Just look at her in the pic and try if you can please to imagine for a moment her life and the conditions of existence for that little baby seen inside the rough cloth-crib dangling behind her back !
That’s the stoic world in which millions of migrant workers from rural India who move from city to city, and from project site to project site, work as peripatetic on-site construction workers…. And even during a pandemic.
It is amazing to imagine — for me at least, yes — how quietly and without a fuss this heroic woman goes about doing her job!
She goes neither whining nor moaning about being a “harassed, almost martyred home-maker” doubling up as breadwinner nor is she flaunting herself as being any kind of superwoman of the comics-strip galactic kind! (And without meaning to sound disrespectful to her urban sisters across all of India, I just can’t help, within my own mind , comparing her own uncomplaining fortitude with that I know is normally exhibited by the far more educated, suave and privileged city-dwelling womankind).
A woman like this asks for no “child day care centres” , no maternity leave nor allowance, no child-support, nor any sympathy from anyone … We see her just making do with the portable daycare centre she herself carries around on her own back , for no more than the meagre daily wage she earns!
She lives in just a poor makeshift, ramshackle hovel but then it is she who helps build sprawling, opulent mansions for the rich of the land!
Sometimes I think to myself, if it were not for the hard work this lady does and for the copious sweat of her brow, the GDP of India — of which they say the Real Estate sector is a very important, “core” and “bell-weather” component — couldn’t be kept chugging along higher and higher, could it?
Our economists and our governments tell us that the health of this nation’s economy depends a lot on the health of the construction-sector … a sector that’s cared and nurtured for indeed by millions of women like the woman in this picture. Without her, the real-estate world would not thrive and the GDP-growth too would stay stunted.
With all the above thoughts swirling inside my mind which this one stark, dark picture aroused and evoked in my mind, I couldn’t help recalling the famous, proverbial words of the American poet that I had learned in school 50 years ago … words that the poet was moved to pen down in heart-melting verses :
“Blessings on the hand of women!
Angels guard its strength and grace.
In the palace, cottage, hovel,
Oh, no matter where the place;
Would that never storms assailed it,
Rainbows ever gently curled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
“Woman, how divine your mission,
Here upon our natal sod;
Keep – oh, keep the young heart open
Always to the breath of God!
All true trophies of the ages
Are from mother-love impearled,
For the hand that rocks the cradle
Is the hand that rules the world.
— William Ross Wallace. (“The Hand that Rocks the Cradle”)
In the case of this poor mother in the picture, she can’t even rock the poetic cradle … for on her back is the cross that she must bear even as she toils all through the day for the bread it will win her and her baby, at dusk.
God bless the Mothers of the world like this woman … She is just one amongst the millions like her in this country who live, work and pass away— Mute, Unseen, Unknown, Unsung and Unremembered …
Sudarshan Madabushi