Maidless in Mumbai is about the urban malady of "maidomania"

 "Lean into your husband, lean into your extended family, and yes, lean into your maid", says Payal Kapadia
Maidless in Mumbai is about the urban malady of "maidomania"

Payal Kapadia's voice is the one that urban Indian women have been waiting for. Known for her children's books, the Mumbai-based journalist speaks with us about her new book, and her personal experiences. 

From working on children's books to writing about having a child, was the evolution natural for you as a writer?

My children’s stories and my stories for adults didn’t come one after the other. They coexist. As a writer, there are many different stories that I’d like to tell. The unexplored terrain of writing for a different age group and in another style is what excites me. 

How did your many years of writing for children help shape your approach to this book? 

When you write for children, you have the freedom to be outrageously funny, or even outrageous for the sheer fun of it. I realised that I have a funny voice that my readers enjoy and that’s all my own. Winning the Crossword Award for my debut children’s novel ‘Wisha Wozzariter’ made me believe in my words. With the success of my books for children, I felt ready to make the leap, to try my hand telling a story for grown-ups and seeing if I could do it well. 

Is the malady of "maidomania" something you coined yourself? How has this "disease" been affecting us through the generations? 

Look around you, maidomania, by which I mean our utter obsession with our house-help, is everywhere. It’s a very specific middle- and upper-middle-class malaise that the World Health Organisation will recognise someday, too late, when it has become a pandemic. On a more serious note, maid talk and maid thoughts are the new form of navel-gazing among urban Indian women. It seems like we’re always on the hunt for a maid. 

Now, men find this funny – and isn’t that a luxury for them? – but the maid has come to represent a choice for the urban educated Indian woman. It’s a choice that her husband does not have to make when he puts on his shoes and steps out to work every morning. It’s a choice that her grandmother didn’t even think to make. 

How have things changed, and how are they changing?

We are a society on the cusp of change. Thousands of women don’t want to be maids any more, and who can blame them for seeking jobs that give them a greater sense of pride? I certainly don’t. But on the other side, we have thousands of women who want both a career and a family, living far from their parents, raising kids in a tight nuclear home. What happens when everyone wants a maid or a nanny, and there aren’t enough to go around? 

It’s tragic that our choices as ambitious, educated women revolve around whether or not the maid is in. It’s also comical in a laugh-at-yourself kind of way. There’s a story here that begs telling. 

How much of the life and struggles of your protagonist, the career-driven journalist, is based on your own real-life experiences? Did the angst here emerge from something personal, in any way?

Don’t look for me too hard in this book. Sure, there are bits of me here, my own experiences as a young working mom, juggling a job, two daughters and an ever-elusive maid. But there are bits of many other women, too. When people heard that I was writing this book, they practically lined up to share anecdotes with me. Not a single incident in the book is pure fiction. Isn’t that both amusing and amazing? 

Then again, there are some hilarious accounts about the struggle of finding - and keeping - a maid. Was much of this inspired by your own experiences?

Let me tell you, there’s nothing remotely funny about the maid Lost & Found when it happens to you! But I would be hard-pressed to believe that all the things that poor Anu faces could happen in real life to one single person! I am telling many stories here, all of them familiar but only a few of them my own.  

The maid-madam relationship is very intriguing, and that’s the inspiration for the book. Your live-in maid knows everything about you – what you are really like in your nightgown with your hair oiled and your glasses on. And isn’t it both embarrassing and thoroughly amusing that the madam is eternally worried to death about the maid leaving? Here’s the uncomfortable, squeamish truth: Our little lives are so dependent on our help. All it takes for the skies to come crashing down on our heads and for us to go into a Chicken Little panic is for the maid to leave. 

How did the idea to build this narrative in the form of a diary come about?

This story is all about Anu, a young working mom, and how she experiences her world. Early motherhood can be a profoundly lonely and stifling world. It is only in this diary that Anu can find a tiny space to be herself and bare herself. 

Are you an avid list-maker too? Does that help make your plans more organised?

Sure, I love lists, and sometimes they get so long, they terrify me. There is something so therapeutic about ticking tasks off your to-do list, and something so restful about those everything-has-been-done moments before a new list begins in your head. 

Your disdain about unsolicited advice is more than apparent. What is the worst advice that you've received? 

There’s no such thing as good advice and bad advice, as I’ve learnt from all the advice that’s been dumped on me! I’ve probably read every parenting book out there, and I’ve concluded that you have to pick a parenting style that comes naturally to you. Like any great skill, parenting is a learned exercise and you get better as you go. 

A friend once told me about the ‘simmer down corner’ – how you could get your tantrum-throwing toddler to sit down in a cosy corner of the room and cool off for a few minutes. It sounded easy enough. Bursting with my newfound Western parenting style, I waited for my daughter’s next tantrum and then ordered her to sit in the simmer down corner. She ordered me to sit there with her. Gulp. Hadn’t thought that one through. Guess who ended up being punished?

From Chicago to Tokyo, you've lived in different places. Would this story have been very different if it happened anywhere else but in India?

The female angst of running a home and running an office is a universal thing, and women anywhere would get this story, it’s universal. The difference is that Western societies have developed ways and means for double-income families to cope, from dependable crèches to one-stop shops where you can buy everything you need at one go. Their maid woes are certainly not a middle-class thing, and you’d hear about them only in some high-rise apartment overlooking Central Park or the Kensington Gardens. 

But in many developing countries, we’ve moved out of the traditional joint family setups that our parents knew. The support of an extended family has disappeared and we still haven’t developed the scaffolding to replace it. Anu’s story could play itself out in Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Dubai, even Brazil, where the way of life is based on the assumption that there is help at hand. 

How much of this was driven by feminist concerns - to do with keeping your career as an Indian woman today?

I’m as feminist as they make them. Maidless in Mumbai is a wake-up call for men to get more involved. Women are too hard on themselves and they pay the price for it. We cook elaborate meals, we raise demanding children, we excuse our husbands from shouldering their half of the work, and we volunteer for every school bake sale. We also hold down challenging jobs and expect ourselves to look like Angelina Jolie. We’ve set such an impossibly high bar for ourselves, it’s no wonder we’re so damn paranoid about our maids leaving! I’d say that ambitious, educated women should take Sheryl Sandberg’s advice and lean in. Lean into your husband, lean into your extended family, and yes, lean into your maid. 

Maidless in Mumbai, Bloomsbury India, `299.

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