On Writing NAME, PLACE, ANIMAL, THING
Annie Zaidi
A guest post by Annie Zaidi, the playwright of NAME, PLACE, ANIMAL, THING
In 2008, I decided to write a full-length play. I’d just quit a full-time job with a news magazine. No longer limited by form and word-length, I finally began to process the material I had gathered as a reporter, and to reflect on life and society beyond the reportage.
In 2006, I was writing for Frontline magazine [https://frontline.thehindu.com/social-issues/article30210501.ece] about child domestic workers. There were horrific tales of violence and neglect, and the trigger for my report came from a especially gruesome crime: a little girl was tortured and killed after she was caught trying on a lipstick that belonged to the ‘mistress’. In the course of research, I learnt of an older story that had proved significant in shaping our laws. Ashraf, a seven-year-old boy was brought away from his own family with the assurance that he would only serve as a play-mate for the child of an IAS officer. Soon he was washing dishes too. One day, the toddler left some milk undrunk in the glass; Ashraf drank it and was caught doing so. The lady of the house beat him, then branded him with a hot kitchen implement. The IAS officer also did his bit to teach the boy a lesson he wouldn't forget. When the child grew dangerously ill, the couple panicked and sent for his family, who then went to the police.
What made this story significant was that the National Human Rights Commission and the Bachpan Bachao Andolan got involved. At the time, the Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Act, 1986, was applicable to 64 professions that were deemed hazardous; domestic work was not included. Activists lobbied the Indian government to change the law so that children under the age of 14 could no longer be employed as domestic workers. Initially, the notification was restricted to government servants, who comprise a negligible percentage of the population. Still, the government did concede that children should not be employed in households. The work can be never-ending (a domestic worker can be woken up in the middle of the night to perform a chore) and the risks of exploitation are high since constant oversight is not possible.
In 2006, the government of India finally expanded this order into a law so that children under 14 are no longer permitted to undertake domestic work. However, there are an estimated 150 million child labourers between the ages of 5 and 14, of which at least 7.4 million are domestic workers. More recent studies suggest that 74 percent of child domestic workers in India are between the ages of 12 and 16. [http://globalmarch.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/NeedGapAnalysis-INDIA_0.pdf] Clearly, the implementation of the law is weak. Besides, it applies to children under 14. What happens to the 15-year-old who lives and works in someone else’s house?
One of the activists I met in 2006 had told me that if the law were properly implemented, employers are afraid they will be “orphaned for the lack of a slave”. He pointed out that employers take their dogs out for walks but not their ‘maidservants’. Some upper-class employers are so afraid their workers might be lured away by better salaries and benefits, they don't allow them to go out at all. The activists would hang around the park or at milk booths to try and meet a worker, but the child would never be seen in public spaces.
It isn’t just small children who need rescue. During my research, I met a nun who worked as a lawyer for the Domestic Workers' Forum. She had a notebook detailing cases of maidservants who had been raped, beaten, financially cheated, or somehow put in a situation from which they needed rescue. The ‘placement agents’ are often the first to assault them, but several offenders were employers or their relatives. In one case, a family had confined a 12-year-old girl and when she was finally rescued, they insisted she leave everything behind, including old clothes. They wouldn’t even give her a glass of water or her due wages before she left. This was a family that owned prime real estate in Delhi.
Many children I spoke to confirmed that they were brought to cities with the assurance they would be educated but once they showed up, they worked all day. They were given leftovers to eat and since they didn’t know anyone other than their employers, they didn’t know where to go for relief. If their parents came looking for them, they may be rescued. But sometimes parents didn’t know where to look. There are no work records, no contracts, no forwarding addresses. Sometimes, the children's names were changed too.
These examples may sound extreme but even in homes where young employees are allowed to study, I observed that things are always unequal. The worker-child is not sent to a fancy private school, not sent to music or swimming lessons and the employer’s children do no domestic work at all. A child growing up in an alien environment must surely feel the pain of such inequality. In middle-class homes, domestic helpers often do not have rooms of their own, or even a bed to sleep in. They might be expected to sleep on the floor of the living room or kitchen. In the morning, they roll up the bedding and shove their personal lives out of sight. The house, for them, is a space where they have duties but no rights.
There were domestic workers in the homes of family, friends and acquaintances. Some were married women who came in to work for just one hour; others were young men. Most were migrants from villages. I began to observe the way casteism and classism worked in cities. Workers are almost never served in the same cups and glasses even though they might be served the same food. Workers almost never sat on the same sofas or dined at the table, and were not encouraged to. Some were not allowed to use the toilets or showers.
The suspicion and pettiness of upper and middle-class employers in India (perhaps this is true across South Asia) goes far beyond under-paying staff or breaking promises to individual workers. It is rooted in the need to maintain the status quo, to not allow your staff to imagine themselves in your shoes. I witnessed people discussing how important it was to not give ‘maids’ westernized clothes, for they would imagine themselves to be someone they’re not. Who was this someone they must not imagine becoming? Obviously, someone who looked like their own daughters. Someone their sons or friends might consider as a partner, and therefore elevate her from her current social position.
Over the last two decades, urban India has changed in unprecedented ways. Now there are apartments and gated communities with separate entrances and elevators for ‘residents’ and ‘service’ people. Some parks would not permit workers to sit unless they’re nannies accompanying the children of ‘residents’. The fact that nannies may also be ‘resident’ in the same house does not qualify them as ‘resident’. I observed couples who brought a nanny to restaurants, someone to hold and shush a restive infant but not seated at the same table.
I began to think about children who grow up in alien homes, whose names are changed, who serve a family day and night and yet, have nobody to love. They don’t visit their own families for extended periods of time, so old emotional bonds might fray. Some teenagers are sent to school, or at least, given the option of studying at government schools. Some might even have a modicum of privacy. The employer might treat them ‘like one of the family’ and yet, they can’t bring home friends from school or have sleepovers or host their own birthday parties. If they quit their jobs, they must return to villages where they’d contend with poverty and the loss of the few benefits they had – running water in taps, toilets that flush, piped gas stoves, uninterrupted electricity, protection from extremes of weather, decent meals.
Those who grow up in an upper-class household face a quandary. If they are good students, they might seek their employer's help to go to college, or they might want to marry and start their own families. But their choices are restricted by the employers’ ideas about what freedoms they deserve. In large cities, space is at a premium. Where would a young domestic worker go if she wanted to date someone? Could she afford to marry for love?
On the other hand, many daughters in India also lack the freedom to date or marry someone they love. They have nowhere to go in a culture that constantly polices love. If they rebel, they might be abused or the family may cut all ties. Apart from a better education, a chance to find a well-paying job, is a daughter's situation so different from that of a domestic worker? Who is allowed to make mistakes, and what does nomenclature have to do with self-image?
Questions like these led me to write ‘Name, Place, Animal Thing’. The script was shortlisted for The Hindu playwrights' prize, and that gave me the confidence to keep writing plays. I hope that many people watch the play and that it serves to build a conversation about domestic work. Home is an intimate space. It is also a social and work space, and it must, at all times, be a safe space. Safety is meaningless if it applies only to ‘residents’ or employers. The safety of employees too is non-negotiable and one must begin to lobby for fair work contracts for domestic workers with special safeguards built in for those who have migrated from outside the state and who will be rendered instantly homeless if they are fired.
We will all live in a better world when we understand that solidarity, and not just sympathy, is a warm and endless quilt that keeps all workers safe. If we begin to invest in equality instead of clinging to our particular shred of privilege, we might set ourselves free too.
Annie Zaidi is the author of City of Incident; Prelude to a Riot; and Bread, Cement, Cactus: A memoir of belonging and dislocation. She is also the editor of Unbound: 2000 Years of Indian Women's Writing. Other published works includeGulab; Love Stories # 1 to 14; Known Turf: Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales, The Good Indian Girl andCrush. She received the Tata Literature Live Award for fiction (2020), the Nine Dots Prize (2019), and The Hindu Playwright Award (2018) for Untitled 1. Her radio script ‘Jam’ was named regional (South Asia) winner for the BBC’s International Playwriting Competition (2011).
Annie Zaidi is the playwright of Name, Place, Animal, Thing which is being staged by Bay Area Drama Company at Sunnyvale Theatre from May 28 to June 5, 2022. More information and tickets available here.