The maids are settling in and we're finding out a little more about them. Ibia has five brothers and sisters and five step-brothers and step-sisters. I don't know where she features in that line-up but both her parents are now dead. Her cousin Malme (our other maid) has twelve brothers and sisters. At twenty, she's the second eldest; the youngest is one year and two months old.
Malme was telling Shilpi that education for her and her siblings has been patchy and rudimentary. She stayed in school until she was about fourteen but then, with little money to go round and never enough food in the house, she started work, joining her parents as a day labourer on construction sites and taking home about five hundred rupees a month. I spent six hundred rupees on beer last night - £7.50 in English money. What that means (apart from my slight hang-over), is that Malme was earning about twenty five rupees a day - thirty pence give or take. I've watched female day labourers on construction sites in Bangalore and it's bloomin' hard work. From morning to night they ferry earth, debris or cement in metal panniers which they carry on their heads. Little wonder then that Malme looks as tough as old boots. I wouldn't put money on it but she could probably beat me in an arm-wrestling contest.
When Shilpi was relating these tales to me this morning I thought again of my maternal grandmother, Emily Whellams. I've written about her and her family on Whellams, another of my websites. Nan-nan, as we called her, had five sisters and brothers and seven half-sisters and brothers, (there would have been eight but Ernest Whellams died in October 1899 when he was a day old and by the end of that year his mother was also dead). The eighteen and a bit age difference between Malme and her youngest sibling also has echoes in my grandmother's family.
When Aunt Doll was born in 1917, the youngest of 13 Whellams children, her oldest brother Charlie was 37 years old, a successful builder and with a growing family of his own. By the time Aunt Doll was five years old, Charlie was already a grandfather. Nan-nan's schooling was patchy too, and the story that's been handed down in my family is that the children would take it in turns to go to school. If it was your turn to wear the shoes, you went to school. If your brother or sister had the shoes, you stayed at home. In India, seeing children walking barefoot to a government-run school is commonplace.
Nevertheless, social ills aside (he said, lightly), our maids' experience with children is already reaping rewards as far as Mark and Niharika are concerned. They're used to picking up children, keeping them occupied, running after them. As for Niharika, she is in her element with two new aunties who engage her, talk to her and sing her songs in Garo. She's already learnt to count to ten in Garo and pretty soon I suppose, she'll be jabberring back to Malme and Ibia in their local language.In the meantime I need to organise some proper beds for the two girls and I think bunk beds are going to the best option. The house is suddenly filling up and pretty soon it's going to fill even more.
In a couple of months from now, my house contents from the UK will be transported across the Indian Ocean and I'll be re-united with my books, music collection and the personal knick-knacks which have largely kept pace with me during various moves and traumas over the past twenty odd years. And to think I arrived in India with just a suitcase and a laptop.
Malme was telling Shilpi that education for her and her siblings has been patchy and rudimentary. She stayed in school until she was about fourteen but then, with little money to go round and never enough food in the house, she started work, joining her parents as a day labourer on construction sites and taking home about five hundred rupees a month. I spent six hundred rupees on beer last night - £7.50 in English money. What that means (apart from my slight hang-over), is that Malme was earning about twenty five rupees a day - thirty pence give or take. I've watched female day labourers on construction sites in Bangalore and it's bloomin' hard work. From morning to night they ferry earth, debris or cement in metal panniers which they carry on their heads. Little wonder then that Malme looks as tough as old boots. I wouldn't put money on it but she could probably beat me in an arm-wrestling contest.
When Shilpi was relating these tales to me this morning I thought again of my maternal grandmother, Emily Whellams. I've written about her and her family on Whellams, another of my websites. Nan-nan, as we called her, had five sisters and brothers and seven half-sisters and brothers, (there would have been eight but Ernest Whellams died in October 1899 when he was a day old and by the end of that year his mother was also dead). The eighteen and a bit age difference between Malme and her youngest sibling also has echoes in my grandmother's family.
When Aunt Doll was born in 1917, the youngest of 13 Whellams children, her oldest brother Charlie was 37 years old, a successful builder and with a growing family of his own. By the time Aunt Doll was five years old, Charlie was already a grandfather. Nan-nan's schooling was patchy too, and the story that's been handed down in my family is that the children would take it in turns to go to school. If it was your turn to wear the shoes, you went to school. If your brother or sister had the shoes, you stayed at home. In India, seeing children walking barefoot to a government-run school is commonplace.
Nevertheless, social ills aside (he said, lightly), our maids' experience with children is already reaping rewards as far as Mark and Niharika are concerned. They're used to picking up children, keeping them occupied, running after them. As for Niharika, she is in her element with two new aunties who engage her, talk to her and sing her songs in Garo. She's already learnt to count to ten in Garo and pretty soon I suppose, she'll be jabberring back to Malme and Ibia in their local language.In the meantime I need to organise some proper beds for the two girls and I think bunk beds are going to the best option. The house is suddenly filling up and pretty soon it's going to fill even more.
In a couple of months from now, my house contents from the UK will be transported across the Indian Ocean and I'll be re-united with my books, music collection and the personal knick-knacks which have largely kept pace with me during various moves and traumas over the past twenty odd years. And to think I arrived in India with just a suitcase and a laptop.
Originally published on Blogger on 15th March 2008. The image, borrowed from Victorian Web, shows a London slum in Market Court, Kensington in the late 1860s.
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