Book review: An incisive account of a complex relationship

Books about maids and madams have been written in the past. There is The Maid Narratives: Black Domestics and White Families in the Jim Crow South which looks at African-American history through the lens of intimate relationships between black domestic workers and the white families they worked for. Based on interviews with over four dozen people — both white and black, these stories seek to bring out the enormous resilience as well as resistance at the peak of segregation and discrimination in America’s South.

Tripti Lahiri’s meticulously-researched Maid in India, is the first book I have read about domestic helpers in India in the 21st century or on what happens when the one per cent and 99 per cent share a home, as the author puts it. The book frames itself as “stories of opportunity and inequality inside our homes”. But it is a lot more.

In essence, the book is about borders — physical, emotional, psychological encompassing the minutae of everyday life.  Lahiri, Hong Kong-based Asia editor of Quartz and formerly with the Wall Street Journal in India, turns her piercing reporter’s gaze on these “borders” or markers which underpin contemporary Indian society as it navigates  myriad transitions.

“Borders between countries are marked out by fences and guards, but borders between classes are marked out by where you may sit, where you may go to the bathroom, and where and with whom you may eat,” the author writes in the prologue.

Then begins the journey as we are transported into homes of the rich and rising classes of Indians many of whom have worked hard to keep the India of poverty and deprivation at bay. They live in “beautifully kept bungalows to which they invite their friends, or they go on outings to malls in air-conditioned cars whose windows glide up, creating a hermetic seal at the touch of a button”.

But this beautiful life comes at a cost. To make this happen, affluent Indians “must invite the other India into their homes, to clean those bungalows, drive those air-conditioned cars, and keep their children away during those long soirees”.

How are “borders” sustained when the denizens of some of the poorest districts of India live in enforced intimacy with the beautiful people?

Lahiri’s deep-dive into India’s upper-class urban milieu in search of answers leads to interesting findings — the borders remain but the interactions between the masters, madams and the maids are not always uniformly negative. There are stories of upward mobility, though not real equality.

In one story, an employer proudly tells Lahiri that none of the children of their servants now work as servants. In fact, both the daughters of a man who worked for their family for decades have gone on to become doctors. Not only that, they married doctors, moving from poverty to middle class.

Employers who are progressive, relatively speaking, and generously help “maids” to get their children admitted to schools, sometimes even paying the school fees, turn a blind eye to maid’s relatives staying in servant’s quarters, etc. Lahiri calls this a “miniature welfare state”, vital in a country where most people do not have access to a safety net or social security.

But the niggling question remains. Does this benevolence come at a price? Are even the most generous employers really paying fair wages? Or is it unfair to compare wages and working conditions in the developed world where “maids” are a rarity and come at a steep price with the situation in India?

More to the point — many employers in aspirational India are not particularly bothered about the maid’s upward mobility. They are too busy clawing their own way up the social and economic ladder and do not have the extra time to train maids, like the old moneyed, leisure class. That opens up opportunities for maid trainers.

Lahiri takes us inside one such agency in Chakkarpur, a village in Gurgaon where a diminutive Jat girl who has never known the luxury of having a maid herself trains new recruits on the finer points of laying a table. Indian readers of the book will merely chuckle but non-Indian readers are likely to be mesmerised by the drill — glasses are placed on the right elsewhere but in India, no matter your class, “you eat rotis with your hands, so they should have been on the left, to be clasped with the clean hand”.

In the maid’s own home, usually a room with an attached kitchen and bath — there will be neither a dining table nor table-laying because sitting and eating as a family at the table is a practice common only among a small group of Indians, Lahiri reminds us.

And it brings us back to borders — the borders that are transcended through this intricate play of learning and unlearning, intermingling and keeping distance between the beautiful India and the other India that props it up.

Though many stories in the book dwell at length on the lives and times of Delhi sophisticates and their “servants”, Lahiri does not let you forget the horrors, the often common-place brutality associated with domestic work. Not all maids have progressive employers.

India has around 3.5 million domestic workers, including chauffeurs and guards. No one quite knows the true numbers of maids in India.

Lahiri’s Maid in India captures a slice of the lives of some maids in India. The book turns the spotlight on the stories and the backstories of some of the thousands of poor, illiterate unskilled women who flock to Delhi from the rural hinterland to work as domestic help — people like Fullin from rural Jharkhand, Lovely from Malda, Mae from Kokrajhar and others.

In a country where the haves and the have-nots rarely share common experiences, the story of maids provides an insightful narrative about how the two rub shoulders every day under the same roof.

As social norms change, “borders” shift and the vast chasm between the two sides narrows a little, but it is worth remembering how much still remains  the same.

Maids continue to be exploited, tortured, sometimes even killed. Posh India still won’t let the poor, without whom it can’t survive, into their sanctum sanctorum-clubs and ritzy restaurants.

I remember how our perfectly-groomed nanny was refused admission in one of Delhi’s tony eateries simply because the management thought she “looked like a maid”. When we protested, the response changed — there were no empty tables. I have never visited that eatery again.

One of the most powerful stories in the book is about Mae, a tribal girl, her “rescue” from a home in Delhi’s Punjabi Bagh. The story’s  twists and turns are emblematic of what happens when the law is invoked for justice.

Read Maid in India not simply as a collection of stories about India’s maids, and their human rights and wrongs.

Read it to know about the way we were, the way we are and the way we will be unless we drastically revise our notion of borders.

Patralekha Chatterjee focuses on development issues in India and emerging economies. She can be reached at patralekha.chatterjee@gmail.com