我和我的家事服务员

Director’s Note by Nishtha Jain
　　When Lakshmi came to work for me, she was all of 16. Dignified—that’s one of the first things I remember about her. Bright eyes in a dark face. She was a wiry bundle of energy, all smiles, beautiful. She didn’t talk so much in those days. Her standard response to my requests or instructions was, ‘Yes, elder sister!’ As I got to know her better, I realized that she didn’t always intend to do as I asked, but she definitely knew how to please me, her employer. How did this young girl become such a seasoned diplomat, I wondered.
　　Lakshmi worked in my home for about an hour every day. She had a few other jobs of this sort, all in apartments in the residential colony where I live. Over time I gradually came to know more about her family and circumstances. She had been working since the age of 10. She came from a family of ten children—eight girls and two boys. The mother had died very young, leaving the youngest children to be taken care of by the older ones and by their father, an alcoholic. The family lived together in two cramped rooms in a basti. Two of her sisters, a brother, and sometimes her father too, worked as garbage collectors in my neighbourhood.
　　Lakshmi had started doing domestic work after dropping out of school. A girl so intelligent not able to cope with her studies was surprising. But her illiteracy bothered me more than it bothered her. She didn’t seem handicapped by it. She was the ‘man’ of the house, and in fact was very efficient in her dealings with shopkeepers, policemen, municipal clerks. I thought sometimes about the trajectories of our lives—two women, both struggling to get a foothold in Bombay. The city that forces us to become hustlers at many levels. But of course my education gave me an advantage, and a kind of freedom that was beyond her reach.
　　My relationship with Lakshmi was friendly, even warm, but there was no denying the social and economic divide. We inhabited very separate worlds. I traveled a lot because of my work, sometimes abroad but she had not even seen downtown Bombay. Apart from the rare visit to her native village in south India her life was confined to her basti and my housing colony two kilometers away.
　　Lakshmi seemed to be accepting of her lot. She was completely without bitterness, and yet she was not at all servile or obsequious. I often wondered at her lack of resentment, and also at how such great disparity could be so widely accepted by millions.
　　As I began to look at our equation, I began to look more closely at myself, and at Lakshmi. She had just turned 20. But her earlier brightness was gone. If this was her life at 20, what would her future be like? I began to feel it would be interesting to make a film about Lakshmi – to document her life and struggles over the next few years.
　　At first I was only thinking about her as the subject of the film. But slowly my interest in her made me start thinking about relationships between employers and domestic workers. ‘Servants’ are around us all the time and yet, in a sense, invisible. All of us middle class Indians have grown up taking their presence and their services for granted. Without thinking twice, we use the words ‘servant’ and ‘maid’, or their equivalents in each language. Everybody always complains about how lazy, dirty, insolent, stupid, or unreliable their servants are. In most Indian homes, servants may not eat the same food as their employers, much less sit on their sofas o