Domestic help – someone you can’t do without but someone you won’t do anything for. In India employing someone else to do your housework is the normal thing to do.

Everyone has a servant. A live-in is the ultimate, but at least someone who comes in for an hour and does what we call ‘top work’. Talking about the maid, running them down, monitoring them etc is a full-time job that most people happily perform. The maid, for the few rupees we throw at them, we consider our very own slave; we think we own them body and soul.

In a recent advertisement an old teacher walks into an affluent home, the maid is seen walking in with saab’s briefcase while the wife is just hovering jobless and well-groomed. Tea is mentioned. Or coffee. Some beverage for the guest. The maid, holding saab’s office stuff, says she will make it ASAP (as soon as possible); but the saab says he will make it instead. The wife looks only slightly surprised – mainly happy that she doesn’t have to make it. The maid looks aghast – like she may lose her job. Thankfully, the ad’s ending gives us hope. The teacher says saab’s tea is so good, that he should only make chai all his life. We are left imagining the maid putting her feet up and telling saab that his chai is just so-so.

This kind of casual rendition of an upper-class home features the maid as fetching and carrying robot, ours to command, ours to dismiss. All the latent bullying in us finds a target. The maid too readily entrusts us with his wellbeing.

Our superiority and their inferiority form the crux of the relationship. They do what they do, it is understood because they are good for nothing else. They must polish our shoes, they must press our feet.

Many acts of violence, including murder, are attributed to this enforcement of class difference. A lack of connect, of empathy, brings on brutal results. Something snaps. Thus are social orders reversed.

In a so-called respectable society, we think nothing of someone’s cook waking up at 4:00 am to serve us a lavish breakfast spread at seven. The odd day we have to go without them, we mockingly inform our friends that ‘she is gone for her mother’s wedding, haha’. Some employers resort to cutting the day’s fee, to stall their tendency to take so much leave.

In malls and eateries, maids are there holding on to the apple of the saab and memsaab’s eye. That’s her job, keeping the brat distracted while her employers have a blast, stuff their faces and generally buy up a storm. She gets to go home and eat leftovers, hooray!

The help’s child/children are a nameless blur to us though. It’s all very depressing, so we insulate ourselves against their stories; the alcoholic husband, the husband who beats them up, the daughter who elopes with a stranger, the son who robs them, Oh, we think, what messy lives.

Not knowing what gossip our help carries back about us to her own home. Oh, that old hag, she must be saying right now about one of us, she has nothing to do so she just stares at me all day.

Shinie Antony is a writer and editor based in Bengaluru. Her books include The Girl Who Couldn't Love, Barefoot and Pregnant, Planet Polygamous, and the anthologies Why We Don’t Talk, An Unsuitable Woman, Boo. Winner of the Commonwealth Short Story Asia Prize for her story A Dog’s Death in 2003, she is co-founder of the Bangalore Literature Festival and director of the Bengaluru Poetry Festival.