A world around an object
Glimpse into a citizen’s life through her household appliance
Her days are full of work, with no spare hours to spend on herself, she says mat} ter-of-factly. A career woman, she works as a part-time housekeeper in scores of households in the nearby apartment blocks. She lives with her husband and children in an unnamed jhuggi in a city sector.
In her late 40s, Bhavani is obliged to work equally hard as a housekeeper in her own home— she cooks the meals, washes the dishes and does the laundry. Months ago she acquired an object of convenience—a washing machine. Her husband had bought it secondhand from a recycler. She encountered no difficulty in operating the machine, being used to such modern appliances even if they don’t happen to be at her home. “I have been operating them daily while at work in my kothiyan (employers’ houses).”
This afternoon she is at home. She performs shifts in the morning and in the evening “and in between I come back to my own house to work again.” At this moment, she is taking care of the laundry. The washing machine is installed outside the one-room house, beside the main door.
The absence of running water in the jhuggi obliges her to store water every morning from a public tap in a few buckets and tubs. “It takes the same time to wash the clothes with the machine as it does with the hands,” she remarks. “But it is less exerting,” she says, explaining that she doesn’t have to beat the clothes or wash the stains many times over with her own hands. She rules out any suggestion that the washing machine might have drastically transformed her life. “I leave for work every morning at six. I return at 1pm when I have to do the same washing and cleaning in my own house that I do in my shifts. I leave again at 5 for work and return at 8 to prepare the dinner.”
Soon afterwards, she is seen spreading the clothes on the wash-line strung outside her home.