One day in the life of a Servant

(From Internet)

AT 7 O’CLOCK each morning, Jagannath Mandal is up and dressed in his white working clothes, making fresh ginger tea for “Madam”, whom he never calls by name. Mr Mandal will today juggle the roles of cook, driver, butler, cleaner and laundryman. He will be on his feet for 11 hours, albeit with an afternoon break.

Mr Mandal is one of India’s tens of millions of domestic workers. Servants are an established tier of Indian society, as they were in Britain and America until the early 20th century. Affluent families have long enjoyed having live-in staff. Yet as we’ll explore in a forthcoming article, 24/7 help is becoming harder to find, as job opportunities increase and most servants’ unregulated wages stay low. Mr Mandal, who has lived with the same family in Mumbai for 30 years and estimates that he is 60 years old, seems to be one of a dying breed.

Mr Mandal’s main workplace is this narrow kitchen, barely more than a metre wide, in a plush but compact seafront flat. “I’m here day and night, so if anything is required I can do it,” he says cheerily in Hindi as he makes upma, a savoury semolina dish, for breakfast. He then fries cauliflower, cooks dal and makes chapatti dough in preparation for lunch. “Sir” works from home, as does the family’s youngest son. The two elder children now live in America.

The job is exhausting. Other morning duties include washing the car, buying groceries, setting the table, answering the phone and the door, and driving Madam to work. “I’m used to it,” he says of the aching soles and calves. “After I come back from [a holiday in] the village, it pains for two-three days, but then it goes.”

In the early 1980s Mr Mandal, then a famer, left Bihar, an impoverished northern state, in search of work. He soon joined this family as a live-in cleaner and was later promoted to cook. He chops vegetables finely and speedily like a TV chef; his chapattis are as light as paper. He earns 9,000 rupees ($172) a month—whereas a live-in cleaner would make on the order of 5,000-7,000 rupees—as well as the standard perks of meals, one or two sets of clothes and one month’s paid leave every year. His employers, who hold him in great affection, also cover his health-care costs and his youngest son’s IT course; many in their position would not.

Mr Mandal sits down for the first time at 2.30pm. He spends most of his afternoon break sleeping in the empty waiting area for one of the building’s retired lifts. He could put his thin rollout mattress on the floor of the flat, but prefers it here. He often chats outside with staff from other flats but, with afternoon tea to brew at 5pm, he rarely goes beyond the compound. After the chai, he does the ironing and makes supper. Every meal is made from scratch. “I have a great view so I don’t have to go out,” he shrugs. The full-length window at the end of the skinny kitchen has a show-stopping view of Mumbai’s coastline and the Arabian Sea below. He eats his meals in this corner, perched on a stool.

Washing machines and microwaves have made his job easier. Other technologies have not. “It used to be that everyone was out of the house by 8am to go to the office. But now because of the internet they can work from home,” he says. “There’s always a pressure to behave a certain way when your boss is around.”

After the family retires at 10pm, Mr Mandal watches TV for an hour (he follows the news closely). Fewer young people have been becoming servants over the past five to ten years, he reckons, partly due to the poor pay. He doesn’t mind the lack of freedom or privacy, which also tends to deter them. In a plastic tub by his stool, he keeps his health-insurance card and a pair of special glasses for watching eclipses out the window. “There’s always something to look at,” he says. “I watch the ships come and go.”