7 - Middle lives

Summary

A woman's job

As I was wrapping up what later turned out to be only the first leg of my fieldwork, I encountered the feminist discomforts that I note in Chapter 1 – while my research was, in part, motivated by the debates on the decline in women's participation in the workforce, I had largely spoken only to women who were employed or in between jobs. A friend told me her family's maid lived in Dakshinpuri, my research participants’ neighbourhood, and knew women who were not in employment. I took up the kind offer and met up with Rama in her one-bedroom home on the top floor of a three-storey brick building in Dakshinpuri. She introduced me to her son and proudly told me that he was excellent at math. She shared some of her life story too – originally from Calcutta (West Bengal), Rama had separated from her husband and lived in Delhi with her son, earning an income through domestic work. Rama's employment – as a maid in several households – was, as several young women who I had been spending my time with had asserted, driven by necessity and a lack of education and skills. For Rama though, employment enabled her independence and improved prospects for her son's future. She discussed, but did not dwell on, the difficult circumstances that had led her to seek such employment.

I went out with Rama to meet some of her neighbours. Prachi, who had been providing me research assistance, also joined me there. We were invited into a house, not dissimilar to Jahanvi's and Chandni's houses that I had frequented, to meet a young woman called Sarla, whom Rama knew well. We were seated on the bed and were offered drinks. Sarla was soon to be married; she had not been in employment, but she had done a few shortterm courses at the nearby Mahila Mandal (Women's Centre, a skill training centre for women) to learn sewing and beauty parlour work. She never tried to monetise skills that she had gained. Sarla told us that she had only studied up to class 4 because of adverse circumstances in her family. And, hence, she did not ever think that employment was an option for her. Her comment reminded me of Jahanvi's mother equating education with employment: ‘… what if there's a marriage proposal in which the family wants a padhi-likhi [educated] girl?