The Tank Doesn't Care What You Call It

My grandmother cleaned latrines by hand. My mother cleaned drains. I clean tanks, the modern way, with a rope and a mask that doesn't always work and a contractor who pays by the job, not by the hour, so nobody stands around checking if the air is safe first. That's the whole history of my family in four sentences. Someone asked me once if things had improved across three generations. I said yes. I did not say how much.

My husband died in a tank in 2019. I want to say that plainly because plain is the only way I can say it without my chest closing up. He went down at eleven in the morning. A private house, an overflowing tank, a man who offered him two thousand rupees to clear it before evening. No mask. No rope tied to anything. Nobody standing at the top counting minutes. He was down there four minutes, maybe five, before the gas took him.

I didn't know it was gas at first. Nobody told me right away. I found out the way everyone in this line of work finds out, slowly, in pieces, from neighbors who heard before I did. That is its own kind of cruelty, being the last to know the shape of your own husband's death.

He used to tell our daughters he worked at a warehouse. I knew what he actually did. He didn't want them knowing. I understand why now more than I did then. There's a shame stitched into this work that has nothing to do with the work itself and everything to do with who's forced to do it, and even the men doing it every day carry that shame home and try to keep it off their children.

I went back to the same kind of work four months after he died. People act surprised when I say this. What did they think I would do. There is no pension for a sewer worker's widow that arrives faster than hunger does. The contractor who sent my husband down into that tank is still working. Still hiring. I have seen him twice at the market since. He nods at me. I nod back. This is normal here. This is what normal looks like.

My son is eleven. I have not decided yet whether I will let him do this work when he's old enough, and I say "yet" like there's a decision coming, some morning when I'll wake up with an alternative in hand, but I know there probably isn't one. My mother didn't have one either. Her mother didn't. The government has a scheme, I've heard, with a different kind of job attached to it, training, a small loan. I have not seen it reach anyone I know. I am not saying it doesn't exist. I am saying it hasn't found its way to this street yet, and I am not holding my breath for the next one to open before my son turns fifteen.

My grandmother cleaned latrines by hand. My mother cleaned drains. I clean tanks, the modern way, with a rope and a mask that doesn't always work and a contractor who pays by the job. Someone asked me once if things had improved across three generations. I said yes. I still haven't said how much.

Translated By: Gowthamm Mandala