Its ten minutes past seven, and I’ve glanced at the kitchen clock for the twentieth time. The doorbell chimes. The relief is unimaginable. For the doorbell announces the arrival of the first of my two maids.
The maid in the kitchen
Manisha is the senior of my two maids, and the kitchen is her exclusive domain. Middle-aged and comfortably proportioned, she has been with me for years. With reason. While never likely to be a prize winner in a sparkling dishes contest, she’s regular and punctual to the minute (which explains my anxiety today). When she does take leave, it doesn’t stretch interminably and indefinitely like the pandemic did. As any working woman will testify, these are sterling qualities in a maid. The pièce de résistance is her ability to make delicious piping-hot stuffed parathas, much appreciated by a husband on a frugal breakfast of oats, fruits, and black coffee!
Sedate and respectful, Manisha waits patiently while I open the door and move out of the doorway before padding in noiselessly to the kitchen. There she stays, busying herself with the vegetables, working her magic with flour and water and rushing through a quick soap and water ritual with the dishes. She can take a subtle hint (the scrubber positioned prominently inside the supposedly washed frying pan, for instance), saving face all around.
Over the years we have established an amicable relationship, aided by her unfailingly readiness to improve herself and seek my advice on various matters – specially on matters of weight loss and fitness.
A hurricane of a housemaid
Reshma, the younger of my two maids, has been with me for just about a year. My relationship with her can best be described as…..tempestuous. Insubstantial and slender as her name, she appears to be perennially caught in a whirlwind. I have to skip rather nimbly out of the doorway when she arrives, for she is propelled in by a Force 10 gale which is subsequently unleashed within the house.
Unlike Manisha, Reshma is impervious to hints, innuendos or, for that matter, even to overt signs of disapproval. Cheerfully chatty as she barges in half-an-hour late, oblivious of my knitted brow and monosyllabic answers, she embarks on interminable tales amidst the flurry of sweeping and mopping. There are tales of marriages, deaths, accidents, and ailments in her family (never a dull moment in that house!). Then there is the perennial stream of her house guests and their breakfast orgies (120 puris with halwa at the last one), her neighbours’ frequent fights culminating in the wife eloping with her lover (a happening neighbourhood indeed!).
She whirls in and out of rooms, never quite done with any, making my husband shuffle from one room to another, interrupting his deep communion with the digital world. Moved to grumble one day, Reshma, genuinely concerned and not the least abashed, asked if he hadn’t slept well. My husband lodged a formal protest alleging a certain frivolity and lack of respect towards the master of the house. Three BHK apartment, I corrected, somewhat frivolously.
Last Sunday, the tornado struck an hour early, while we were still at breakfast. She flashed me a beaming smile and commented “I’ve caught you at breakfast today,” rather like I had my hand in the cookie jar.
The final straw
However, these are but minor irritants. No balm can heal, and no bridge can span the breach caused today. There can be no hopes of a reconciliation. She was watching as I popped in my regular calcium supplement. “Will that medicine help me put on weight and become plump like you?” she asked.
Never can Reshma and I ever see eye to eye again.
Thus ends the tale – of me and my two maids.