That Lady In My Life

She stares out with a distant look in her eyes, lost in deep thought, oblivious to the rest of the world. All I can see is her tough profile as she ponders matters unfathomable. I should have been reaching for my camera to get the movie-perfect shot; instead, I opened the bolt of my screen door. No, she isn’t nobility, and no, she isn’t a model. She is, in fact, my maid. The sound of the scraping bolt is her cue; she returns her gaze from the horizon, takes off her slippers and gets into action. The queen has arrived.

I, just like thousands of Delhiites are slaves to our maids. Without them, we can’t clean our houses, wash our utensils, have clean clothes or in a lot of cases, have anything to eat. It’s not like they do a very good job of any of the aforementioned things either, it’s just that they do it, and we can simply laze around. Sometimes, I get confused as to who’s the servant and who’s the master. The thing with Delhi’s maids is, you cannot expect them to have a fixed time, all you can do is twiddle your thumbs while you wait for her to arrive and clean up your mess while giving you dirty looks all the time. And god help you if you dare to try and supervise them, be it out of fear of thievery or a desire to get better work out of them. They look back at you with disdain as if you are the thief in their territory, and will fail to spot that dirty spot on the floor right in front of their eyes no matter how clearly you point it out to them.

I wonder who was that first Bengali lady who decided to make that epic train journey to Delhi to settle down here and scrub other people’s floors for a few rupees. She started a grand tradition, which seems as timeless as it is indispensable. If you ever have the chance to employ a newly arrived maid, you will notice her complete ignorance of the local language. You will try to explain to her how you expect the household work to be done, and she will speak something in her own tongue which you will be unable to make head or tail out of. Yet, it is a system which manages to work beautifully, in a hugely beneficial symbiotic manner. The maid gets trained while you manage to get squeaky clean floors, clothes and utensils. That is, until such a time till the maid hasn’t been delhiized. If it’s her first Diwali in the city, she will bow her head in genuine thanks as you give her a bonus in cash or kind and think of you as the kindest person on the face of the earth. Give her a few months, and you will notice a constant degradation in the quality of her work and any subsequent bonuses will be snatched out of your hands without so much as a murmur of thanks.

I just thought of eating a bowl of hot soup to beat the chill, pulled out a bowl and found a fine layer of vim on the inside. I don’t know how many kilos of vim I have consumed over the years, but it hasn’t killed me yet. In any case, I can’t live without my maid anyway.

Only In Delhi.