About the Help
It may not be a conversation we want, but it’s certainly one we need
In her first book, journalist Tripti Lahiri demonstrates that she is a meticulous reporter. She goes wherever her story leads, from elegantly appointed drawing rooms in Lutyens’ Delhi to a Jharkhand riverbed where a woman named Suruj Kujur carries baskets of sand to waiting trucks for 12 hours a day. As a result, Maid in India is full of such scarcely credible glimpses into the working lives of India’s poor.
By 5.30 pm Kujur “has hauled more than 4,000 kilograms of sand, all on her head”, for which she receives Rs 110, writes Lahiri. It’s no wonder that Kujur’s daughters hightail it to India’s metropolitan cities for a chance to wait hand and foot on the likes of us.
Lahiri, in a strained prologue, tells the story of a birthday party in Goa, a rare reunion of friends who are in their late 30s, busy with demanding jobs and mostly single. However, one of them who is married throws the whole weekend into disarray by bringing her nanny and ‘allowing’ her to sit at the table at breakfast and dinner. Lahiri writes of the “silent tensions seething in the room”, of “all of us pretending the morning had not been roiled by subterranean tremors”, but never once wonders about a mother who cannot take her child to breakfast with family and friends without a nanny in tow.
This is not to shame upper middle class mothers, but to wonder at the lives we have created for ourselves in which every onerous task is somebody else’s job. We’re job creators, we tell ourselves. We’re giving someone a chance to make some money. Except the pay we offer is ludicrous, usually below even a notional minimum wage. In Delhi, say, minimum wage for unskilled labour is a little under Rs 14,000 a month, and semi-skilled labour a little under Rs 15,000. A survey on a jobs website last year pegged the amount maids make in Delhi at Rs 6,000 with drivers earning Rs 12,500.
Even if you’re not mistreating your help—beating them, sexually abusing them, locking them in cupboards which, as Lahiri’s research shows, is not as uncommon as you might think—the chronic underpayment, the stiffing of poor, sometimes desperate people, is a scandal. In a modern country, people should not have to rely on luck, or the mercy of their ‘masters’, to be treated with dignity. Despite Lahiri’s staid prose, Maid in India is compelling. And what it shows us about ourselves... to borrow from Mr Kurtz: The horror! The horror!