Column

She is an important member — by extension — of one’s family, and becomes indispensable from the moment a couple graduates to parenthood. A maid — call her bai, ayah, maushi or what you will — is often treated on par with members of the family so that she does not migrate to other households. Nowadays, young couples even pre-book servants when they realise they are pregnant. In fact, japa maids are very popular in the city even though they come at a premium.

A distant 22 years ago, when there was just the two of us, Anand and I delighted in doing all the cooking ourselves, leaving mundane chores to our ‘top’ servant. By the time Aakanksha arrived, and then five years later, Gaurav, we had got a ‘morning to evening’ bai whose primary job was to tend to the needs of the children and keep the house clean. Being working parents in a nuclear family (like so many others in Mumbai and elsewhere) often meant turning a blind eye to many of her faults and jobs not done because of frequent memory lapses.

Around ten years back, Anand started travelling for work — first to America and then New Delhi, Kochi and now the Middle East. By then we had a live-in servant, making it easier for me to get to work on time. I remember one 20-something-year-old who spent hours on our landline (a fact I was told much later, after I had asked her to leave due to a spate of calls from her ‘brothers’.) Till then, I attributed the high phone bill to the fact that my ICSE-bound daughter was discussing studies on the phone with her friends.

Luckily, the mistrust that this girl created in my mind was soon expelled by a 30-something maid, Sunda, who blended in with the family and catered to all our needs with affection. In a year, she got married and pushed off, sadly to be widowed within three months, but unable to return since she was bearing a child. Today, she is the one care-taker we still remember with affection.

Now, my twosome insists that we can run the house without the intrusion of a full-time help. In theory totally possible, but in practice a dream that cannot be translated into reality. It can only happen when the kids are ‘house trained’. Though I have many friends who say proudly that they run their homes without maids as the helps do not work to their satisfaction, I am not one of their ilk. So, often returning home — mostly peopled by just two members — and finding the hall littered with remnants of the day’s activities, especially if friends have come over and left, I long for a Lady Friday at hand. Lacking that, the evening is spent with junior and me tidying it up. And when my daughter returns home on her infrequent breaks, I turn into a modern-day Hitler with both, trying to get some order (read: neatness) into the house.

Recently, after a long time, I travelled out of town — the first trip was to Delhi and the second to Muscat — on work. Wary of leaving my son at home alone, the first time he stayed with his friend,

Aneesh (reports were perfect), and the second time, at home, since his sister had arrived for her break. When I called up on both trips, I got the answer: ‘Don’t worry, everything is fine!’ In fact, when Aneesh’s mother (also my friend) Aparna asked me the second time why Gaurav was not going to stay with her again, I took it as an indirect compliment.

I returned to a home in different states of being ‘lived in’. I have now rolled up my sleeves, metaphorically, and roped in both my ‘little’ ones to help with the pre-festival cleaning. Being much taller than me, they can reach where I cannot. The grumbling ignored, we are spending moments poring over old photographs, games…and sometimes, re-living memories, something a maid would not relish. This is perhaps one of the bright sides to a home without a full-time maid, of course. But, my search continues for a hiccup-free, dust-free home…

— The writer, Executive Editor, Verve, is, in her personal space, often driven to distraction by her two growing ‘young adults’, but she loves the madness of it all