What will follow in the lines below is not a book review of sorts. It will rather be an amateur documentation of how a book can touch lives and leave its imprint, writes SUBHASREE GHATAK
I had been hearing about this book by the award-winning journalist Neha Dixit quite a lot, and I decided to read it when I saw one of my favourite authors, Shrayana Bhattacharyya post about it on Instagram. Ever since that day till yesterday, I have read this book on the daily commute, amidst work, at the airport, on the airplane, in the cab, while waiting outside my supervisor’s cabin, while cooking, while eating and every other place my routine expected me to be in. I didn’t read the book to dissect the art and craft of it; instead, I allowed it to dissect me and how to put in words, the many ways in which it has succeeded. I am writing this down for digital archives so that year on year I get reminded to come back to it. Come back to it at a time when I would have changed locations, jobs and maybe a part of myself. I pledge to keep the many lives of Syeda in the deepest corners of my heart. Syeda represents the precarities of lives that depend on the brink of the informal labour market in the capital city of Delhi. She has switched 50 jobs in 30 years of her life since migrating to Delhi from Banaras. The story intricately weaves the complex structure involving family occupation, migration, piece rate wages, informality, female friendships, marital relations, childcare, the drudgery of domestic life, majoritarian politics, and everything else on the margins. The story of Syeda is the story of many unnamed and unheard women whose lives are portraits of the Indian informal working class to whom minimum daily wages are also a luxury. The book delves into so many themes that unpacking all of them is an emotional task. A lot of economics and policy research has conveniently chosen to remain blind-eyed to the informal workforce. Moreover, the issue of bigotry and majoritarian politics that has misshaped the recent face of the country is deeply saddening and frightening. To adhere to either a book review or to an economic analysis of the informal workforce that my passion or profession demands me to do will limit the emotions with which I would want to talk about this book. Typing all of this into a document, the precarity of the lived lives of so many people while being shielded away from a scratch is just a reminder of sheer privilege and accident of birth. At this juncture, there are too many emotions to process and I would want to stop here and urge whosoever was patient enough to read till the end to please pick this book up and allow it to gently and fiercely dissect you.
