house help, part one

basanti was the magical one, the dreamer with the slow smile, her hair wispy and unkempt, skin mottled with unfinished thoughts. she was beautiful as she floated through our rooms. we shared our dreams every morning, as i sipped my green tea and she chopped and diced for our breakfast. mine was a recurring one of being chased by wild animals, meticulous panthers and rhesus monkeys that would appear and chomp my arm off after a short chase. hers were also recurring, alwayz about struggling to fly, as she ran away, from animals and from  her mother, who chased her with a stick. when her mother came to visit from the village she was tiny, no bigger than her 3 year old grandaugher, and i couldn't imagine how she'd infected her daughter with a life long fear. 

but silky was different, much more pragmatic, poring over the hieroglyphics in the kannada newspaper that came specially for her. another rape! she'd say with almost gleeful horror, he gagged her with an iron rod, broke into the house, you can't trust any one these days. I'd shake my head, tut-tut, and so the gossamer mornings were quickly burnt away into the banal horror of everyday life.

what does it mean to let someone into your house, to live your life just one degree removed from their skin? her hands chop dice cook wash everything that goes into your mouth. her fingers massage your head and back, fill rubber bottles with hot water in the winter and crush ice into glasses of iced tea in the summer, smooth over the creases in your bed every mornings, scrub your clothes, wring out even your inner clothes, your bras and underwear on days you're particularly lazy, hopefully your mother doesn't know. she hangs your bags, fold your clothes, pins your sari, give you sartorial advice on your new clothes, this is too wrinkled, that color is nice. pushes you to attend social obligations you don't intend to fulfill, but its her wedding how can you not go? 

But today there is a crisis to be solved. we need to talk, she says. she looks determined and troubled. i ask her to come into my fathers room, this house is all windows and no doors, voices travel through it like the gust of wind from the gigantic cooler in the summer. maybe this is why things just go missing, because the borders between being and non-being are just too porous.

her eyes quickly well up and her voice rises, shrill. i come here to work, she says, there are both of us, and yet i hear things, i heard from the garden bhabhi asking about that girls clothes, but i don't wash them downstairs, i finish the work here, and then i was upstairs today and everyone knows my name has been mixed in the mud and my son, i can't lift my head with what he did i know what you all say about me and i ignore it but it can't go on like this i can't live like this. i cant live like this. i move uncomfortably towards her, pat her shoulder and quickly take my hand away, unsure about how to comfort someone when you're the source of her misery. she's miserable, but there's something unsettling. even marriages break up, I tell myself, mothers and daughters vow to never talk to one another. but something here isn't right. I mumble about trust and the lack thereof, the funny thing is how often this word is thrown around in my life. speak the truth baby, says ma, and this dicta is my heavy albatross.i drank with a friend later that night, and he laughed at me, what is this christian attitude towards the truth! do what you have to and deal with it later. but, and this is the power of imagery, ever since I couched this feeling in colerige's calamitous metaphor i feel the physical weight of every untruth and half truth.

what is it about little lies that is scarier than big ones? i can't tell, can't tell if she's a hounded animal, back to the wall, snapping at every movement towards her in the only way she knows, that acid sharp smile and crisp denial, banking on the dreaminess our heads are wrapped in - or if this is calculated, and we're too busy to notice strings emerging around us, tightening to draw us in. like a bond movie! don't be idiotic. but the signs are there, i saw her fight once, like a panther at her door, sinewy and snarling.

I don't know why you're waiting, says achiles, waiting for a real calamity to jolt you.  

do these things happen? the world is a strange place, I can't forget how boring and brutal it can be. we  lie and cheat, steal and hack through relationships and lives for opal rings and for our muscles to contract in orgasms.