RURAL REALITY MEETS BANGALORE DREAMS
[Experiments like one in Bangalore, luring
migrants to fill factory jobs, collide with an old way of life that keeps women
and girls in seclusion until an arranged marriage.]
By Allen Barry
 |
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Shashi and Prabhati Das,
in awe of Bangalore, India, walking from work at a clothing
factory to their dorm in
June. Credit Andrea Bruce for The New York Time
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BANGALORE,
India — The factory floor is
going full throttle when the new girls walk in. Everywhere is the thrumming of
sewing machines, the hum of fans, the faint burning smell of steam irons. On
narrow tables that run between the machines, half-assembled Marks & Spencer
miniskirts are thrust forward by fistfuls. The tailors, absorbed in the task of
finishing 100 pieces per hour, for once turn their heads to look.
The new girls smell of the village. They have
sprinklings of pimples. They woke well before dawn to prepare themselves for
their first day of work, leaning over one another’s faces in silence to shape
the edges of each eyebrow with a razor blade. Their braids bounce to their
hips, tight and glossy, as if woven by a surgeon. On their ankles are silver
chains hung with bells, so when they walk in a group, they jingle.
But it is impossible to hear this sound over
the racket on the factory floor. The tailors glance up for only a moment, long
enough to take in an experiment. The new workers — teenagers, most of them —
have been recruited from remote villages to help factories like this one meet
the global demand for cheap garments. But there is also social engineering
going on.
A government program has drawn the trainees
from the vast population of rural Indian women who spend their lives doing
chores. In 2012, the last time the government surveyed its citizens about their
occupation, an astonishing 205 million women between the ages of 15 and 60
responded “attending to domestic duties.”
Economists, with increasing urgency, say
India will not fulfill its potential if it cannot put them to work in the
economy. They say that if female employment were brought on par with male
employment in India, the nation’s gross domestic product would expand by as
much as 27 percent.
Experiments like the one in Bangalore run
against deep currents in India, whose guiding voice, Mohandas K. Gandhi,
envisioned a socialist future built on the small-scale economy of the village.
They also collide spectacularly with an old way of life, in which girls are
kept in seclusion until they can be transferred to another family through
arranged marriage.
Bangalore is the first city the 37 trainee
tailors have seen. They are dazzled by the different kinds of light. Picking their
way through the alleys around the factory, a column of virgins from the
countryside, they stare up at an apartment building that towers over the
neighborhood and wish their mothers could see it.
Among them are two sisters, Prabhati and
Shashi Das. They have come from a village at the end of a road, a place so
conservative that the single time they went to a movie theater, their male
cousins and uncles created a human chain around them, their big hands linked,
to protect them from any contact with outside men. They are, as far as they
know, the first unmarried women who have ever migrated from the village to
work.
Neighbors in the village are waiting to see
what happens. The nasty ones say, with obvious relish, it will end badly. They
whisper about migrant workers whose eyes were removed by organ traders while
they slept. They say Prabhati and Shashi will be “used this way and that.”
Still, they go. Prabhati, at 21, is stubborn
and able, and Shashi, two years her junior, pretty and fizzing with suppressed
laughter. The two sisters hook pinkies when they walk down the lane that leads
to the factory.
“All the flirts and ruffians in the whole
world must have been born on this lane,” Shashi grumbles, but she is laughing.
Attention is like water to her.
The sisters are waiting, too, to see what
will happen to them. They are both at the age when they could be summoned at
any moment to be displayed to a family of strangers as a potential
daughter-in-law. And each of them wants something else, something impossible.
It is late May, the first day of their
factory summer — of love letters folded into squares and dropped onto work
stations; of fevers sweated out on the floor of a bare hostel room; of
supervisors shouting in a language they do not understand, a couple of words —
“work” and “faster” — gradually becoming clear; of capitalism, of men and of a
bit of freedom.
Luring
Idle Young Women
It all started in March, in the drippy jungle
of rural Odisha, when two distant relatives happened to meet on the roadside.
One of the men had found employment as a
“mobilizer” for Gram Tarang, a for-profit agency contracted by India’s
government to recruit and train workers. He mentioned that Gram Tarang was
offering a cash incentive — roughly 450 rupees, or about $6.75, a head — to
mobilizers who identified young women willing to enroll in a training program
for garment factory jobs.
The second man, Hemant Das, perked up,
sensing the approach of a change of career. Hemant had an underfed look and
teeth rimmed with tobacco stains. Among the first college graduates from his
family, he had tried his hand at laying bricks, tutoring schoolchildren,
programming computers, setting up wedding tents and waiting tables before
finally falling back on the only job widely available to men here, working as a
field hand for 200 rupees a day.
Hemant was from a village called Ishwarpur,
and as it happened, idle young women were something Ishwarpur had in great
quantity. That they could be monetized came as good news.
On its economic merits alone, Hemant figured,
the government scheme would prove tempting: After two months of training, their
daughters would be placed in a factory in the industrial center of Bangalore,
where they would earn the legal minimum wage, 7,187 rupees per month, or about
$108, which is more than most of their fathers make. Six months after arriving
in Bangalore, they would be free to return home if they wished.
Hemant set out the next day with a fistful of
pamphlets and an uncharacteristically sunny disposition. But as he made his
rounds of local families — 30 of them, at least — they shook their heads. No.
“Letting go of female children is dishonorable, in itself,” explained Pramanand
Das, who presides over an informal family council.
Minati Das, the mother of a 19-year-old, got
to the point quicker. “Not everyone wants a daughter-in-law who is a working
woman,” she said. “They think she has lost her chastity.”
The village had its own plan for these young
women. Upon reaching adulthood, they would be transferred to the guardianship
of another family, along with a huge dowry that serves as an incentive to treat
them well. The transfer is final. Once married, the new bride cannot return to
visit her parents without permission, which is given sparingly, so that the bonds
to her old home will weaken.
She must show her submission to the new
family: She is not allowed to speak the names of her in-laws, because it is
seen as too familiar, and in some places she is not allowed to use words that
begin with the same letters as her in-laws’ names, requiring the invention of a
large parallel vocabulary. Each morning, before she is allowed to eat, the
daughter-in-law must wash the feet of her husband’s parents and then drink the
water she has used to wash them.
Hemant would have been completely out of luck
if he had not thought to try Karuna Das, who had two daughters of marriageable
age. Karuna was a sinewy day laborer, and he had roamed far from the village in
his younger days to work in iron foundries in Chennai and Hyderabad. The gossip
was that Karuna agreed to enroll his eldest daughters because he was unable to
scrape together 100,000 rupees for dowries. That was undoubtedly the case.
It was also true that Karuna did not care
much what other people said. He had never behaved like a poor man. When word
spread that he had agreed to send Prabhati and Shashi, the village elders
convened emergency meetings to determine whether this violated “purdah,” or
separation between the sexes, and whether this would damage the marriage prospects
of their own daughters. Women stopped by to tease the girl’s mother, Radha
Rani, who wept inconsolably.
It turned out that Karuna had not been asking
for permission. He instructed his daughters to pack four or five changes of
clothes. Go see what the world is like, he told them. “They were reluctant to
go anywhere because they were a bit scared,” he said. “I told them being scared
is O.K. O.K., you’re scared. Now you have to move on.”
The sun has not yet risen when they arrive at
the hostel that will be their new home for the next six months: 137 women in 15
unfurnished rooms, every inch covered with girlish flotsam, underwear and bras
drying on the window grates, sentimental verses penciled on the walls.
Prabhati and Shashi’s room is being painted,
so on the first night 25 of them crowd into two rooms, so tight that one of
their roommates stretches out on the kitchen counter. “I thought there would be
beds,” murmurs one, and the chaperone from Gram Tarang looks exasperated.
“They complain, ‘You could have given us
this, you could have given us that,’” he says. “We sweetly explain that it is
not possible. They don’t have the bed system in Bangalore.”
But the girls are too keyed up to sleep.
Climbing onto the roof, they can see the sun rising over a landscape of other
roofs, where, in all directions, migrants seek a breath of quiet. There they
can gaze up at the 22nd story of an apartment building, where residents come
out to hang their laundry on balconies. It is the most amazing thing they have
ever seen: big people looking tiny.
“I want to see what I haven’t seen,” murmurs
one of the girls, sleepily. “I want to see what I don’t even know exists.”
Baby says something about her eventual return
to India, and when someone corrects her, she looks up sharply.
“Bangalore is in India?” she asks.
First
Train Ride
Prabhati has never seen a train, much less
ridden in one, and on the 33-hour journey to Bangalore the earth seems to heave
under her. As miles of paddy fields slide by, she vomits. Thatch roofs are
replaced by peaked roofs, and she vomits. When they reach south India, rain
begins to hit the window in fat spatters.
It had come as news to Prabhati that the
training program involved traveling 900 miles. But some intention had hardened
within her. She wanted to prove the neighbors wrong. She did not care about her
marriage prospects because, after examining the marriages that surrounded her
in Ishwarpur, she decided she did not want to marry at all.
“I will go to Bangalore,” she told her parents.
“If I come back, then you can get me married. If I don’t come back, you can’t
get me married.”
Shashi sits beside her retching sister and
strokes her back. She had not wanted to come. Happy enough with a future as a
housewife, she had focused her energy on making mischief. Among friends, she
introduced herself as “45 kilograms of hotness.” Out of the corner of her mouth
came a stream of dirty jokes, and she made the other girls dissolve in helpless
laughter by comparing breast sizes to vegetables (including, mournfully, a
kernel of corn).
Working on an assembly line was not Shashi’s
idea of fun. But Prabhati plunged forward, and, as usual, Shashi cruised along
in her wake.
The sisters, lugging a bag of clothes, sit
with 35 other girls from Odisha who are making the same journey.
They have all dressed in baggy
purple-and-gray uniforms, with ID cards swinging from their necks. Their
parents had made last-minute attempts to keep them from leaving, which had to
be repelled with sustained tantrums. A girl called Baby, who is 18 and
bespectacled, said that she had secured her mother’s permission only by
refusing to eat for two days.
“They wanted me to come home,” she says. “I’m
not going home.”
The Gram Tarang instructors had taught them
an anthem about self-sufficiency, and they sing it on their journey to
Bangalore, again and again, for comfort.
We
will stay a month and train ourselves
This
job is the story of our lives
The
job is as important as prayer
We
won’t fear, and we will go ahead.
The sun has not yet risen when they arrive at
the hostel that will be their new home for the next six months: 137 women in 15
unfurnished rooms, every inch covered with girlish flotsam, underwear and bras
drying on the window grates, sentimental verses penciled on the walls.
Prabhati and Shashi’s room is being painted,
so on the first night 25 of them crowd into two rooms, so tight that one of
their roommates stretches out on the kitchen counter. “I thought there would be
beds,” murmurs one, and the chaperone from Gram Tarang looks exasperated.
“They complain, ‘You could have given us
this, you could have given us that,’” he says. “We sweetly explain that it is
not possible. They don’t have the bed system in Bangalore.”
But the girls are too keyed up to sleep.
Climbing onto the roof, they can see the sun rising over a landscape of other
roofs, where, in all directions, migrants seek a breath of quiet. There they
can gaze up at the 22nd story of an apartment building, where residents come
out to hang their laundry on balconies. It is the most amazing thing they have
ever seen: big people looking tiny.
“I want to see what I haven’t seen,” murmurs
one of the girls, sleepily. “I want to see what I don’t even know exists.”
Baby says something about her eventual return
to India, and when someone corrects her, she looks up sharply.
“Bangalore is in India?” she asks.
Unlearning
Village Lessons
For the first few weeks, everything is new.
Stepping out of the hostel, the trainees are surrounded by men: Men on
balconies, men on scooters, men lounging in doorways, staring. The road is
plastered with signs saying “tailors wanted,” and one girl gives a yelp of
alarm, mistaking them for wanted posters.
On the day of a Hindu festival, Prabhati
peers down from the roof at a troupe of transgender dancers, smiling and
twitching suggestively as men press in around them. When one bends down so that
an onlooker can stick a folded bill in her cleavage, Prabhati is so shocked
that she has an impulse to reach for a stone and throw it.
“If this happened in the village,” she says,
“you would all be dead.”
In rural Odisha they like to say that “a
girl’s shyness is her jewelry.” But here, there is no space for the newcomers
unless they make space for themselves. To cross the street — a throbbing two-lane
road coursing with auto rickshaws, clattering cargo trucks, scooters carrying
whole families — requires stepping in front of the slower-moving vehicles, if
necessary stopping them with their bodies. The girls waver, and then they
plunge.
Much of what they learned in the village must
be unlearned here. One evening when Baby begins preparing dinner, several of
her roommates protest. She is menstruating, and caste tradition dictates that
menstruating women must live in isolation, sleeping alone and taking care not
to step into the kitchen, lest they contaminate the food and water. So two of
the younger roommates cook, emerging an hour later with a glutinous, inedible
glop. At this point, Baby is irritated. Menstruating women are allowed to work
in the factory, aren’t they? She walks into the kitchen, and the scent of
spices and onions fills the room. After a brief discussion, they agree that the
menstruation rules will be void for as long as they are living in Bangalore.
Then they stuff themselves with food and fall into a deep sleep.
When they are introduced to a factory
supervisor and dive to touch her feet, a traditional gesture of respect toward
elders, the supervisor jumps back as if she has been stuck with a hot poker.
She then assumes a slight crouch, as if preparing to defend herself from
further reverence.
Back in their bedrooms, the girls laugh
hysterically at this. From childhood, they have been told that it is
disrespectful for a girl to laugh out loud in the presence of elders. In the
event of irrepressible laughter, girls must cover their mouths with anything at
hand: the corner of a dupatta, a hand, a washcloth. This lesson, too, flies out
the window. In the hostel they laugh like tractors. They laugh so loud they
spit their water out.
Low
Wages, Long Hours
“I’m giving you 25 seconds to thread this
needle,” the supervisor says in Hindi. The recruits, whose native language is
Oriya, barely understand. Thirty-seven tailors bend their heads, trying to
guide frayed threads through a maze of eight loops.
At the K. Mohan & Company Exports Private
Limited, the girls have entered a world of machines: massive industrial
extractors, laser cutters, a rapid-response protocol that kicks in when a
needle tip breaks off.
And yet, incredibly, garments worn in the
West are still made by humans — nearly all of them women, working exhausting
hours, with few legal protections and little chance of advancement, for some of
the lowest wages in the global supply chain.
As the trainees practice sewing straight lines
on pieces of scrap fabric, supervisors pace the aisle, hoping to spot one with
machinelike dexterity and speed. One of them slows, and then stops, beside a
girl called Cuddles, the daughter of a truck driver. The supervisor blinks,
looks again. This is — there is no other word for it — talent. She has covered
the fabric with seams as straight as the lines on ruled notebook paper.
Cuddles is among the first in the group to be
integrated into an assembly line, bent over, eyes straining. Her task is to stitch
together three small tags for the Marks & Spencer stretch corduroy skirt:
one that identifies the brand, one that gives washing instructions and one the
size, a scrap so tiny that it is nearly impossible to hold straight between
finger and thumb. If she allows a tag to slip to the floor, or fly away in the
gusts from the ceiling fan, her salary will be docked. She will be under
pressure to complete this task 100 times per hour for eight hours, with one
half-hour break for lunch, for a base daily wage of around $2.
A man with a loft of dyed black hair steps
out of his office to greet the group. This is N. Manjunath, the assistant
general manager for human resources at the factory. He is recruiting rural
workers through the government program because he is desperate: City-dwellers
are no longer interested in factory jobs like these, with their low pay and
punishing conditions, and attrition rates are high. Migrant women are more
docile. This is what Manjunath is hoping.
Prabhati, Shashi and the other recruits take
seats in a canteen, and sit with their hands folded in their laps. They are to
work every day but Sunday. They can collect their pension in 40 years. Should
they die on the job, state health insurance will cover funeral costs.
They are drowsy. The numbers fly by them in
flocks. When a response is expected, they chorus “Yes, miss,” or “Yes, sir,” as
they would to a schoolmaster.
Any questions?
“Can we work on Sundays?”
Manjunath thinks of himself as a kind man.
But the complications of employing village girls have strained his last nerve:
the weepy petitions for leave to return to the village for essential functions,
like a father having a hemorrhoid removed; the domestic squabbles, which on one
occasion ended in the consumption of toilet cleaner; and the “love cases,” in
which a tailor, upon forming a romantic attachment in the factory, is summarily
ordered home.
Lately, when the girls come to him with
complaints, he listens skeptically, with a sardonic smile. He assesses this
latest batch of recruits, the second from Odisha, as “lackadaisical.” He
believes they have come here for an adventure, and will gravitate back to the
village as soon as their parents tell them to come home.
He is right to worry. After six months on the
job, when the government incentives are paid out, around half the trainees
brought in by Gram Tarang return to their villages. Only 40 percent stay longer
than a year.
It comes down to this: If the village has a
plan for the girls, so does the factory. Leading them through the rows of
machines, Manjunath wags his finger.
“Don’t get married too soon,” he warns them.
Dreaming
of Love
Within two weeks of their arrival, one of the
sisters’ roommates has eloped straight from the factory gates, not even
stopping by the hostel to pick up her clothes. Those who remain spill their
secrets to one another. Tanushree Behera sleeps entangled with a girl she calls
her wife. Jayasmita Behera is divorced, having left her husband less than two
weeks after the wedding.
“If I had stayed,” she says, “my life would
have been destroyed.”
The rest spend their evenings in quiet
conversation with boyfriends, whose existence is unknown to their parents. They
examine each other’s palms for creases that indicate they will be among the
small number of Indians — as low as 5 percent, according to one survey — who
marry for love. At the factory, they stitch their boyfriends’ names on scrap
fabric. Male tailors stroll by as they work, dropping love letters folded into
fat wads, and the girls read them aloud, to comic effect, at the hostel. “My
dear, my lever,” someone writes to Shashi in broken English. “I have tied you
up in my heart.”
Sitting cross-legged on the floor, they
compare notes on evasive maneuvers they use to avoid being shown to prospective
in-laws, like Roadrunner slipping away from Wile E. Coyote. Shradhanjali
Mallick, the beauty among them, says she used to have success with bouts of
hysterical crying, but that moving to Bangalore has been more effective. “How
can they marry me off if I am not physically present?” she asks innocently, and
Prabhati laughs. “Let them hold a wedding of mothers-in-law and
fathers-in-law,” she says. “Because that’s the only kind of wedding they will
be able to pull off.”
This is not something Prabhati can laugh
about at home. Her views on marriage were set in stone several years back, when
a young wife in her village was set on fire in a domestic dispute. Prabhati has
been arguing for years that she should be allowed to remain single, that her
parents should proceed to fixing a marriage for Shashi, who is pretty and will
get better offers. “I will become a nun,” she says. But her parents flick away
her comment, casually, as if it were a fly. So she thinks of escape.
This is a subject she cannot discuss with her
sister. Three years ago, Prabhati came across a mobile phone that a secret
boyfriend gave Shashi as a way of keeping in touch, rigged, as if for
espionage, with no audible sound or light, to be switched on at times when they
have agreed to speak. Prabhati snatched the phone away and informed her father.
Shashi screamed at her father that day — don’t break that phone! — but she
never saw it again. For months, she could not look him in the eye.
The sisters were never as close again. When
it comes to the future, Prabhati and Shashi keep their own counsel.
Praying
for Sunday
By the first week of June, the new girls are
praying for Sunday to arrive. Their joints hurt. Their backs hurt. They come
home from the factory with fingers punctured by needles or sliced by industrial
clippers. Sitting still for eight hours is strange and new, and at times, the
boredom is maddening. They sing to their machines. They pull hairs out of their
chins. Baby amuses herself by giving herself little scratches on the wrist.
They are locked into the hostel except for
“out passes” on alternate Sundays, which are granted by the factory human
resources staff. A Gram Tarang “life skills” instructor makes the rounds inside
the hostel, selling them 600-rupee jars of an Herbalife energy drink, which she
tells them will help them keep up with the pace of work in the factory. It does
give them energy — it includes caffeine and maltodextrin — but it also gives
them diarrhea and eats up their remaining cash. This is no small problem, because
they are running out of money for food.
They count the days until June 10, when they
will be paid for their first two weeks of work. Prabhati and Shashi, who had
left home with 5,000 rupees, or about $75, find themselves with 100 rupees
between them. “If there’s no salary today, it’s going to be a problem,”
Prabhati says.
On June 10, they are not paid. Three more
days pass, and they still are not paid. Outside the factory window the sky has
turned black and the air is churning; a curtain of monsoon rain is about to
sweep in.
About 15 girls walk into Manjunath’s office,
hearts pounding, to demand their pay. He looks up from his desk, annoyed. The
usual genial expression has vanished from his face. He explains that he cannot
solve their problem: The company has opened bank accounts for them, but the
bank has not delivered their A.T.M. cards. Anyway, he dismisses the suggestion
that the girls are running out of money. And who, he wonders, has given them
the idea that they can make demands? He surveys the group in search of its
leader.
“My clear understanding is that if you have a
basket of fruits and only one is not good, it will spoil the other fruit,” he
explains. “You have to take one out.”
When Jayasmita steps forward to say they have
not eaten since yesterday, he swivels his head in her direction. He does not
speak Oriya. “What did she say?” he asks a caseworker.
The girls are promised an advance for rice
and are ordered to leave his office. They shuffle out. They had been planning
to stop working unless they were paid immediately, but their strike has lasted
less than five minutes. Jayasmita slumps against a wall, and vows never to try
anything like that again.
“When you come to a new city,” she says, “you
have to learn to care for yourself, and not bother with others.”
The money for the first two weeks’ work comes
through three or four days later — after withholdings for pension, health
insurance, lodging, food and kitchen furnishings, a grand total of 1,874
rupees, or roughly $28. This sum must last them for the next month. In the
hostel room where Prabhati and Shashi stay, the amount of the paycheck is not
relevant. They have never earned money before, only asked their fathers for it.
A wave of happiness washes over all of them. They do not feel like girls, they
say: They feel like boys.
They transfer credit — 30 rupees, 50 rupees —
to the cellphones of their mothers, brothers, sisters-in-law, brothers-in-law
and boyfriends, as if they were distributing sweets to celebrate some windfall.
Unable to wait, they call their families from
cubbyhole A.T.M.s to share the news. This is not always welcome. Cuddles
transfers a balance of 50 rupees to her father’s phone, but he considers it
shameful to accept money from a daughter. He calls her, angrily, to say, “Never
do that again.” Cuddles doesn’t care; she has never been so happy.
Prabhati and Shashi are among the last to
receive their A.T.M. cards. They find a bank machine in between Krishna
Jewelers & Pawnbrokers and Blooming Buds India Playschool. Leaving the
A.T.M., Prabhati feels joy, but she is not the type of person who shows it. She
scans the street, looking for some way to celebrate, and finally asks a man if
she can borrow his bicycle for a moment. She climbs on top of it and pedals as
hard as she can, her braid flying behind her. Then, taking note of his look of
worry, she swings the bicycle around and returns it to its owner.
Shashi dances down the stairs and most of the
way home. The money sends a wild thrill through her, so that she wishes she
could fast-forward through the next month, and the month after that, and after
that. So that life is a long string of paydays.
The two sisters make a pact: They will stay
in Bangalore at least a year. They spend much of their paychecks on nose rings
for each other, tiny specks of 22-carat gold. They place them on each other in
front of their roommates, beaming, their faces so close together that they
could be kissing.
Then Prabhati lies down on her stomach, full
length, cheek to the cool linoleum. She is not feeling well.
Among
the First to Falter
It is strange that one of the first girls to
falter is Prabhati, who was the most resolute about staying in Bangalore.
She has contracted a fever that comes and
goes for two weeks. She stops eating and then stops talking; her eyes are so
hollow that you could place a handful of rice in them. Shashi stays home,
combing her sister’s hair and forcing her to bathe.
But then she must return to work, and
Prabhati is left shivering on the floor. “In city life,” Prabhati says, “even
if you are dead, people will just get dressed and go to the factory without
being bothered.”
Minati Mahji, who has lived in the hostel for
six years, observes them wearily. Of 130 women who arrived at the same time,
only she and her four roommates have stuck it out. She tried switching to
another factory, but it was no better, and she wound up back in the hostel. Her
pay has crept up to 9,800 rupees, or $146 per month.
She has seen wave after wave of young women
arrive from the countryside, freshly hatched, and she knows how it usually ends
— with the girl’s disappearance into that old world as a daughter-in-law.
“Whatever they are planning, it doesn’t happen like that,” she says.
Even through her fever, Prabhati knows she
wants to stay. She tries to keep her illness from her family, handing her crisp
new 500-rupee bills to a street-corner doctor who seems to give all his
injections in the buttocks. It is Shashi who tells their father that her sister
is sick. Her father calls the Gram Tarang training center, demanding that
Prabhati be sent home, and the training center calls the factory.
On the day she is to board a train to return
to Ishwarpur, Prabhati stands at the edge of the roof, tears streaming down her
face, and watches her younger sister walk down the lane toward the factory.
The mood in the hostel sags. “The day she
left, she told me: ‘I told you I would stay a year. And I couldn’t even stay
for two months,’ ” Jayasmita recounts.
Minati doubts Prabhati will return. The
family, having violated custom once by letting the daughters go, is not likely
to do it twice. “People mean to come back,” Minati says. “But they don’t come
back.”
On the assembly line, someone covers
Prabhati’s sewing machine with plastic sheeting. Three weeks later, two burly
men come to push it to an area marked “idle machines.”
Just like that, Prabhati is back in her
mother’s thatch hut, feeding kindling into a clay oven. Coming home is like
falling into cotton. Rice is sprouting up through great reflective planes of
water, so vivid it hurts your eyes to look at it.
The neighbors stop by, seeking an outcome to
the family’s experiment. “So, are your daughters back from their jobs?” asks
one, in a voice thick with self-satisfaction.
Prabhati’s mother, Radha Rani, takes her to a
country witch, who traces shapes around her head with a broom and declares that
someone has cast an evil eye on her. He blows on her, a holy wind. Outside
there is the smell of things growing. Prabhati sleeps as if she is under a
spell. When she calls her sister, hoping to arrange for her return to
Bangalore, Shashi sounds far away.
Becoming
a City Girl
It turns out factory life agrees with Shashi.
She has been absorbed into an assembly line expected to produce 100 pairs of
khaki chinos an hour. In the morning she takes her seat among hillocks of
pants, and spends the next eight and a half hours in a work-trance, punctuated
by the shouting of supervisors and a half-hour break for lunch. A whiteboard
lists the per-hour target. They are always behind.
Behind her in the assembly line, a potbellied
man in his late 30s peppers her with the gustatory queries that pass for small
talk in south India. Have you eaten today? Are you hungry? Do you want to eat
more? She swivels in her chair to ask him, “Would you like me to shove these
pants down your throat?”
Shashi finds it interesting that she, the
screw-up in the family, is the one becoming a city person. She examines her
face in the mirror for signs that she is becoming paler. She tells the family
that Prabhati should not return, and that she cannot send money home this
month. Instead, Shashi arranges for a meeting with Sunil, a boy from a
neighboring village whom she wants to marry.
Six years ago, when Sunil first asked Shashi
to meet him in person, she was escorted by a female cousin and was too shy to
look at Sunil’s face. When he sat on the chair, she would go to the bed. When
he went to the bed, she would go to the chair. Finally he told her to stop and
listen. She sat still. Whatever it was he said to her, it made her feel that he
was her own.
“I love him, you know?” she says. “I do not
know whether he is good or bad.”
Since that day three years ago when Prabhati
discovered the cellphone Sunil had given her, Shashi has been proceeding cautiously
with a plan to persuade her parents to agree to her choice for a husband. She
and Sunil have chosen names, Situ and Sukhi, for a girl and boy. “If I work for
a long time,” she says, “and I really insist on it, there is a chance.”
Now that her sister is gone, it is no longer
necessary for Shashi to keep this a secret. It is a blessed relief, like taking
off a shoe that is cutting into a tender part of your foot.
On the August day when her third paycheck
comes in, Shashi doesn’t tell anyone what she has planned. Leaving the hostel
means breaking curfew, but she persuades her friends to go with her. The small
group threads its way along the darkening street, past rotting cauliflower and
coconut shells. The girls are headed to a bright shop where smartphones are
displayed in glass cases.
The shopkeeper is about 25, his shirt
unbuttoned to reveal a glint of gold chain. He has seen many girls like these,
provincials, fishing out coins at the vegetable market. He does not hide his
disdain. But when Shashi announces that she wants to buy a 4,000-rupee Lava A59
smartphone, he is suddenly wide awake, respectful.
Shashi’s face is a mask of concentration as
she repeatedly counts the bills and arranges them into a fan to show the
shopkeeper. The girls around her are hushed. The amount is more than half her
month’s pay. It is the weightiest decision she has ever made.
When they step back onto the street,
something flickers across Shashi’s face — triumph — and she pumps her fist.
Back at the hostel, she drops her new purchase into the hands of her roommates,
who immediately go through it, looking for WhatsApp, which they discovered the
week before.
Sunil will be calling soon. He has been
badgering Shashi to make this purchase so she can send pictures over the internet.
She disappears into the bathroom to splash cold water on her face. She is gone
a long time. She lies for a moment on the floor, staring at the ceiling. Then
she dials a number in the village.
“Elder sister,” she says. “I got my phone!”
Not
the New Girls Anymore
September has arrived, and every day there is
a new reason Prabhati cannot return to Bangalore. Her mother has stomach
cramps. Her younger siblings’ tuition bills are due. No adult male is available
to accompany her on the train journey. Prabhati mentally reviews the cost of
the ticket: 1,350 rupees for the train, 300 more for the auto rickshaw from
Majestic Station. She jokes, a little nervously, that she should steal the
money. A voice in her head tells her that if she doesn’t go now, she never
will.
And yet that voice is becoming fainter. She
can feel the village’s drowsy peace overtaking her. Her mother says, in an
offhand way, that it is time to start finding a groom. This is not how it was
supposed to go. Shashi ensconced in the city, and Prabhati stuck in Ishwarpur.
“Before, I was at home, and I didn’t know anything, and it was O.K.,” she says,
dully. “Now I know something, and it’s not O.K.”
Back in Bangalore, the factory girls’ fathers
have begun to call. They expect them to come home on leave in December, after
the six-month factory stint is up.
Jayasmita’s father says a marriage proposal
has come from a man in Cattuck. “I tell them I’m not going anywhere,” she says.
“The moment I heard talk about marriage, I hung up.” Shradhanjali says she will
return, and plans to wriggle out of yet another proposal. “If possible, I’ll
fight it off,” she says, but sounds uncertain.
“You know where you’ll find her in a year?”
Jayasmita says, teasingly. “At her in-laws.”
The factory girls seem less afraid every
month.
Shashi sees her boyfriend, Sunil, as planned.
He takes the overnight train in from Kerala, where he has migrated for work.
They meet at a nearby gas station and walk in a park for most of the day,
holding hands. At 4 p.m., he returns to the train station and boards another
overnight train back to Kerala. She uses Facebook and WhatsApp to communicate
with him, as if the internet were two tin cans attached by a piece of twine.
Every time they get into a fight, she uninstalls the apps.
Her smartphone has become an appendage. She
presses it to her ear while she is walking down the lane, striding over rats
flattened into the pavement. Waking in the night, she rolls over and checks it
for new messages. A group of her friends are toying with the idea of leaving
the hostel, seeking higher-paid work at another factory.
She is amazed at how far she has come.
On an outing last Sunday, she arranged to
meet a male cousin, another migrant worker, and a group of them strolled
together at the edge of a highway overpass, breathing in the exhaust from 12
lanes of traffic. They don’t have money to step into a restaurant, so they sit
on a pipe on the ground outside a Toyota dealership, in the bright sunshine,
comparing phones.
That’s another thing: Shashi and her friends
are not the new girls anymore. The new girls are arriving from Uttar Pradesh
and Jharkhand. Their braids are tight and glossy. Dropping their bags in their
rooms, they climb up to the roof to gaze at the 22-story building, which is the
most amazing thing they have ever seen.
Their eyes widen at the girls from Odisha, in
their jeans and T-shirts. The girls from Odisha regard them with friendly
condescension. They invite them into their rooms, as if they’ve been here
forever.
This article was reported over four months by
Ellen Barry in Bangalore and Ishwarpur, India. Descriptions of events are based
on her firsthand observations and on dozens of interviews. Andrea Bruce
contributed reporting assistance. Jennifer Harrison provided interpretation.
