Me and Maids, February 10, 2009

Don’t read me wrong, but for as long as my memory goes maids have been a subject of hot discussion of my grandmother, mother and now my wife and her mother.

``She takes leave too often, steals, drinks milk from the fridge, dirty, ill-behaved…,’’ have been the common complaints.

Maids have been spoken about by women of my household with the same passion as I may talk about cricket, golf or shares.

Frankly, I have considered them a nuisance and maid issues very silly woman talk, until I have had to take part-responsibility of baby sitting Khyati.

These girls know that they have you by the b…ls (pardon the language) when it comes to the kid.

A couple of bad experiences I can recall are when I had to multi-task between Khyati and a stiff deadline, which I thought I could manage with the maid.

I made the mistake of snapping at her on some issue I don’t remember.

She promptly told me ``saab, chakkar aa raha hai (sir, I have a headache).’’ When a young girl speaks about such a problem, it only means one thing and one has to let her go to her room and rest.

During my early days of handling Khyati with a maid, I lost my temper at one and she promptly packed her belongings and left.

Then began a mad scramble for a new maid and soon I realized that getting one is an organized racket involving agencies that charge a hefty service amount without any guarantees.

The agencies as a matter of fact encourage maids to leave employers so that they make more money by re-cycling them elsewhere.

Further, given the pace at which the Indian population is pro-creating, the maid sector is a monopoly.

Now I look at handling maids as a very serious matter and have had discussions with my mother on the issues involved. ``Be gentle and diplomatic,’’ is her advise.

Our current maid has negotiated TV time for her favorite soap operas and spends quite a bit of her day talking on the cell phone (call this emancipation due to technology and cheap call rates) to sundry drivers and gardeners, spread all over the country.

I good naturedly pretend that all of this is very funny.