Column

Salaam Mumbai

My Nepali cook who is in hospital, being treated for malaria, sent me an sms yesterday, requesting me to send over his laptop so that he could play computer games while he was recuperating.

In few areas is Mumbai as well served as it is in its domestic help. The household help we have in Mumbai is smart, enterprising, upwardly mobile and streets ahead of help anywhere else in the country. I know of instances where domestic maids have put daughters through medical college, where servants from nearby slums have mastered sophisticated gadgets and appliances, and many cases where young men and women who have started out as domestic servants have ended up playing pivotal roles in the offices of their employers.

And yet, the lives of these men and women who spend their waking hours serving us, are still fraught with uncertainty, insecurity and inequity.

Even in the most modern and progressive households that exist for all practical purposes in the 21st century the rules that apply to the domestic help are feudal. There is no job description, no concept of working hours and adequate rest, no benchmarking of remuneration to economic factors, and no job security.

Servants in Mumbai may earn more than their counterparts in the rest of the country but are still terribly exploited, only because after years of being ground down their lack of confidence prevents them from demanding a better deal for themselves.

And so, even as its citizens enjoy the fruits of a booming economy, no one has bothered to reward their domestic help with commensurate increments.

And the irony is that even as Mumbai’s aspiring middle-class, climbs to even dizzier heights of lifestyle benefits, its domestic servants have also kept pace with the city’ evolution.

An NGO that taught primary education in slums was pleasantly surprised when the parents of its children, who worked as domestic servants in nearby homes, turned up in hundreds to request that the teaching be imparted in English so their children too could share in the benefits that an English education brought.

A group of servants recently floated a ‘ business’ scheme, wherein they sold household items through direct networking-a business model that seems dodgy- but their instincts for survival cannot be faulted.

And there’s my own cook, who has taught himself how to use my old laptop, work every electronic gadget in the house as if he were born to it, and communicates with me when I am outside the house by sms (“Memsahib, aaj kya khana banao?”) No doubt about it. Mumbai’s servants are ready, willing and able to take their rightful place in the city’s economic resurgence –but will we let them?

s_malavika@dnaindia.net