Missing Women

 

 

I stopped by an old building I lived in 15 years ago. It looked tired and dusty as ever. I climbed the stairs to look at the door of the apartment I used to live in with my husband and toddler when we first moved to Delhi from the United States. My little boy had gripped the same stair rail as he climbed down, one step at a time, till he reached the last step and launched off into a hands-free final jump while I lugged his tricyle alongside. The stairs also reminded me of Kamlesh.

 

Each morning, Kamlesh would sweep the stairs and stairwells from the top floor, down to the driveway and the front gate. If this wasn’t evident because the dust still lay thick, the proof of Kamlesh’s daily attendance was the uninterrupted stream of commentary and curses that hovered in the stairs. It blustered in the distance like an approaching storm, and then grew louder as she whacked our landing with her broom. It returned again when she slapped a dirty rag to mop our landing with invective rather than the half-bucket of water I foolishly insisted on.

 

The building was constructed where a single-family home had stood. The builder had given the ground floor to the two warring brothers who had inherited the home. They now occupied the front and the rear apartments with their families, without looking at or talking to each other. My neighbors told me that Kamlesh’s father used to be the sweeper until he died. Then, Kamlesh took over.

 

She was small-framed and her chocolate skin was loaded with jewelry. She would show up around 8 o’ clock each morning loaded with bangles, necklaces, nose-ring, a fresh line of vermilion in the parting of her curly hair, and anklets banging as she marched up and down the stairs.

 

She looked like she could be anything between 15 and 30 years old It was hard to tell how old she was or to keep straight how many children she had. It became evident over a few months that she had a shiftless husband who had a government job that entitled them to squalid quarters a few kilometers away. And her miseries were compounded by a string of girl children who were constantly sick and prone to every accident possible, requiring them to get shots or be admitted to hospital wards, which kept Kamlesh’s attendance at work spotty, but her demands for tips and hundred rupee notes unending. In a space of a few months, an assortment of betis got scalded, hit by cars, erupted in sores or were struck by mystery illnesses.

 

“It’s my bastard fate, madam, I’ll have to spend, spend, spend on these girls to get them married off, and I have to spend, spend, spend on them now.” Kamlesh had brought a dowry for the privilege of tying her fortunes to those of her laggard husband, and she would see that and all her savings flow out into the dowries of her daughters. She had reason to curse the world and collect every rupee she could in the meantime.

 

One day, the doorbell rang without stopping, I knew it was Kamlesh. She had to take one of her girls to the hospital, she said. “Everybody has given me one hundred, and Biwiji upstairs has given me two hundred, so give me at least that much.’’

 

I was skeptical, but gave her a hundred and asked her to show me the hospital’s receipt the next day. “You don’t trust me!” her eyes narrowed. “Arre, I’ve been in this building longer than you. People have even given me a thousand rupees in a flash and never asked for a receipt. You people have come from phoren. What is 100 rupees to you?”

 

I hardly wore jewelry, and our family car was a boxy Maruti 800 that my husband or I took turns cleaning, to the amusement of our neighbors and their servants. We had one maid to help with housework and babysitting, compared to the three or four my neighbours averaged. We drove ourselves and stood in lines to pay our own utility bills because we didn’t have a minion to dispatch on our behalf as most people did. I cooked most of our meals and took my son to the park myself instead of sending him with a servant. The one maid who worked for us was free to go to her quarters by 8 pm at night, while other servants in the building usually worked until close to midnight because their families ate late dinners.

 

Still, Kamlesh was convinced I was supremely wealthy because I had just moved back to India from America and had a husband who was white.

 

She was flattered that my husband let her sweep and mop all the floors of our apartment before he moved in. Other families allowed Kamlesh to only tiptoe to their bathrooms the designated territory of the untouchable, but wouldn’t let her sully the rest of their home, which was cleaned by other servants who also turned up their noses at picking up a mop or brush in that space.

 

But when I moved in a few weeks later and insisted on cleaning my own bathrooms, Kamlesh was outraged. She saw no Gandhian self-sufficiency, no moral vindication, no sisterly solidarity in my decision to wield a toilet brush in my own bathrooms.  I was a threat to her livelihood. And my addled and fancy ideas from abroad could turn her world upside down: Really, what would happen to people like her if everyone else in my building also began cleaning their own bathrooms?

 

Kamlesh cleaned all the bathrooms in her buildings except ours. Everyday, after my neighbors had showered, she would spend a half hour throwing plastic mugs of water at their bathroom tiles and toilet and pushing the mess into the drain with a jhadu. She suspected that I had quietly hired someone else to do the job she had inherited, and would periodically lean on my doorbell demanding to know who the shameless encroacher was. She refused to believe that I cleaned and dried our bathrooms.

 

I thought about the injustice of denying her the opportunity to earn those 300 rupees. But I decided not to change my mind. I could bend my principles to help her out a bit, but the thought of letting this shrew invade my home every day with her shrill rants about all the people who crossed her and her and her constant complaints about her hard life didn’t appeal to me. Her life was clearly rough, and there was something commendable about the inextinguishable spirit that moved her to profanely and publicly question every nasty card fate dealt her all these years. She was a warrior, not a whiner, but I didn’t want to participate in her fights or be a spectator. I had just come back to India after a dozen years abroad. I wanted to arrange my life as a new mother simply and live it quietly.

 

Kamlesh was determined to punish me. She left the stairs leading to our floor unswept. She left the mounds of dirt collected from the rest of the building on our landing. Her protests didn’t get a rise out of me. I swept the dirt she left. I quietly hired her sister-in-law, who swept the building next door, to clean my stairs. Kamlesh declared war. What if the rest of the building liked her soft-spoken and hard-working rival and replaced her floor by floor? Her angry finger rang reveilles of displeasure on my much-abused doorbell. She demanded I sack the encroacher. She swore she would teach me a lesson for messing with her. I ignored her, until one day she threatened she would have my son kidnapped. Now I was frightened. I submitted a hand-written complaint to the local police station. Her sister in law stopped sweeping my stairs. “I will have to stop, madam, she said. “She has made my life hell. I cannot listen to this abuse every day. I only want to earn my two chapattis quietly.” My neighbors did not like Kamlesh’s work either. But they endured her. “This class of people are all like that,” one neighbor, a college professor advised. “You don’t understand. This is not America.”

 

Kamlesh did not ring our doorbell again, although I would hear her swatting the stairs and berating the world and everyone who crossed her. Then, some months later, her sister-in-law began to sweep the building again, every floor of it. Kamlesh was not well, she said. I went to the United States for a few months. Kamlesh was still not back.

 

“Don’t you know, madam,” her sister in law said. “She’s gone mad.” Kamlesh had found out she was pregnant. With another daughter.

 

It is illegal for doctors to conduct tests to determine the sex of a fetus or to pass this information to expectant parents, but as with many laws in India, this one gets passed over because many couples want to have sons and would rather abort a female fetus. Kamlesh had decided to get an abortion because she could not afford to raise and marry off another daughter. Ultra-sound clinics dot Delhi and its neighboring towns, where the sex ratio of girls to boys is dramatically lower than the already low 933 boys to girls nationally. By law, these clinics have posters declaring they do not do perform gender-determination tests. There are other, coded ways of letting a pregnant woman and her family know if it’s a boy or a girl. “You have a healthy child. Go distribute laddoos,” the technician shouts if it’s a boy. “Congratulations. Go buy jalebis,” they say if it’s a girl.

 

Women like Kamlesh, whose families never took them for prenatal check-ups, sprang money for these gender tests. Sometimes, the test results were wrong.

 

“When they ‘dropped the baby’ (aborted it), they told her it was a boy, not a girl.” Kamlesh was inconsolable. That boy could have been her chance to be finally respected by her husband’s family, to earn back in dowry some of the wealth that would leak out with her daughters’ weddings and dowries, to have someone to support her when she was old. “She’s gone mad,” her sister-in-law said. “She’s not coming to work any more.”

 

I never saw Kamlesh again. We moved back to America some months later.

 

 The sex ratio of girls to boys has since plunged in south Delhi, to 762 girls for every 1000 boys.

 

Since I last saw Kamlesh, there would be approximately 36-million more women in India if those pregnancies were not aborted selectively to weed out girls.