Divorced, discarded and invisible, how a mother cleans hostel toilets to educate her daughters
TAQWA SHAFI
SRINAGAR, Feb 11: Before the hostel stirs to life—before alarms ring, slippers scrape the floor, and laughter echoes through corridors—she is already there.
At the break of dawn, under dim fluorescent lights, a 40-year-old woman bends over cold tiled floors with a plastic bucket and a frayed brush. The smell of disinfectant clings to her clothes, her skin, her breath. She scrubs toilets used by hundreds of girls, washes away stains left behind by strangers, and empties dustbins overflowing with the waste of lives far more comfortable than her own.
For the residents of the girls’ hostel, this cleanliness is routine.
For her, it is existence.
She is a sanitation worker—one of those people society looks through, not at. A woman whose labour is visible only when it is missing.
Years ago, her life looked very different. She married by choice, believing love would shield her from hardship. She entered what was considered a stable, financially secure family. But security, she learned too late, can be a fragile illusion—especially for women.
Over time, she gave birth to three daughters. One of them was born physically disabled, requiring lifelong care, patience and medical attention. Instead of support, the child became a reason for blame. Slowly, the warmth of marriage turned into hostility.
Then, without warning, her husband remarried.
She was not consulted. She was not prepared. She was simply discarded.
One day, she and her daughters were thrown out of the house that had once been her world. There was no maintenance, no settlement, no assurance. Only closed doors and silence.
“I begged him not to separate me from my children,” she recalls, her voice trembling. “I told him I had nowhere to go. But he had already chosen another life.”
She returned to her parental home hoping for refuge. Instead, she found judgment. Because she had married against her parents’ wishes—and into a family perceived as affluent—her return was met with resentment rather than compassion.
“They said, ‘You made your choice. Now face it,’” she says quietly.
With no real support and three daughters depending entirely on her, she rented a single-room accommodation—a cramped space that serves as bedroom, kitchen and shelter for four lives. It leaks in winter, suffocates in summer, but it is the only place she can call home.
That was the moment she decided not to wait for mercy.
Uneducated and with no employable skills, the only work she could find was cleaning toilets in a girls’ hostel. Every day, she scrubs floors stained by indifference, carries garbage others refuse to touch, and wipes away what society wants hidden.
She works silently. Often ignored. Sometimes openly disrespected.
“There are days when people wrinkle their noses when I pass,” she says, forcing a tired smile. “But I tell myself—this smell feeds my daughters.”
Her hands bear the cost of survival—rough, cracked, scarred by chemicals. In winter, they bleed. Gloves are a luxury she cannot regularly afford.
When her shift ends, her labour does not.
In the evenings, under a weak bulb, she stitches clothes for neighbours to earn a few extra rupees. Her sewing machine hums late into the night, long after her daughters have fallen asleep beside her. On most nights, she sleeps no more than three or four hours.
Her greatest fear is not hunger.
It is education.
Two of her daughters attend a government school. Her eldest—the one with a disability—needs constant care and frequent hospital visits, expenses that often push her to the brink.
Yet, despite everything, hope refuses to die.
Recently, her second daughter passed her Class 10 board examination, scoring 418 marks—without tuition, without coaching.
“She studied on her own,” the mother says, her eyes filling with quiet pride. “I could not afford help, but she proved she is strong.”
Society advises her to give up.
“People tell me to stop their education and teach them tailoring,” she says. “But I want them to stand on their own feet. I don’t want them to live the life I was forced into.”
When rent is due and money falls short, she skips meals. When her daughter needs medicine, she postpones buying clothes for herself.
“I can tolerate hunger,” she says softly. “But I cannot tolerate seeing my children cry.”
Being divorced in this society adds another layer of cruelty. Landlords hesitate to rent to her. Some question her character. Others demand advance payments she cannot afford.
Still, she refuses to bow.
Despite exhaustion, humiliation and relentless uncertainty, she carries herself with dignity. She does not ask for pity. She asks only for opportunity.
“I clean toilets,” she says firmly. “But my daughters will not.”
Her story is not just about poverty. It is about abandonment, gendered injustice, and the invisible backbone of society—sanitation workers whose labour keeps spaces livable while their own lives remain unbearably fragile.
Every morning, hostel corridors gleam. Students walk past spotless floors without a second glance.
Few stop to think about the woman who made them shine.
Behind those clean tiles stands a mother fighting—scrub by scrub, stitch by stitch—to ensure her daughters inherit dignity, not despair.
