Folding priviledge

A huge eventful event happened in Jasmine’s life. I guess she must have mulled over it for the longest. One day she tells me that she has decided to keep a servant for the morning. One hour. “She will come for one hour and help me do all the house work”. “sure. Go ahead”. I was pretty surprised and pleasantly so. Our income has obviously grown in the last ten years, enough to have one more servant at a thousand bucks a month.

When Jispa was born we were probably the only couple that did not have a full time maid. A full time maid is seen as a necessary thing when you have growing up kids. She takes care of the kid and runs behind the kid with water, food, diapers everything. That’s the objective of the maid. The kid in charge. We resisted this. Jasmine is a work horse. She likes to work. She likes doing stuff around the house and saw no real reason to have a maid. I too loved being with my child and whenever we went out I would be happy to be the tiffin box carrier. In fact when Jispa was a baby the cargo pants were in fashion and I loved them. One packet would be her food and the other would be her water bottle and so on. They were full of stuff that I needed as a daddy on the go. This do-it-yourself worked well. We only had one evening servant who came in to wash vessels and clean the floor. So I was pretty surprised when Jasmine decided to have an extra hand for an hour. I have never questioned her on the expenses of the house and frankly I haven’t a clue. She knows how much money we have and that’s that, it’s up to her to manage the household. And so we have an extra help. It’s been an interesting journey so far. Jasmine is figuring out work for the one hour that we have her. And also when the bell rang on Saturday and Sunday morning Jasmine got up cursing – ‘I will have to tell her not to come early on weekends’. Hah, I love this.

While Jasmine outsources the jobs to the new one, she tries to get eth boring jobs done. One of the boring jobs is folding the clothes after they are washed. I can vouch for the fact that it’s a might boring job to do. You sit and you surround yourself with a pile of clothes and get it done one by one. So the new lady gets to do it. With one problem – she doesn’t know how to fold clothes. Yup. I never knew there was such a thing like not knowing how to fold clothes. When I saw my t shirts, they were pretty badly folded. Not that the lady is a lazy worker. In fact to the contrary, she is a diligent and hard worker who does the cleaning job dam well. She just doesn’t know how to fold clothes. Jasmine then taught her how to fold clothes but then still, over the weekend I had to unfold my t-shirts and then fold them back again. Nicely. I like neatly folded clothes. For some reason I hate folding the clothes badly. Especially the handkerchiefs. I hate badly folded handkerchiefs. I like to join them correctly from edge to edge, the smoothen out the cloth and fold them over and over till they are nice and flat, almost ironed.

But really – it set me thinking. Why would someone not know how to fold clothes? Is it a skill we take for granted? People who have adequate clothes and adequate space to put them only know about folding them, and folding them well. With a person of meager possessions, folding clothes the right way is a big ask I assume. Poverty is a trap that is difficult to get out from. One barely understands the entire range of privileges we have. The privilege of keeping ones possessions neatly. Who would have known that to be one. My other servant also keeps her valuable stuff with us. I learnt that she had just a few suitcases as a store of her worldly possessions.

So I told Jasmine – just get her to fold the t shirts a bit more narrowly. I will manage after that. Afterall I am in Mumbai. In Mumbai there is no Space. Our cupboards are narrow, we can’t fold our clothes broad. Most of us don’t have walk in wardrobes to hand clothes and a few hangers to cling on to. Those from smaller towns will see that folding clothes right so that they are very compact is something we learnt well. They probably have the privilege not to fold clothes nice and compact. Oh dear we are so poor.