Maid in Mumbai

In all the years she spent with us, P could never see what the fuss was about this city, variously referred to as ‘maximum city’, ‘city that never sleeps’ or ‘city of a million dreams’. She was after all a Chennai girl and a reluctant immigrant to Mumbai when she first came to work for us. 'People here don’t speak Tamil, how can it be a great place’ summed up her attitude to any city outside Tamil Nadu.

First thoughts

Her first reaction to Mumbai after stepping off the train at CST was not very different from that of any first time visitor to the city– where are the all these people going and why are they in such a hurry. Dirt, squalor and a sea of strangers was not exactly a welcoming sight, I guess. The two hour long drive to the suburbs where we lived took us past slums, gleaming skyscrapers, more slums, 5 star hotels, plush residential towers and then, more slums. We even pass the largest slum in Asia (if you know Mumbai you’ll understand that no statistic about the city can be modest, everything has to be prefixed with biggest, most, longest and so on).

A home with a view

We live on the 27th floor of a high rise in a posh suburb, far from the city, with a view of the lake for which we have paid a handsome sum. Only now, the view is a mere glimpse, that can be had only from a demarcated 10inchX10inch spot in the living room, provided we crane our necks at a 45% angle to get past the new high rise in front. P is amused that we pay a premium to get this high from where everything looks like an ant, we can’t call out to vendors from our doorway at will, and it takes longer to get in and out. And it is not as if you escape the mosquitoes at this height - she has already seen a few buzzing about. ‘Did they take the elevator with us?’ she asks in her own inimitable, wry style, something we get used to in time.

‘In Madras, people pay a premium for a ground floor flat which comes with a small garden.’ I knew right at that moment, this was only the beginning of the Mumbai-Madras comparison saga.

Food and culture
She looks at us as if we are traitors who have sold our souls to the enemy when we eat rotis instead of sambar and curd rice for dinner. She doesn’t buy the fact that for even ‘Madrasis’ in Madras have switched to rotis for one meal on health grounds. As for her, P made it clear that neither would she eat rotis nor would she learn to make them while she was here.

Over time P had mastered the art of communicating in sign language with the milkman, dhobi and driver. She had even managed to teach the cleaning lady a few words in Tamil, but not a word of Hindi had entered her system yet. She was a great source of entertainment for friends and visitors who called on us. She always assumed they knew Tamil because they were our friends and unleashed a barrage of greetings on them in fluid Tamil. Anyone who knew even a smattering of Tamil got to sample P’s extra special filter kaapi.

Bollywood
I remember the day Shah Rukh Khan came to our building for an ad-film shoot. There was an air of nervous excitement about the entire building. Everyone from the security guard to the grandmother with arthritis and the blackberry thumbing honcho was dressed in his/her Sunday best, hoping for a photo or at least an autograph opportunity with the superstar. After all, it was not every day that the badshah of bollywood paid a visit to a leafy, peaceful suburb.

If there was only one person in the midst of all this action who was truly unmoved – it was P. In Madras, between the movie stars and the movie-star-turned-politicians, there is enough going on for the average Tamilian to give Bollywood the cold shoulder.

P’s reaction to Bollywood’s undisputed superstar was thus :

‘he’s not dark (=not good looking), he doesn’t have a moustache (=disgusting),he is dressed in jeans and t-shirt like normal people (=hardly the garb befitting a superstar)    'What sort of superstar is he? Give me a Thalaiavar (Rajinikanth for the uninitiated) any day' she says with a shrug and gets back to her chores on the 27th floor, completely unimpressed.

It took a while for me to realise how culturally alien Mumbai was to P. We could have well been living in Papua New Guinea for all she cared. To her it would be just another place that was not Madras.

I realised I had taken P out of Madras, but hadn’t succeeded in taking the Madras out of P. She’s gone now, while all I can do is hope and pray that I find someone half as well-meaning and endearing, to fill the huge void left by her.