For Champabai Who Made The Invisible Visible

A few days ago, I received the news that she had died unexpectedly, collapsing while she was out grocery shopping in their hometown, Howrah, where she lived with her husband, sons, and grandchildren. She was in her mid-sixties.

Champabai was much more than my children’s nanny. She was my friend, sister, and ally. And I was, in different ways, her daughter, her friend, her didi and her madam. Without her, I could never have raised my boys, Amartya and Agastya, nor become the woman I am today. For Amartya, she was his most beloved grandmother, the one who could comically lumber around the living room, pretending to be a giraffe, and sing beautifully to comfort him when he was unwell.

I broke down when I heard the news of her death. When the tears subsided, I was left with a question I had never considered before: How do I grieve Champabai? What is the protocol to honour and respect her life? Her love, her labour, her lifetime of caregiving?

Domestic helpers like Champabai, who spend their entire lives looking after families — their own, and other families that slowly come to be their own — do not get remembered in large prayer meetings or elaborate obituaries. Their work is intimate, essential and, too often, invisible. We think of them as family, but do we honour them as family when they pass away?

My family and I took antim darshan over a video call; we will hold a puja for her soon and, of course, continue to support her family financially through their bereavement. Her portrait is already there alongside our family photographs. But beyond the rituals, there was a larger role that she played in our lives that needs cherishing.

When Champabai left us last year, I had given her a collection of photographs of her time with us, and letters, in a photo book. After hearing about her passing, I shared a soft copy of it with close friends and family who knew her, and requested them to share their memories of her. Several of them recalled affectionately how she had tended to their children when they visited us. These are messages that we will hold on to in our grief. But more importantly, they led me to a larger question: Who is immortalising the everyday labour of women like Champabai? Who records the feeding, bathing, soothing, cooking, cleaning and comforting through which other lives become possible?

I found unexpected help in the young visual artist Saviya Lopes, who turns local and personal histories into art. One of her most striking works is a painting of three women sitting at a kitchen table, surrounded by domestic objects — breast pumps, milk bottles and fruit waiting to be cut.

It reminds me of Champabai, who steered me through breastfeeding, babies and domesticity, and in doing so enabled me to have a life beyond them, as a working mother. Much of the work I have been able to make visible in the world was possible because of the work she did that remained largely invisible. The painting will remind me that the labour was never mine alone. Behind it was a cheerful, loud, loving woman who helped my sons and me become who we are today.

Piramal Raje is a writer and public speaker