Maid in India: Stories of Inequality and Opportunity Inside Our Homes by Tripti Lahiri

Author:Tripti Lahiri [Lahiri, Tripti]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mobilism
Publisher: Rupa
Published: 2017-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

DEFENCE COLONY

DIWALI IS FAMOUSLY THE FESTIVAL of lights, but it could just as well be called the festival of housekeeping, when each house is swept clean by the soft golden strokes of a previously unused phuljharu. I once did this myself, when I moved into a two-room barsati in Delhi in 2006. It was small enough and I was feeling poor enough that for a few days I followed the example of a British colleague who, unlike many other expats or newly returned Indians, was reluctant to hire someone to do his cleaning.

The barsati came with wall-to-wall carpeting (an odd choice in a city this hot and dusty), a dun-coloured dust trap, which I promptly covered with grass matting sourced from the Tamil Nadu state emporium. As I swept its woven surface one muggy September evening after work, I saw that the freshly-dried grass strands of my new and tightly-bound broom were shedding little particles, creating a fresh layer of dust to replace what I had just corralled into a dustpan. If I swept too vigorously, larger bits of dried grass detached and strewed themselves about. Too big to be swept up, these had to be gathered up by hand and thrown away separately. A new jharu requires vigorous banging against a wall before its first use, but when I was a child, someone else was doing the cleaning, and I had never noticed that fact.

And so, although my apartment was a 275-square-foot studio subdivided by a thin partition, I threw in the towel (or rather, the pochha) and took up the landlady on her offer to avail of the services of her part-time maid, P., a dainty Rajasthani woman who liked maroon lipstick and graphic flower-printed saris, and who announced her daily arrival up the stairs with a tinkling of her silver anklets.

She told me that housekeeping was charged at 150 rupees a task in Defence Colony, a neighbourhood where plots on either side of a wide drain had been originally allotted, since the 1960s, to people who had served in the armed forces. In the time I lived there it was notable for its construction noise, as army families’ descendants converted their homes into buildings of several floors, suitable for renting to foreigners and newly returned Indians. We shook hands on 500 rupees for washing the breakfast dishes, daily sweeping and doing the laundry a few times a week, as well as four days off a month.

Despite having a job where I was supposed to question why things were a certain way, to wonder why there were so many children at construction sites or about a property market that led millions to squat despite the clear and present danger of eviction, these kinds of questions were far from my mind when hiring a maid for the first time in my life. I didn’t analyse the forces that had shaped the pay we arrived at, or wonder where she would go to the bathroom or eat lunch during a work day that included cleaning several houses from 7 a.

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