Imagine a life where you are no longer the person who dines on a fine table three times a day, who sleeps in a bed that is as soft as a dream, and relaxes on couches that are luxuriant and stately. In fact you are the person that sets the table and does the dishes after, who makes the bed and does the laundry, who sits on the cold hard floor while others laze on sofas; imagine a life where you are the “help”. Truthfully, it is a life nobody would want, including the ones who live it, but why is this life so repulsive? Is it perhaps because of the tasks that a maid is charged with, or that on the grass-root level the status our maids are awarded is downright derogatory, and no one wants to be part of a group which is so demeaned? Unquestionably the answer lies within the latter.
Racism died decades ago (not) and sadly, society dividing differentials still thrive in this modern era. The color of your skin and by extension your ethnicity might not set you apart as often as it did before, but it’s still there and your social status nearly always does. While we treat all employees respectfully and equally and maintain a careful employer-employee relationship, these pleasantries suddenly go amiss when it comes to the help our households. Many people might disagree and venture to say that they treat their maids the best they can. I disagree. It should be remembered that even in the old times, a slave wearing a collar of gold was still at the core level a slave. Treating an individual well does not mean awarding it necessary or unnecessary gifts, it means that you see them equal to yourself, and that you by no means treat or perceive them lesser beings. It is but a fact that many households take care of the help that work for them, and award them accordingly at any occasion they might find feasible, but is that enough? Is that not like throwing treats to a caged animal to make it grow complacent until the next round of gifts? If we truly identify the “maids of our society” equal to us, than we would ask them to sit on chairs not on the floor, we will talk to them as cordially as we would to a person of our own financial stature, in a nutshell we would stop treating them like lesser humans.
It is sad that on account of theft, our maids are the first to be blamed, what is even more derogatory is that some people offer only leftovers to these people who might have cooked entire luxurious meals for them. To understand this matter further I wanted to probe deeper in the “help’s” psyche, hence I interviewed my own maid.
Q: Why do you sit on the floor while your employers don’t?
A: They are above us. We sit on the floor in order to pay our respects to them.
Q: Why do you think they are above you?
A: They are educated; our jobs are tied to them and so are our loyalties.
Q: Have you ever been a victim of violence practiced by your employers?
A: No, but some of my relatives have been.
Q: Would you work for people who beat you?
A: Depends on my financial stability.
My short conversation with her not only revealed a maids way of thinking but uncovered the social practices and ideologies that have created the unbalanced equilibrium of our society. The illiterate, and more specifically, the poor of our society consider themselves below those who had access to good education. In their opinion the literate ones know better how to act and behave in every way of life, which means their conduct is not only better but correct. I ask you, is it their fault that they have considered the rich and literate above them? Have we not contributed significantly in stemming these ideas more strongly? Do our actions not accentuate that we are by some false standard better than these maids who help make our house a cleaner, better place every day? Some households in our society go as far as beating their help due to an often unintentional mistake. Even though these cases are rare, they exist primarily because the maids are unaware of their rights and the fact that they deserve as equal a place in this society as anybody else. Being illiterate has become their curse and this awareness is the root cause why they consider the rich and educated above them. They might be illiterate and unaware but what is our excuse?
We live in a country where only half of the population is educated and even less are rich or stable, the majority that decides the fate of this country every five years is the same group that is ridden over every day. These people unknowingly trust us to be the better men, but we don’t have it in us to show them that in this world nobody is better than another. Their lack of knowledge is their excuse, but what is ours? Shouldn’t we correct this ideology the best we can? It is our seldom realized responsibility to emphasize to every individual, literate or not, that education creates enlightened minds, not better men.
It starts from the small things that people start considering themselves inferior and then it reaches a level where the same people stop considering themselves humans. Slavery didn’t start in a day nor did it spread in a blink of an eye, it was a slow plague that destroyed many innocent lives, a new epidemic faces us now. One which is beyond color and race, it is a different factor that divides us now and it is harder to breach. For this reason it is imperative that we start today, this second, and whenever we see a maid letting herself down, we teach her to pull herself up. The day we situate this society in equilibrium is the day many crimes die and we all become better men.
Written By: Rabab Ahsan
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