She could barely keep her eyes open. She’d been cleaning the house since dawn, chopping produce for the festivities of the following day. She’d been washing the utensils alone for hours. She was worn out. But now she had to prepare a special dinner for her employer’s extended family coming to celebrate the night before Eid.
The thought of cooking for a family reminded her of her own. In a reverie, she thought of how her family would be anticipating Eid back in her desher bari. She imagined her mother busily bustling about, planning to make a meal for the next day, her sisters practising tying each others’ hair with new red ribbons, her little brother strutting around with a new tupi.
The smell of chicken burning brought her back to reality. Frightened how her “madam” would react, she hurriedly tried to salvage it. But it was too late. She received a hard slap across her face.
Asmani gathered herself to concentrate. The unstoppable tears trickling down her face went unnoticed.
This scene isn’t fictional. It’s symbolic of how helping hands are treated in our society today. It’s a milder version of many such cruel incidents happening in these working class people’s lives.
Helping hands are a large part of our community -- buas, baburchis, driver chachas, darwan chachas. It’s important that we learn to respect them from our childhoods. The maids in our homes struggle the most. There’s no limit to their hours of work each day; most of them don’t get even a day off per week.
In many homes, they sleep on the kitchen floors, and their only source entertainment is the television, which is also restricted by their employers. Most of them don’t get holidays even on religious occasions, which they too are entitled to celebrate.
Behind every single mistreatment, injustice, and inhumanity lies the core problem of our collective mentality. Our mentaly compels us to treat those poorer than us as inferiors in every way and thus, we sometimes forget that they, too, are humans.
We leave our children in the care of these buas all day, yet we don’t think of them to be clean enough to sit on our furniture with our children. While our child sits on the sofa, the bua sits on the floor. They eat on the floor; their rations are measured and are often cheaper varieties from what the employers eat. In some houses, there are restrictions imposed on helping hands using elevators.
Since independence, the number of reported deaths of helping hands through abuse has been alarming; and no doubt there have been countless unreported incidents that never made it into the statistics.
Sadly, our attitudes have become such that we treat our servants more like slaves. Very few of us realise how important it is that these helping hands are treated honourably. The first non-family members a child sees after birth are the help, and it matters how the child sees these employees treated. After all, nothing is truer than the fact that charity begins at home.
In many countries, children greet their janitors the same way they greet their teachers. The nannies and cooks are not forbidden to sit on the same furniture as their employers. They have their rights, and are treated as members of the family. Development isn’t just national income -- it is also how we treat those who work for us.
In our subcontinent, most of us don’t learn to greet our darwan chachas at the schoolgates. We are rarely taught to be compassionate to the person making our breakfast, tidying our rooms, and doing other simple tasks.
It’s not that helping hands shouldn’t be given any work -- it’s what they’re paid for. But there’s a difference between treating them as help and treating them as slaves.
Our sisters at Holy Cross College have rules that helping hands in their facilities will not have to work after 8pm. There are families who support the help in educating their children, and families who let the maid eat first at a Chinese restaurant before leaving the child in her care. These people are the promising examples the rest of us should follow.
This is an issue within our capacity to confront, and one that can lead to a substantial difference in our society. Shomman, the brainchild of my father, is an organisation focusing on this, and is about to take its first step. On this May 1, recognised as International Labour Day, Shomman will be paying tribute to the helping hands who lost their lives to ill-treatment since Bangladesh’s birth. Join Shomman in spirit by giving your helpers the assurance that you care.