The life of a Karachi maasi (servant)

Bismillah, alhamdulillah.

As we trundle down University Road heading south towards the centre of Karachi I look to my left and spot some very basic tent like housing. Three and half such tent houses sit together about a hundred feet above University road. The elevation they sit on continues a further 100 feet above them and lies in an area  known as Block 1, Gulistan Jauhar.  On the top of this hill sit large water tanks funded by the World Aid Fund that supply water to the surrounding areas.

My attention shifts to the back of the car as I am given a quick precis of the basic life of a maasi or servant lady. These ladies come from the interior of Sindh province and work as domestic maids washing clothes, dish washing, sweeping the house, cleaning bathroom and toilets and in some cases cooking. Each one of these tasks is charged at 500 RS per month, so if you ask the maasi to perform more than one task you pay another 500 and so on. Their average monthly income is around 7-8000 RS as they work for around 3-6 households.

The detailed run down about a maasi’s life had been prompted by my question about who the tents on the side of the hill belonged to. The answer was maasis. These ladies come from interior Sindh and camp out in such make shift accommodation. In places such as the side of the hill their rental costs are virtually zero, sometimes they set up camp on plots of land where landowners charge them 500 RS per month or even let them stay just asking them to move on once any construction starts on the land. There is no running water or sewerage system that reaches these temporary tent houses but some luxuries of life such as electricity manage to make their way in. This happens courtesy of a 500 RS (the going rate) bribe of the local area electricity inspector, who attaches an illegal wire to the main electricity cables running overhead, they manage to get enough electricity to power a fan, a fridge and perhaps a television.

Life is very tough and the average maasi is a very thinly built but sturdy lady dressed in the traditional Pakistani ladies shalwaar khamees with her dupatta carefully balanced on her head passing behind her ears in that typical Pakistani style. The lady in the back continues describing the life of her maasi. She works with her daughter in their house doing the ironing plus washing, dish washing, a daily brush of the premises and a clean of the toilets and bathrooms. She pays her 2000 RS per month. Her daughter is currently helping her out.

The maasis children whether girls or boys are seldom educated. Boys if lucky may find themselves being educated up to the beginning of secondary level if they accompany their parents to Karachi or are placed with a family who take simple work from the boy or girl and in return agree to fund their education and given them time off for education.

Back in their rural areas they face the blight of a poor education system. It seems that the waderas (landlords) are not interested in promoting education and actively conspire to make sure that there is little to offer in terms of free education in these areas. It is difficult to judge whether this is really the case or not but it is an accusation that I have seen levelled at the powerful landlords in the rural areas time and again by a wide variety of Pakistanis across many years.

Even in cosmopolitan Karachi maasi children face discrimination. One maasi in the local area had brought her son and tried to enrol him into a madrassah, but was refused on the grounds her son was not Punjabi. Occasionally  boys are enrolled into government schools but even in this situation they are usually not educated beyond 14 by which time they are married off and have to start a family life of their own.

Maasi’s usually come with their husbands to Karachi, the husbands work as gatekeepers for other families and the aim in life is to try and build a permanent house back in their villages. When December time comes children in alternation with their parents return back to their villages to help with the annual harvest. Some maasis may be lucky and get a break and are able to go abroad where they will earn around 16000 RS as a basic salary and usually manage to get a total of 40,000 RS, at least if they make it to Saudi Arabia. One such returnee who had spent time in Saudi Arabia had come back with a different attitude, I was told.

She would sweep the floor and then tell the madam of the house that if the children dropped any rubbish where she had already swept the floor she would not sweep it again. She was also very particular about ironing clothes and insisted she would not iron clothes that were not turned the right way round and she would not do any extra duties that were not in her initial agreement. The lady who had been employing her was quite surprised by this behavior and was told by another maasi that she had learned all these new way of doing things after she had come back from Saudi Arabia. An ironic world indeed when labourers learn about human rights after returning from Middle East.

Technorati Tags: Karachi domestic workers,maasi – domestic workers,cost of domestic worker in Karachi,rural areas in Sindh,population migration,Gulistan jauhar,water supply Karachi,education in rural areas,human rights in Saudi Arabia