The scorching sun in Thiruvananthapuram has been unrelenting. Usually, the festival day of Attukal Pongala, on which thousands of women set up temporary hearths outside their homes and on the roads of the city to cook sweet payasam for the goddess of the Attukal temple, ends with cooling showers. This time the skies were cloudless.

At the protest site of the ASHA workers’ strike, the women joked. Someone said, the skies are either imitating the earth, delaying due rainfall indefinitely. Or the news that the brutes down here won’t even allow a tarpaulin shelter has reached the heavens, so the rains are delayed, another woman giggled. It must be the latter!! They all laughed.

“The truth is that the rulers are busy praying that we will pack up and leave! They should have offered the pongala!”A senior ASHA who sat next to me chuckled. But what about Suresh Gopi? I asked her. He seemed to be coming over here like a devotee? Three times now? She bent over in mirth. I, pictured the scene of Union ministers praying to the least powerful of workers.”Oh,” she said. “He can come all he wants! Isn’t he an elected MP, a Minister? He must receive our petitions, that is his job!” Then, with a mischievous smile, she said, “He brought us offerings, you know, kits of pongala things…well, he is free to come , to pray or negotiate!”.

“But do you really think he is making devis out of you?”I asked. She straightened up in her chair. “Look, he is free to come and gift stuff. But we have been doing pongala offerings much, much before he or any of the politicians appeared here! And we will accept pongala items from anyone, including Pinarayi! That doesn’t mean that we are in his pocket. I for example, I have been a communistkaari since I was a kid… Suresh Gopi will have to do more than distribute pongala kits!”

She was clearly hinting at the whispers maligning the strike as a BJP conspiracy. Suresh Gopi has been using the strike to puff up his image by making visits, distributing pongala kits, and making statements about why the women there are offering the pongala. The protestors have not objected, but they have made it clear that this means nothing. As S Mini made it clear to TV channels this morning, the workers hoped that in his next visit the Minister Gopi will bring a government order that affirms JP Nadda ‘s promises in Parliaments, to increase incentive payments. “He is in power,” the ASHA worker pointed out. “He must do something.”

“We are not devis, ” chipped in a young, energetic woman who was listening to our chat intently. “We have heard enough of that … During the COVID, we were angels… right? Fat good it did us! If politicians come here like devotees, they are looking for boons or blessings… More work for the goddess, and we are just desperate women seeking survival wages!” Women’s day messages from Sanghis were full of praise for Durgas and Kalis, and maybe they will work among the Malayali savarna elite women. Not among women who have, through the very lives they have lived, learned what a farce the worship-women-like-Durga talk is.

“We also learned that though we aren’t lipstick clad houris, people will listen to us on TV!”

The women see through the foolish posturing of the government with remarkable clarity. Veena George telling a non Malayali journalist that ASHAs in Kerala enjoyed maternity benefits aroused much laughter. “Most of us are done giving birth. Madam doesn’t know!”

Even if not goddesses, these are women who have fought battles against the colonial hierarchical culture lingering in Kerala’s public health bureaucracy. One of them, a sixty-two year old from central Kerala, told me about how the Junior Public Health Nurse behaved rudely with her all the time. “She is much younger than me, but calls me edi-podi all the time! When everyone is present!” To call a woman edi, unless she is very close to one, is rude behaviour, and unspeakably rude when the woman is older.

“She even sent an awful message, making fun of my participation in the strike!”

Other women shared similar stories. One of them recalled how a certain JPHN threatened them saying that if they didn’t behave sufficiently deferentially, she would complain to her union and get it to demand disciplinary action against the ASHAs!

Noticing the appalled look on my face, the senior ASHA lady turned to me again, “Don’t think that we let them go! I don’t!  There was this Health Inspector newly transferred, a young guy, just old enough to be my son, who called me ‘low born ‘. Know what I did? I complained about him to every single place, and soon enough he came and fell at my feet! Then an officer from the DHS office came and begged me to spare him… He has two kids and he needs his job … I made them call a meeting with everyone present and made him apologise in public!”

No devi this, and no need, either. If you know that you can fight for your rights, then you don’t need devi-like superpower.

Meanwhile the lady continued: “You know that I have a bad leg? A dog bit me when I was out, and it was COVID time… Well, I have been in this since 1993, starting as a member of the Mahila Swasthya Sangh… Now this bad leg is beginning to hurt ..  I told a channel chap about it and he wanted me to show the leg .. I lifted my saree and showed it … And now this JPHN sends me a message asking if I have started lifting up my clothes for money….

The young women listening out let out an angry yowl.

“Chechi!! Let us go to the Women ‘s Commission, NOW!”

Not angels, not devis, not houris — the fighting women workers of Kerala!