David Beckham, Robert De Niro, Jude Law... there's no dearth of celebrity husbands who have flirted with disaster for the misdemeanors of their kids' nannies. I've not been that unlucky -- or lucky, depends on how you look at it -- but my experiences have been enlightening on the run and entertaining in retrospect. Here's my story:
Babysitting can be a nightmare, especially when taken literallyThe Greater Painted Snipe is one of the intriguing one-offs of the Animal Kingdom, and literally the closest living thing to a sitting duck. He is a drab, dull homebody whose singular goal is to keep his house in order and his brood well-fed. His sometime wife — the painted one — wears the proverbial pants and is an aggressive and promiscuous go-getter. She fights off other females for the attention of this dreary chump. Once he is suitably smitten, she conducts her business in a lustful frenzy. After she has accepted his seed, she potters around impatiently feigning interest in hubby and home. One stormy night, she lays her eggs and leaves. The next thing you know, she's repeating this cycle of domestic entrapment with another unsuspecting dad-in-waiting.
Wives would kill for husbands like that. Mine almost did.
Three years ago, when I quit a droll corporate job to embark on a destitute freelance career, I took it upon myself to bring up our infant daughter. While burping the baby and diaper-changing were ennobling pursuits, they didn't necessarily pay the electricity bill and the home loan EMI. I had to free up time to work and conduct my house-husbandry in a supervisory role. Ergo, we decided to get help.
It came first from a genial chauffeur who had ferried my wife and her protuberant belly in her last trimester. He presented a unsmiling middle-aged widow with a school-going child. Her plight, when we heard of it, breached the dams of our hearts and unleashed a flood of pity. We hired her without ado.
It so happened that I had to travel on some aimless errand. When I returned I found no help. I asked my wife about it but she only glared. Though I couldn't muster the guts to inquire what went amiss, I found clues.
Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow had also been hired as a cook. Proof of her skills in that department were preserved in the fridge for my inspection. Those chapattis, I suspect to this day, were made in connivance with a dentist desperate for new business. Even so, the food was tolerable. What wasn't was that she had tried to feed it to our toothless infant.
We went help-less for a while but inevitably risked our lives again. We approached agencies supplying "child-care professionals" — a glorified epithet for an ayah. Some interviews ended as soon as we opened the door. With others we didn't bother — peering through the magic-eye was enough.
"Personal hygiene and trustworthiness," my wife hissed into the phone every time the agency demanded to know why we had turned away their emissaries. In the end we keeled over and settled for a swarthy, turnip-shaped candidate in a glittery sari. She regarded our little one without interest and was more concerned about fixing her price.
Off went my wife to work. She called several times to inquire how our new assistant was faring. All went uncomplainingly well for a week. Some evenings, I was served tea and pakodas. Who doesn't love that? That weekend, my wife inspected the provisions and discovered that we had barely a trickle of cooking oil. She demanded an explanation.
"Pakodas," I said.
"What pakodas?" she asked.
Turnip had fried an inordinately large quantity of pakodas, of which I had eaten barely a handful. Clearly, she consumed the rest to maintain her figure. However, it wasn't this infelicity that got my wife's goat, but her shimmery saris.
"Slutty," she remarked.
Every evening before Turnip left she spent 40 minutes locked up in the bedroom. She emerged dolled up and perfumed, her hair brushed and coiffed.
"Do you think our lady works a night shift?" I wondered.
We didn't wait to find out. The agency sent us a replacement. Within days, my daughter was scratching her head. While bathing her we discovered a plague of lice and nits. Now, I'm an adorer of creatures great and small but these wingless bloodsuckers are personae non grata. Worse, it was a touchy subject to discuss with a woman. I let my wife do the honors. She presented Crawly-Head with a bottle of Mediker.
"I don't have lice," the new ayah snapped. "They probably flew in from outside."
To boot, Crawly-Head sang like a frog, cooked like Veronica Lodge and reeked of teeth in deplorable decay. Some days I went hungry because she'd burned the bhindi or let the sambar evaporate as she sat before the television in open-mouthed rapture. Finally, we showed her the window — the one where she said the lice had come from.
There are many more entries in my Nanny Diaries but they came to a blissful end when my little girl started going to school. While I'm glad to have the house to myself, now and then I am besieged by old nightmares.
There's truth in the saying "Teri nanny yaad aayegi!"
This piece first appeared as a column in the July 2011 issue of M magazine Illustration: Bijoy Venugopal
83 comments