It's a game of musical maids

Musical maids

JAKARTA (JP): If someone was to procure a statistic on the favorite topic of conversation among housewives in Jakarta, I can say the topic of maids would win hands down.

For a newcomer to Jakarta the prospect of having the luxury of employing two or three housemaids is incredibly delicious. However the taste does turn slightly sour when one learns of the mystery that lies behind holding on to them. An enigmatic situation arises sometimes when their comings and goings are more expeditious than the time it takes to gobble down a Big Mac.

All households have their fair share of trouble when a new maid walks out on her second day of employment, flinging an, "nggak betah (not adjusted) as she whizzes out of the door before you can utter the "t" of "Tunggu" (wait).

While some of the residents are blessed with old hands who usually absorb the shift in workloads during the change of maids or rather "working guests" (as one exasperated lady expat puts it), there are others who are not so fortunate.

Just the other day at a tea gathering a "fresher" to the city was expanding on the teething troubles she had while settling down in Jakarta. Besides the hunt for a good house and the children's school, it was the bit of the maids that held every teacup suspended an inch away from their respectively open mouths.

She was in bliss for about three days after getting her first batch of two maids. She must have walked under a ladder because right on the third morning one of her maids came to her pouring forth bucketfuls of tears. She had just got a message that her mother was dying and she had to leave right away. Overflowing with sympathetic gestures my non-Indonesian speaking friend rushed her off with a month salary, asking her to call the very next day. The next day she got a call from the maid saying that now her brother had passed away and she would be back after two days. Skeptic suspicions blistered in my friend as she realized she had been taken for a ride. And as if that was not enough, the other maid thereafter develops pusing (headache), goes to buy medicine and never returns.

And so it goes on for us all constantly deciphering the mysterious ways of our house-helps -- more baffling than the Bermuda Triangle as someone describes it.

Life goes on in those households that have seen the death of four to five fathers or three to four mothers of an old housemaid and have decided to stop counting and play the game.

Then there is the hilarious story of the typical homely housewife who loves her kitchen. She spends hours reaching gastronomical perfection.

She recounts of how her two maids left at the drop of a spoon. What stumped her the most was that they went to houses with lower salaries. Much later she learnt through indirect sources that they had left because they did not have enough privacy.

So now she has an official cook who is the king of the kitchen. She is very efficient and needs no help but my lady friend is practically a guest in a domain which once was hers. And now if you ask her how the household help is, she says, "Oh, great! The house is actually run by them. My family and I just stop by to eat and sleep."

-- Pavan Kapoor