Maidservants

They are indispensible but intolerable too. It is a general wisdom that neither the presence of maidservants keeps housewives satisfied and happy nor their absence does. Life without maids is not only miserable it is unthinkable for housewives and other ladies managing their home affairs. Housemaids are mostly found in abundance in posh and affluent societies, usually living in the servant quarters of large bungalows and remain on call round the clock. A large population of them also works as daytime workers in upper middleclass and middleclass areas.

This community is widely called as Maasi, Naukrani, Kaam wali larki or Mai. At times they are also called with their half names or nicks like Nooran, Chhona, Chanda, etc. They invade the house when male members of the house leave for work and children go to school. They perform multiple household assignments e.g. cleaning, pocha (rubbing the floor with wet piece of rag), dusting, dishwashing, laundry, ironing and cooking (sometimes just making chapati or even limited to making dough).

From the moment these maids take control of the house, they work like machines (housewives always call them lethargic and kaam-chor) to finish the job as quickly as possible and run to the next house for a similar work. The housewife would invariably take every measure to pointing out maid’s mistakes and her carelessness to the work so that maid redoes incomplete jobs, her stay gets prolonged. The great lady in the same breath asks her to finish the work as quickly as possible. On the contrary, the maid would always insist that she has done all assignments with great care and responsibility. Exchange of foul words, explicitly by housewives and slyly (dil hi dil me) by maids, never stops. Staring into each other’s eyes is a very common sight.

All the necessary electrical gadgets we own for easing out our lives are operated by maids widely & wildly resulting in frequent repairs and replacement of them in almost a year’s time. Science and technology are yet to invent such home appliances that cannot be damaged by the maids. It shouldn’t be surprising if manufacturers of washing machines, irons and vacuum cleaners print a tag called “Maids Proof” on them in near future.

One needs to glance at the maid when she irons the clothes; she literary fights a boxing match with clothes. Her arms move as swiftly as a boxer tries to hit the opponent. If a TV is playing a drama or film at the time the maid does ironing, rest assured the outcome would be burnt clothes. By the way, are you aware of any housemaid that has not burnt the expensive clothes of Begum Sahiba while ironing? Sometimes the burnt dresses are the brand new ones which poor Begum Sahiba is yet to put on. Similarly, school dresses of children have never survived maids’ wrath. The not-so-expensive shirt of Sahib-jee sometimes also carry hot ironing stamp somewhere near ribs, arms or at the backside.

After every dusting assignment, the housewife would grab the hand of a maid and show her the dusty patches she intentionally left undone on a dressing table, showcase, TV screen and furniture. Ask a maid to clean the mirror with wet newspaper, she would find a blackened paper, most of the time the one which carries film advertisements and here, your mirror is more blurred than ever. And then, maids have long & unknown enmity with books, laptops and computers. Cleaning of these articles is surely beyond their jurisdiction.

Coming to the laundry; if you are habitual of putting on new clothes after an initial wash to kill the fabric smell, be ready for its discoloring or application of an abstract art on it. Mend your habits to put on new clothes as long as you can because once it reaches in the domain of a maid, only prayers can get you back in the same shape and shade. Many a times you forgot to take out handkerchiefs and small currency notes from the pockets of shirts and pants. After washing, spinning and ironing, you would always find these items crumpled up exactly where you left them.

Something on cooking; if your kitchen is being run & ruled by the maids then you need to buy monthly grocery every fortnight and ignore the wastages. After every meal the large quantity of residual food lands in the shopping bags maids carry always with them. Maids are very bad cook; it is generally portrayed by housewives. If family members begin liking the cooking of a maid, the credit always rests with the housewife because she taught her cooking skills. Similarly if the maids are given free hand to dishwashing (literally speaking they always have) then the housewives are ought not to count and recount the glassware.

In spite of above narrated blues one must always consider the great ease, advantage and luxury of having maids at our doorstep. A maid employed to work for 3 assignments i.e. cleaning, dishwashing and laundry gets less than 5000 rupees a month, a meager amount less than or equal to 1 to 5 percent of our monthly household income and we still remain unsatisfied over maids’ ever increasing salaries. Most of us serve them with leftover foods and old & used clothes to wear (literally rags or those that cannot fit us). We treat them inhumanly and exploit their poverty shamelessly; hardly offer them hot fresh meals, new clothes, shoes or advancing them part of their salaries. We insist maids to do laundry on daily basis with chilling cold tap water under freezing temperatures. Be storm, thunder, cold or rain, she must be there. A maid is ought to be immune to diseases or at least she pretend to.

It is generally alleged that housemaids are synonymous with stealing of household items especially cash, jewelry and cell phones. If something is lost or forgotten, the first accused is always a maid. Sometimes they undergo insult, torture and dishonor over the theft charges they never committed. I’m yet to undergo such an experience but we did find some maids consuming some eatables like biscuits & fruits as well as stealing raw food items like sugar & tea without our permission. Prima facie, it looks a breach of contract or shaking our confidence but factually it is more a disgraceful act on our part over keeping the maids starving and needy on such petty things.

I must share a spine chilling incident here: Once cleaning the floor, a teenage daughter of our maid took in hand a peel/shell of a Pine-nut (Chilgoza), brought that to my wife and asked what we called it! With her eyes open, my wife asked in disbelief: Haven’t you eaten Chilgozay before? The girls’ reply was astounding, bloodcurdling and heartbreaking; someone gave us a little quantity of them a few days ago but we didn’t know what they were and how it was eaten! We found ourselves being sucked in a quicksand.