Maidless in Mumbai

by Payal Kapadia

  ‘Welcome to Smiling Services, first stop and last stop for the perfect maid!’ Somebody pinch me.

  ‘Maid for cleaning, cooking or children, Madam?’

  Yes, I’ve definitely died and gone to maid heaven.

  2 Oct

  The bureau sends me Ravina. She is nothing short of a dusting dervish, and I have taken an instant shine to her. Of course, this has only the tiniest bit to do with how she sings as she works, conjuring pleasant memories of Felicita (who is no doubt bringing unbridled joy to some other woman somewhere).

  MIL (who is here, among other reasons, because Bearded Baba is back) scrutinizes Ravina in a way that could pick a head louse from a mile away. ‘Very strong, isn’t she?’

  Ravina is more muscular than the average Jane, but who says a woman has to look like a Dunlop pillow to be womanly? ‘Strong is the new thin!’ I tell MIL.

  ‘She sounds like Usha Uthup,’ MIL starts again.

  ‘Husky is the new sexy.’

  ‘And the hair?’ I follow MIL’s gaze and I start. Ravina’s arms are unusually hairy. (Though I’m not prejudiced against hairy people.)

  I’m readying Tara for bed when Sameer returns. ‘Anu, I see you have a new maid . . .’ It’s rather endearing that he’s started noticing these domestic things.

  ‘. . . Have you taken a good look at her?’

  Why does everyone have to be so lookist these days?

  ‘Your mom’s been doing all the looking,’ I retort.

  ‘Anu . . .’ I know that voice from past experience. It’s his bad news voice: ‘The maid is a man.’

  It is as if a giant, hairy arm from outer space has swooped down, scooped me up and launched me into orbit. ‘She’s wearing a sari!’ I huff. Men overlook the obvious.

  ‘She has an Adam’s apple.’

  Could I have missed such a prominent projection of the larynx? Or other prominent projections?

  4 Oct

  ‘Why does every maid that comes have to go?’ I ask Dr Bhasker.

  Dr Bhasker shifts in his chair. ‘Does that bother you?’

  ‘I’ve told you before, I’m not here to talk about myself.’ I hold his gaze.

  ‘Of course.’ He studies his notes.

  ‘But since you’re asking . . .’

  ‘Go on.’ He looks up.

  ‘It’s my greatest fear.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Losing the maid.’ Why am I whispering?

  I tell him about Rosie, Ravina’s successor, and how she suddenly vanished this morning.

  ‘Like a Himalayan climber stepping off the edge in a blizzard,’ I say. ‘Leaving behind only a comb with some hairs caught in it. Only, in the Himalayan climber’s case, I guess he would leave a glove, right?’

  Dr Bhasker seems dazzled by my nuanced thinking, so I continue. ‘She could have said goodbye, you know? It’s not like I was going to handcuff her to the kitchen door . . .’

  I pause to let this sink in. ‘I might have thought about it, but that’s OK, because one can’t help one’s thoughts.’

  Dr Bhasker opens his mouth to say something, but I’m not done here. ‘I thought I’d put her comb in a box with her name on it. Like a relic. Just in case she returns after I’ve given up peering at the horizon with binoculars and plastering “Have You Seen This Person?” posters all over the city.’

  He looks a little horrified. ‘Just joking,’ I hastily add. ‘Relax, I’m not a psycho.’

  Later, I call the bureau for a replacement, but the free replacement period is up.

  ‘It’s an old bureau trick,’ says Sonia. ‘They’ve probably asked her to leave your house and go off to another so that they can earn a fresh commission off her.’

  The thought of Rosie, bringing cheer to another home after mine, like a lamplighter illuminating one street lamp after another, has plunged me in darkness.

  6 Oct

  ‘You look wound up, Anu,’ says Sameer.

  Why does Sameer have to shoot off his mouth without thinking? Anxiety can go on like an infinity equation. Now I’m wound up about being wound up about being wound up.

  ‘Remember that weekend getaway I asked you about earlier?’

  My head is swimming. ‘I can’t go, Sameer! Got to find a new maid! And get this new maid to stay! And I have to keep seeing Dr Bhasker—’

  ‘Who’s Dr Bhasker?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? How Dr Bhasker has agreed to counsel our maids?’

  ‘By seeing you?’ There is a tone of incredulity in my husband’s voice that irks me.

  ‘Well, yes, it’s a maid disorder, don’t you see? Why else would they keep quitting all the time?’

  7 Oct

  ‘You think we’ll ever stop being scared of them?’ wonders Bhavna, who has just started giving empowerment talks to battered women. (Of course, she’s talking about us here. And how we’re scared of our maids.)

  ‘Let’s face it, there’ll be no maids in a few years, they’ll all be working in shops and factories and beauty parlours, and we’ll simply have to deal with it,’ says Sonia, slipping her heels off and massaging her feet.

  ‘I’m already dealing with it,’ I mutter. Sameer is working late again, and Tara has been at her crankiest all day. Good thing I didn’t tell Mom about it when I dropped her off.

  ‘It’s not personal, Anu,’ Bhavna says, stirring her coffee. ‘We’re on the cusp of an enormous social transition, that’s all.’

  ‘By the way, I’m not about to be caught with kids when this great social transition happens,’ quips Mansi. ‘Better to be childless than maidless.’

  ‘Better to be homeless than maidless,’ drawls Nina, who is leaving her kids with the governess and taking off on another girls trip to Dubai.

  There is a glum silence as the rest of us think about the black holes of our homes, swallowing us in a swirl of half-eaten food, dirty dishes and soiled nappies. When we look back at our lives, will we measure them in leaks plugged, appliances fixed, children soothed, maids minded—or will we have done something more?

  Trust the woman who can go into poetic raptures every time she trims her cuticles to see the bright side. ‘If there’s life beyond men, there’s life beyond maids!’

  Bhavna’s bravado is infectious. ‘To a maidless future!’ yells Mansi, refilling all our glasses.

  Sonia punches the air with her fist and bellows: ‘No more busting our balls getting them to like us—’ when her phone rings.

  ‘Shush!’ she silences us mid-jubilation. ‘Hello? Janaki? Is Tanay in bed?’ Her voice takes on a sweetness that we have never been at the receiving end of. ‘Yes, yes, clear the table, please?’ The prior air-punching fist is now five nail-bitten fingers fidgeting with the corner of the tablecloth. ‘I feel terrible missing the dinner you made,’ she says in a conciliatory tone, ‘but I’m stuck in a meeting.’

  ‘What?’ she glares at us as soon as she’s hung up and returned to her belligerent self: ‘For God’s sake, what?’

  8 Oct

  Mom was in a tizzy when I picked up Tara last evening.

  ‘Thank God you’re here!’ she said, ushering me in. ‘Tara refused to eat. She lay down on the carpet and kicked up a giant fuss that lasted forever! I tried a thousand different things! At last we settled on ice cream, but she let it melt all over herself and then wanted it back in the cone. I’ve never felt so helpless, Anu . . .’ She buried her head in her hands. ‘Except, maybe, thirty years ago . . . I guess we forget. We want to forget.’

  My breath snagged in my throat.

  ‘I felt so drained when you were a baby,’ she said, throwing her head back with a juddering groan. ‘So lost, so lonely . . .’

  I looked at my mother. Really looked at her as if we had met for the first time. She could be any other woman. She could be me.

  She was genuinely puzzled when I threw my arms around her, sobbing, ‘Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?’

  ‘It wasn’t important, Anu,’ she said.

  But
it is.

  10 Oct

  Tara has just drawn a wobbly little circle with a dot in it. ‘Mummy!’ she says, jabbing at the picture with one chubby finger. One-eyed mummy. She traces a long, squiggly line along one side. One-eyed mummy smiling from ear to ear (albeit with no ears). I scoop her up and give her a long dose of the tickles before putting on some music and heating up lunch. Is that how Tara really sees me? As happy?

  Who knows, maybe I am? Even if Tara and I are just Going Through the Motions. Just jumping up halfway through lunch for a clumsy twirl, and just splashing dirty dishwater at each other like a pair of bored goofballs, and just getting her water because she’s laughed herself silly into the hiccups.

  I look at how I’ve managed to give her lunch and wash the dishes and make the beds . . . Why is one-eyed mummy smiling through it all?

  Maybe it’s because Mom remembered how she raised me thirty years ago. And because she finally said what I needed to hear most of all. That it was OK to find this so hard. Maybe everyone does.

  11 Oct

  A month’s worth of news has slipped past me unnoticed. How could it have come to this? I stare at the headlines. Will the Sceptic take the fall?

  ‘Is it true?’ I call Eddy. ‘That you’re retracting the story? That they’re coming after you?’

  ‘This story is all smoke and mirrors, Anu,’ he sounds finished. ‘There are too many questions Pia can’t answer, too many gaps she can’t explain. I told her I’d back the story to my last dying breath if she gave me anything on the whistle-blower, anything at all. But she’s given me nothing!’

  I think of all the months I waited for Sanmitra to call. I think of his village and his people. All this is real.

  ‘It’s a good story, Eddy.’

  ‘Your faith in Pia and her story will take us all down!’ he yells. ‘Think about it, Anu! Have you known Pia to hold out against such pressure? Will you consider, for one goddamned moment, that she might have made it all up? That there’s no whistle-blower?’

  ‘But there is!’ I shout back.

  ‘How can you be so sure?’ His voice has dropped all of a sudden.

  ‘Because he’s my whistle-blower and this was my story!’

  And it is as if a giant rush of wind has blown down out of nowhere and scattered the fog. I’ve said it, and it can never be unsaid. I’m going to stand up and own this story. Not because I want to get back at Pia, but for something larger. Like saving the Sceptic.

  17 Oct

  It turns out that none of the algorithms Arjun Puri picked up at business school could solve the inscrutable maid problem. ‘There’s no such thing as a perfect maid!’ he fumes.

  ‘It took a fancy B-school degree to figure that one out?’ I quip.

  ‘How does it make business sense to train them for six months if they’re gone before I’ve placed them?’ he groans. ‘Why can’t I find employers who are willing to pay fair wages for professional house help?’

  ‘Maybe there are no MIL-free zones in Mumbai?’ I interject, and we both laugh. Why am I laughing when Arjun Puri has delivered the worst news of all?

  We could talk some more, but Tara is just out of her bath, the milk is on the boil, and flirting (even of the goal-oriented sort) takes time. Besides, there is something decidedly unattractive about a man who hits the wall and gives up. Even if the problem is . . .

  ‘Hopeless!’ he exclaims. ‘I’m sorry, Anu, but I’m folding up here. There is that one maid I tried training, by the way, if you’re still interested . . .’

  ‘Let me guess,’ I say, towelling Tara dry. ‘She’s not perfect?’

  I can practically hear him grinning over the line. ‘Who is?’

  As observations go, that’s pretty astute for a MBA type of guy with no real-life training. After I hang up, I stare at the blotchy mirror I was planning to wipe clean and how tired I look in it.

  Maybe it’s OK to ask for help. I pick up the phone and I call Dr Bhasker.

  18 Oct

  I have a meeting with the Sceptic’s Legal team today. It’ll be a long and gruelling one, I know, with lots of explaining to do. But I’ve promised to give them all the context they need to defend this story. My story. Even if the rest of the world thinks it’s Pia’s.

  ‘Good luck!’ says Sameer. ‘Go take back what’s yours.’

  ‘Thanks, but don’t you have to be at work?’ I ask. ‘Isn’t the partnership decision any time now?’

  He has an odd look on his face. ‘We’ll talk about that later.’

  He watches me steadily as I slip on my wedges and grab all my papers.

  ‘I miss the old you,’ he says.

  I do, too. Which is why I won’t imagine all the dreadful things that could happen to Tara in my absence. Will she drown in her bathtub because her clueless father was watching television? Will she choke on a giant crayon? Will she tumble out of her highchair?

  Instead, I’ll save the Sceptic. And Sanmitra’s village. And me.

  ‘How’d it go?’ Sameer says when I return. Sameer is still in his PJs. Tara is wearing her clothes inside out, and her bib is on. Both of them are alive.

  ‘Guess I was wrong to think you wouldn’t manage,’ I keep a straight face. ‘Was it easy?’

  ‘Guess I was wrong to think it would be,’ he says. The floor is strewn with toys, paper, a used diaper, and a half-eaten crayon. I try not to think of where the other half is.

  ‘What about the task list I left you on the fridge?’ I cannot help myself.

  ‘Tara spilled juice on it,’ he shrugs. ‘It’s OK, lists have always been more your thing than mine.’

  21 Oct

  Nina couldn’t bring herself to tell me, so I hear it from the others. How there was no one to watch the governess who was watching the maids who were watching the kids.

  ‘Nina caught her with the husband and chucked her out,’ says Bhavna.

  ‘She should have chucked him out instead,’ says Sonia drily.

  Poor Nina. Sweating the small stuff so much that she could barely see the big stuff. Maybe she is more like me than I imagined.

  ‘What do you want now, Anu?’ She sounds tearful when I call. ‘The governess? She’s gone.’

  I squirm guiltily. Not that Nina cares: ‘Divya is down with a viral, and Vir is missing all his classes, and Vivaan is running amuck because no one’s ever taught him how to behave, and of course I don’t know where to begin!’ She pauses to catch her breath. ‘I’m only their mother, for Christ’s sake!’

  I’ve never heard Nina sound like this. Maybe she was only in control so long as she had a maid?

  ‘I didn’t call about the governess.’ Sure, I’ve wanted a maid, too, for so long that I can’t remember being in a place where I didn’t want one. But poor Nina needs a maid, and that’s different from wanting.

  ‘What did you call for then?’

  My voice comes out calmer than I expect it to. I know it’s the right thing to do. ‘I called to send you a maid.’

  23 Oct

  ‘How are the maids, Mrs Narain?’ I search Dr Bhasker’s face for a tell—but no, he would make an excellent poker player.

  I point out how refreshingly normal Farida is. ‘She isn’t fancy or anything,’ I say. ‘Just a single mom from the nearby shanty looking for a few hours of part-time work while her son is in school. No obvious neuroses,’ I pause so that he can take notes. ‘No observable psychoses either.’

  ‘That’s good, Mrs Narain, that’s—’

  ‘But I’m not here to talk about the maids,’ I interject.

  ‘Oh?’

  So I tell him, with great difficulty at first, what happened to Nina. And how I gave her Arjun Puri’s trained maid. ‘I guess she reminded me of the big picture and how I’d lost track of it.’

  I kneel down to brush a few biscuit crumbs that Tara has dropped on the carpet. ‘It was the small stuff that started picking away at me constantly, till it became big stuff . . .’ Funny, how it gets clearer as I tell it.


  Dr Bhasker seems to be drawing something. ‘I think you’re ready for this,’ he says, pencilling out a triangle with three points, labelled P, V and R. ‘When you had Tara, you were thrown in rescuer mode, that’s R,’ he says. ‘It felt like the whole world depended on you, didn’t it?’

  I think of Tara’s endless crying, the endless demands for milk, the endless advice. ‘I guess that’s how all new moms feel,’ I know this only after I’ve said it. ‘We’re supposed to be perfect and always know what to do.’

  Dr Bhasker’s face softens. ‘It’s very stressful, Mrs Narain, believing that everything hinges on you.’ He taps at the V point on the triangle he’s drawn. ‘It starts making you feel like a victim.’

  What can I say? The man can read my mind.

  ‘And sometimes, when being a victim gets too much, all the pent-up resentment turns you into a persecutor.’ He points at P now.

  I sit back and think of the Proxy Moms, Sameer, Tara, the maids. I recall all the anger I felt, and how it cut me off from everyone.

  ‘You were shuffling between three points on the same triangle, again and again, do you see?’

  The cosmic joke that the universe has been playing on me finally makes sense. ‘I should let go,’ I say slowly. ‘Because I’m not perfect.’

  ‘And how does that make you feel?’ He is looking at me intently, his pen hovering uncertainly above the notepad.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. I’m a little astonished because I do feel fine. Why else am I smiling like this? ‘I’m about to be released from the cycle of maids and re-maids, Dr Bhasker, like the Buddha!’

  I don’t think Dr Bhasker sees it at all, poor man, even though he’s the one who came up with the triangle. He takes off his spectacles and wipes them like that might help. I suspect he is also gathering his wits/thoughts/notes because our hour is coming to an end.

  ‘Your husband came in to see me the other day . . .’

  ‘Sameer? Whatever for?’

  ‘It seems he wants to talk about the maids.’ This has to be some kind of joke.