Exploring subcultures and forgotten communities.
Exploring subcultures and forgotten communities.
To protect Nagma and her younger brothers Kamil, 6, and Suhail, 7, from the unpleasantness she knew would ensue during the divorce; Nagma’s mother, Aneena, sent them from their hometown of Saharanpur in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to their aunt in Delhi, for a holiday.
The young tourists were dazzled by the capital. The Qutab Minar, with its immense height, represented everything they’d immediately liked about the city: “Looking at it I thought, if they could build something like this all those years ago, then I could do anything!” recalls Nagma.
Her aunt seemed to agree. Abruptly claiming that her budget couldn’t stretch to feed three more mouths, she found Nagma employment as the sole domestic worker for a family of eight.
“I knew nothing to begin with,” says Nagma. “But within six months I knew everything. Because I was afraid for my life! If I made a mistake, they’d beat me with whatever was lying around — a broom, the dustpan.”
It would be six more years before the Child Labor (Prohibition & Regulation) Act of 1986 would be expanded to include a ban on employment of children in domestic work under the age of 14. Still, the circumstances of Nagma’s employment — the coercion and violence she suffered that year, in 2000 — still placed her aunt and employers in violation of the Juvenile Justice Act, which consolidates laws dealing with the care and protection of children.
According to the 2001 census, an estimated 12.6 million children (from ages five to fourteen) were employed as domestic help in India. Current estimates vary hugely, given the ‘behind doors’ nature of the work. While the Government still claims that 12.6 million children in India work, UNICEF estimates the number is now at 35 million, of which 20 percent to 40 percent are domestic workers. UNICEF also estimates that the majority of these children fall within the age group of 12-16. It has said that neither the Child Labor Act nor the Juvenile Justice Act deal with the causes that compel families to put their child into domestic work: poverty, debt and marginalization.
Nagma no longer recalls the name of her former employers. But now 19 and still living in Delhi, she recalls the things that were, to her at the time, as overwhelming as the Qutab Minar had been.
The house her employers lived in was three stories high. But all they could spare her was a corridor so snug even turning was impossible.
They owned five ‘hi-fi’ cars. But she was never paid a salary.
And one of the two daughters of the house was a flight attendant with film star beauty. Such a pity then, Nagma muses, that her “heart was full of filth.”
“When she had ‘night duty’ she’d leave the house at 3 a.m. And until she did, I had to stay awake,” says Nagma. “And I had to be by her side, handing her her lip liner, eyeliner, colored contact lenses. Those lenses! If I hadn’t correctly guessed which pair she’d made up her mind to wear she beat me! But these are details. She wanted to beat me and so she did.”
Nagma didn’t know that her aunt had also forced Suhail into domestic labor. And that Kasim worked for his aunt, sweeping and swabbing her house. This was a ploy, Nagma believes, to keep her mother from guessing what her aunt had done.
When my mother would call my aunt and ask about me, she’d say, ‘she’s out playing, speak to Kasim.’ And what could he say? He was terrified of my aunt. So he’d say, “we’re fine.”’
It would be almost a year and a half before Nagma’s mother visited Delhi. She would later say to Nagma that she’d initially been glad their aunt had taken them away from the turmoil at home.
When Aneena was told where Nagma was, she set off to get her daughter back. But Nagma’s employers told her they wouldn’t release Nagma unless Aneena paid them 10,000 rupees, or about $250. This was presumably the sum they paid Nagma’s aunt to buy her.
Selling children for a lump sum, either directly to an employer or via a “recruitment agency” is common practice. It ensures that the trafficker, in this case Nagma’s aunt, is paid right away and doesn’t have to maintain contact either with the child or the employer.
Aneena refused to pay them any money.
“And then,” says Nagma. “She left.”
“And I was beaten.”
But two days later Nagma’s mother was back. And she brought with her activists from the non-profit group Bachpan Bachao Andolan, or Save the Childhood Movement, which in turn brought the police and press. A middle-class family that beat its child domestic worker may have been an all-too familiar story, but it was still too good a story to miss.
It’s 2011 and Nagma’s colleagues and students fondly call their brown-haired, dimple-cheeked teacher “Babli.”
Nagma is a teacher at Mukti Ashram, a rehabilitation center for child laborers.
“I was never able to get along with my mother again,” she says. “I couldn’t forgive her for not coming to get me earlier. So my brothers and I came here. When I turned 18 and the ashram authorities asked me what I wanted to do, I said, ‘I want to help.'”
So Nagma teaches the basics of the alphabet and numbers to about 50 boys, all of them victims of some form of trafficking, and abuse, and as a result damaged, and all of them unsure of what will happen to them next, while at the same time hopeful that if their beloved Babli Didi can be happy after what she went through, then perhaps one day they can, too.
Like his sister, Suhail wants to teach. Kamil wants to be an actor.
“I’m not afraid of being on stage,” says Kamil. “But that’s because of the ashram. I was scared of so many things before.”
Nagma laughs. “We were all very naive. Now when we return to Saharanpur all the boys and girls surround us and ask about Delhi. And they sound exactly like we once must have: ‘Have you seen the Qutab Minar? Have you ridden the metro?!'”
She looks at her brother with a twinkle in her eye. “If only they knew the thing’s we’d done.”
The author is the recipient of a 2011 Karmaveer Puraskaar for Social Justice. She will be speaking at TEDxAmsterdamWomen at the Van Gogh Museum on December 1, 2011.