In 1978 my father took up a three-year academic post at a university in Malaysia. Mum, me and my younger sister went along and we lived a pretty standard western suburban life just outside Kuala Lumpur.
It was much what we were used to, with the exception that we ended up employing a live-in housekeeper/maid, locally called an "amah". She was a twenty-something Tamil Indian girl called "Meena", who cooked, cleaned and washed for us. She had a dazzling smile, a stereotypical macho Indian boyfriend and cooked the best damn' curried fish I've ever tasted. She was very sweet but rather poorly educated by our family's standards.
She was also a Hindu and though I never entered her living quarters I wouldn't have been surprised to have found in there a small shrine to her personal Hindu deity. Her upbringing had obviously been typical of most Indians I meet to this day, in that she was totally respectful of her parents' wishes and accepted all of their wisdom and teaching without question.
My sister inevitably established the typical coterie of giggling schoolgirl friends, who often came to visit our home after school. They were of mixed ethnicity and economic background and not a few treated amahs like furniture, as their parents did. Meena, like all amahs, respectfully tolerated pretty much anything dished out to her by her 'superiors'.
It happened that the father of one of my sister's friends became sick and died soon after, of a heart attack. The following day all the other girls gathered at our house to go in a group to pay their respects at her home, in accordance with local custom. When my mother told Meena of this the result was quite unexpected: when the girls returned Meena wouldn't let them into the house.
She insisted that the girls go into her living quarters and get undressed so she could wash all their clothes. The girls had to wash as well - face, hands and feet. Meena was utterly adamant about this. The girls protested but mum quickly sized up the situation and insisted that they do as Meena insisted, which they did amidst much giggling. Fresh towels and sarongs were distributed and only then were the girls allowed into the main house. Once their clothes were washed and dried they could change back into them.
What makes a meek, compliant maid take such a strong and uncompromising stand for no immediately apparent reason? Mum provided the interpretation and explained it to the girls afterwards. They'd been to a house in which a death had occurred and Meena was responding ritually to the situation.
In the days before modern sanitation, antibiotics and antiseptics, the death of anyone who was not elderly was, more often than not, a result of an infection or contagious disease. This may have been quite the norm in the populous, subtropical India of Meena's ancestors. Anyone who had been in close contact with the deceased or who had even been in the same location would be at risk of transmitting the disease to others. One of the best counters to this transmission is cleansing the clothes and body before any subsequent contact with people or places. It's quite a sensible thing to do, even if you don't understand why.
Meena herself could not explain exactly why she acted the way she did. The fact that heart attacks are not contagious had no bearing at all on her response to the situation. All she knew was that "this is what is done" in such circumstances. It's what her parents and grandparents did and there was no reason to not do the same, nor reason to question it.
There's actually no advantage in having a reason, because that offers the opportunity to make judgement calls on the relative risk. No, it's much simpler to say "This is what you do" in every case and leave it at that. Undoubtedly it was the Hindu priests and other authority figures who realised the practicality of the act and its benefits, then established the rule and ritualised it.
Obviously there was no possibility of contamination in this case, no contagion whatsoever and thus no need for such behaviour, but the ritual response persists. In this instance Meena's behaviour had no tangible benefit or effect, apart from amusing some teenage girls for a while. It certainly didn't hurt anyone. What is more significant and important, though, is that it gave real comfort to her and allowed her to assert herself (for a change). She obviously held a professional responsibility not only for the house she maintained, but to the people who lived in it - her employers. That she didn't recognise nor appreciate the underlying reason for her actions is yet more evidence of the prevalence and usefulness of "Lies to Children".
