I was seven when my parents first started discussing how to raise me without my mom. She was developing what we’d later find out was a severe autoimmune disorder, and managing mind-numbingly painful immobility was going to be a lifelong project. My parents were panicking.
But to be middle-class or above in India, is to have the luxury of being cared for by other people. Someone to clean and cook in our homes, fetch tea in our offices, nurse us back to health, the list goes on. And so, I was raised by the perfect nanny. Uma aunty was a constant fixture in my life from eight to 18, through four cities, my first forays into romance, all my board exams and college admissions. She was even there when I returned from college and set out on the great, big adventure we call employment. Having seen our family through my tantrums and my mother’s recovery, Uma aunty decided to retire after securing many promises that she’ll be invited to my wedding (“‘And could you hurry it up please? Are you sure there’s no special person in your life? But there are so many more men than women in this country,” she told me suspiciously.)
Uma aunty was up there with Mary Poppins, Nanny McPhee, Maria in the Sound of Music. But the self-absorption of childhood obscured a rather uncomfortable fact – perfect nannies never seem to have baggage of their own. They arrive out of nowhere – divine intervention for families in disarray. And then just like that, after fixing everything – riotous kids, family finances, mortal danger – they leave quietly, as mysteriously as they arrived.
But what happens to the nanny once the invariably widowed father has found a new wife and doting mother for his children? In Maria’s case, she herself graduates to family member from professional help. However, where do Poppins and McPhee go after the wedding bells stop ringing? Do they have families they return to? Children of their own who have been in someone else’s care for the duration of this one story?
It’s uncomfortable to think of these women as people with their own lives. So we invent mysterious, magical auras for them – conveniently absolving ourselves of the need to ask humanising questions of the help. Poppins and McPhee are supernatural creatures and everyone knows magic must remain mysterious to work. Maria, a mere human, is an orphan, so naturally, there is no backstory to explore.
Nanny stories always focus on the narrative arc of the family, not the help. Stories start with a crisis (usually the absence of a mother) and conclude when the order has been restored (usually the entry of a lovable step-mother). These stories may seem like they’re about nannies, or more realistically, mother-replacements, but they’re really about the familial core of society. The genre not only demands that children’s lives be ordered by a maternal figure, but also mandates that the mother-replacement eventually make way for a ‘real’ mother. What happens before or after isn’t the point of the story.
“There is something you should understand about the way I work,” McPhee tells her wards. “When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go.”
What would happen if the nanny stayed? What would happen if we switched to the help’s perspective? Obviously, fiction gives us some answers. In her poem, ‘the maid’, Nayyirah Waheed, writes:
“call her a part of the family, but never ask her
her childrens names.
just
do not be surprised the day
you accidently
look in her eyes
and
her spirit pulls your heart out through your mouth.”
In her novel Lullaby, Leila Slimani traces the slow, painful derangement of a nanny, Louise, as she takes increasingly desperate measures to maintain her co-dependent relationship with her employers and their children. Eventually, driven to desperation by a family that doesn’t seem to have any emotional need for her anymore, Louise kills her wards and attempts to take her own life too.
We don’t even need to go as far as fiction to stretch our imaginations. Millions of women are employed in domestic work of various kinds, including childcare, but their lives remain as obscure to us as their fictional counterparts’.
Recently, a copy of a Singaporean nanny’s daily schedule made waves because of the realities it revealed. This anonymous woman seems to start her day at 5:30 am, goes to bed at 10:30 pm and only takes a half hour off in the middle of the day. She does everything for a several-member household made up of two parents and what seems to be three children. She gets one day off a month.
Before you gasp and ask how this could happen, remember that the Indian government doesn’t yet have laws that guarantee domestic workers a minimum wage, compulsory paid leave each year or maternity leave. The government has been planning a policy since 2015, but unlike laws, nobody is obligated to implement a policy. The only positive development in the recent past has been that domestic workers can now get health insurance under the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY).
We like to say that women’s work is invisible, but that’s not really true. We see women work long, gruelling hours all the time, we just don’t acknowledge care work as ‘real work’. Instead, we mask it in narratives that emphasise someone’s motherly nature or resort to magical powers to divert attention from the labour we take from them. We don’t ask domestic workers questions like ‘Can women have it all?’ even though they are, in several ways, the original ‘career women’ who support their families, work round the clock and often give up time with their own families to care for someone else’s.
The best nanny stories deprive the children of real bonds with the women who raise them. Because behind talented domesticity lie questions about wages and health insurance, and those are really the things that determine questions of employment. But we make women trudge through murky emotional waters with care work, undervaluing their work monetarily while praising their emotional worth unabashedly.
Increasingly, we talk about the rise of the care economy – how everything will be automated soon enough and human things like emotional care and service will be the only things we’ll be able to monetise convincingly. Before that happens, maybe we should talk more about creating systems that value such care and service work in the same ways that we currently value other professions.
Perhaps the strangest part of interacting with Uma aunty post-retirement is how little we have to talk about now that her physical presence doesn’t shape my life. These new, awkward silences on the phone make us both uncomfortable, bonded as we are by something that lies between transaction and love.