Helping hands

These days it is easier than ever to outsource your life

Growing up in Calcutta as a little girl, the high point of my year was the annual visit of my aunt who lived in London and could be relied upon to arrive laden with presents. But as I grew up, I came to realize that this was the high point of the year for my aunt as well. Not just because she loved us and missed us – which, of course, she did – but because this gave her some much-needed respite from domestic chores.

While in London, she had to do the cooking and wash up afterwards, make and unmake the beds, vacuum the house, and even give the toilets a good scrubbing, in Calcutta all these tasks were the responsibility of cooks, maids and cleaners. So, for the month that she was here, she could sit back and relax while the endless work that is involved in running a house, was delegated to paid help.

You don’t know how lucky you are in India, she would constantly tell my mother. And my mother, with her gift for pessimism, would grimly reply that it was only a matter of time before India went the way of England as well. By the time I grew up, she informed me, it would be impossible to get household staff. People of my generation would have to do what my aunt did; take care of the household chores ourselves.

Well, in a way, my mother was right. It is getting increasingly difficult (and much more expensive) to get help these days as social mobility kicks in – and that’s just how it should be. But strangely enough, even though domestic help is getting harder to find, people like us are doing less and less for ourselves. In fact, as I look around at my peer group the thing that strikes me the most is how we have managed to outsource most of the drudgery associated with everyday living, taking advantage of two-job families and the disposable income that comes with it.

The most visible symbols of how we have outsourced our lives are such taxi services as Uber and Ola. Even those of us who have cars, don’t bother to take them out every day (or, for that matter, hire drivers to lessen our burden). Who wants the hassle of maintaining a car, battling road rage as you try and negotiate traffic, finding parking space wherever you go, and renewing insurance every year, when you can tap into an app on your phone and get a chauffeur-driven car at your location in a matter of minutes? There can’t be a more fuss-free way of going to work, heading out for the evening, getting back home, or even running errands.

Except, of course, that even those errands have become fewer and fewer over the years. There is, for instance, no need to go shopping for groceries or fruits and vegetables. Yes, you guessed it, there is an app (or rather several) for that. And if you don’t want to go digital, you can simply phone your neighbourhood store and get all you want delivered at your doorstep at no extra cost (though it’s always a good idea to tip the delivery guy).

If you are fond of cooking, you don’t need to do the drudge work of prepping your ingredients. There are apps that will source all the ingredients for the meal of your choice, clean them, chop them up, and send them to you in a pretty little box. If you are on a diet, there are apps that will deliver healthy meals for all days of the week.

And if at the end of a long day the last thing you want to do is toil in the kitchen, there is always Swiggy, which will bring the cuisine of your choice to your doorstep. No need to employ a cook, whose repertoire is necessarily limited. Now, the whole restaurant world is your virtual kitchen and you can order anything you like at any time. Serve yourself on paper plates and you won’t even need to do the washing up.

In fact, given the kind of services that are available to us these days there is very little reason to put ourselves out at all. You can download tutoring programmes that will help your kids with their homework when you can’t. There is no need to leave the house to catch a movie; you get the best of programming on streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hotstar, which you can enjoy from the comfort of your couch.

There may be a dearth of household help in the market, as young men and women opt out of domestic service. But that gap had been filled by such housekeeping services as Urban Clap (disclaimer: I have never used them and have no idea how good or bad they are) that will, for a reasonable sum send over a team of workers to your house to give it a good going over. You can choose the frequency  and the range of services and have a spanking clean house without the palaver of managing domestic staff.

So, I guess in a way, both my aunt and mother were right. My mother, when she pronounced the imminent death of domestic help. And my aunt, when she claimed that we in India had no idea how lucky we were.  

We may no longer have in-house staff like we used to, but we still manage to outsource our lives quite efficiently – and cheaply. Though how long that will last is anybody’s guess.

  

Maid in India

It won’t be long before she disappears from our homes; so it’s time we learnt to look after ourselves

Do you remember those Hindi movies of yore, in which the domestic help was always called ‘Ramu’ – or perhaps ‘Ramu Kaka’ if he was a tad older. This man would run the entire household for his ‘Bibiji’, filling in as cleaner, cook, gardener, housekeeper and general factotum. But the family he served never saw him as a ‘servant’. Instead, they regarded him as one of the family (hence the honorific ‘Kaka’) and a valued member of the household.

But ‘Ramu Kaka’ wasn’t just a fictional character. Ramu Kakas existed in real life as well, attached to families for generations on end, serving father, son and then grandson, until they were finally pensioned off to the villages they came from, and their own sons and grandsons took their place.

Those days are long gone, of course. Now, rare is the family that can boast of a ‘family retainer’ who thinks nothing of devoting his/her entire life to serving one particular household. These days you consider yourself lucky if you can persuade your domestic help to stick with you for a couple of years, not a couple of generations. And those familial ties that were created by long years of service have disappeared entirely.

These days our relationship with our domestic help is strictly transactional. We agree to pay a certain amount of money for certain services performed over a certain number of hours. The arrangement lasts only as long as both parties are happy with it. And that is as far as this social contract goes.

There is no special bonding over cooking breakfast or cutting the vegetables for lunch. There is no gossip exchanged as you watch the saas-bahu soaps in the evening. In fact, women who work outside the home hardly ever even meet the women who help run their houses. They just hand over a copy of the key and hope for the best.

I was reminded of this last week as I began reading a collection of short stories by Renee Ranchan, titled To Each With Love. In one of the stories, The Fiefdom, Ranchan writes about the torturous relationship between a ‘Memsahib’ (or ‘Ma’am, as she is deferentially called) and her ‘maid’. How a relationship that begins with the ‘Memsahib’ wielding all the power gradually transforms into one in which the ‘maid’ is in control. So much so that the lady of the house even willingly turns a blind eye to her domestic help’s pilfering, so dependent is she on her services.

As I read the story, which takes a rather dark turn half-way through – I won’t tell you more; you can read it for yourself and find out – it suddenly occurred to me that ours will probably be the last generation that can tell these stories. By the time our daughters and nieces are grown up and running their own homes, they will be lucky if they manage to score any domestic help at all.

Things are already changing in the big cities. Young women who even a decade ago would enter domestic service as a matter of course now have several other options that can exercise. They can work in beauty salons and spas, if not as operators then as attendants. They can be hired as sales staff in the retail sector. They can become attendants at petrol pumps. If they learn how to drive, they can aspire to become Uber or Ola taxi drivers. And if they know how to read and write and speak a smattering of English, the possibilities are endless. 

It’s not surprising, then, that the domestic help sector in the metros is now populated by young women from less developed areas like Jharkhand or Orissa, most of whom arrive in the big city with one single objective: to make enough money to put together a respectable dowry so that they can go back in a few years time, marry and live happily ever after. In the long run, they want to raise their own families; helping you raise yours is just a short-term objective, the means to an end.

So, it’s only a matter of time before the supply from these areas can no longer meet our insatiable demand for domestic help.

And if you ask me, that is a good thing. It is about time that we spoilt middle-class folk learnt to look after ourselves.

I mean, how hard can it be? Everyone in the West seems to manage fine. Even those who are relatively well-off are perfectly happy cleaning up after themselves. They cook their own meals, wash their own dishes, clean their own toilets, make their own beds, do their own laundry, even iron their own clothes.

So, why can’t we do the same? We now have the same labour-saving devices these folks rely on: dishwashers, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and what have you. All we lack is the will to look after ourselves because it is so much easier to dump all those nasty chores on someone else less fortunate than us whom we pay to do all our dirty work.

Well, that option may not be available to most of us for much longer. So, let’s get acquainted with the many attachments that come with a vacuum cleaner and learn to stack a dishwasher the right way. It’s time to learn to deal with our ‘maid-less’ futures, one laundry-load at a time.