Helping hands behind India's urban glitz

Book review of 'Maid in India: Stories of opportunity and inequality inside our homes'

MAID IN INDIA

Stories of Opportunity and Inequality Inside Our Homes

Tripti Lahiri

Aleph

314 pages; Rs 599

In his 2008 Booker-winning first novel, The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga charts the story of Balram Halwai, who rises from the darkness of his village in the hinterland to grand, if bloody, success as a self-made entrepreneur in the metropolis. The story resonated not just because it was emblematic of the glitz of the new India but also because it denoted how that new India was sometimes built upon the dreams of its lesser mortals.

In Maid In India, Tripti Lahiri offers evocative and detailed accounts of one subset of these lesser beings: The thousands of workers who migrate from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and West Bengal to make lives as domestic help in India’s metros. It’s an important book, covering personal stories of a group of people whose presence is the unobtrusive support system that keeps the new India running and burnished.

The domestic worker is a special class of manual labour that populates India’s urban agglomerations. She comes from some of the most deprived parts of the country – where even basic necessities like electricity and water are still unavailable or severely rationed – and is plonked into some of India’s most exclusive neighbourhoods where, as Ms Lahiri reminds us, it is not uncommon for residents to spend as much on an Italian dinner as is the maid’s monthly salary.

Although Ms Lahiri uniformly points out such class disparities, her book is chiefly about the courage these women – and domestic help are primarily women – display in building lives in new and, at first, frightening places. From Golbanu bibi, who would not let her son work so long she is alive, to Lovely, who brought her sisters to Delhi to enable them to have a better life, the domestic help Ms Lahiri profiles are exemplars of entrepreneurship and initiative.

The class distinction inherent in the relationship between the employer and the maid is not a new phenomenon — in India’s bureaucratic circles, for example, it was not uncommon to have the help do multiple things for little to no salary in return for accommodation and the promise to take care of urgent financial needs. 

What is new is the anonymity of the person coming to work in the household. With the rise in incomes and loss of age-old networks, people in the cities no longer have the support system on which their parents could rely. Yet, the most enduring relationships even today are based on more than a monetary transaction. A Delhi lawyer, who hires nearly 10 men and women to help around the house, offers them a slew of benefits ranging from health insurance to children’s education.

The relationship between the employer and the domestic help is an uneasily intimate one, but this intimacy is not always two-way. Ms Lahiri recounts how the driver of a friend knew great details about her life since he had often accompanied her on her journeys, while she struggled even to remember his name. Similarly, the domestic help know more about the relationship and financial statuses of their employers than even their closest confidants may, causing trust issues between the two parties.

On the other hand, more experienced maids can sometimes have an upper hand when dealing with clients. Ms Lahiri reprises the story of a new mother whose nanny would often comment on her lack of experience with the child. This stung her and made her postpartum depression all the more insufferable. She was able to relax only after the nanny left them.

Ms Lahiri aims for such balance in other areas too, such as when she shares the story of how a lower middle class family decided to hire a maid. Om Prakash Verma and his wife take care of their own domestic cleaning and other duties and rue that their daughter-in-law not only does not help them with domestic work but has hired a maid for her own house which is one floor above the Vermas’. Later, Ms Lahiri presents the daughter-in-law’s story, a nurse whose older son has autism and she herself is recuperating from cancer. 

Beyond the personal anecdotes, the book also discusses the work by non-government organisations to improve the lot of the domestic help. Ms Lahiri profiles Gauri Singh, who runs The Maids’ Company in the National Capital Region, an organisation that both trains girls arriving from other states to work as domestic help and assures that their rights are preserved. The company’s clauses are hearteningly specific about such seemingly small matters as lunch breaks and access to the toilet.

India’s persistent income inequality and high population will ensure that domestic help will be around for a long time to come. Ms Lahiri’s book is a reminder that for People Like Us, who are so quick to believe that they are ushering in a new, more evolved India, the blind spots begin at home. The plus side, when domestic workers become like extended family, is not nearly as frequent as the other kind, where they have to fight for their most basic rights. Formalising rules for domestic work, Ms Lahiri reiterates, will go a long way in bringing a semblance of parity to what is essentially an unequal relationship.