Now that we are in a complete lockdown and the coronavirus is spreading like wildfire in the country, we have all have ‘allowed’ our domestic help a leave of absence.
Hopefully, it’s paid leave. Because if it’s not, then you’re a grade-A asshole. And if you are not earning and argue that it’s your parents who take care of this shit, and they are not paying, then your parents are assholes.
Let’s be honest. We are feeling the pain right now, ain’t we? See, cooking is easy when you do it once a week.
But now, it just sucks, having to cook at least for two meals a day. And if you’ve got kids, then those little bastards get hungry way too often.
It’s all creativity, to bake and cook when you don’t have to do it as a routine. Looks good on Instagram. And if you’re a dude, the ‘true feminist’ comments that come with the ‘everybody should learn how to cook’ caption really makes your self- satisfied being, feel smug.
Or maybe you just love cooking good food. The problem with that is you won’t be cooking good food every day. Time to time, we all get distracted. Some day that Rajma will get a little burnt, and you’ll look around to curse at someone but all you’ll have is a damn mirror.
Then, you’ll eat that burnt Rajma with that mushy rice, kyunki cooker pe 3 ki jagah 4 seeti baj gaye, while you were busy cleaning the utensils.
Also, while you were busy cooking, you missed more than a few spots in the drawing room, which you would have noticed had you been reading the morning news sitting comfortably on your sofa, legs up, kyunki your help would be wiping the floor.
But now, you ain’t got that luxury either. It’s actually quite funny how none of us ever thought that this was a luxury.
It’s literally just one person gone from our lives for a few days and everything seems to go to shit without them.
It’s like finally getting that break up that you have been threatening her with if she missed seeing you on the weekends or asked for a gift on Diwali.
It should make you happy but then, it didn’t happen on your own terms, and now you can’t even swipe right because coronavirus fucked us all.
Do I even need to stress this point any further or are you understanding what I am talking about? Our domestic help needs much more than we pay them.
What we think is tiring now, they do it every day to the best of their abilities for us and many other families like us, because their livelihoods depend on it.
We are all realising how tough their job is now, a job we considered to be menial labour. What’s more shameful is that it took a bloody pandemic to realise this!
