SHARDA & "Us"

The maid, Sharda, who comes to our house to do the daily chores, gets two thousand rupees at the end of the month. No weekly holidays and if by chance she falls sick or takes a day off I can feel the faint sound of vuvuzela [my wife’s grudging grumble] polluting the house.
She has a son and a daughter to support beside a husband who does some odd jobs, but mostly sits at home. She can manage to work at five more homes like ours, and armed with around twelve thousand rupees she wages a battle against WPI & CPI, which seems to be growing stronger day by day with no effective resistance whatsoever and seems to have even overpowered our very own soft spoken, weak Prime Minister, who is a wizard in economics.

Sharda sends her children to school and schools like all great business institutions have no room for sympathy, except for the devil [read people with money and power]. Our education minister has declared that education is the right of every children, but like that fabled word of Dronacharya, the silent or whispering, “iti Gaja” was left out by the media [may be they could also not hear it].
Kapil Sibal’s conscience is clear as water from the Ganges near its tributary [more mud than water] and hence skipping the entrance to the school he is more focused on the abolition of exams for students of the age where finding a girlfriend is of more substance that Newton’s Third Law.

Sharda does not read Economic Times, for that matter she does not read at all, she is clearly leading a life as delineated by the great Hindu scriptures, submitting herself to “karma” without any expectations. Newspapers, televisions are all treated by her as luxuries of life, which when avoided will lead her to the “stairway to heaven”.
She has never heard of terms like WPI and CPI and a mention of the same would lead to a Freudian slip of Communist Party of India [CPI] having to counter another political opponent in the next assembly elections.
Every day she rues that it is getting difficult to meet ends, a fact also echoed by my wife, although the level of their difficulties may well be related to two lines in parallel planes.
She gets a raise every year and that raise is not measured by the inflation, cost of living or even meeting targets or performance, but by shear gut feeling of my wife, which I would say may not be as perfect as the HR initiatives of Fortune 500 companies but leaves not much room for complaint. The measure of the practice is testified by the fact that she is with us for last three years and promises to continue barring any untoward incidents.
There have been some houses where the annual increment was met with resistance, but Sharda alone could not carry on the fight as she has more than a dozen competitors lined outside the house to replace her. This is the advantage some people take, maybe they are wiser in the tricks of the world and my wife keeps wandering why she could not be like them. Such virtues are in great demand in today’s world and it takes more than intelligence to learn them. It is more like flying a plane, where the hardness of your twin assets matter more than your grey matter.

Sharda does not know who Sharad Pawar is, but she knows that her children get less and less diet every passing day. Even if she knew detailed biography of Sharad Pawar she could not have done much as before an election she votes for the party who gives her the maximum ration, which hardly runs for a week. Neither does she know about Murli Deora, whose sleight of hand has led her to preserve as much of kerosene as possible and the family has adapted to eating half boiled rice.
But I envy her; she does not have to bother about the white elephant “automobile” and does not have to travel in those, oh so dirty public transport, rubbing your shoulder and smell with “oh, those dirty public”. In fact there will be a smirk in her face if she finds out she is in the same bus as I am.

Sharda likes Rahul Gandhi, I never came to know why but she says that next time she will vote for whichever party Rahul Gandhi stands for. She also has doubts if Rahul Gandhi will campaign for CPI [Congress Party of Indira] or Forza Italia. From the time she heard that Rahul Gandhi is visiting the home of Dalits and poor, she has bought and kept a nice blanket along with a new set of Stainless Steel plate and glass. She also made a list of things that she would prepare and a list of demands had been drafted by her son in English.
But off late both mother and son have gone into hibernation and she blames the opposition, the anti nationalist, communal BJP, for their absence.

She has dreams and lives by her dreams. She dreams of her son becoming a graduate, getting into a well paid job, getting married to a girl from a good family, having a new house full with the pitter patter of her grandchildren and she, stopped with years of hard work rather than age, will cherish those moments.
Dreams of common man, dreams which will mostly remain dreams and this Sharda will continue till her daughter in law or daughter becomes the next Sharda.

Not a soul will cry, life will go along as it goes, till Sharda gets her next year’s increment.