“Main Zubaida, tum koan?” I heard a booming voice blare out of my headset when I called my mother last week.
Every winter as the Polar Vortex descends on the Midwest my mom packs her suitcases and flies off to India. Over the years finding reliable domestic help during her stay in Pune has become increasingly difficult. Growing up we had a number of kaamwaalis that cleaned our dishes, washed our clothes and swept our floors. There was Kashibai and her daughters Suman, Shardha and Munni, Indubai and her daughter Radha and a number of others who I don’t quite remember. The mothers did the day shift and the daughters came by in the evening after school. It seems strange now that we needed servants to help with our daily chores, but back then, it was par for the course and in many ways an integral part of the social fabric. People living in the slums worked for people living in apartments. Kashibai’s husband was a day laborer who barely made enough to satisfy his drinking habit, and without the fifty rupees a month from our house and a dozen other homes she wouldn’t be able to feed herself or her children. The children working though, that’s harder to justify. In the thirty odd years since, things have changed. There are fewer maids and the ones left, charge substantially more. Also they are looking for long term contracts, not the two or three months my mom requests. And so that brings us back to Zubaida. If she knew I was writing about her, well, I am not sure what she would do. A slap across my face, a kiss on my forehead or a shrug as she continues to watch the next episode of Big Boss, are all distinct possibilities. Zubaida was born in a small village near Bombay, was married off when she turned fifteen and after three horrid years doused herself with kerosene and lit a match. The right side of her face and body are still badly scarred but any emotional trauma from the event has long since passed. She is loud, she is proud and she is intimidating. She’s been married and divorced thrice and my mom tells me she is with someone new and so doesn’t come to work as often. When she does, she uses the time to catch up on her prayers and fasting, which frustrates my mother to no end, because she ends up sleeping through most of the day. I am paying for her piety my mom complains. Sometimes she’ll buy eggplants and ask my mom to cook them because she likes my mom’s cooking.
“Sajid” I responded and then listened to a twenty minute rant about how my mother was not walking enough, and how expensive onions were and the terrible bus service in Pune and the weather that was still so warm in December and how the water only came for three hours a day and the electricity kept cutting off when she was watching TV and that I needed to buy a new TV for the apartment and the new flat screen one from Samsung was really the one I should buy and that her omelettes were the best in the whole world.
“Please mummy ko phone do.” I interjected when she eventually paused to catch her breath.
And just as my mom was about to take the phone, I heard Zubaida shout in the background.
“Arey Sajid Bhai ko bolo, Happy Happy.”
And a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all of you as well.