Monsoon Misery: Why Umbrellas, Rain Footwear Are A Luxury For Working Class Women
A polythene bag clasped over their head is all the protection many domestic workers and women vendors have against heavy coastal monsoons
In the first week of July this year, when the monsoon was ferocious in Mumbai, Maheshwari, 21, our domestic worker, would often land up drenched for work. Why don’t you carry an umbrella, we asked. She just smiled ruefully. It made me think – is an umbrella a luxury for many working class women? And this is what I found to my surprise – it is.
A no-frills umbrella costs Rs 200-Rs 300 but for Maheshwari, whose husband is an autorickshaw driver, that is a lot of money to spend on her own comfort. She is six months pregnant, but rain or heat she has no choice but to work in two households. She earns around Rs 6000 a month, but her mother-in-law keeps a sharp eye on the family earnings and likely would not allow her to spend Rs 500 on essential rain gear – an umbrella and waterproof footwear.
When I spoke to her mother-in-law, she handed over an old broken umbrella to Maheshwari. “It leaks, it can hardly protect my head,” says the young woman.
This reminded me of the years between 2009 and 2015 when I ran our tiny family business on the street – a vegetable thela (cart). We had only one big umbrella, the kind hawkers use to protect their wares. This was our only shelter from the rains for more than 10 hours a day.
We had three umbrellas back then between seven family members. My mother, who worked in multiple households as a domestic worker, took one, and the rest of us shared the other two. We often walked soaking wet to deliver vegetables home to our customers. The books we carried – to study when we had a breather – had to be kept dry so we would park them at Paresh uncle’s grocery store across the road.
If I needed a bathroom break while at the stall, I had to wait for my sister to arrive with her umbrella. I would sometimes arrive late for job interviews during the rains because I had to wait for a family member with an umbrella to return home. If I told interviewers that I was held up by the rain, they would say: “Come on, this is the monsoon, It will rain for four months. Are you going to sit at home the whole season?”
Why could I not tell them that I did not have an umbrella of my own? Maheshwari’s quiet smile says it all: poverty does not allow you dignity – not only do you live in deprivation but you are also supposed to hide it.
“An umbrella is not only a basic necessity but it also facilitates people’s work life. I have observed several times that women from the unorganised sector have to deal with loss of pay when they can’t go to work in heavy rains because they don’t have umbrellas or raincoats. It also restricts women’s mobility. In rural Maharashtra young women miss their school, colleges for weeks and not having basic facilities is one important reason why girls drop out of schools and colleges. When resources are limited, it is [the needs of the] men in the family that are prioritised,” says Kajal Boraste a feminist researcher at the London School of Economics and Political Science, who has worked with young women in rural Maharashtra for years.
‘I Have To Worry About My Leaky Roof’
Suman Singh, 31 works in an apartment block in Andheri east. She has an old black umbrella which she bought last year for Rs 150 but she couldn’t buy a new pair of rainproof sandals that could cost double.
“Barish me slipper se fisalne ka dar toh lagta hai, naya sandal lene ka man hota hai. Lekin phir sochti hoon, utne paise bete ke school ke kharche mein kaam aayenge (I worry about slipping on these old shoes and wish I could buy new ones. But it is also money I could use for my son’s needs at school),” said Singh.
For all these women, monsoons are not the season of popular Indian imagination – watching the rains over a hot cup of tea and pakoda. Living in a Mumbai slum, rains are all abouts leaking roofs, choked gutters, overflowing public toilets and mosquitos.
“Baarish aati hai toh ham sochte hai ki chhat pe abhi plastic dalna padega. Uske liye 1500-2000 rupaye chahiye, woh kahan se layen? Enjoy kaha se karenge bolo? (All I can think of is finding the money to buy a plastic sheet to cover the roof),” says Suman.
Covering the roof of her house every year is an additional expense for Shabana Ansari too. The 19-year-old lives in Annabhau Sathe Nagar in Govandi, an eastern suburb of Mumbai, and this year the family could not invest in a covering for the roof. “We keep buckets to catch the water that drips through the leaks in our roof,” she says.
Ansari is yet to buy an umbrella for the season. “I don’t go out when it’s raining hard. Otherwise I make do without an umbrella, I just take shelter inside a shop or building if I have to,” says Ansari.
Pooja Vijay, an activist who runs the Savitri-Fatima community libraries in the Govandi and Mankhurd areas, says most women she interacts with do not own umbrellas. “They always share them. Buying a new umbrella and monsoon footwear is a luxury so they just stitch up old umbrellas. Most young women and men who do promotional gigs outside railway stations and malls just use polythene bags to cover their head,” she says.
Young women in rural Maharashtra, have similar stories. Pranita Mondhe,18, is doing her BSc at Nashik’s KTHM College. She lives in a village, Shirasgaon, in Trayambak taluka. Pranita has five sisters and a brother. Her father works as a driver and mother is a mid- day meal cook at a government school. Pranita had to struggle to pay her fees for the first year, which is Rs 2750. Then there are the expenses on new books, notebooks, uniforms and bags. And her siblings have their own needs.
“There is no money left for umbrellas or raincoats at the end of the month. We have one umbrella between two sisters. We schedule our outdoor work according to availability,” she says. She sometimes also shares her school friend and neighbour Rupali’s umbrella.
“I had to go to Trayambak for my Class 12 coaching, around 7 km from my village. Sometimes in heavy rains I miss my class. If Rupali and I share an umbrella on our way to the coaching centre, our books and bags get wet,” says Mondhe, who hopes she will earn enough to buy herself a brightly coloured umbrella one day. “Pappa fakt kali chhatrich aanta karan tich swast milate (my father buys only black umbrellas because they are cheaper).” says Mondhe.
In our family we could afford to buy foldable, pretty umbrellas only after 2018, after our finances stabilised. A monsoon brightened by a colourful umbrella is something of a luxury for my friend too. “When I first came to Mumbai, I saw hundreds of colourful umbrellas and I was stunned. My monsoons had always been black, literally,” she says.
In the more affluent families of Maharashtra monsoon travel, especially to the ghats and their waterfalls, is something of a tradition. Pranita did go on one family trip four years ago, to the Dugarwadi waterfalls in Nashik not far from her village. But now her father says he cannot risk his children falling ill after being exposed to extreme weather.
Challenges at Workplace
Singh says monsoons are a time for falling sick frequently. She gets drenched on her way to work and then works through the day in wet clothes, washing, scouring, and swabbing. She recalls being humiliated by her employer when she asked for a cup of tea on one such miserable monsoon day when she felt cold and feverish.
“She told me: ek chaay bahar das rupaye ki milati hai, tujhe roj doh time chaay dungi to uska 600 rupaiya hoga (a cup of tea costs Rs 10 outside, if I gave you tea twice a day I would need to spend Rs 600 a month.” She remembers that she cried all the way home that day.
This reminded me of my mother’s ordeal at work. She would tell us that she was always expected to sit on the floor in the homes of her employers, not even offered a mat or a sheet to protect her from the damp which caused her legs to swell. These were acts of thoughtlessness she is yet to forget eight years after she stopped working. Her more ‘generous’ employers would give her their broken umbrellas. So she made sure that when we gave Maheshwari an umbrella, it was brand new.
Smita*, another domestic worker from Sakinaka, recalls her monsoon ordeal. It had been raining very heavily one day and she had asked her ‘madam’ to lend her an umbrella to pick up her son from school. “I promised to return it the next day. She told me to get an auto instead. I had only Rs 70 with me so an auto ride was out. I just covered my head with a polythene bag and dupatta and picked up my son,” she says.
Shabana Ansari’s mother runs a vada pav stall in Sathe Nagar. Monsoons are anyway a dull season for her business and this is made worse by the fact that she does not have an umbrella to protect her food stall. The plastic roof is simply not enough to keep off heavy rains and winds. And then the area near her stall gets flooded and filthy. Shabana’s father’s autorickshaw also needs to be repaired frequently in monsoons. No matter how hard the family works, there is never enough money to deal with monsoon troubles.
Kajal believes that the state should provide a monsoon allowance to its working class so it can afford essential rain gear and deal with monsoon-related health issues. “In foreign universities, college students, researchers get winter allowance as part of their scholarships for season-specific needs such as warm clothes. The Indian education system should adopt such practices, which will ease the life of students and mostly women at least,” she says.
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