Musarrat, our housemaid..yes we have a housemaid, it is the custom here...they need jobs and we need help...so beyond this surprise that some of you may have..let me start again.
Musarrat comes to our house everyday. She claims she is 25 but she looks 17 and apparently she has been married for 5 years to her first cousin, her mom's sister's son.
The first week, everything was rosy. This pretty girl finished all the work fast and well. Second week, she started feeling ill and would keep saying that her back hurt. In fact, would not say anything but when I would come by the iron stand, I would see her tired and sitting on a chair whilst ironing. I asked if everything was all right. She pretended to be fine.
The other day, when she started playing with my hair, her hand accidentally touched my shoulder and she was burning! I gave her tylenol right away and made her a sandwich and forced her to sit and rest for a while. After half and hour, she started working again...she doesn't eat in our house, she says she is never hungry.
Yesterday, I asked Musarrat why she doesn't tell her family that she is not feeling well. She responded, they say "nothing is wrong with you". This bugged me and so today, obviously I had to stir the subject again.
I: "Did you tell them you were unwell?"
M: "I did and my mother-in-law started yelling at me that I was making excuses to miss a day of work."
Financial causes...I kept quiet. But Iram can't stay quiet for long..call it my blessing or my vice.
I: "Well if they force you to fall ill, do they realize you will miss more days of work?"
That comment unleashed the dam. The dam of complaints, tears, sadness and everything else. Musarrat, which is a beautiful Urdu word that means "happiness" in Urdu...was anything but happy.
She was forced to marry her cousin at a child's age, did not know what was happening. In Islam, it is a woman's RIGHT to agree to marriage. One can't consider a marriage legal till both the bride and bridegroom agree. They probably waited for her adolescence before they unleashed their hungry son on her. She has had one child who died after birth...I don't ask details, I know it is hurtful. Maybe in this house where medical practice is shunned upon, the child died of a very basic illness because noone ever believed that he was ill in the first place...maybe, God knows...
Anyway, Musarrat doesn't complain about a forceful marriage, she doesn't complain about a child marriage or a bad mother-in-law, who is her mother's sister! All she says is, "The sad part is...he is like them. He only listens to his mother and he has told me. 'I will never do what you tell me to do.' "
I am just processing this information when I hear faint sobs. This young girl, with her head covered in a black dupatta, sobs over the sink whilst she does our dishes. I immediately make her drink some water and offer her some tea. I want her to sit down and tell me why she is crying. Here is where the problem comes...
I know, that she is hit at home and harassed all the time. Mental violence for sure...and I am bloody well sure, physical as well, but I am scared to ask...why, you wonder?
I am scared to ask because I know my limits. I can't do anything about it for it is not just her, it is the millions. We tried to intervene in the last housemaid's case and her husband forebade her to work in these "bad women's" house ever again. Right now, at least she can share her worries with me...if I intervene, she will bear more torture at home and they will withdraw her from our house.
Troubled, I think...then what is the solution?
Then I think of this amazing ceremony I went to the other day. It was "Mehergarh's" graduation ceremony where Dr Fouzia Saeed and Dr Kamran Ahmed, two well-educated social workers are training people, especially yourth, from all over Pakistan to solve various social issues in the home and at work involving bonded farmer labor, sexual harassment, domestic violence. The brilliant thing is that these people are from Musarrat's neighborhoods. They are not people like us, they are people who live a life like Musarrat. When more and more of these people will be trained, whose main focus is eradication of these issues and they will be people amongst these people, I can see some sort of hope for change.
There is only so much I can do with my one life. This is not an excuse...this is a pondered upon realization. I can try to do my best through a career I have chosen and along the way, do whatever else I can do.
In Musarrat's case, I thought and considered but then I realized that I was not the one to intervene...she will have to wait or better yet, just pray and hope that she will have the power to demand respect or find a way to grant this well-deserved right to herself.
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