Household Help - reprise

We hired a new maid a few weeks ago (Chanana) – and she has been terrific. She is a wonderful and diverse cook, preparing multiple types of cuisine (Indian, Chinese, Italian). Her husband will be our driver, as soon as we get a car. (Amnon is looking at used Toyata Innovas; one of the very few vans that are sold here.) (In the interim, we are still getting around with taxis.)

Chanana works 6 days of week, which is the norm. We had some friends over for brunch last week, and we asked Chanana if she could come over for a few hours on Sunday, as overtime. She readily agreed. When I mentioned this to colleagues on Monday, they commented in return that their household help works on Sundays, too. It’s pretty amazing to me; the “bottom of the pyramid” workers not only earn a pittance; they have what most of us would consider unacceptable working conditions.

So many hours of household work are now completely removed from us. I feel like I should be swimming in free time, but somehow I am not. It occurs to me that India relieves us of daily household labor on the one hand, but adds all of this extra time to other activities. Shopping, for example, is a much more time-consuming activity; I have not seen any 24 hour supermarkets where you can swoop in and do your shopping on the way home from work. All of this is exacerbated by not having a couple of cars available to us.  And so the chores and errands that do remain for us seem to take a lot longer.