Precious Lessons From My Late Mother

I was born into a fairly well-off family. We enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, and my father’s salary was enough to afford numerous fulltime home-help or ‘domestic staff’.

One of the finest things that I remember from my childhood days about my late mother was her compassionate treatment of our home-help, so that they were, in a sense, an integral part of our family. Within the constraints of a hierarchical employer-employee relationship, she related to them with care and genuine concern for their well-being and also a certain sort of respect. I don’t remember her ever referring to them as ‘servants’. I never heard her once shouting at them or even speaking harshly or disrespectfully to them. They ate the same food that we ate, and as much as they wanted to. Occasionally, she would give them gifts—for themselves and perhaps for members of their families. She would speak to them kindly and would sometimes even enjoy lighthearted conversations with them. Maybe she would also generously help out with their children’s education, marriages and employment. She fully trusted them, so much so that when we went out of town for a vacation, she would leave the house in their care. When she and my father would go out for a social occasion—which was very often—she would leave us children in their care, confident that they would look after us well. She would leave her handbag, containing her purse, lying about anywhere in the house she chose and be elsewhere and didn’t seem to suspect that someone from among the home-help might pilfer it. It was likely in large measure for the way she treated them that many of the home-help we had in my childhood days stayed on and worked with our family for several decades. I think they might have had deep affection, or maybe even love, for her.

Without saying so in so many words, through the way she treated our home-help my mother demonstrated an important lesson about how to relate with others, particularly those considered ‘lower’ in the social hierarchy. The home-help we had were from different religious, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds, but this did not seem to matter at all to my mother, who, through the way she related with them, provided yet another unspoken lesson—to treat people as fellow people, rather than on the basis of the social group into which they had been born or with which they were identified.

Truly precious lessons these!