Beyond the refuge of numbers - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Robyn Davidson
He is a quiet, unassuming man. But he stands up for himself when necessary. He refused to go to Delhi to work in his Sahib's other house, because he didn't want to leave his family. ‘I will do anything you require of me,' he said, ‘but I will not leave the mountains.'
I found out that he had a wife and two young children, but no-one else – which was very unusual. Extended families may be a pain in the neck sometimes, but they provide safety nets. Bippin had very little land, very few resources. This job was his lifeline. He sent his children to the government school. He managed.
I was in Australia when I heard the news. Bippin's wife had died in childbirth. In his house. With the local midwife in attendance. He had taken her to the town doctor a couple of weeks before – an expense a lot of husbands can't or won't afford. Everything seemed to be fine. But she bled to death anyway. He had no one to look after his two older children, and no one to feed the newborn. He continued to come to work at the house, only taking a couple of days off for the cremation. His wife was burnt along the little creek running through the property, beside the track. Neighbouring women gave him help with the children and provided milk for the baby. But Bippin was secretly coming unhinged. Worry? Grief? Guilt? Depression?
All mountain peasants like their drink – cheap rot-gut brew that they swig on their way home in the dark. It is tacitly understood that our staff never drink on the property. But Bippin took to drinking surreptitiously while on duty. I knew this but said nothing. I didn't want to get him into trouble with ‘Sahib'.
The drinking got worse. He went on a bender. He stole all the liquor from Sahib's cabinet (a couple of dozen bottles of whisky, vodka and rum) and downed the whole lot in a matter of days. His personality changed. When Sahib rang the house from Delhi, Bippin answered the phone with the Hindi equivalent of ‘Who the hell are you? Bugger off.' Then he hung up.
Sahib gave him another chance. He was sent to dry out in Jaipur. He came back and went on another bender. Meanwhile, a second wife had been found for him, to look after his children, but she harangued him night and day. Nevertheless, he fathered another child by her. The other servants took a dim view of this, and began to avoid him.
Sahib took him to task. Bippin dried out again and promised to reform. He didn't. He stole money for grog. He has now lost his job with us. I don't know how he'll survive. He will probably become one of those gutted refugees in the city, struggling to find work, struggling to stay alive, and struggling to send something back to his children. Or perhaps he'll avoid the whole catastrophe by killing himself. Quite a few peasants have been found dangling from trees in the forest. Or perhaps he'll pull himself together, stay off the grog, in which case Sahib will consider taking him back.
BAHADUR CAME TO WORK for me when he was a boy. About fourteen probably, though he lied about it. So yes, I am guilty of hiring child labour. But then, his household needed the money. His father, a tough old patriarch, said I should ‘train' his son, and that his son had better work hard or there'd be trouble.
I watched Bahadur grow up, from a worm-infested pubescent (I dose all the staff with worming tablets, so the telltale patches of white on their faces disappear and they put on weight) to a gloriously handsome young man, married at eighteen and a father at twenty. He has been able to buy a buffalo with his wages, so that his firstborn will grow up strong on its rich milk.
Bahadur's job is to look after my two dogs. He's a bright boy. It is a scandalous squandering of human ability, an insult to human dignity that his best – possibly only – prospect in life revolves around the wellbeing of two spoilt dogs.
But he is grateful for the job, because if he didn't have it he would have to go to a town to find work. There wouldn't be enough money to bring his family with him, because towns are expensive places. He'd come home once a year, to assist with the harvest. The rest of the time he'd be lonely, even Bollywood movies and bright lights don't make up for that. He might get lucky of course, and make enough money to keep his children with him, to give them a better education and opportunities than they could have had back home. But he would still need to send money back to the old people left on the farm. They would depend upon him for clothing, medicine, equipment.
In any case, as dog-keeper he's better off than the little Nepali boy who is part of the gang Sahib employed to quarry stone, and act as porters. There are about forty of them.
Most rural households in Nepal depend on at least one member remitting their earnings from outside the country. Then there's the Maoist insurgency and the viciousness of the state police. It's difficult to distinguish those trying to avoid the conflict from the bulk of economic migrants because the countryside is so criminally impoverished.
The wages we pay these men are not high, but they prevent families back home from sliding further into poverty. Some say that migration not only reduces poverty, it reduces inequality. That it contributes to economic growth and development. Remittances are thought to stimulate the local land market, to increase local wages and the demand for local goods and services. But the evidence is ambiguous. Migrant labour may well contribute to economic growth, but in doing so the migrants are socially and economically excluded from the wider benefits of that growth, such as access to health and education, housing, sanitation and freedom from exploitation.
Migrant workers are, on the whole, paid less than indigenous workers. They provide a cheap, flexible and non-unionised labour force which, we are told, is important for growth. But no one has calculated the far-reaching social costs or the implications for longer term development. Poor workers are unlikely to be able to educate their children, and are therefore unlikely to break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
I would like to adopt the Nepali boy. I would like to send him to school. I would like most of all, to send him home. But I cannot do any of these things. So he is employed as part of the gang, to carry tea out to the men at the quarry, to run errands, to dig in the fields like a man. He can't be more than twelve.
Finally Keshav's wife. When Keshav died several years ago, it was very difficult for her. She had to work in the fields on her own, look after parents, look after children, and work and work and work for less and less and less. She wasn't well. Something not right in her stomach, she indicated. Whenever I met her, in the fields or going down the track, she would fall at my feet and weep. Bickering relatives picked on her. They squabbled about her land.
I began to avoid her because I couldn't see any way of helping her in the long term. And her demoralisation demoralised me. I'd tried to set up various little industries – mushroom growing (a total failure), flower production for the Delhi trade (ruined by hail and transport costs), a market for local handicrafts (no one wants cheap knitted beanies from the Himalayas). In any case, to make anything work in such communities you have to be there all day, every day for years and years and years. And that I am unwilling to do.
Keshav's wife was found hanging from an oak tree.
Statistics can be a relief. ♦