Amma is back

By Dhananjani Silva, Pic by Berty Mendis.

For more than a decade they had thought she was dead. So it was a happy and tearful reunion indeed for the family of N.G Mallika when she returned to her motherland last week after 16 long years, having gone to Saudi Arabia as a housemaid in 1991.

During her absence, things had changed drastically …her two sons and the daughter who were just 11, 8 and 7 years old when she left, had grown up and become mothers and fathers themselves. Forty-seven-year-old Mallika, says that she was, at first, quite amazed, but overjoyed, to see her grandchildren.

What was the cause of Mallika’s disappearance for the past 16 years? The Sunday Times visited her at her home in Weragama, Wadduwa to find out. It was the poverty trap that had first led her to consider leaving her young family and going to West Asia. “My husband was working as a labourer earning a meagre salary, barely enough to fill the stomachs of our little ones. We had no permanent place to live. Meanwhile a person named Ranjini in the area, promised me that she would find me a job in West Asia. I decided that it would be a better option for me to overcome the hardships faced by our family members.”

Reunited at last: Mallika with her children, all grown up now.

In addition to the money that Ranjini took from her for the visa and the other documents, she was also charged an additional amount on the basis that she would be insured before the departure, Mallika recalls. Having reached Saudi Arabia, she was taken to a house there to work as a housemaid. “I had to take care of seven children and the paralysed old mother of the employer, as well as doing the house work,” she said.

Many were the hardships that Mallika had suffered. She says she worked from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m, enduring both verbal and physical abuse, sleepless nights - a similar plight to that of many Lankan migrant workers in West Asia. Worse still, Mallika said she was forced to work in another four houses of her employer’s relatives which were in the neighbourhood.

She had no choice but passive acceptance as refusing the orders of the master meant severe beatings and further harassment for her, she says.“Once the elder son hit me on my head with a hot water bottle and my head was badly injured. That day I ran out of the house on to the road hoping to escape, but they came and caught me,” she told us.

When after two years her contract was over, she was detained by the employer, who took away her passport saying that this was the general rule of the country. Mallika recounts that she was not allowed to go out of the house and as a result she could not correspond with her family in Sri Lanka for 13 years. The letters she had given her mistress, asking her to post them to her family were torn and put into the dustbin in front of her very eyes, she said. All her pleas were of no avail.

“For the first two years they paid me a little salary, but at the end of two years, all the money I collected was taken back from me by force. I continued to work like that for 13 years and 2 months. Then I got chickenpox and they dumped me at a camp site saying they no longer wished to have a Lankan housemaid,” she said.

The camp, she says, housed as many as 480 inmates, most of them being Sri Lankan migrant workers. “They too had faced a similar plight…some had even been tortured and were far worse off than me... their hands and legs were broken…and they had been burnt,” she says.

The camp turned out to be a blessing in disguise for Mallika and she recalls with gratitude the generosity and concern of those in charge.

“While I was there, I wrote a letter to my daughter and handed it to the lady in charge there who in turn handed it over to the Sri Lankan embassy there. It was because of this that I got the opportunity to come back,” she said adding that she is thankful to the officials at the Foreign Employment Bureau for expediting her return.

For Mallika’s daughter, Nilushika Shamali having her mother back has been something she never thought possible but she was also carrying the burden of not having told her of the death of her husband in the intervening years. “My father was upset over my mother’s sudden disappearance- he did everything possible to find her. He used to work four days a week only; the rest of the days he would visit police stations, various departments and officials trying to find out about my mother. He used to take us with him every time he went, and I still remember accompanying him to the Foreign Employment Bureau as an eight-year-old. He used to cry at nights saying he will somehow find her.”

“When all his efforts were fruitless, he took to drinking as he thought that our mother had died. He lost his memory at the end…and he used to just walk on the roads, muttering to himself. Finally he met with an accident and died,” Nilushika said. The children now face the prospect of breaking the news to Mallika who has been asking for her husband. Having returned to the country, she had also asked her children to take her to see her mother, not knowing that she too had passed away.

She left when she was 31 and though she is now savouring every moment with her kith and kin and the grandchildren she never even knew she had, Mallika can never get back the years she has lost.