The Sluts in My Neighbourhood

I wrote this a few weeks ago when the Besharmi Morcha/SlutWalk was supposed to happen….
They go by the grand name of “pourakarmikas” but what they do isn’t so grand. They are the men and women who clear the city’s garbage – everything from leaves to shit of every denomination including human. .
Shovelling shit – literally or figuratively – has never been the most coveted of jobs and a pourakarmika’s is no different. Add to that the fact that the pay sucks – and in many ways. For example, a large majority of pourakarmikas are contract labourers, at the mercy of their unscrupulous, corrupt contractor bosses. So their salaries are almost never paid on time, often not arriving before the 15th or the 20th of the month. Then, in many cases, the contractor makes them for the stipulated amount, but half or even less than half of it is actually paid. The rest goes into the contractor’s already bulging coffers.
The working conditions are not just unsanitary but also dangerous, sometimes even life-threatening. Most work with bare hands, handling stuff like broken glass, syringes, dead carcasses of animals, hospital and toxic waste. So, disease and injury is common – ranging from asthma, tuberculosis, heart trouble to gangrene even loss of limbs and fingers. And sometimes, these workers have to go down manholes that may be filled with poisonous gases that can – and have – killed. So strikes are commonplace; desperate measures for a desperate people; sometimes so desperate that during one such strike, two pourakarmikas poured “night soil” over themselves to get the attention of the concerned authorities! (Wikipedia describes night soil as “a euphemism for human excrement collected at night from cesspools, privies, etc. and sometimes used as a fertilizer.⁾
But, the women face occupational hazards of a different kind. Many are young, beautiful girls (whom I itch to photograph but am too self-conscious to do so!), but even if they weren’t, it wouldn’t prevent the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle harassment that they are often subjected to by their male supervisors – “special treatment”, just because they are women.
A few days ago, the daily early morning collection of garbage did not happen. Another strike, I thought and didn’t pay any further attention to it apart from grumbling about having day-old garbage in the house. The newspapers confirmed the strike and the story was a familiar one. A high-ranking local official had been getting the women pourkarmikas to work at his house, often beyond working hours. It’s probably a common enough occurrence, so I thought, there must have been something else that made the women protest and their men to join them and go on strike .
I found out what that something was the next morning. Once a week, gangs of pourkarmikas are assigned to different parts of the city to sweep and clean all the roads. The ones that come to our area consist of mostly women and I have befriended a few – they do a special cleaning of the rain water drain in front of my house for a tip. Gauri, Nagamani, Lakshmi, Rangamma – their names are beautiful, these women with skins of chocolate satin against which gleam impossibly white teeth when they laugh.
Some days, if I’m not outside when they arrive, one of them will call.
“Amma!” Just one loud, bell-like yell and I know who it is…..
And some days, they’ll gather for a drink of water, flocking around me like chirpy birds, their voices laughing and calling out to each, cutting through the air like clear, shrill, sharp bird calls.
This was one such morning.
I leant on the gate, feeling the sun gently toasting my back as I watched the women wield their long-handled brooms in the drain.
“So, strike, hahn? Why this time?” I said, opening the innings
And it all came tumbling out - it seemed that having to run personal errands for the official was the least of their woes.
Don’t come to work with your faces washed clean, they tell us, Amma.
Don’t put kumkumam on your foreheads, they say.
Don’t wear “good” sarees to work, they tell us.
I listened, disbelieving…
We have children and homes to look after, Amma. And sometimes, on some days of the month, we are not so well. So we come late to work or we can’t come at all. They cut our salaries – 150 rupees for each day that we are late or absent.
We work all day in the open, under the hot sun, Amma. We have no drinking water and the constant sweeping and inhaling of dust gives us breathing problems. The mornings are really bad –  sometimes we can barely breathe…
One woman picked where the other left off, the rhythmic sounds of their brooms providing accompaniment for a sorry, shocking litany. But the most horrible of all was yet to come…
We work all day in the open, Amma. We have no toilets to go to. So, when we find a place where we can go and when we sit down to relieve ourselves, they come and bend down and look.
Just for a few seconds, I thought I hadn’t heard right. But I had. I felt rage welling up.
I started to blubber, “Why don’t you hit them….scream….why don’t you…what about your men……”. I petered out because I could see no rage on these women’s faces; just a sad,stoic blankness.
We have told them, Amma – we are women and we have problems that we can’t tell you and if we did, you wouldn’t understand. So until you find somebody who can, it’s brooms down.
As I stood there and watched the women walk away, dragging their brooms behind them, I remembered that all of these last few weeks, there has been so much talk about Slutwalk. Or should I say, “Besharmi Morcha”?
It’s true that a woman is seen to be “asking for it” if she dresses a particular way. But she’s also a slut for so many other reasons. She is a slut when her man dies or worse still, leaves her; or worst of all, when she has no man at all. She is a slut when she has too much education. Or too little education. She’s a slut when she talks to much, laughs too much and when she dares to have an opinion of her own and voices it. Or worse still, that she is shameless enough to show that she has a mind. She’s a slut if she does anything without the permission of her father/husband/brother; and when they are all gone, her son.
And she’s a slut when she lifts up her saree and squats in public to relieve herself because there is no private place where she can do so.
And sometimes, she’s a slut just because she is a woman.
And for all this sluttish behavior, she has been humiliated, beaten, molested, raped, maimed, burned, even killed.
And it has nothing at all to do with wearing tight jeans or a t-shirt or showing her cleavage
So – Besharmi Morcha?
Why not?
But my question is this. Will it fight for the right for hundreds of thousands of besahrmi women like my Nagamanis and Lakshmis and Gauris and Rangammas all over India to pee and defecate in dignity?