Meet Asha Chechi: The Lover of Koels
With great life in her voice, sitting beside the sewing machine with a cup of tea, koels singing in the background, you see Asha chechi. Asha chechi comes from Ethumanoor in Kottayam, and lives in Ayarkunnam with her two children, a boy and a girl, and husband.
Asha chechi’s journey with tailoring has been an interesting one. She has been tailoring intermittently ever since she was a young girl, about twenty years ago. The interest developed as she began watching her aunt with a machine. After tenth grade, she did a course in tailoring for five months or so, but subsequently did a course to become a nurse and started working in Bangalore for four years. Then, she went to Bihar, where she worked for one year, before coming back home to get married. Getting back from Bihar, Chechi took up tailoring again, learning it for five more years. After having her first child, she stopped tailoring as her responsibilities increased. But it seemed like, just like it had been all her life, that she might be done with tailoring, but tailoring wasn’t done with her. Indeed, Chechi took up the craft again eight years later and found in Swara a place to pursue her passions, as she now continues with the organisation.
Even though you would usually see Asha chechi in a ‘churidar’(a tightly fitting trouser that reveals leg-contours, worn in the Indian subcontinent) at work, she loves wearing the saree. Quite specific in terms of preferences, she says that her favorite colors are kingfisher blue and “the same yellow hue that a ripe papaya has”. Chechi enjoys gardening, cooking and making new things that she comes across online, being quite experimental that way. She speaks of the novel experience of making masks during the time of the pandemic, which kept her occupied and provided her work at that time. Despite the loss of daily income, with her husband being a daily wage labor, Asha chechi says that she managed just fine during 2020, due to help and support from the government.
She has few really close friends, Shalija being the closest one, with whom she shares everything. She is extremely close with her sisters-in-law, something that may come across as quite unusual, but one of her biggest supporters is Bhanumati ji, whom she refers to as Bhanumati ‘teacher’, for she teaches tailoring at Swara.
Chechi speaks very fondly of her children and husband, who are extremely helpful and caring towards her. Despite doing very hard manual labor all day long, her husband takes out time for her, taking her where she pleases to go, and dropping her at work, with the children bringing her lunch from home during day-time as Asha chechi leaves for work quite early in the morning. She absolutely adores her family, they are her lifeline she says.
Asha chechi’s biggest wish for the time to come is to have a house of her own, with her family, and you can see just how her face lights up as she speaks of the prospects of having herself a house built.
