The Suitable Bai

Uncommon terms used in this title of the blog and the blog thereafter:
1. Bai : origin – unknown .Though believed to have coined by a certain Bombayite (now Mumbaikar) when Tutankhamen – The Egyptian Pharaoh visited India to a discotheque sometime in 1485 BBBC. It signifies one among the millions who specialise in floor-sweeping, laundry, sponge-down and many such essential, otherwise usually taken-for-granted chores necessary for a respectable and hygienic survival. Generally the term is used for some Indian females and that for men or in-betweens is so far unheard of.)

Place: Mumbai - 2004 AD:-

I had just joined the job and had moved into the flat which was taken on lease. A 2BK compact with the necessary furniture in place. But there was a hitch with the wardrobe which was made of timber and belonged to the dinosaur age. All the shelves had a neat layer of wood-dust over them and I thought a cleanup would be enough to get rid of the thing forever .I was wrong, as within days the dust would start collecting again and this time on my clothes. Left with no other option, had to get the whole of the wardrobe minus clothes replaced with a new one.

There were other issues though. After a week got over it struck me that that my stock of shirts, trousers and the unmentionables would soon get over and would desperately need a wash. The floor, the table-tops, and the numerous other exposed surfaces began catching dirt, sand and leftover of dead insects eaten by garden lizards haunting the walls. In college I had learnt to do all the cleaning and washing all by myself and so reckoned why not try this time too? I set to work one fine holiday and it took me a little less than five hours to finish the jobs-
Mix detergent.
Soak clothes.
Wait.
Inhale.
Sweep floor.
Wipe tables-top, chairs, TV screen, window-panes, kitchen sink.
Brush monitor, speakers, mouse,key .
Puff air.
Rinse already soaked clothes.
Rinse again.
Remove sweat from forehead.
Mop floors.
Hang clothes for drying.
Gasp.
Fall flat on the bed.
I woke after twelve and half hours.

What I had missed was that in college the room was cellar-sized and anything more than two puppies would face a severe space-crunch. And here I was dealing with a 2BK dwelling. Let alone the washroom and restroom. Then one set of jeans would last for two fortnights without any wash and now a little blotch on the shirt or the trouser would be adequate to hinder any further odds of a climb up the clichéd corporate ladder. This meant laundry visits more often.

Inquiries of a desperate mind followed and within little less than a jiffy I struck gold with zero impurity. There were women in Bombay collectively named the Bais who would take care of the entire housekeeping activities regularly and leave the house in refulgence galore. For a moment I reckoned that my misery and tribulations were over. But I was horribly wrong.

Shanti-Bai was hired. She was called Shanti-mausi for operational smoothness as in olden days bai was also used to suffix unscrupulous ,sleazy girls.( Just to digress a bit- In those days when video–recording appeared only in popular science-fiction books, and actors were seen only in plays on stages ,guess how forbidden scenes were censored. Was it by pulling the curtain for the required time or switching off the lights?)Fixed for three days a week, the work got underway. Things were running fine when week number two drew closer and it just happened that my eyes spotted a few coarse areas on two of my favorite shirts. I was sure they were not there at any point in time before the bai came into my life. A bit of interrogation revealed the truth. Instead of the fine-fabric liquid detergent, she had used the conventional hardliner soda-laded one and moreover used a utensil scrubber to scour off dirt from the clothes. She was fired and that marked the end of Shanty-bai.

Soon another was employed as I had no intention to carry on with the work by myself. Her name was Tulsi. And it seemed, just to remind her name to the planet around she made it a point to wear only dark green on Mondays, sea green on Tuesdays, Bottle green on Weds, Emerald green… and the so on. That was just the beginning. Once I noticed her little son wearing a green trouser with a similar colored T. What the color of her husband’s towel would be was far too obvious. And the exhaust fumes out off the chimney of her home could easily be passed off as Green-house emission .She set to work. A month passed. Once when I returned from office, and went into the apartment, discovered an unusually disarranged house, and sniffed something was wrong. A silver plate, which was kept as a souvenir, was missing. It did not require the likes of Sherlock Holmes to find out who had dunnit Before going to work, I used to leave the keys to my door with the neighbour.Tulsi, the bai would collect it, get in, do the cleaning and move out .Until that day , when she decided to flick a few things too before she delivered the keys back to my neighbor and slinked away. By now the plate would have already been recast into a necklace.Tulsi was never seen again. A police complaint was lodged but it was soon lost under a heap of files. Soon I lost track of the past and carried on with blogging along with other money making exercises like engineering in the corpodom.
The third was hired after a longish gap as I wanted to ensure that this time things should not go wrong. A bit of homework, I thought would be worthwhile and so went on a feedback gathering mode from my neighborhood. Finally settled on a veteran, who had been in this business for the past 32 years and could anyday start bai-consultancy services (BCS) of her own. A bit expensive she was when compared to the rest of the sisterhood but I had enough of it and was ready to shell out some extra dinars without any disgust or tight-fist. When the third month passed and the day when I handed her the fees, she demanded a hike of fifty percent citing rising fuel prices and inflation as reason. But, it had been only three months, I argued, but she seemed not to budge and offered to quit if I would not acknowledge the hike. After an endless haggling, the deal was settled with a thirty percent raise from next month. Another month later she demanded an equal raise.
With a hard-made polite face I asked her to leave, which she did.
That was the last time I said “Good-bai”

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