Man From Matunga

My wife and I are hav­ing major domes­tic issues.

It’s that time of the year. The tem­per­a­tures are ris­ing, the kids are at home for two months and rou­tines have changed…it doesn’t take much for tem­pers to start fraying.

It’s that time of the year…it’s not only chil­dren who have school vacations…the domes­tic help also goes away to the villages…and the finely wound tapes­try of daily life starts unrav­el­ing. The cook goes on leave and even though there is a new one, we sud­denly need to pay more atten­tion and give more time to meal prepa­ra­tion. The house-help also goes on leave at the same time, with­out arrang­ing for a locum (and there is hardly any­one around to do a locum) and this adds to the daily chore bur­den, includ­ing some­times hav­ing to do the dishes. The chauf­feur goes on leave, com­pletely dis­rupt­ing the daily rou­tine of going to work, going to the mar­ket and get­ting the kids dropped and picked up from their var­i­ous activ­i­ties. And col­leagues at office too go on hol­i­days adding to the over­all work burden.

There are two dif­fer­ent worlds liv­ing together, depen­dent on each other. One world is the one where we work and run our homes with every­thing in between. And then there is the world of the peo­ple who enable us to do this…the maids, the ser­vants, the chauf­feurs, the cooks, the tiffin-carriers and all the oth­ers, whose raison-d-etre is sup­pos­edly to make our lives sim­pler and easier.

This other world runs our world. With­out the enablers, we would find it vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to func­tion and to carry out the activ­i­ties we do. Peo­ple often com­pare our lifestyles to those in the West, who even with higher income lev­els find it a lux­ury to be able to afford a maid to come in twice a week, leave alone hav­ing chauf­feurs and cooks. Many who don’t know, espe­cially those liv­ing in Euro­pean coun­tries, often think that a good num­ber of us are Mahara­jas still liv­ing in a monar­chial world with all the help that we need at our beck and call. Lit­tle do they real­ize what the truth is! The real Mahara­jas are peo­ple like our cooks (and we Gujjus even call them that) with­out whom our daily rou­tines sud­denly would just derail.

So depen­dent are we, that it takes one lit­tle devi­a­tion in our finely sched­uled lives for every­thing to start crash­ing. The dri­ver falls sick, so we have to self-drive, which means the car remains at work and can’t go back to pick up the son from school, which means one of the par­ents has to change his/her work sched­ule or request another par­ent to take care of the son, who still though needs to be taken to another class, which means one more favor from another par­ent or com­ing home ear­lier from work, and since the car was not there to take the cook to the mar­ket, the cook hasn’t been able to get fresh veg­eta­bles, which means din­ner will also be an issue and so on and so forth.

It has been a tra­di­tion in our coun­try that once a cer­tain social level is reached, menial house­work is passed onto domes­tic help. Yet, friends in the West man­age quite well with­out armies of enablers and with no sig­nif­i­cant drop in pro­duc­tiv­ity. Per­haps at some time in the future we too will be able to ape them and man­age our lives on our own.

Until then…domestic problems…are prob­lems that occur when the domes­tic help is not around. Domes­tic issues between cou­ples and among fam­i­lies need another name.