Continued from here
In the meantime, Suji rattled on. Her son would offer her a Rs. 1,000 raise in salary, which would be deposited directly into a bank account he would open for her. People like Ponnammal could never dream of such an opportunity, just think of how much her life would improve with the extra income. She could fix the leaks in her roof, she could buy back all that jewelry that she had sold to the pawnshop, she could afford to eat better food….the words raced out of Suji’s mouth and it was as if she did not want any of her thoughts or doubts to overtake them. Finally she stopped, and looked at me with a faintly challenging air. Would I be small-minded enough to deny Ponnammal this once-in-a-lifetime chance?
The next morning, I asked Ponnammal about it. Shuffling her feet and looking everywhere but into my eyes, she muttered that she was really looking forward to this. Suji Amma had shown her pictures of London in a magazine, and she had never seen a more beautiful place. Suji had painted a picture of paradise, a Garden of Eden with no serpents.
So clean, so many parks and gardens, everyone walking in nice, straight lines everywhere, and they even had a queen! A faraway look came into her eyes and she took off on a flat, toneless ramble. Suji Amma’s son was going to live in a place which had a big park nearby with a pond and ducks in it. There was no dust at all there, everything was so clean, the work would be so much easier over there because there were machines that did everything, and all she had to do was learn how to operate them. Clean water flowed out of the taps at all times of the day and night, standing in lines for that precious commodity was completely unheard of, and you could actually drink it straight from the tap without all the time-consuming boiling and filtering that took up so much of one’s time here. There was a shop nearby where you could just walk in and buy anything under the sun – milk, soap, vegetables, all fresh and neatly packaged, napkins, no bargaining and haggling, everyone was nice and polite there, and the buses and trains were never packed and overcrowded the way they were here… Ponnammal ran out of steam at this point, and her mechanical recitation tapered to a halt. It was as if her determination to believe everything that had been described to her had developed a few chinks. She looked up at me, and I saw a hesitant look, an expression of doubt, even fear, in those normally confident eyes.
I spoke to Suji about it that afternoon. I told her that I believed that it was not such a good idea to send Ponnammal off to a strange land. Leave my own situation aside – it would have been nice if Suji had consulted me before making any decision since, after all, Ponnammal did work for me as well - but perhaps Suji was not being entirely fair to Ponnammal by only mentioning the benefits of going to work in London. I must confess that I did warm up to my theme more than I normally do to most things and my voice took on an edge which Suji was certainly not accustomed to. I even went so far as to accuse Suji of being selfish and not thinking of Ponnammal’s situation.
Here, I said, Ponnammal was practically like a lord of a large fiefdom, dispensing advice and other services to her community. She had a certain status here, she was always surrounded by people who needed and respected her. Who would she talk to in London? Who would need or respect her there? Locked up in a cold, lonely house, with perhaps only a television for company for most of the day, she would go crazy. She did not speak a word of English. Her world would dwindle down to the confines of that house. Why, Suji herself had told me so many times about how miserable her sister-in-law had been in her first years in Canada when, assaulted by the cold, the loneliness, the complete differentness about everything there, she had suffered from a deep and protracted depression. She did not mind or care about risking the same happening to Ponnammal? I held forth in this vein for a while, my voice and emotions rising as I carried on.
Suji listened in silence. When I finished, her response startled me. In a shrill, hysteria-tinged voice she started yelling at me. She was being selfish? Stop and think, she shouted, at how selfish you are. Oh, you have all these great ideas about equality and opportunities for everyone and female liberation and such things, but only if they involve you and your kind. Jabbing a finger close to my face she said that it was people like me who kept India from truly progressing. I was all for progress and growth in an abstract sense, she screamed, as long as it did not impinge on my comforts or lifestyle. People like me actually wanted people like Ponnammal to remain poor and dependent on menial jobs, because the alternative meant that we would have to clean our own homes and cook our own food, like they did in America, and oh, no, that kind of life was not for us. Not when we had servants who could do all that for us for a mere pittance! Let Ponnammal’s going be a lesson to me, she shrieked, where I would be forced to rethink all my ideas about who was fit to go where.
To be continued
