Friends with househelp

I sometimes worry about the househelp. I spend long hours in my Uncle's house (when I'm not off on some grand adventure...of course) with the cook, the cleaning girl and the maid. (That sounds like the beginning of a joke. It's not.) By and large they tolerate my unpredictable eating habits (I eat at odd hours, I occasionally defile delicious Indian dishes by adulterating them with things like cheese, I don't cook eggs nearly enough), my almost visceral insistence on washing and drying my own clothes, and the hours of time I spend in front of the computer.

They're used to it. But I'm not used to having other people worrying about me. My uncle's staff are some of the best in the business, and in Mumbai, househelp is a thriving business. Everyone has a maid, perhaps a cook, sometimes even a driver. These are informal business arrangements. Maids come and go. Their employers don't pay taxes on their labor, contribute to their 401 K, or provide them with medical and dental insurance. But that doesn't mean there is no organized system of recompense. The better employers give away clothes and dishware, pay for medical expenses, help out with incidentals like cousins' weddings, even pay for the children to go to school. So it's not a bad gig.

The worst employers, meanwhile, don't even bear talking about. Suffice it to say they can't keep househelp longer than a month.

After a sad day last month when the cleaning girl brought me my white professional shirt, stained with dark red patches due to some mysterious malfunction in the washing process, I've returned to washing all my own clothes. I've told her this is what I prefer, but just in case, I stash my valuable professional clothes in the corners of my wardrobe. (Incidentally, the same red stains appeared in a load of my machine wash clothes a week ago. She didn't say anything, but her entire posture said 'I told you so.' Now I have a pink towel, but the mystery isn't any closer to being solved.)

Meanwhile, I boggle the cook by finagling odd foods. Most of my favorite dishes - improvised in college, I admit - combine foods I love with foods that are healthy or at least low fat. This is how I became obsessed with a salad, made from chopped tomatoes and white cheddar, that I whimsically call "caprese" in order to give it legitimacy. Or roti (a whole wheat tortilla) rolled around cheese. She's given up. In my more generous hours I worry that she thinks I don't like her cooking (nothing could be farther from the truth, I've said so but I don't know if she believes me). We have wildly different ideas of nutrition - when she found out I take Splenda in my morning tea, she nearly threw a fit. "At your age sugar is good for you!" she said. Easy enough, coming from a woman who after having two children is probably as slim as I am. (Here's another fun fact - I didn't believe all the hype about the American obesity epidemic until I came to India. People really are much thinner. I am an average size!)

The point is, I'm so used to managing all my own needs - dishwashing, driving, cooking, cleaning, etc - (obviously with the help of heavy machinery) that it sometimes confuses me to hand over these tasks to others. To do so constitutes a bit of a paradigm shift.

(By the way, I wasn't kidding when I said that these people are some of the best. We go places together. They worry when I get bored. They're good at their jobs. Enough said.)