I’m sorry, I’m sorry. This post has been long delayed because I have been dealing with some very, how should I put it, unique problems. In short, I’ve been managing the help.
If you’d spoken to me at the beginning of June, I would have told you how settled I was feeling, and how smoothly things were running at home. Smooth to the point of me feeling superfluous to my own life, and to the point where I was running out of excuses not to start looking for a job. But then on June 4th, Jasper’s nanny announced she needed to return to Nepal for a week, and that she was leaving the next day. In itself this wouldn’t have been a huge problem, seeing as I am confident I can parent my own child, don’t yet have a job, and was happy that our other helper could continue looking after the cleanliness of our house and wardrobes. Or so I thought.
What actually ended up happening was that we had an uninvited house guest, a falling out, a firing, a regroup and now finally a new strategy.
The issues started when Jasper’s nanny, Seema, returned from Nepal. In her absence, our other helper, Shova, a relative of Seema’s, had expressed some confusion over where she lived and with whom she was meant to be staying and in the course of this discussion had offered to stay at our house to babysit for Jasper. I jumped at this, as this gave Dylan and I the chance to play some evening squash and tennis, and we even considered a cinema trip one evening before we discovered we were too late for tickets. Given that Shova didn’t want to stay at Seema’s in her absence, and didn’t really want to travel all the way to Navi (New) Mumbai each day, I suggested she stay at ours, in the spare room, for a couple of nights. IKEA had finally delivered the right mattress for the spare bed, and as we didn’t have any actual house guests, I suggested she sleep in there. She also needed food, of course, so I let her buy some rice and veg with the kitty money we keep, and let her know when best to use the kitchen so as not to disturb us.
No sooner had she stayed one night than she started to act like she owned the place. I was aware she was doing some laundry, but thought nothing of it, given that she didn’t seem to have a fixed home while Seema was away. I was also aware that she would need to shower in her new en suite, and gave her a towel accordingly. Dylan and I agreed that it was better for her to be clean and clean clothed than otherwise, and trusted her to clean up and leave the place as it had been before starting work each day, or leaving for the weekend. What transpired was that she bundled her black jeans and red t-shirt in with some of our clothes, destroying any chance of whiteness they still had in them. And she was showering multiple times a day, as and when she fancied it, coming out of the spare room with glossy wet hair before setting off on errands to the shopping mall. Even when she wasn’t staying the night, she was using the shower, and one day she decided to have a bowl of noodles at 4pm, sitting down at the table opposite me while I tried to do some writing.
In our defence, Dylan and I’s sense of responsibility towards our helpers is warped, having housed and fed both nanny and helper through COVID and the coup in Myanmar. But I now see that what is appropriate for someone who calls you in desperation and floods of tears saying their house has been raided and that they’ve just watched someone get shot at point blank range on the street outside, is not appropriate for someone who just can’t quite get along with their extended family.
I spoke with Shova about how she appeared to be treating the house like a hotel, and I think she understood. She seemed to take on board that she was not paid to destroy our clothes and take showers, and she left for the evening. This time, she forgot to turn the iron off, which, in retrospect should have been an instantly fireable offence, given that it could have led to an actual disaster, rather than just some pinkish grey t-shirts. But I was busy with Jasper and decided she could have one last strike before she was out.
And strike she did. Seema returned, as expected, but also (probably) brought back COVID with her (as also expected, to be honest). This led to a few more days of nannyless parenting for me, and delayed my understanding the full extent to which Seema and Shova were no longer speaking. When they were finally both back under the same roof, I realised I was running kindergarten negotiations as one wouldn’t speak to the other. This was not the smooth-running ship I had been on at the start of June. The final straw and the nail in Shova’s coffin came when she left what, for all your sakes, I will only describe as a ‘mess’ in the toilet for me to discover several hours after she had gone for the weekend. This, I decided, was more than I had to deal with from someone who was literally paid to keep things clean and tidy. And so her one month probation and her time under our employ came to an unceremonious end.
Jasper’s nanny Seema is a cut above the rest and every time I hear how much fun they have together and watch how patient and caring she is in helping him to do and say things, I am grateful that we have her on the team. She’s also a rational, kind person, from what I can tell, and hasn’t made any errors in the 2 months she’s worked for us, so I have high hopes that she won’t go the same way as Shova. But she does live far away, and with the monsoon rains as heavy as they are currently, this means she is likely to have some difficulty in getting to and from work sometimes. She has shown me videos of her wading through knee-deep water on station platforms which makes me wonder how on earth the trains run at all. To counter this travel risk, my new strategy is to have a helper who lives a lot closer to our home. We are now three days into a month trial of sharing a helper with another family in our building. She cleans their place first, and then once she is done, comes to us for a few hours. Cleaning and doing laundry for just two and a half people really isn’t a full time job, it turns out. So far it’s working quite well, but there are two new restrictions on my freedom that are the result of no longer having a full time person hanging around in our house:
Amazon deliveries which can be any time between 7am - 9pm and often need a pin code.
Preparing Jasper’s lunch, which needs to be done earlier than this new helper is currently able to reach us to avoid him nodding off in the middle of it. I know technically the nanny should be able to do this, but Jasper is going through a very adventurous phase and shows much potential for self-destruction. I would rather do what I can to keep him and the house in one piece while I am able.
So far this new helper has required a lot less training than the previous one, and apart from her slightly creative approach to storing crockery in and around the kitchen, there has only been one thing I have really had to teach her: bunny management. Or as we call them - The Regiment. Anyone who comes to work in our home is introduced to Jasper’s bunny, and then, in secret, to the other two bunnies whom Jasper doesn’t know exist. The instructions are clear and simple; never let Jasper see the bunny who has just been through the wash. At this point I have given this training session to 4 people - our former helper, our other now former helper, the new helper and Jasper’s nanny. I wonder if they ever had occasion to meet and compare notes, would they all start with “Did she give you the bunny speech?!”. “Weirdo.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve been surprised by our domestic help. There was the time in Yangon that our friend and temporary housemate Tom went for his swimming trunks only to find that they had been stitched back to front in an effort by Marina, our housekeeper, to cover up a mistake with the iron. A similar mistake by the same cleaner led to a butterfly patch appearing overnight on a white tennis skirt of mine. And then there was the time our later helper made us apple pie for dinner. Nothing else, just apple pie, having not fully understood that a meat pie and a fruit pie serve a different purpose. And then of course there was the time our security guard, while not exclusively recruited and managed by us but still considered as someone who helped us out, stabbed his colleague to death on our doorstep. But that’s another story entirely!
I am well aware that I am talking about some very first world problems that can only arise because we are living in (what was formerly known as) a third world country. And I am also aware that I am trying to find solutions to problems that haven’t yet arisen. Who knows, perhaps by the time I find a job, Jasper will be old enough to make his own lunch and we will finally have purchased everything there is to purchase on amazon. But for now, I should just be grateful for the help I do have, and maybe use some of my reclaimed spare time to start my search for a cook.
Photo: Monsoon rains cruising into Mumbai and heading straight for our apartment complex.
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