The future of domestic help in India

 I have been raised lazy. I'm not trying to explain away my laziness, but trying to give context. In my middle class south Indian background with a working mother, there was always a domestic help around during my childhood. Going to the US when I hit 20, I had to do all my household chores by myself. But because I was only doing it for myself, and not a family of four, I found it do-able.  But it was a nuisance. And it opened my eyes to how most of the middle class in the developed world lived - sans domestic help. And ever since, I have been waiting for the women in India drop their brooms and mops and say- "We don't want to work as domestic helps anymore." Because that day is coming. Maybe even within our lifetimes. 

My mother's maids educated their daughters. My own maid's daughter has a degree, is working in a BPO and is actively encouraging her mother to stop working as a domestic help. My former maid, who took a career break a few years ago to go to her native place to take care of her ailing father, once she came back and saw that all the houses she worked at had gotten others to fill her shoes, decided to take an alternate path. She has taken up work as housekeeping staff at a corporate office. The hours are strict, but the pay is good, she has colleagues she hangs out with at break time and she gets health insurance so she can go to a private hospital for treatment while before, she had to go to the government hospital and be ill-treated. 

The country is trying to educate as many women as possible and the economy is booming. Many middle class working women in certain urban pockets are finding it hard to get affordable domestic help. This is mainly due to the fact the area around them maybe too posh/too expensive to have any lower-middle or lower income living pockets nearby. Since availability becomes an issue/ demand becomes high, and the few women willing to make the trip into those posh areas drive up the salaries, and the comparatively not as rich households there cannot afford to pay the salaries demanded by the domestic helps. So they learn to do without domestic helps. 

As for the domestic helps themselves, if a woman has school going kids, has larges swathes of the day free and has a mind to work, there are plenty of opportunities for her now that she didn't have a few decades ago. Is it any wonder that more and more women prefer to work in garment/glass/ceramic/plastic/fill-in-industry-of choice factories than to work as a domestic help? Especially if they get skilled in their profession of choice and can command a good pay check, why would they ever go back to working as domestic helps? Because lets face it, this is an unregulated industry - and the people employing the domestic helps aren't always good employers. For every lazy/incompetent/sticky fingered domestic helps story you hear, there are equal number of draconian/bigotted/kanjoos/demanding more than they pay for- employer stories. 

If there's anything that the COVID lockdowns have taught people, its that self- reliance is the best. Many domestic helps I know have taken up alternate careers after the lockdowns. Many middle-class working women I know have tech-ed up their houses and have stopped having domestic helps. I'm not saying that the whole system of having household help is going to stop anytime soon. We still have a long way to go to ensure that every girl child gets educated. But looking at every other "developed" country around, this system will stop one day, and it's coming sooner rather than later. 

Father of Daughters : An Indian Daughter's Perspective - I

 There's an episode of the TV show "The West Wing" and if you like the overly verbose writing of Aaron Sorkin - where 100 words are used to communicate 2, you would know this. It's about an Arabic phrase "Abu-el-banat" - which means a "Father of Daughters" which is shown in a funny way in a monologue by Martin Sheen - who plays The President and who is a father of three daughters - that a father of daughters needs all the help he can get - free cups of tea- in this case. If you google this phrase you would see the sheer number of ways that it can be interpreted given that we aren't native Arabic speakers. Pity, sympathy, joy, exasperation, resignation, condescension, and it's supposedly an insult as well. 

My father had only daughters. Now, he is a typical man born in the late 1940's and raised in a typically patriarchal house in south Tamil Nadu. Guess what that means? His mother did all his and his brothers' chores, and he has seen women do all the household chores in every house in his village and in the town 20kms away as well.  While his sister was taught the importance of house-keeping and cooking, he wasn't even taught to fend for himself when he had to live alone when he started working. After years of his college's hostel food, he survived on nearby messes for food as an adult, and guess what? Constant outside food takes a toll on the body. But that's a story for another day. 

Back to my point - I doubt he even knew how to make himself a cup of coffee or tea. His job was putting the food on the table and nothing else. Because that is all he was shown and any instances where he saw men performing domestic tasks either did not compute in his head or he dismissed as an anomaly. So when he raised his daughters, got them educated and then eventually married, guess what? Remember the #Sharetheload advertisement that Ariel put out that had people oooh-ing and aaah-ing? That happened organically in my father as well within a few months of my marriage. 

Men are a bit slow. And severely lack instinctive empathy compared to women. Also when it's your wife, it's still not your flesh and blood being overworked and loaded with household chores in addition to office work and taking care of the kids. The child that he raised with so much love and care was now the wife in another man's house. The bulb doesn't go off otherwise it appears. So, slowly my father began to take on some repetitive tasks that  normally fell to my mother even though she was a working woman herself. He is not making full meals mind you, but still, even if he can make coffee and tea for himself, heat up his own meals, wash the vessels occasionally, that is a big load off my mother's back. 

A father of daughters grows up eventually. He starts seeing things he never had before, even in his later years, he is capable of learning and changing. What about the fathers of only sons? 

Joy in the day-to-day

 As one grows older, one begins to get wisdom - or so they claim. I am just left with more unanswered questions and fewer definite answers. I write less, I exercise less, I play less, I eat less, I spend less on myself. The only thing that being an older adult and all that it entails have left me is more work. As a kid I thought that the adults have everything. But now I find that the opposite is true. Adults have a lot of work and responsibilities and very less enjoyment, true enjoyment, that we experienced as kids. I assume that once I become a true old lady - in my 60's maybe , If I live that long and retire from a full time job, I may have more time on my hands to do as I see fit, but I doubt it. By then, I would hopefully be a grandmother, and grandmothers have a lot of work too. But, I digress. 

Enjoyment in the small things: Are the longer lived years making us more jaded compared to kids where a lot of experiences are new? And with time, will we lose more of our joie de verve and be filled with ennui for life? Is this why some older people get religious- seeking God as a way to feel some joy? Also, Is this why  some older people get better at accepting the concept of death? Aaah, I'm so bored with this world, I might as well go?  

I am trying to understand joy and the pull this emotion has on us, to keep us tethered in this realm. I am trying to find a way to keep joy in my life and clearly failing miserably as a lot of things feel designed to pull me down. All I'm left with is weird pondering that goes nowhere. And then I get back to my chores. Aah, the humdrum of middle class life with middle class concerns, time tables to be followed, lunches to be packed and meetings that need attending and people who need to be called back. What would we do without you all?