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A good maid is a past-life connection. That’s all I ask astrologers: “When will I meet the maid of my dreams?” I’ve kissed many frogs, puckering up not for Prince Charming — really, the roads are crawling with them — but for a maid, a maid. As any woman who has faced a pile of dirty pans and insomniac infants knows, a good maid is a lifesaving drug. She arrives like a fairy godmother and waves her magic wand.

Sure, they come from food-less lands and require a cheaper variety of rice — “how much they eat!” — and an eye should be kept on them at all times lest they make away with the family jewels, literally. For the romantic history of an average Indian male starts with the domestic help. He may marry a pearl and chiffon girlie version of his mother, but the poet in him hankers for the soul mate who looks at him with large eyes and says nahi saab, Bhagwan ke liye aisa mat keejiye. If caught red-handed, rat scurries away. After all, which madam worth her salt and fading sex appeal will believe the bai when better half bleats, “She came on to me first!”

Helping themselves to the hired help is not limited to homes. At workplaces, bosses will throw suddenly intimate smiles — what they call ‘consensual smiling’ — and subordinates have to take them to court to wipe off that smile.

The magical thing about maids is that they’re getting smaller and smaller! “They have no clue which year they were born!” vaguely claim those for whom the little, little hands toil. A chit of a girl in tattered clothes totters under the weight of the big fat baby-ji’s big fat schoolbag. In up-market eateries, the mother stuffs her mouth while the maid, presumably equally or more hungry, distracts the little darling. Those who eventually get around to feeding the maid invariably place them bang in the path of the waiters who, being above maids in the social order, will bump into her while to-and-fro-ing. Amidst raucous guffaws, the socialite will say loudly to the poor thing eating so conspicuously, “Arrey, spoon use karo!”

Domestic servitude comes in many packages: the suck-ups, the poor-me’s, battered wives, pilferage specialists and the magnificent nodders who patiently listen to your humble request again and again that the broom must meet the floor now and then.

Maids also make you feel better about your lot in life. Mine once borrowed some balm. “It’s for my husband,” she told me with no particular inflection, “whose hand is numb from beating me black and blue.” Another one said her drunk husband stripped her naked — in front of kids and in-laws — before he proceeded to belt her so she couldn’t run out screaming for help. And here I’m ready to divorce husband for the poor quality of his jokes!

I for one am madly glad that my maid turns up at all. Breathlessly, I scintillate her with small talk. And for those of you who want to know if I raped my maid — puhleeeeze! I’m only mildly aroused by her.