‘I could’ve become a police officer’

“I could have become a police officer if only my father had let me study,” she says wistfully before turning towards the sink, loaded with sticky utensils and foaming with soap. It is 9 a.m. and she will be dashing off to other apartments in the gated community. Anitha didi, as she is known in the colony where she works as a domestic labourer, still has five more homes to go to before she can begin the journey back home. From Nallagandla, the upscale suburb where she works, in north-west Hyderabad, back to her home in Patancheru in neighbouring Sangareddy district, is a 10-kilometre journey.

Anitha Rathod, 25-year-old and already a mother of four, belongs to the Lambadi community, listed as a Scheduled Tribe in Telangana. She is among the many migrant workers employed within the gated communities of Hyderabad - a city that ranks among the top five in the country for attracting migrant labour. Working long hours, she needs to leave behind her extended family in Challagidda thanda, her children with her parents in native Maineli, and also give up on her dreams.

Every morning, her day begins at about 4 a.m. with cooking and washing clothes, cleaning the house. At 5.30 a.m. she boards a bus to nearby Lingampally in Ranga Reddy district. And from there takes an auto for Rs. 20 to reach the gated community in Nallagandla by 6 a.m. The Telangana government’s Maha Lakshmi Scheme, introduced in 2023, offers free travel for women in state transport buses, and that helps Anitha save on some portion of the commute to her workplace.

Nine hours later, close to 3 p.m. after she has cleaned several houses in the colony, she embarks on the return journey, reaching in time to make dinner for her family and attend to other household tasks.

Her husband has not had a steady job as long as she can remember. “He doesn’t help, be it paying the rent for the house, or taking care of the children when they come home, or managing the household,” she says.

She is talking to us as we follow her through the twists and turns of a clean, narrow lane in Patancheru, where she lives. The lane gets wider and busier as you go, past a huge zilla parishad high school for girls, past the weekly vegetable market, past the little carts selling clothes, toys, sweets and more, past the minaret of a mosque to a quiet cluster of houses.

For her single room home with pucca walls and a bathroom, Anitha pays a rent of Rs. 5,000 every month. She has to pay extra for water and electricity. Outside her room is the only tap that brings drinking water once every two days. Occasionally, her husband fills a few vessels with water and stores them. A big pile of garbage is lying right outside a small field at a little distance. “People just throw garbage here; the municipality truck comes only once in a month to collect it,” Anitha says. She pays Rs. 100 towards monthly garbage collection. Two thirds of the roughly Rs. 25,000 she makes each month goes into running the house.

“I have seen nothing but hard work from childhood,” she says, recalling how her father sent her to graze buffaloes in the fields when she was in Class 5. Her younger brothers continued to study in private schools, but she was forced to drop out. “Sab chale jaate to ghar mein kaam kaun karte bolke maare mereku [My father would say if everyone were to go to school who would work in the house – and hit me while saying that],” she says with a nervous chuckle, her palm covering her mouth.

“I was nine when I started taking the buffaloes out to graze. I used to ride them.” Soon after, she was sent to work in the sugarcane fields. “Kids working in the fields earned around 10,000-12,000 rupees in a month or two, that’s it,” says Veena, Anitha’s younger brother. “Cutting sugarcane is gruelling work, and has its hazards too,” he adds.

“We used to work 15 hours a day, even when it got dark, cutting cane with our sickle, tying up bunches. Then we walked with those heavy bundles from the fields to the main road to load them into trucks,” Anitha says. “My hands and legs used to be covered in gashes when I cut saanta [sugarcane stalks],” she says, pointing at her limbs.

“There were no first-aid kits then. If you got a cut, they either pour the sugarcane juice on it, or quickly tear a piece from their clothing and bandage it. No injections either,” says Anitha’s brother.

“I wanted to become a cricketer,” Veena says. “I was good at it and played in the leagues in Hyderabad too. My father supported me, and I even got selected, but it all came to an end when they asked me for 10 lakh rupees.” But he and brothers, however, got to pursue their studies unlike Anitha and three of her sisters.

Anitha was barely 12 when her marriage was arranged. “Our children are married off early, girls by the time they are 12 or 13, and boys when they are 16 or 17,” she says. “I was keen to study more, but I had to listen to my elders. You always listen to your elders, don’t you? When I got married, I could not even understand what was happening!” She says with a laugh.

For her wedding Anitha remembers her father gave Rs. 14,000 to her husband and some gold and other jewellery worth Rs. 30,000 to her. Her in-laws sold all her gold. She continued working on the fields even after marriage. “Just 20 days after giving birth to my first child. It was an operation, and I was asked to return to cutting sugarcane,” she says. “I had to have many children because if a Lambadi woman does not give birth to a son, her husband abandons her.”

Violence against women, she adds, is common in her community. She recalls her father’s violent bouts with his first wife, and then against her mother, his second wife. “My own father at times used to drink a lot. He married twice, and he used to hit his first wife so much that she fled from him. His second wife, my mother found it hard to walk because of how much my father used to hit her.”

Anitha's husband is not quite different in his treatment of his wife. “He does not give me any money or anything and starts hitting me if I ask him to get something, even for the kids,” she says. Raising four children without help from her husband has proved tough for her.

Some months ago, Anitha needed money to take care of her younger daughter, who has a heart problem and needed to be taken from Narayankhed to Bidar in Karnataka for scans ordered by the doctor. To cover expenses like these, she has started putting Rs. 5,000 in chit funds (a financial arrangement among a group of people in a community) every month. And she has been made to believe that after the deposit duration of two years is over, she will make Rs. 1,05,000 plus an interest of Rs. 15,000.

Sugarcane work was better than domestic work, she feels. “They used to give us an advance, even more than one lakh rupees. It used to help with sudden expenses if the children fell sick,” she says. Anitha sometimes thinks of going back to that work. “Saanta kaatne mein kaam rahta, magar paisa bhi rahta [Sugarcane cutting is a lot of work, but there is also money],” she says.

Until she makes that return journey to her village, perhaps some day, she continues to take that morning bus and auto to the upscale Hyderabad neighbourhood—for another long day of washing, swabbing and cleaning.