With great shame I recall the pithy sum we paid our servants in the old days. Till this day I am haunted by the face of the grizzled old "Mochi" or shoemaker/repairer, who came from door to door to repair our shoes He re-soled my shoes for a very tiny sum of money. I recalled how he looked at the work at hand, the small piece of leather in his hand, and figured out how much profit he would make.......a few paisa. The "Bisti" or waterman who drew water from the open well that we shared with several other people/ He was gaunt and grizzled, and drew water with a rope and pulley, and came to our kitchen and bathroom to fill the clay water cisterns. His pay for the month cuold not have been more than 3 rupees. Painful memories but that is in the past. Where I live in Goa today, things have changed dramatically. Casual laborers are non existent. We have to compete with others to get casual laborers from Bihar, Chattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand etc. We have to go and pick them up from where the laborers gather, give them a ride to our homes, and pay them Rs. 700/- per month for a total of perhaps 7 hours of actual work. And even these laborers have disappeared and returned to their hometowns because of the current Covid-19 crisis. Children of the laborers who served our village in my childhood, mainly helping tend our rice fields, repair our roof before the monsoon rains, and various other menial tasks, are now well educated, with some of them doctors, engineers, and government servants and bank clerks. They all own cars and scoters, and have built palatial homes in the village. And so it should be. The landed lass known as bhatkars are living in the memories of days gone by, with their children mostly clerks, with a few aspiring to go to college.Our rice fields lie fallow, our cashew plantations remain un-picked (by the owners) and the bhatkar class now mainly rely on remittances from their children, serving on cruise lines, or in the gulf states. If there are indentured servants, it is definitely not in the Goa that I know.
