SAGIRA AND THE MANGOS
I've always liked Sagira!
I'm not sure why, and I suspect she's a much more complex personality than
I imagine. But she has something, some special umph, or as the French would
say - Elle a de la gueule.
I also like Sagira because she's a link to a little bit of my own past. A
few years, I spent some time in a little village called Jitvapur outside the
market town of Madhubani in Northern Bihar.So, my ears pricked up the first
time Sagira told me she came originally from a village near Madhubani.
“Do you remember a village called Jitvapur?”
“Ah yes! it is between Madhubani and my village. If you had gone just
a little further you would have reached my village. If you come with me to
the village. I'll take you everywhere. I'll show you where they are making
the clothes, where they are running the power loom. I'll take you around everywhere!”
Astonishing. One day she probably will! But for now, back to the Past.
Sagira left her village and came here, like hundreds of thousands of the poor
and landless of rural Bihar.
“I came here to Bombay because I had a lot of trouble in the village,
trouble, suffering, hardship, nothing to eat. That's what it was. First my
husband came, and then I followed him.”
Sagira was married at the age of twelve, normal practice in Bihar. Her husband's
family owned land but had a chronic cash flow problem. You can't live from
wheat alone.
Sagira and her husband fed their stomachs winding cotton thread or lara on
to a spool for the weavers. For this they earned the princely sum of 20 paisa
a day. One half of one cent! So Sagira's husband came alone to Bombay in search
of work. Sagira stayed behind. Waiting. But her husband didn't like Bombay.
He came home. Sagira turned her hand to anything to earn a few paisa. She
built mud houses, sold snacks in the market, helped make saris. Finally, she
worked in the fields. But they still couldn't make ends meet. And there was
already one extra mouth to feed.
I had my first son born - Akhtar - who was two years old. I was just watching
everybody going, and I thought: Come on. Let me also try and go to Bombay
and see what there is!”
She started the journey with the clothes on her back and half a kilo of atta
(flour) The bush telegraph brought her to Byculla, to a handful of people
from her village living on a street near here.
Her husband fell ill with jaundice. For the better part of fifteen years he
would more or less sick. Earnings were irregular. Costs just went on increasing.
At the time of his death in the mid-80s, Sagira was spending 25 Rupees a day
on a private doctor and medicines!
So, in addition to raising a family, Sagira had to earn the money to keep
them all, quite literally, alive. Sagira became a domestic servant, and quite
by chance!
“You see, I was coming back from the toilet, and this lady called me
from the building opposite. She told me to come up..I got very worried. Go
up? How do I go up?”
But she went up, and into a whole new world of objects she had never seen
or imagined! She gives a little laugh at the memory.
“She told me to sit on the bed. I had never seen a bed before. There
were all sorts of things in her house. There was a bed, there was a chair,
there was a TV. Never seen all this in my life.”
The woman wanted to her to do the dishes, wash the floor. Sagira hadn't the
faintest what that meant. But she quickly learnt. She was soon earning 600
Rupees a month, a far cry from those days not so long before in Bihar.
But nothing like enough: there was her husband's medical bills. And their
hut on Dindimkar Road was pulled down almost every week. It was a nightmare.
Her eldest son Akhtar never could go to school. He had to start working at
the age of nine, in a power loom.
And then her husband finally died, whether from jaundice or something else,
I don't know.
“I thought to myself: now I must do something to build my house. I have
no husband. I have got four children - it was now 1987 - he was working in
the power loom over there. So, for a while we lived on that. And then I got
a handcart for 500 rupees and I started my own business pf selling seasonal
fruits. So, if there were berries, then berries. If there were corn, then
corn. Whatever was in season we would sell.
Akhtar's now running the handcart business. Sagira's moved on to what she
calls Collecting Paper. What Paper? Where? In the Streets? From Offices? Sagira
says she'll show me.
~
A few weeks later, Sagira tells me to meet her at 8 in the morning at Crawford
Market. Then I'll understand!
Crawford Market's the last of a dying breed - a wholesale fruit and vegetable
market that feeds a great city.
Covent Garden in London, Les Halles in Paris have both been gutted and transferred
to anonymous industrial estates in their respective suburbs.
Crawford Market, thank God, survives. For how much longer? I don't want to
know!
Wholesale merchants sit on old wooden platforms six feet above the floor,
surrounded by wooden crates of fruit and vegetables.
In the aisle in front of me, Suresh packs vegetables into a huge jute sack.
The stuff's been trucked in here while we sleep, from places like Nasik, hundreds
of miles into the interior. And in noisy, belching trucks.
“And where are you going now?
“Going to China Garden restaurant, Kemps Corner”
. I've eaten there. The place is full till two or three in the morning. You
need connections to get a table. Suresh reads from a list and stuffs a big
jute sack.
“Ginger, Celery.”
“So the restaurant buys this everyday?”
“Everyday, yes, correct”
And Suresh somehow finds space for the ginger root and the celery. Then closes
the top of the sack with a draw-string. Ready to be loaded into a taxi and
whisked a few miles up the road.
Sagira's next door,, ankle-deep in straw and packing paper and surrounded
by shallow wicker baskets containing the season's first mangos.
Each mango is individually wrapped in white paper. That's a lot of waste paper.
And Sagira's current source of income.
Doesn't take long to fill Sagira's sack. Her partner Noorjehan's busy collecting
cardboard fruit boxes to flatten, recycle and resell. For both women - Time
to unload at their office.
We've left the market en route to the women's "office", a piece
of canvas fastened against the perimeter wall of the market. Inside, stacked
high, are neat piles of flattened cardboard and packing papers. How much can
she make in a day from this?
“It depends on how much I collect everyday. If I collect 30 Kilos then
I get 60 Rupees per day, at the rate of 2 rupees a kilo. Only during the season,
and the season starts from February and it last till June..
Sagira starts at 5 in the morning, and often finishes well after midnight.
Days like that she figures she's earned a rest. Sagira takes a big sigh as
if to say I really need a rest after that!
“You get more for these cardboard boxes?”
“Yes, you certainly get more money for the cardboard boxes. You get
2 rupees 50 paise; sometimes even three rupees a kilo.”
“Why only three months a year?”
Noorjehan says the answer's obvious, isn't it? Not to me it isn't! My pennies
take more time to drop!
“I work only for three months because that's the season. It's the mango
season and with mango season lots of paper in the mango.”
“So, the rest of the year you don't work? You live off that money?”
“I survive on what I earn in these three months. And my son is also
working. So, rest of the months I survive on whatever he earns.”
A few days later I met up with Sagira back in Byculla. She's got the usual
money problems. Expenses that never seem to slow down.
“I have two kids in school. One in the Sixth, one in the Fourth. Where
am I going to get the money to pay for those expenses? Now they don't have
a school bag. Just to get one school bag costs 70 Rupees.”
Pencils, uniforms, books, paper - it all mounts up. Rehmat told me it costs
several hundred Rupees a month to keep her two kids in school.
Ten years ago, maybe Sagira would have just thrown in the towel over a little
thing like the school bag.
But ten years ago, Sagira met Sheela Patel and Celine D'Cruz at Nagpada Neighborhood
House. When Sheela and Celine and the others left to try and help the pavement
dwellers, Sagira chucked her job as a domestic servant. At last, she had a
mission in life!
“ They didn't ask me to leave the work. They said: You work, and then
you come here in the afternoon, whenever you get time. But I was dying to
come over here. I didn't want to do this work.”
Sagira now collects savings from the other members of Mahila Milan on nearby
Dimdimkar Road, where she's lived for many years now. She doesn't get paid
for this. But that's really not very important.
“I'm not coming over here because I'm getting anything from here. I'm
coming over here because I want to come here, and I want to find out about
my house.”
Today, Sagira makes her late husband out to be an extremely tolerant man.
But in fact, he wasn't too keen on Sagira's work with the other pavement dwellers.
“You know, my husband, how he used to fight with me, how he used to
beat me. And he would keep telling me: You're going over there. Nothing will
happen till I die. You won't get a house! Really he died and I still haven't
got a house..but I still keep coming..because I want to come over here.
Sagira ferrets around in her cloth bag, pulls out a piece of paper from a
school exercise book.
On it are the words to a song that dates back to the bad old days, when their
huts were destroyed every week, sometimes every other day.
“I sat with Usman Chacha and I said..now for two days we just sat. I
said: we have to write that song. I would say it, and he would write it. I
can read. But I don't know how to write.”
Sagira composes herself. It's been a long time.
Singing this song again is painful. Half her life flashes before her eyes.
There were good times. But so much of it was bad. The days before the women
began their long climb out of the Blackness of Despair.
She folds the paper, slips it into her bag. And turns away so I won't see
the tears.
Essay
Episodes 1 - 4
Episodes 5 - 8
Episodes 9 - 12
Episodes 13 - 16
Episodes 17 - 20
Episodes 21 - 24
Episodes 25 - 28
Episodes 29 - 32
Episodes
33 -35
Main
Episode List
Cast of Characters
Credits
MP 3
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