Shikasta

I found Ranee with a group she had saved from the whirlpools not far from the frontier. I asked if I might travel with her, so that I could make contact as I had to, and she agreed. So I went on with her. Her charges were as stu

INDIVIDUAL EIGHT

Her type and situation were endemic on Shikasta, repeating themselves over and over again, and this had been so ever since inequalities of position, and expectation, first appeared. Because females were at risk, needed help during the time their offspring were small (I repeat obvious facts, since basic facts tend always to be those most easily overlooked), because of this dependency of women, they have at all times found themselves in positions where they had no alternative but to become a servant.

A noble word.

A noble condition.

In Shikasta a race dominant in one epoch may be subservient in the next. A race or people in a condition of slavery in one time or place may within a few decades become master of others. The roles of the females have adjusted accordingly, and whenever a people, a country, a race, is down, then its females, doubly burdened, will be used as servants in the homes of the dominating ones.

Such a female, often to the detriment of her own children, whom she may even have to abandon, may be the prop, the stay, the support, the nourishment of an entire family, and perhaps for all of her life. For her working life, for such a servant may be turned out in old age without any more than what she came with. Yet she may have been the bond that held the family together.

An unregarded if not despised person, someone at least considered inferior, and thought of not so much as an individual as a role - a servant: but this female in fact being the centre of a family, "its point of balance - it is a situation that has been re-created over and over again, in every time, every culture, every place...

The example of it that was my concern occurred in an island at the extreme west of the Northwest fringes. It had been, for centuries, a poor place, much exploited by other countries.

A family priding itself on its "blood," but without much money, employed a poor girl from the village. Because of economic conditions, marriage was never easy on the island, but the reason this girl did not marry, never even considered it, was that she was emotionally absorbed into the needs of this family by the time she was fifteen. She cleaned the house - a large one - did the cooking, and looked after the children as they were born. She worked as hard as any slave ever did, and accepted low wages, because she knew the family was not rich, and because she had never been taught to expect much - and because she loved them. She would spend a month's wages on a toy for a child or a dress for a loved little girl.

Several times mother and father quarrelled, and separated: then she looked after the children, held things together until the parents were united again.

The children, five of them, grew up while she grew old. They left home and the island for other countries. The two now old parents were in a large house, increasingly rickety, alone, with nothing in common but memories of having had a family. They decided to emigrate. One evening they told their servant, who had now been working for them for fifty years, that her services were no longer needed.

They took off, leaving her to clean and lock up the house, which was to be sold, and walk back to the village where she now had no tie but a widowed sister, who grumblingly offered her a home. The servant had nothing at all, only her clothes, and these were mostly cast-offs given her by the family.

It took months for her to understand what had happened to her. She had never seen herself as exploited, as badly treated. She had loved the family, collectively and as individuals, and their lives had been her life. They had not loved her, but she believed they had, "in their way." She had often thought them careless, thoughtless: but they had charmed her, delighted her! A kiss from one of the little girls, a smile from "the lady" and "I don't know what we would do without you!" - this had seemed enough.

She was numbed, low in spirits, and subject to crying fits "for no blessed reason I can see."

The sister gossipped indignantly about the treatment of her sister. A young woman in the village who had aspirations to journalism wrote up the story, and it appeared in a local newspaper, and was later reprinted in a big newspaper on the neighbouring island.

The servant was brought even lower by these events. She dreaded that the family might think her ungrateful.

She received a reproachful letter from the parents, now on an island where it was su

The servant found herself being snarled and growled and wrangled over, while she remained passive, not knowing what had happened or how.

She wrote an incoherent letter to her former employers, full of phrases like "I didn't know anything about it!" "They did it without telling me."

Now they took advice from a lawyer. This ought to have been Taufiq, for, properly handled, the case would have exposed a good many areas of exploitation. He would have pointed out, for instance, that this situation, the woman working for any number of years in the most intimate service of a family, only to be dismissed with as little consideration as would be given to an animal, and less, in some cases, was at that time prevalent - and he would have been able to cite a dozen countries, bringing witnesses of several races and cultures.

A case did take place, but it was of the kind that onlookers find distasteful, embarrassing, a conflict of self-interest and dishonesties, with no real focus or point to it.

My responsibility did not go further than the servant herself: an old friend, though of course she did not know it, and two of the sisters, who were remorseful over what had happened. They had never thought of the old servant, except in sentimental terms, since they had left home, but the newspaper article and emotionally self-pitying letters from their parents made them think again. Both were open to better influences, which I supplied, and arranged their future accordingly.

As for the servant, her distress was acute. She felt in the wrong, and wronged. Her life with her sister was doing neither of them any good; she soon died.

I put her in the care of Ranee, in Zone Six, for she was already game for re-entry into Shikasta for "another try."

While engaged in these tasks, I was more and more concerned with the problems of reporting adequately: having so recently been tutor to individuals who had volunteered for service on Shikasta during its last and terrible phase, I was able to contrast their expectations and imaginings of Shikasta with the reality. Facts are easily written down: atmospheres and the emanations of certain mental sets are not. I knew that my notes and reports were being read by minds very far indeed from the Shikastan situation. I therefore devised certain additional material, to supplement my reports.

ILLUSTRATIONS: The Shikastan Situation

[On his return from Shikasta Johor offered the records some sketches and notes made in excess of his mandate. He believed that, as is recorded above, students of this unfortunate planet would find it helpful to have illustrations of the extremes of conduct produced by such a low concentration of SOWF. Emissary Johor tended almost to apologise for these sketches, which he admitted he had written, sometimes, for his own use, to clarify his mind, as well as to assist others. For our part, we have to point out - and we do this with Emissary Johor's full permission - that Johor had been within the Shikastan influences for some time when these sketches were made, and these are influences which conduce to emotionalism. Archivists.]