Director’s Note by Nishtha Jain
When Lakshmi came to
work for me, she was all of 16. Dignified—that’s one of the first
things I remember about her. Bright eyes in a dark face. She was a wiry bundle
of energy, all smiles, beautiful. She didn’t talk so much in those days.
Her standard response to my requests or instructions was, ‘Yes, elder
sister!’ As I got to know her better, I realized that she didn’t
always intend to do as I asked, but she definitely knew how to please me, her
employer. How did this young girl become such a seasoned diplomat, I wondered.
Lakshmi worked in my home for about
an hour every day. She had a few other jobs of this sort, all in apartments in
the residential colony where I live. Over time I gradually came to know more about
her family and circumstances. She had been working since the age of 10. She
came from a family of ten children—eight girls and two boys. The mother
had died very young, leaving the youngest children to be taken care of by the
older ones and by their father, an alcoholic. The family lived together in two
cramped rooms in a basti. Two of her
sisters, a brother, and sometimes her father too, worked as garbage collectors
in my neighbourhood.
Lakshmi had started
doing domestic work after dropping out of school. A girl so intelligent not
able to cope with her studies was surprising. But her illiteracy bothered me
more than it bothered her. She didn’t seem handicapped by it. She was the
‘man’ of the house, and in fact was very efficient in her dealings
with shopkeepers, policemen, municipal clerks. I thought sometimes about the
trajectories of our lives—two women, both struggling to get a foothold in
My relationship with Lakshmi was
friendly, even warm, but there was no denying the social and economic divide.
We inhabited very separate worlds. I traveled a lot because of my work,
sometimes abroad but she had not even seen downtown
Lakshmi seemed to be accepting of
her lot. She was completely without
bitterness, and yet she was not at all servile or obsequious. I often wondered
at her lack of resentment, and also at how such great disparity could be so
widely accepted by millions.
As I began to look at
our equation, I began to look more closely at myself, and at Lakshmi. She had
just turned 20. But her earlier brightness was gone. If this was her life at
20, what would her future be like? I began to feel it would be interesting to
make a film about Lakshmi – to document her life and struggles over the
next few years.
At first I was only
thinking about her as the subject of the film. But slowly my interest in her
made me start thinking about relationships between employers and domestic
workers. ‘Servants’ are around us all the time and yet, in a sense,
invisible. All of us middle class Indians have grown up taking their presence
and their services for granted. Without thinking twice, we use the words
‘servant’ and ‘maid’, or their equivalents in each
language. Everybody always complains about how lazy, dirty, insolent, stupid,
or unreliable their servants are. In most Indian homes, servants may not eat
the same food as their employers, much less sit on their sofas or at their
tables. They do back-breaking labour and are routinely made to do extra chores
for no extra pay. Their earnings are paltry, with no unions to determine fair
pay or laws to enforce minimum wages. They do not even have weekly offs, yet if
they fail to show up for work due to ill health or other reasons, they are
berated; when they ask for leave, they are interrogated closely without respect
for their privacy. That’s how it is, more often than not.
Most employers,
knowingly or inadvertently, tend to treat domestic workers as if they are
inferior or less entitled beings. Some of us have questioned this attitude in
ourselves, and have consciously learned to be more democratic, but class
notions are deeply rooted in our culture and ingrained in all of us. It’s
common enough to come across a liberal person expounding passionate socialistic
views but completely oblivious to his/ her underpaid servant working in the
same room or sweeping underfoot. That liberal could as well be me!
This is when I
decided to change the focus of the film to ‘our relationship’. A
film not just about my maid but about us. And, in the process, explore our
relationship with each other and reflect on the whole gamut of attitudes and
issues between servants and employers. I was interested in seeing how she
negotiates two different kinds of spaces—her home where she seems to be
the boss, and other households where she was the maid.
I asked her if I could film her and
to my surprise she agreed. I shot with her for a few days. She thought it was
done. After all I had interviewed at her length and filmed her at work. She was
surprised when she realised that it would be a longer project. But soon after
she started getting irregular with her timings. She was forgetful, and often
looked tired. When I talked to her, I realized she was overworked. She had
taken on seven to eight households, working almost 14 hours daily. I asked her
how much she earned from it all, and it worked out to a sum that, together with
her siblings’ erratic earnings, was not enough to feed the family. She
was constantly in debt, borrowing money from her employers. And then she fell
ill.
I began filming with her more
intensely. And thus began the process that lasted two years and is still
continuing in a way.
I wanted to make
transparent the very process of making this film—the problems inherent in
filming oneself and one’s relationships. What is my relationship with my
maid? How do I bring myself into the film? What does the presence of another
camera and cameraperson do to our exchanges?
Then, how do you get
beyond role-playing? I was taken aback by Lakshmi’s ease on camera. She
would never steal a glance at the camera—she behaved as if it
didn’t exist. I wondered if she would also know the right things to say.
And in some of the filming, she did begin to give me almost too-perfect sound
bytes—be it about her rotten fate or her father’s drinking.
Also, how would the
process of filming affect our relationship? Though my attempt was to bridge
distances and see if we could be equals, could it end up doing the
opposite—making her more vulnerable? After all there was a double
hierarchy at work here—not only of employer and employee, but also the
inevitable power equation between who’s behind the camera and who’s
before it. There were days when she was bubbly and cooperative; days when she
was moody, almost sullen. In a way I liked it that I wasn’t always sure
of my ground with her. Atlhough it made my task as a filmmaker tougher, I was
glad she was able to assert herself, sometimes silently, sometimes even telling
me not to film.
And
what about me? How much would I really be willing to share with her? I often
went from thinking we were becoming friends to wondering if our worlds, and
worldviews, could ever really meet…