When nine-month-old Eesha first uttered the word ‘mama’, the entire family gathered around her. Jyoti Phadke Rao, Eesha’s mother, prodded and Eesha kept repeating ‘mama’ again and again. But when Eesha’s father Siddharth Rao tried his luck, she was not so forthcoming. Eesha wasn’t saying ‘baba’ so easily. Siddharth decided to keep trying.
And then, in a few days, while Siddharth was still in hot pursuit of
the word ‘baba’, he heard Eesha’s nanny talking to her. She kept repeating, ‘aila’ (colloquial Marathi term meaning ‘oops’) and ‘bomla’ (a not so nice way of saying ‘oh god!’). Now for the Raos, a family that shuns alcohol, doesn’t cook non-vegetarian food, and looks down on slang, this came as a shock. While Siddharth was trying to get Eesha to say ‘baba’, the nanny was adamant on ‘bomla’. And the nanny had the upper hand. She spent at least 12 hours daily with Eesha. In fact, Eesha had already picked up the nanny’s habit of making bird-like noises.
It’s an affliction everywhere, so common that you could throw the proverbial stone and hit a household with a nanny problem. Monty Roy, manager at Spectrum Enterprises, an agency that supplies nannies, has a theory. “More husbands and wives work today compared to before, and need someone to take care of their baby. But there are not as many nannies. Thus, there will be plenty of not-so-good nannies, but there’s not much that you can do about it,” says Roy.
The hi-tech nanny
Puja Shah, a jewellery designer and mother of a four-year-old and a five-month-old, did try to do something. But in the bargain she got a scar so bad she became the talk of all gossip parties — Shah changed 13 nannies in one year. She is presently on her 14th one. “There was a time when I started doubting myself and my baby. I started thinking that it was us who were the problem,” she says.
Shah has some strange tales to share. She has forgotten their names or the sequence they came in, but remembers them by their nicknames. So the One-Hour-Nanny was the ‘briefest’ one.
She came, got hired, worked for an hour, and politely asked if she could go home, because she had left clothes out to dry. She never returned. “The High Tech Nanny would look around the house and complain about how we didn’t have the latest gadgets.” She had previously worked in wealthy homes of NRIs and for her, things like the Child Monitor was a must. (Child Monitor is an ‘electronic leash’ worn by the child and is popular in the US. If the child moves beyond a certain distance, the adult’s receiver starts to beep.)
Battling the poachers
Another fear was parties. “There would always be birthday parties to attend, and though I hated it, I would send my children with their nanny. Sometimes even mothers would be invited, and I would worry constantly. Because parties are the place where poaching happens,” she says. “For me, it was rarely an occasion to have fun. I would have to keep a close eye on my nanny,” she adds. Her current nanny has been around for the past two and a half years, but Shah still crosses her fingers at the mention of her nanny. She sounds like a battered old grandma reminiscing about her hard times when she says, “I have seen the worst of times. I’m not taking anything for granted. She might leave me and I will get caught up in thevicious cycle of finding and appeasing nannies again.” But can one blame her?
Lopamudra Achuthan, a mother of two, didn’t go through as many trials and tribulations in finding a nanny. But her nanny had some ‘softer’ issues of her own to deal with: she kept falling in and out of love.
She stayed with the Achuthans for three years and often took a week’s holiday to visit her lover in Kolkata. But she would disappear for months on end. And then, she would return, having fought with him. Then again, after a few months, she would realise that she loved him. “She once did not go to Kolkata for months. We believe she had acquired a secret lover in Mumbai,”
Achuthan says, as the child was suddenly calling his Bengali mother ‘ammi’ and Tamil father ‘abba’. She must have been taking my son for walks while she secretly met her Muslim boyfriend,” she adds. The nanny left two months ago on a vacation and never returned. “I am guessing she is now sure that she has fallen in love,” Achuthan adds.
While Achuthan is currently looking for another nanny, so is a certain K Vijay. He started looking for a nanny while his wife was four months pregnant. After months of search, Vijay did find one, but when the baby turned nine months old, she wanted to quit.
“We kept requesting her not to, and even started granting her as many days off as possible,” says K Vijay. She would go on leave for two to three weeks at a stretch, and we would bear with it, with either of us taking a day off from work to be with the baby. The nanny continued for another nine months and eventually quit. They are now looking for another nanny, but all the nannies they have interviewed are either very “scary-looking”, so much so that the baby started crying, or too inflexible (one such nanny wanted to abandon the baby at six sharp every evening, unwilling to wait a minute further).
As for Rao, she gave her nanny a CD of nursery rhymes to be played to Eesha. But Eesha hardly responds to any of the songs, Rao discovered. A few months ago she saw Eesha dancing to the tunes of Mujhe Neend Na Aaye... Na Jaane Kahan Dil Kho Gaya (from the 1990 film Dil). Turns out the nanny has a collection of these songs on her mobile.
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