When Rehana (pseudonym) moved to Dhaka for work to provide for her family, her son was only a month and a half old.
The next time she could visit him in Barisal, three long years had passed. “He would not come to me,” she says. Her son had stopped knowing her smell as his mother. Her son is now in his 20s, and the scars of those lost years still carry into their relationship.
“It is hard to talk to him about that time,” Rehana reflects. Her tone is surprisingly matter-of-fact.
Her face lights up when she talks about another child: The little boy she cared for in the home where she worked for many years.
She tells one story after another -- potty accidents, small rebellions, behind-the-scenes acts of care and play -- in the moments while his parents were away for work.
“I would take him out on walks, buy him grapes and lotkon. He’d scrunch up his face at the sour fruits but still come back for more. Sir would scold me: Do you have too much money? I told him: "Wouldn't I have bought my own kid fruits?”
Her rancorous laugh soon turns to tears.
She remembers when they went abroad. She remembers the one time they came back. She could not hold herself back when she saw him. The boy, now a teenager, stood awkwardly as she hugged him, with only vague awareness of the many childhood hours spent in that embrace.
A fellow domestic worker had warned her years earlier, when the child was still small: “Will he know you when he is older?”
Now she makes her peace with those words. “He won’t know me when he is older. That’s the reality. I only wish him happiness and pray that he lives well.”
That peace is fragile. Between stories, she falls back into tears. She still stays up at night thinking about him. Her love, she says, will last forever.
Rehana’s story is unique, yet common.
According to Oxfam, more than 30 lakh women work as domestic workers in Bangladesh. In December, CAMPE, in collaboration with The Daily Star, convened a national roundtable on the “Protection and Improvement of Living Standards of Domestic Workers” to confront the realities they face.
Domestic workers and organizations representing them spoke of undefined working hours, withheld wages, verbal and physical abuse, and arbitrary layoffs. Though the Domestic Workers’ Protection and Welfare Policy was adopted in 2015, implementation remains limited.
Participants called for domestic workers to be included under the Labour Law, for registration and access to social protection schemes, for written contracts, minimum wage, working hours, and support for healthcare, housing, and more.
These are structural demands -- advancing rights, dignity, safety. There is no substitute for implementation of such reforms, and yet, there is something else.
In our homes, the boundaries between family and service blur in intimate ways. Domestic workers feed, bathe, soothe, and raise children. They perform the sacred acts often associated with motherhood -- within the constraints of low-paid, insecure employment, and rigid class hierarchy.
We share the intimate spaces of home. That intimacy never escapes class. The bua eating alone late at night in the kitchen, fighting off mosquitoes. Separate plates. The taboo against sitting together. The parallel infrastructure -- the “servants’ bathroom.”
Children are smart. They learn to discriminate quickly.
The infant barely distinguishes between the care of an aunt or grandmother from that of the house help. The toddler learns to discriminate, even abuse.
As children grow older and households change staff, these attachments -- unequal from the start -- quietly disappear. Children are taught, in subtle and explicit ways, to value biological and economic care very differently. The fault line deepens with age.
Rehana loves a child she can never claim access to. She gave the fruits she could not give her own son. She carries memories that the child will not.
Listening to her is to confront a difficult question: How do we want to treat love that is powerful enough to grow even amidst such hierarchy?
To the gaze of middle and high income households, the physical and emotional labour of women like Rehana is transactional. For a small salary, we take it for granted. We rely on it. Our careers depend on it. Our children are shaped by it.
At the December roundtable, speakers called for urgent structural reforms that the new government must take seriously and implement. Even in the best case, they will take time.
Yet, recognition can begin at home. Every day we make choices that “implement” the informal social contract that exists between higher income households and the lower income women who work in them.
How we -- the readers of this publication -- wield the power we have over domestic workers says more about our character than it does about them.
Rehana laments: “He won’t know me when he is older”. Whether our children grow up to remember -- or forget -- is a choice we shape for them every day.
Risalat Khan is a Climate and social justice activist.
