Of Dad’s departure. And the maid’s too…

It’s been a manic past few weeks. What with huge festivals back to back and Daddy wrapping things up before he heads out of the country and my maid leaving, I feel like a headless chicken running helter-skelter.

So, yea, my Daddy is heading out to join me mum and bro. And, it’s been crazy trying to take over the reins of the house from him. Firstly, my dad is one of the conservative types. He used to his set ways, and likes other people to follow them as well. This is fine by me, except that how I work when he isn’t around really shouldn’t bother him. Ha! Some days I am just so naïve!

There’s been many a power struggle that I have had to fight – most of them with my Dad emerging victorious. Not that I am not aggressive and won’t stand up for myself. I just figured once he’s gone, he can’t really make me dance to his tunes anyways.

The second frustrating thing with my Dad leaving is that he has this faith – and, it’s deep-rooted too, that as soon as he is gone, the house will fall apart. As if he is the glue holding together the cardboard of the walls of our home. I have to admit, he has been an immense support in my re-acclimatization to India and when I started working in Far Away Land. But this has been going to far. Any day, the lock is somewhere other than its location (oh yea, we have a set place for the locks, the keys, the calendar, post it notes….), it’s a certain sign to my Dad that house will be in ramshackles when he returns.

I have also been having lessons on the weekends – the everything-I-need-to-know-when he’s-gone kind. So, in the last two weeks, I have had a crash course on where to get milk, groceries, vegetables, an alternative location to get milk, groceries and vegetables, where to stack the newspapers, who to call to dispose aforementioned stack, the investments in each family member’s name, which bank accounts are where, insurance policies, as well as locations of laundry, photo studio, stationery depot. And, let’s not forget the processes on boiling milk(which I knew), steaming rice and dal(which I knew) and the contact numbers for the gaswalla, telephonewalla, electricitywalla and dhobi walla. It was enough to make me go walla-walla.

It’s all very endearing and I love the bonding time before he’s off, but sometimes I wish he was off already. I get exhausted reassuring him that everything will be fine – apparently, in his world, I never lived in the United States for a good 4 years all by myself! He still thinks I am the 10 year old, frock(with red sash) wearing little girl with fountain ponytails that he would push on the cycle or pull down when she climbed too high up on those giraffes in the park!

And, just as Dad was settling down with some semblance of security that I would (as I have been constantly telling him) not burn the house down in his absence, our maid decided she was going to quit. It all happened so fast, I didn’t know what to say to her.

There I was sitting and drinking my morning tea, shaking the grogginess out of my eyes, heck, my entire body. The maid was diagonally opposite me, wiping the floor, when she suddenly looks up at me and says, “I won’t be coming from tomorrow.” At first, I was waiting for her to finish – I thought she was saying, she’s off to her village, and will be back in 10 days or something like that. But no. There she was actually quitting. I was in shock and barely could speak. Who would sweep? An mop? And dust? An the utensils – I was not sticking my hand into those cream smeared milk vessels – I still feel like vomiting when I see the cream floating on top of the milk. Shudder.

When I did manage to blurt out, “Why are you leaving”(the caffeine was taking its time to work on me that day), she offered a garble of excuses one after the other – something about her husband not wanting her to go to the village because she can’t afford it. Like I said, it was plain gobble-di-gook to me. And, to top it all the cheek of woman to say she wouldn’t wipe down the furniture because she had handed in her notice. She was quitting the next day, not that day I reminded her. She just blinked at me. *blink blink* Sometimes I really wondered if she was daft or so damn sly as to act daft to get out of work. When I talked about the situation to an aunt in the colony she cluck-clucked about the “hired help these days” – professionalism is a tall order to expect, reliability even taller, and there are very few who are amazingly good at both, my aunt told. She proceeded to regale me with her experiences with the help for some 45 minutes – as if I wasn’t having enough lessons swimming in my head already.

After the maid left, I sort of resigned myself to the idea that I’d have to cook, clean and the whole sha-bang all over again. Dad though, was in a tizzy. If he was feebler, he might have had a spike in his blood pressure. He was positively livid about how she could quit, what an inopportune timing it was, that he wouldn’t pay her goddamit. But, after he calmed down, Dad just right-hoed and set about finding a new maid – one who would not hand in her hat and leave me in the lurch. And what do you know the glue that he is, he did find one.

Joy! Our home’s natural order has been restored. We have someone to clean the cream crust on the milk vessels! My Daddy is once again the brave hero who would save his little girl when she had climbed too high up and didn’t know how to get down.

God, I am gonna miss him when he leaves.