I
After a night’s sleep intermittently interrupted by sharp, penetrative period cramps, announcing the arrival of a difficult cycle, my alarm rings at 7 am. It reminds me of what lies ahead – the continuous performance of joy, flirtation, charm, and anything that makes the people I was about to meet feel cared for, wanted, desired.
As I begin my day at the cafe I work at, I dig into the performance of desire I learnt as an adolescent girl when boys in older grades would look at me, trying to sneak a peek of my cleavage, sometimes visible between two buttons of my school shirt. I prepare. Using a borrowed crimson lip tint, some of my own thrifted jewelry, I perform the look of casual attractiveness. I venture out to the cafe which has granted me employment for five days a week through the season. The ‘season’, as is spoken in the (booming) hospitality industry in Goa, centred around tourism, begins in December and ends in February or March, depending on how many tourists the state welcomes that year.
Flirtation is an art; it’s play, I soon realise. I start to have fun with it. The desire in me grows, for the customers to ask my name, to enquire details about my life outside of the cafe, to be seen as the exotic, attractive stranger they meet on a short trip. When the guilt of indulging in vanity strikes, I tell myself that I am doing this for the benefit and satisfaction of the teenage me—the shy, self-conscious girl who hated the way her body looked, the ‘cute’ one who boys approached as the person who would facilitate access to her more attractive friends.
That day, I was not that girl. Suffering through unbearable pain in my abdomen, I did only what was necessary. The flirtation turned into contempt. Charm took a turn towards rudeness. I hated that my body was being used as a tool to serve these people, the people who were willing to encash their wealth for a few moments of flirtation with a stranger. I had to work through my pain at the slightest wave of their hand. All they needed to do was make eye contact, and I was theirs, smiling, conversing, responding to inquiries about my personal life, what I did after work, what I did besides this, where I bought my nice jewellery from.
Carefully measured details are exchanged. I answer their questions with more questions. Curiosities about their life come to my mind: Are they travellers? Do they live here? All my queries ultimately calculate their spending power. Can I sell them an expensive slice of cheesecake? Is it even worth trying? My body is tired. The pain in my abdomen is now clutching onto my lower back, ready to crawl towards my thighs. It’s difficult standing up for so long, but the cafe owner watches as I make my sale. I try harder, leaning on one foot and then the next.
I feel wetness on my leg as I walk back and forth taking and delivering orders. Maybe my leg brushed against the water dispenser in the kitchen while I was filling bottles.. The jeans feel heavier; I reason that running around will help dry it. I notice blood on my hand as it brushes against the fabric. The old shame of period blood engulfs my mind, but soon afterwards I remind myself of all the progress I’ve made since. It’s just period blood.
It’s natural. My body has a uterus, the uterus bleeds. Shame starts to wear off, paving the way for the disgust as the smell reaches up my nostrils. I need to use the toilet, wipe my leg, my arm, and my jeans. Just then, a hand goes up, “Excuse me? Can you bring me water directly from the tap and not from this bottle? I am uncomfortable with bottles”.
II
Until two months ago, I worked in what is popularly known as the ‘development sector’ (a term I would like to deconstruct, analyse, and destroy perhaps some other time), an affair which lasted seven years. I was surrounded by, and often building discourse on labour, agency, autonomy, rights. Those words had seeped into my vocabulary permeating into every crevice of my existence, enough for me to spit them out in any conversation, with or without context. I became an expert in bringing feminist perspectives into all leisurely hang-outs with friends, talking about rest as resistance, agency as paramount for all marginalised genders, and sat in restaurants feasting on platefuls of spaghetti carbonara and glasses of red wine, dissing the savarna agents of feminist politics today.
I had earned this. The benevolence which I could now afford to bestow upon domestic workers in my house, offering to pay for their child’s school fees, giving away gifts on Diwali and Eid. I made tall claims to know what struggle is, because I believed that I had experienced it. I had struggled with a job that paid 20k a month and traveled to remote villages, and now that I have reached a place where I could afford access to previously denied spaces, I had earned it. This was supposed to come at some point, and it had.
In my stint as a ‘development worker’, I worked on projects across remote villages in India, with groups of young adults, adolescents, and women. I had the creative freedom to use storytelling, movement, music, and PowerPoint presentations as part of my work. After engaging in models and frameworks of instructional design and multiple curricula focussed on ‘empowering’ underrepresented and marginalised groups, especially in rural India, I transcended to the sphere of international work. In the ‘development industrial complex’, international organisations remain at the top. They are the first ones to receive funds, and have the power to decide which organisations are worthy enough to implement their agendas with their local communities. With discourse and vocabulary around inclusion, representation, and intersectionality growing in the lexicon of those savvy with internet and academic verse, many of these organisations are also becoming increasingly open to employing people from marginalised genders and castes.
What slips between the crevices of this discourse-building is the labour that bodies of working-class women continue to do, both for it and in a way because of it. Development organisations today seem to have mastered the art of talking about class, caste, gender, disability, and intersectionality as a whole, but little is done in policy, practice, or employee training to understand how these categories are supposed to fundamentally shift ways of organisational functioning. An employee who spends a large part of her salary in supporting family members, medical costs for disabilities, childcare or housework, among a myriad other things is still expected to clock in
and clock out at the same time as someone for whom everything else is taken care of or is outsourced to another working-class woman’s labour. The mere entry into the organisation, or getting the job, is often considered an act of benevolence, after which the onus lies with the individual to help change the system in ways that may or may not support them eventually. The “extra” negotiations need to be asked for by them, by going through rounds of conversations, convincing, and compromise. This capitalistic system of aiming to extract labour from the bodies of all individuals in the same way, assuming all bodies to be the same, directly negates all the work that the sector is claiming to do. We are being extravagantly optimistic in believing that the mere act of introducing seemingly inclusive terms into our lexicon is helping the movement. In fact, it is only lending more strength to an already exploitative labour system which benefits from working-class bodies remaining at the disposal of this benevolence, as need be.
The right to rest, which the sector is increasingly harping on, is not merely the right to give employees ten days of no work, but it is to continually and radically dismantle the ways in which work itself is looked at on all days of the year. When extracting labour and time (in the forms of painful timesheets and unequal feedback processes) from employees is the norm, our blinders are only getting tighter.
III
This is my first time doing a working-class job. I grew up with the deep belief that if I laboured enough and if I was smart enough about it, one day I would gain access to the spaces that were closed to me. And I did. Feminist work opened doors for me that I may otherwise not have been privy to. It pushed me to speak up, to believe in myself, to afford luxuries that I had only looked at through glass doors in expensive markets. But as I happened to transition out and use my body to serve people in ways that are directly marked as such, I realised that I had spent most of my life aspiring for something that can only exist as exclusionary. The working class body, especially the woman’s body, remains acutely invisible. The bodies continue to labour and wither in the stories of development workers, being used to further the normative agendas of development, but fails to occupy the heart and imagination needed to build new worlds.
