Cleaned Out

One plus of living in India is having hired help. You feel slightly embarrassed you’re paying someone the equivalent of £15 a month to clean every morning but you obviously get used to it surprisingly quickly. It’s a relief to have help as Delhi’s dust gets everywhere. Surfaces have to be wiped and floors swept and mopped daily or everything gets covered in a layer of brown.

Our allowances don’t cover luxuries but for me a cleaner is a necessity that gives me more time to relax, exercise and keep in touch with home. I like to go with the old argument that you are contributing to the local economy and spreading moolah around. One friend here has a huge house shared by 5 adults, 3 children and requires around five hired help, each with specific tasks, from drivers to maids to cooks. In these larger households, each domestic aide has their specific duties and they operate to a clear pecking order. That’s a creation of one job per adult. Our landlady tells us it’s harder to get the staff these days. They want more money, they know they can get more and they take long periods of leave to visit their families back home in the rural areas of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Orissa to name but a few of the poorer states.

Our old cleaner was a cheeky 25 year old man-child. We thought he was about 17 until he said he had a wife and child. Trips to the bathroom meant you weren’t following him round the house. He would then miss out on the sweeping and wash the dirt round the floor instead. On the days he finished in 20 minutes flat you knew he had skipped on a few chores. The landlady would tell us we had to be firm with him and follow him around. They had known him since he was a teenager and use to work for them in Uttar Pradesh. Apparently since moving to Delhi he had been mixing with other cleaners and was no longer the obedient boy they once knew.

We’ve had a new cleaner for a month or so now. She is an older lady who chats away to me in Hindi that I only vaguely understand. She knows I don’t as I have a random vocabulary and little grammar. My responses when I do understand tend to be of the two word variety. Still she chats away and I love her for it. It’s much better than moody version one. We even giggle when she can’t get doors open as she is so slight. Mostly there seems to be a mutual respect that was woefully absent with the last light-fingered cleaner. He used to pick things up and look lovingly at them until told off and once it looked like he was trying to pinch a cell phone.

With our new cleaner it’s very simple. She cleans, we pay her. If she wants time off she gets it. I do my best to understand and shake my head apologetically when I don’t. If she needs something, she’ll say. After months of struggling with the other one it’s a relief that we have a cleaner who fulfils their part of the bargain and we are once again supporting a small part of the local economy.