“They are worried who will do the work if the staff test positive.” 1843mag looks at the truth about rich Indians’ relationship with their domestic workers
f you are well-off in Kolkata it’s easy not to see things. As a child, I used to love watching the sun set over the city’s glinting horizon from the windows of the 13th-floor apartment where I grew up. I didn’t look at the slums below. And until the coronavirus pandemic, many of us gave little thought to the fact that our own homes contained a stratum of impoverished workers: servants and maids, cooks and drivers, breathing the same air, now dying the same deaths.
Before long, our domestic arrangements started to strike me as odd. I had always thought of our flat as one unified place. Now I realised that it was divided into two zones. My parents and I occupied the bedrooms, reception and dining area. The balcony was where Saraswati dried our clothes and Nageshwar ironed them. In the kitchen, which I rarely entered, he and Saraswati sat on the floor and ate rice that was cheaper and coarser than ours.
Two weeks later, when covid killed the owner of a flat above ours, Nageshwar asked me if “covid” was just another word for death: if the coronavirus scare was some sort of conspiracy to panic people. He seemed to be unnerved, and wanted to be with his family. It finally dawned on me that our flat was Nageshwar’s workplace, not his home.arlier this year, Modi began boasting that India had beaten the pandemic. Shortly afterwards a second, more destructive wave raged through the country.
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