Sunday, January 01, 2006

Girls as House Servants

Work


The Doom of Minor Girls as House Servants
The car of an industrialist belonging to Coimbatore parks near a small tiled house in a village near Madurai. Two gentle men (the managing director or other managers of the industrial unit) gets down and are received by the poor parents of Susila residing in the tiled house. The gentle men enters their house, takes tea served by Susisla's parents and talks to them freely without the sort of unpleasant expression on their face that usually educated people would show when happening to talk to poor. They share poor family members' feelings of living in poverty and difficulty. They promise to adopt their minor girl Susila and to give her salary in their house. They guarantee by word that they would treat Susila as their own daughter.

The poor parents of Susila believes the words of the gentle men with their glowing eyes and are so happy that their child has attained endless joy in her life. Rather than living with her poor parents who cannot afford to pay for her three times food even, she can have a great life in the gentlemen's bungalow. The guests (the gentle men) are rich and well educated. So they are good people. They will look after their girl as their own daughter. The poor child will wear costly clothes like them and eat rich food. This is the ignorance of the poor illiterate parents of Susila. So they happily consent to send their girl to live in the gentlemen's house.

Innumerable minor girls are drawn in this way by the industrial rich for working in their residences as servants. When they `recruit' the girls in the village they would well pretend to be fathers and brothers. Once the girl steps in to their bungalow….all her dreams would shatter in no time. She would see her hell there. The house owners would start to instruct her what to do and what not to do. Where to walk and where not to walk. Where to sleep (her sleeping place will be mostly one of the store rooms of the bungalow) and where not to. She would be given only diluted rice three times a day as her food. She would be required to look after the overall maintenance of the bungalow. Such girls mostly are drawn from other districts such as Madurai, Sivagangai, Selem, etc. There will be some other girls also in the bungalow like her. They would also be drawn like her. In a bungalow there would be up to three to five girls as servants.

The under age children would often commit faults. For every fault they would be cruelly punished, beaten up, knocked down and abused in third degree by the women folk and men folk of the bungalow. If they could not fulfill their assigned duty they should undergo special punishment. Of-course the vulnerable girls would fall as prey for the sexual urge of bungalow men without any evidence left out to prove such things happen. When the parents visit her the bungalow owners would again become the girl's fathers and brothers before her parents. The poor parents would be given good reception and presented with some thousand rupees and would be safely dropped in the bus station or railway station to return home. This clever approach of the bungalow owners helps them to hide their mistreatment of the girl otherwise. The neighbours who may come to know about the illfate of the girl in the bungalow would not come forward to speak it out as the industrialists are powerful.


One can see a number such servant girls with hands swollen, torn clothes, hunger and a search for escape in their eyes in the housing areas of Coimbatore. Go to police? You would get the reply from the khakis that if complaints lodged they would jump in to action. You lodge a complaint with police? You would be locked before sunset with the charge that you planned to defame the industrialist purposely you were involved in some illegal activity. Also the concerned girl will be made to give word that she was safe in their house and nothing bad happened to her. So average folk would never bother the sufferings of these girls in the housing areas of the industrial city.

But the questions which are posed before each of us is depressing: Should these girls be battered endlessly? Would the civil society of a developed city like Coimbatore remain silent when the adolescent girls in the housing areas are put in to inhuman behaviour? Will not activists bother such cruelty done under age girls? Who is to bell the cat?

Nilavarasu Kannan

1 comment:

nilavarasu said...

Thanks Vinesh. Keep cracking.