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”

.

Zenophobic Jeev

One of my colleagues, whom I’ll take the liberty to call Jeev(name changed). I’ll not venture out to reveal it for security reasons that would become clearer, apparent and fundamentally reasonable as you stroll through whatever follows this sentence.
The non-software private sector companies in this part of the earth, one where Jeev and I work has an average age of thirty two and a quarter, unlike it’s public sector counterparts for whom it’s fifty nine yrs and 364 days and 23 hrs and … (Thanks to the culture out there which would make Ruby Goldberg to Ruby yawn yawn Oldberg. But that’s another story).
Jeev is one of those few Indian men with Dravidian origins who could be sent to WWE without any prior training or weightlifting or sausage-gobbling and still one could fearlessly put his entire inherited treasure to bet on him when he’s is playing Shawn Michaels, fresh from a heavy lunch on a Thursday afternoon. Most of the push back –retractable chairs in our office had to be sent to the city municipal scrap yard within seven hours of procurement from their manufacturers and distributors. Thanks to the one hundred and thirty six kgs of uncooked bones, flesh, pancreas etc. which Jeev was made up of. Any ordinary plywood seating accessory would turn into a nuclear-wreck as soon as it would be graced with Jeev’s posterior bulbous mass. His manager once ordered a custom made sitting arrangement especially for Jeev’s needs and the safety of the other ‘ordinary’ chairs. It was made from duralumin alloy for extra support and topped with foam for a painless sitting experience. Jeev was moved by this act of concern and since then never thought of floating his resume to the job-consultants in Thuvakudi, Eden Gardens or anywhere else.
Jeev has different tastes when compared to most of his sane colleagues, including me. He was the only one among the ever-growing number of bikers (especially after the Bollywood flick called Dhoom) who bought a LML Graptor. It’s another issue that the manufacturer had soon after stopped production of the bike following customers complaining about their girlfriends falling off from the speeding bikes owing to intimidating noises from the suspension system. Now two of the Graptors can be spotted at the Auto Museum in Helsinki. The rest can be found at the aforementioned city municipal scrap yard except for one which rests with Jeev’s garage.
Jeev develops attachments with anything he buys, and sometimes it costs him a few thousands. Like once, in his school days when he refused to give away the chewing gum which he had been chomping for the past fourteen hours. And went to bed chewing it only to find a hard, acrylic, unwanted piece of gum stuck to the expensive velvet bed-linen next morning. The linen was thereafter used for cleaning the family car with a quick replacement in place.
Last year he got a Maruti Suzuki –Zen at it’s maximum retail price after believing whatever spilled out of the promos and advertisements. Primarily it was because of the fuel efficiency which was lusty enough for him to make a dive into his bank account and make the purchase. He was an avid driver and had even test -driven his friend’s Volvo made Bus. But that was with a Light Motor Vehicles License which he had obtained before he even knew where the steering wheel in a car was placed. Bribes had come to his rescue then. He had dreams of becoming an F1 driver once but with passage of time he realized that there are no custom made F1 cars for 140 kgs human-looking monsters in the circuit yet. He changed his mind and decided to become an Electrical Engineer instead.

For the first few days we had to hear epics of incoherent information about his car, especially during lunch time when he made it a point to raise the topic and continue it till the office dispersed at 18.30 hours. It included everything from the color which he bragged that could have been taken for authentic platinum in bright sunshine to the horn which he claimed made a certain Gurbinder Singh, his neighbor, mistake for Radio 93.5 FM. But all this trumpet- beating, Zen-worshipping, and car-washing lasted for a smattering of a time.
Once he was speeding (mind you he was an aspirant F1 driver at one point in time) past the Mumbai Pune expressway at 130 kilometers an hour. He would have pushed the accelerator more but the engine would splutter, spit, gasp and thud. About FIVE HUNDRED meters ahead, a stray underfed cow was crossing the road with apparently no visible purpose and was appearing to make only half an attempt to even plod. The next few milliseconds were jammed with reflexes, some which came with experience and the rest, momentary gain of smartness. Jeev released the accelerator, clogged the brakes with too many megawatts of power and waited to see what would follow. He was yanked from the seat and would have smashed against the windshield but for the seat belt wrapped around him which did not give away. The cow was safe and gave a blank look more than that of Schumi’s face after the failure at Monaco Grand Prix.The hood of the Zen hit and had shattered onto the divider.
Seven days later Jeev bought a new Indica Xeta for reasons untold. But I guess it was too much for him to be taken as a “dumb” (Courtesy: Catchphrase from Tata Indica Xeta TV ads).

Today his Zen can be spotted at the city municipal scrap yard.
…

[P.S. This was an intended fairy tale and all characters excluding myself, the Graptor ,the Zen and the Xeta are purely a result of imagination gone irreversibly wild]