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I’ve used the pronoun “she” of the kaajer lok because they are, mainly, women — except the drivers, who are a special breed and a cut above the kaajer lok. Shampa, who was married off hastily before succumbing to TB, experienced marriage for what it is in its first celebratory phase in a working-class woman’s life — a rescue and absolvement from a future of domestic work. If the man is sober and relatively well-off — that is, if he owns a small shop or a taxi — it’s possible his wife will be spared from becoming part of the immense churning that is kaajer lok. But even if he isn’t a destitute alcoholic, she, once the bliss of early married life is over and reality crowds in, might well start work as a maid, especially if the family is ambitious, and wants to give their children an education better than they had. Most often the men aren’t sober. This is what adds, in periodic waves, new women to the ranks of the kaajer lok. These days, very few women search for work cold, in the streets, or dependent on their friends’ advice, but turn up at one of the several “centres” in Calcutta that supply houses with domestics and carers. The advantage for the domestic of working via the centre is that they’re paid a daily wage rather than a monthly salary, and this works out better for them, as the wage adds up to a more substantial salary than they’d have got as a full-time employee. In return, the centre keeps a small percentage. My father’s carer, Kamala, comes to us from one of the smaller and less greedy of these centres, and she has to give to it only ten of the one hundred and ninety rupees she earns daily. In return, she’s with my father for a full twelve hours, sometimes nodding off, as she has a punitive routine, and on certain days wakes up at three o’clock in the morning to collect water because of a recurrent drinking water shortage in her area, VIP Nagar. (No problem with running water for bathing, she says; it’s the mishti or “sweet” drinking water that’s in short supply, and is provided by municipal corporation trucks at dawn, distributed by a pipe three times a week to people who’ve presumably been lining up with the resolution of shoppers at a sale.) She’s here at eight to attend to my father. When she rises and walks about, it’s in a scalded tiptoe, like the devout negotiating a bed of coals, an effect created by her corns. My father, whose main aim now is to be left alone, can’t stand Kamala; but it’s with my mother that she has repeated spats, as once daughter-in-law and mother-in-law did, mysterious, bottled-up outbursts, indicative that each has a strong view on truth and reality, but also of the wearingness of human contact, which rarely ever does credit to human beings.
I recently called the person who runs the centre through which we employ Kamala; he was loath to meet me. “Let’s talk on the phone please,” he said. “I don’t know enough about this business — it’s my wife who really runs it. She’s away.” His wife had been a nurse at Ruby Nursing Home, and then Divine Nursing Home, and had made good use of the networks she’d built up of carers and nurses when they started the centre in 2009. This man, Debashish Das, had been a manager in a small fertiliser company, then branched out, with the impulse towards freedom common to middle-class Bengalis, into the fertilisers business himself. That venture (as is also often the case with those Bengalis’ bright ideas) was a non-starter; unrewarding, with farmers deferring payments, and too demanding. He then got into the private car hire business, first with a Tata Indigo, and then an Indica; it changed Mr. Das’s life, and became a limited but flourishing trade. This centre for domestics was his latest essay, established upon his wife’s contacts, and an enterprise he was pretty confident about. “There’ll always be demand,” he told me.
Supply was ensured too. Cyclone Aila, or Hurricane Aila as it’s often known locally, had devastated crops and cultivation in North and South 24 Parganas beyond the city in 2009, the year of Mr. Das’s centre’s inception, and its after-effects still sent a steady trickle of women towards him, and from him eventually to our part of the city. The women from these centres — not Kamala, though, for she’s very much a Calcutta person — have the sullen, shell-shocked air of refugees, of people who don’t know where they are and what they’re doing there. They are unimpressed by upper-middle-class luxury; they’re swiftly bored; they’ve worked in one kind of world all their lives, and are now being asked to comprehend different appetites and demands which make them look despondent and probably feel homesick. “Women also have to work because their men drink,” said Mr. Das. “They drink and die.” We discussed the adulterated liquor — country liquor or “hooch” as it’s romantically called by newspapers — that claimed, in mid-December, the lives of one hundred and seventy men in a town near the Bihar border. What had struck me was not just the scale of the tragedy, but how little sympathy was expressed in the media for these fatally misguided drinkers.
When a domestic with whom you’ve had a long-term, rocky relationship — one that goes on and off, on and off — begins to feel restless, there may well be signs, so indecipherable as to be non-existent, that she’s about to go again. I’m thinking of Lakkhi’s last stint with us — by “last” I don’t mean “final,” but “most recent.” There’s never anything but a cursory finality in one’s interaction with a domestic; renewal is usually in the offing.