Dust redux

Zazie is officially obsessed with our maid, Geeta. The University is paying for a cleaning service and that comes in the form of Geeta, a lovely, strong-willed, efficient and savvy woman who lives in the nearby village.

"Why is Geeta hanging our clothes out to dry in the wind?"

"Will she wash my subway shirt?"

"Why can't Geeta spend the night?"

"Why does she help us so much?"

"Will Baby Num eat Geeta?"

"I love Geeta so much I want to eat her up."

Granted, it is strange having someone in our house. But I don't think we could do it all by ourselves. We have shiny tiled floors and live in the middle of the dustiest place in the world. The landscape reveals a country full of shameless litterers, but we could eat off of the floors. (Though it only takes a few hours for the floors to be covered with a thin layer of dust and dirt. Not to mention crumbs, but that is the three year old who likes to see if we really can eat off the floors.)

Also, Geeta speaks a little English. So for about an hour each evening, we get closed captioning to the hidden-in-plain-view intimate world that surrounds us. She gives her perspectives on things like letting us know that the pots and pans the University gave us are cheap and will melt in the fire of the gas stoves, and that Usha's night time guard keeps falling asleep, and that the generic brand of window cleaner is basically useless, and that one time, when her Dad worked at a bank, they gave him a television for Diwali. She asks if she could take the jug that our cooking oil came in from the garbage and I give her all the green chilies that the guy at the farmer's market throws in to round up to a kilo. (She helped me make dal one night: the. spiciest. thing. I. have. ever. eaten.).

The other day, Zazie and I were reading a danish folktale, "The Wonderful Pot." In the tale, a very poor and starving man sells his last possession--a prized cow--for a talking three-legged pot. The pot runs to the stingy rich man's house and gets the wife the fill him up with pudding and then the pot returns to the poor man's house and they eat for the night. The second time, he is filled with enough wheat for the poor man's family to eat for years and the third time, the pot returns with all the rich man's gold and the poor couple become rich.

Part Robin Hood, part Sweet Porridge and part Jack in the Beanstalk (the pot ultimately abandons the rich man to the North Pole), I realized that this story--already a complicated tale about poverty, greed and benevolent thievery--is made virtually untenable by our fancy housing colony's proximity to this impoverished village in India. Our colony is only separated by a short concrete wall. On one side pavement and grass, on the other, dirt roads and garbage heaps. Geeta will sweep and mop and clean until all the dirt is gone, but she always leaves the back door open. The wall between her house and mine is small. And for all the efforts to make it feel like we are hermetically sealed in an aseptic world, the wind keeps us colliding into each other.

After reading the story, Zazie said, "Why is the pot going to steal our pudding?"

I blathered something like, don't worry as long as you are kind to people and generous, everyone will always have enough pudding.

This lie is as meaningful as that short concrete wall that separates their pot from our pudding, that sweeps their dust from our tiles. It is difficult to see my sweet baby grow into this complexity, to see my little girl who doesn't see those things yet, but yet still knows we are the ones with the pudding, that we are the one who could eat off the floors, but choose not to (most of the time).