The housemaid [fiction]

A short story

Please ignore the previous mail containing the short story. Enjoy this one.

She sat down cross-legged on the floor at the feet of the recliner while I came into the scene and cozied up on the indoor swing. Her voice was an incessant monologue like the low pulsing oscillations of the swing itself.

She started narrating her story of the summers as she popped paan into her palm out of a little round tin and spoke through her reddened mouth.

''It’s getting so hot here that I keep thinking of ways to save myself from dying”, she waved her hands all over the place. I conjectured that she was trying to mirror her words through her body so as to convince herself that what she was saying was indeed reaching the other person. She was almost deaf.

"Soon after I finish the first floor, I go straight to the ground floor and finish up work over there." She paused to pack slaked lime into a betel leaf and looked up at me. "Then, I walk straight out, I don’t even look sideways. I take my pillow and a sheet and go in search of a huge kanuga tree. I'm getting old. I need to save my life as best as I can.”

She said it with such plain determination that it was almost innocent. With her late-fifties rugged look, I was astonished by how I thought of her that way - innocent. She works, alternating between our and an other relatives’ house from dusk to dawn, likes talking from what little I know of her and is an amazing lipreader.

"Do your work slowly and carefully", my mom said behind her back as she was preparing to head downstairs.

'Slowly and carefully ?', She asked with her eyebrows raised.

"Yeah", nodded my mom and looked at me. “She understands everything", she teased.

I was indeed pleasantly surprised to see how her guesses were almost never wrong; they were more understood than guessed. She wrapped up her potli of assorted paan and pulled the stings taut to close it.

"'I do my work diligently, Ammani", The way she said Ammani sounded so much like ‘Abhinaya’, said really fast. I was surprised that she knew my real name and not what everyone calls me at home. Just then my mom turned to me and went,"my avva (grandmother) used to call us that - Ammani." Now, it made more sense, I thought.

"When your grandma was away”, she gestured to indicate my grandma being in the US and even your mom had to go somewhere, I did all the work and cooked meals for the men in the house. I would make rice and pappu but your dad would only eat morsels of it before I had to throw it all away.

My mom had mentioned in a serious tone earlier (the kind of seriousness parents conjure up when talking about ‘those days’ when they had to walk over five kilometres to get to school) that this woman never liked to waste food. It’s because they know the value of it, she had said.

"'All he eats are those big, brown chocolates", she held out one of her hands and used the fingers of the other one to signal the size of it. "Huge ones, they are, and he litters the wrappers all under the bed. I have to bend my back too much to retrieve them while sweeping."

I just nodded looking at her languid expressions. "Hmmm", I said and realised that it probably didn’t reach her. There are no lip movements to read when people say ‘hmmm’. Maybe she noticed the nod and my throat while I made the guttural noise. I snapped back, that was not important.

"… stop eating chocolates. He can eat them all he wants but he should also have proper meals. Chocolates don’t count for meals, right?" I managed to complete the first half of the unheard sentence from the context and was feeling happy about it when she interrupted my thoughts.

"Right?" she inquired again.

Yeah, absolutely, I nodded with my lips pursed.

She got up expressing satisfaction and muttering the names of different gods, got back to work. And I sat there wondering what her name was.

On the road outside, I heard men in bullock carts going "hrrrr" and I caught a glimpse of the oxen treading the path with synchronised head bobs and hoof clicks - left, right, left, right…

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