for survival as an adult, because unless you are very rich, there is no other option.

However, here in India, because labour is so abundantly available due to widespread poverty and lack of education, our social systems are geared differently.  If people became independent enough to all their own work, millions of poor people would lose their jobs.  Also, our culture of male dominance ensures that if we were to do all the work ourselves, it would be the women of the house struggling to do it all, with no practical help from their male siblings or partners.  Availability of affordable labour has made it possible, for our women especially, to delegate the routine and time-consuming chores to someone else and devote their time to a career or hobby and a more active social life.

But things are changing now.  Our generation of Indians may be the last to have enjoyed having domestic help to do all our manual work.  We already see now that it is becoming more expensive and more difficult to find domestic workers, because the poor in our country have begun to have higher aspirations.  They want to educate their children and come out of poverty and the youngsters among them would much rather work at jobs in factories and retail outlets than at manual work in someone’s home.  This in my opinion is the best thing that could have happened for them – the breaking free from the cycle of poverty through education, higher aspirations and greater opportunities.  At the same time, it also means that the more well-to-do among us need to foresee the change that will surely come in the future and teach our children to do everything that needs to be done; and for that we ourselves need to believe in the dignity of labour.