As I write this review, I am reminded of a snippet of a news from a newspaper: Kapil Misra, a onetime stalwart of the Aam Admi Party who for the last several years has been with the BJP, has filed his papers for the impending Delhi election for the Karawal Nagar constituency.
How tragic, and how ironical, that the person whose presence and threats triggered off the violence that destroyed Syeda’s home in 2020, should have returned to the same area to fight an election. Like so much else in Syeda’s life, the truth is consistently stranger than fiction.
Who is Syeda X? That question lies behind The Many Lives of Syeda X : The Story of an Unknown Indian, (Juggernaut, 2024), Neha Dixit’s remarkable, quiet, and yet devastating account of one woman’s – or perhaps I should say an ordinary woman’s – life.
One woman, who is actually every woman – she is the domestic worker you see walking down the road in front of your home every day, she is the young woman stitching clothes to earn an income in her home, she is the toilet attendant in the mall you visit, she is the vegetable vendor who stands by the side of the road, the construction workers who lugs kilos of cement in the house that’s being built next door, the rag picker who gets chased out of the gated colony where you live.
The Many Lives of Syeda X : The Story of an Unknown Indian, Neha Dixit, Juggernaut, 2024.
Or she is all of these, for the likelihood is, that at one point or other in her life she has worked at many or all of these things.
She is also the woman whose labour holds together so much about the lives of “people like us”, middle class, well off, urban, educated, privileged. She cleans the almonds we buy in fancy packs from gourmet stores, collects their broken bits and pieces that go into the fancy cookies we eat with our tea, stitches buttons and pockets onto the jeans we all wear. And she is also the woman whose labour holds together her own family with the meagre income she brings in, even as her husband drinks away what he earns.
It’s not that Syeda is not a real-life character, who exists in the here and now. She has parents, grandparents, a husband, children, friends, co-workers. She lives (when she can), eats (if there is food), works (at any and every job, sometimes several at one time), and sometimes, just sometimes, she manages to spend time with her girlfriends, watching movies, giggling and exchanging notes.
But most of all, she works and works and works to keep body and soul together, to feed her family, to have a roof over her head.
She’s one of millions and millions of such women workers in India. But she doesn’t count. Or, more accurately, as a worker, she does not exist. Some years ago, in the organisation in which I work, we initiated a research project on women and work.
The constant moving of women from job to job in short periods
We began with a question that puzzled us: statistics showed a disturbing fall in India’s female workforce participation rate. Were women really dropping out of work? How could this be? For everywhere you looked, women were working ALL the time. If anything, it was the men who were lounging around often.
It was when we turned our eyes to women like Syeda that we began to see a different reality: a continuous, uncertain, precarious cycle in which women did nothing but work, often moving from job to job in short periods of time. Perhaps this was one reason data could not catch them.
When Covid did away with their jobs as domestic workers, they turned to home based production, some took to sex work, when a factory opened up nearby, they went there; when a mall came up, they moved to that. Basically, they went where work took them, but it was rare that they managed to stay in any job ‘permanently’.
And because of this constant ‘job mobility’ (importantly, not a choice but a necessity), these workers were difficult to count, and campaigns to ensure better working conditions for them were more or less doomed.
As Neha’s painstaking and meticulous research shows us, the changeability of women’s labour, or indeed of the labour of the poor as a whole, has little to do with choice or preference. That is a luxury they don’t have. Instead, it’s the larger world around them that impacts their lives so directly – climate change forces them to migrate, the city beckons as a place to make a life, factories are set up illegally and shut down arbitrarily and they have to move, violence – actual and as a threat – plays a big role, especially if you belong to a minority religious group.
As Syeda says, speaking of the communal attacks on Muslims in the wake of Advani’s rath yatra: ‘Till then we had known hunger, grief, sorrow and frustration, like everyone else. But this was the first time we experienced terror because of our religion.’
The larger story of ‘India’ and the complexities of “modernity”
In setting Syeda’s life, and that of the people around her, against these larger developments, Neha Dixit also skilfully weaves in the larger story of ‘India’ and the complexities of “modernity”, attentive all the time to what modernisation means for the poor and vulnerable. And yet, unlike so much writing about the poor, Dixit is never patronising.
Indeed, her restrained, unadorned prose, does not turn her characters into victims, or indeed gloss over their ‘flaws’. Instead, she brings a storyteller’s skill to her characters who, within the space of a few spare lines, become real people, oppressed, exploited and yet, able to sometimes negotiate with power, and other times defeat it by just stepping away and, on rare occasions, confront it (as Syeda does when she joins a union), vent their anger at it, and win the battle.
Years ago, as a publisher, I had the good fortune to be able to publish an autobiography by a young woman, Baby Halder, who had lived a life much like Syeda’s – precarious, discriminatory, exploitative, violent – until a kind hearted employer offered her a way out.
While reading Baby’s book, I remember being struck by the constant courage to put aside loss and disappointment, pick up the pieces, and just start again. No time to grieve, no time for regret or remorse, the only thing to do was to keep moving on.
Of joy, friendships and support
But, as Neha’s book shows us, in the midst of all this there is the possibility of joy, of friendships and support. This happens for Syeda when a woman who comes to be known as Radiowali, provides a space in which the women come together and talk and sing and dance and share jokes.
It happens when they form a trade union and stand up to exploitative employers and win small victories. It happens when, as a group, they fight and succeed in securing a higher price for peeling and cleaning almonds, impacting not only their neighbourhood but the international market.
When Neha Dixit brings her book to a close and leaves Syeda, not much has changed in her life. She’s lost her son, and her daughter – who has been her mainstay but with whom Syeda has a complicated relationship which somewhat resembles what she herself has been through as a woman – has married a man of her choice and will soon move away.
But these are not earthshaking changes – death, marriage, departures, all of these are the stuff of daily life. Syeda’s story then offers no dramatic closure, no drumrolls that herald change. Instead, her husband Akhmal cooks her a meal and she picks up her tiffin and heads off to job no x in Tronica city.
It is precisely for this quietness, this matter-of-factness, this simplicity and truthfulness that this book must be read. It offers those of us who live with privilege, a mirror to the casual cruelty and indifference towards those less privileged, that informs our lives.
Urvashi Butalia is a feminist publisher and writer based in Delhi. Among her publications is the award-winning oral history of Partition: The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India, Penguin, India, 1998; Duke University Press, 2000.