She lived in a tiny shack on a piece of poramboke land close to the southern compound wall of our colony on Baroda Street in Chennai back in early-1960s. What did she have inside her hut? Two earthen pots, a clay stove and two straw mats.
She was a widow. She worked as a servant maid for six families. There was a hole in the compound wall through which she would come and go. She possessed just two faded saris, torn at many places. She knew only two things in the world: wash clothes and clean utensils. She had only one relative in the world: that was her son. She would start work early in the morning each day. She moved from one household to another till noon.
As a boy I used to watch her from the small sit-out of our first floor portion, as she squatted before a heap of utensils and clothes at the foot of the common well. I used to feel sorry for her as I watched her toil non-stop. As I kept looking at her, suddenly she would look up and smile at me, showing her broken yellow teeth as if she understood what was going on in my mind.
Hers is a smile I remember even now, after 50 years. To my eyes she was not a servant maid but a servant mermaid. She was a benign blend of fish and human being. Her body was fish-shaped. She hardly spoke. She had a certain air of tranquillity and resignation about her. Whatever you said to her she had for an answer only a smile. I always felt that she was a refined celestial being sent to earth as a punishment for committing some offence. The poise with which she endured her hard life could be found only in spiritually evolved persons.
The wages she used to get for the back-breaking work as cloth-cum-dish-washer was five rupees a month. Even that she won’t get in full. Her employers would deduct two or three rupees since she used to take leave at least for two days in a month on account of illness. The households that employed her would show no mercy when she absented herself. They used to shout at her, abuse her and even raise their hands at her.
She used to go back to her hut only around eight in the night to make supper for her son. What supper? Only some rice and boiled tamarind water called kuzhambu, with one or two pieces of fish that she managed to buy from roadside stalls. On some days she won’t have the ingredients to cook. Mother and son would then fill their stomach with water and go to sleep on a tattered mat unrolled on the cold mud floor.
Their plight became worse during the monsoon rains; when it rained outside, it poured inside her hut. Mother and son would curl up like dogs in a corner of their hut, shivering and on an empty stomach. None of the householders were known to have given her any food even though they all knew she had a young son to feed. My family had not hired her, and she only knew us as one of the tenants of the colony. But when I was hit by a car while returning from school and got admitted in hospital, she cried out aloud.
We, from the privileged classes, never bothered about the suffering that Chokkamma and her child were passing through every day. But she, though a poor woman of the lowest caste, cried for an upper caste boy with whom she was in no way connected. She was unlettered, ill-dressed, soaked in poverty and even dirty, but inside she was a lady. A swan trapped in a crow’s body. She had nothing, but with that nothing she was content. Chokkamma harboured no ill-feelings towards anyone. There was not an iota of envy in her.
Her worst test came when her 17-year-old son was run over by a train. She did not come for work for some days. She was sitting like a statue at the entrance to her hut most of the time. After about a week, one morning when I looked at the foot of the well from our sit-out, she was there as usual engaged in washing dishes. She looked up and smiled at me through her matted, dishevelled hair. There was no trace of the tragedy that befell her recently on her face.
I learnt about the capacity to endure sufferings with resignation, more from Chokkamma the ‘mer-maid’ than from all those books I went through in school and college.
