A Childhood Spent in the Little Maids’ Room

The house of my childhood was a sprawling, echoing place, a grandeur measured in marble floors and high ceilings that seemed designed to amplify solitude. Yet the room I returned to most often was a small, spare space tucked beneath the servants’ stairs, a place of cracked teacups and folded cots, smelling always of cardamom and sweat. There, among the hushed whispers and weary sighs of the women who polished our silver and scrubbed our floors, I learned to breathe most freely. My parents’ world demanded posture and silence; theirs offered gossip and laughter, tinny radios playing Hindi film songs, and the flicker of a borrowed projector casting second-rate Bollywood dramas onto a bedsheet pinned to the wall. We spoke in fragments—my broken Arabic, their halting and utilitarian pidgin version of it, with gestures and inflections filling the gaps—but I never corrected their grammar or scolded them for slouching.

They called me habibi, though I was neither their child nor their equal. Their hands were raw from bleach, their voices hushed when the house stirred overhead, but they let me linger. In return, I became a makeshift confidant: they showed me photos of sons and daughters left behind in Kerala or Davao, sang lullabies they’d crooned to other children, and rolled their eyes as I dispensed nine-year-old’s advice about their troubles. I thought myself their ally, and I somewhat was. Only now do I wonder how much they humoured me, how much my presence, however clumsily earnest, was another small labour in lives already crowded with service?

Nevertheless, I learned to recognise the weariness in a half-swallowed sigh. They had crossed oceans to clean a stranger’s home, mailing remittances to villages they hadn’t seen in decades, yet their grievances were offered lightly, like jokes they’d grown tired of telling. When I picture them now, I see pragmatists carving pockets of joy from what they had: a shared meal, a smuggled cigarette, and of course, my wide-eyed company. Power is not softened by guilt (no matter how much of one musters up) but by the stubborn, daily act of tending to one another in rooms the world doesn’t think to look for.

Perhaps I am being too utilitarian in hindsight. Indeed, how keenly I sensed, even then, that I served as proxy for the sons and daughters they had left behind! These women—whose existence was reduced to waiting in that airless room for the shrill summons of a bell; waiting through the interminable years for reunion with families grown strange; waiting, always, for some reprieve from the thousand indignities of servitude—had taught me, in their loneliness, a lesson far greater than the scattered phrases of Malayalam or Tagalog I would later forget, viz., that kinship, as much as mercy, flourishes most vividly in the cracks between power and powerlessness, and that the heart, when attuned to the whispers of the marginalised, may yet learn to beat in time with the rhythms of a wider, wounded world. I was in a very real sense theirs—their kid.

To escape hunger, they’d submitted to a world where employers held their passports like collateral, where a broken vase might cost a month’s wages, and where even their laughter was rationed. I remember their girlish delight on rare outings—a trip to the mall’s ice rink, a school play where they clapped too loudly, as if storing up joy for the lean weeks ahead.

And yet—how bitterly ironic!—it was the servants, not the masters, who stood accused of depravity. The majlesesem> of our relatives resounded with lurid tales of their savagery: of maids who pilfered jewellery to fund clandestine orgies; of drivers who seduced virginal daughters with pagan incantations; of cooks who laced biryanis with love potions to bewitch cuckolded husbands; of nannies who whispered heresies into the ears of pliant infants, corrupting their ‘pure’ Arabic with the barbarous cadences of Kerala or Kathmandu. The details varied but the message didn’t: servants were vectors of chaos and their morality is always already suspect. Never mind that this was dripping from the lips of men who thought nothing of backhanding a gardener for a smudged vase; of an uncle who pawed at the new Nepalese girl during Ramadan iftar; an aunt who docked Fatima’s pay to cover a ‘missing’ phone she’d likely misplaced herself. The real thefts were quieter—the way their contracts were backdated, the way their homesickness was weaponised. It was a projection of the nobility’s own rot onto those too powerless to refute it.

My friends—yes, I’ll call them that—absorbed these slights with a shrug. What else was there to do? They’d mastered the art of vanishing: lowering their eyes, muffling their Tamil hymns, laughing at their own accents before anyone else could. They are screamed at by the top my mothers’ lungs, but they never held any grudges. They mocked our gilded Quran stands (“Allah doesn’t need gold leaf!”) yet prayed fiercely for our souls. And when my mother warned me not to “overfraternise”, they simply pressed a hand to my wrist—we know—and asked about my school.

My cousins found my habits baffling. “Why do you sit with the khadamas like a stray?” they’d ask, smirking over footballs or PlayStation controllers. To them, the maids were appliances—useful only when silent, invisible except when malfunctioning. My refusal to play along unsettled them. The breach of etiquette was one thing, but it also hinted at a rot in the hierarchy they’d been raised to venerate. Their jabs—Do their stink rub off on you? or Careful, they’ll curse your future wife!—was subtext for an unspoken fear that the walls separating us might, after all, be thinner than they claimed. Their scorn had rules. You could humiliate a maid, or yell at one, but never listen to one. To treat servants as human; to learn their villages’ names, their children’s ages, their hopes and dreams and so on, was to risk contagion. Once, when I mentioned that Amina’s son is studying engineering at university in India, my eldest cousin snorted: “Liar. Their type can’t even spell.” But he didn’t really laugh as it was not meant as a joke, he sincerely believed that ‘Indians’ (and by that he meant a specific kind of people from India, those who are desperate enough to leave kin behind and work for strangers for bare remittances) held a religious belief that serving in this life will land them a better life in the future. This was merely a reframing of the lie that their poverty proved their inferiority.

The maids, for their part, understood the game. When relatives visited, they’d shoo me back upstairs, wiping crumbs from my shirt as if scrubbing away evidence. “Go be with your people,” they’d say, though we both knew I no longer belonged entirely to that world. They shielded me from consequences they couldn’t afford to risk themselves. They let me pretend I was their ally, even as they paid the price for my naivety.

Of all the women in that cramped room, Suwaida left the deepest mark. She arrived in ’97 when I was still toddling, a sharp-elbowed 22-year-old from a Kerala village where, as she put it, “even the crows went hungry”. Over two decades, she became my secret refuge. Her hands were chapped from scrubbing our floors but she could peel a mango in one unbroken spiral. My mother called her ‘the help’; I called her khala—auntie—though she’d swat me half-heartedly for it. “Not here,” she’d whisper, glancing at the door. Her life was a spring of losses: a sibling dead before ten, a father who drank the money meant for rice, a daughter in Kerala she hadn’t held since infancy. Yet she wore her grief lightly. She narrates her indentured trip to Qatar as a triumph, as the pittance she earned in our employ became the remittance-laden lifeline that spared her own children from the maw of the same hunger. Oh how fiercely she loved them! How she hoarded Polaroids of their gap-toothed grins beneath her thin mattress, how her voice caught on the vowels of their names—Amit, Priya—as if speaking them aloud might conjure their ghosts into that joyless room! She showed me Priya’s letters with the care of a curator handling relics, tracing her finger over the Indian script. “See how neat her ka is?” she’d say, as if perfect penmanship could will her child into a better life. When my mother banned sweets, Suwaida smuggled rasgullas into my schoolbag, winking as the syrup leaked through the foil.

My mother’s warnings escalated. “She’s not family,” she’d say, her voice brittle. “You’ll confuse her.” By ‘confuse’, perhaps she meant forget her place as forever staff, a functionary whose humanity must be bracketed by the parentheses of her duties. “You mustn’t blur the lines,” she would admonish, her voice taut with the anxiety of one who intuits, however dimly, that the entire edifice of her world rests upon the fiction of those lines’ inviolability. Rules multiplied: maids were barred from the upper floor after dusk, forbidden to use the front stairs, to linger in rooms unsummoned. But Suwaida had survived worse than my mother’s edicts. She simply adjusted—humming Mappila pattukal while dusting my father’s study, knowing he’d never recognise the sly wit in those Malayalam-Arabic verses about fishermen outsmarting landlords.

Late one night, I found her in her room squinting at a new photo of Priya. “Too thin,” she muttered, though the girl was grinning. When I sat beside her, she didn’t shoo me away. We shared a blanket, our knees touching, as she recited the letter line by line. My Hindi was rudimentary, but I understood the ache in her voice when she said, “She asks if I’m taller than our mango tree.” My mother’s boundaries dissolved in those moments. Suwaida never railed against the rules, but she simply sidestepped them because dignity is never handed down by those in power; it is seized in the cracks between their demands.

Children, I think, are the only true anarchists. They haven’t yet learned to see servants as a class—only as people who sneak them sweets or let them win at cards, and both bond over the adult’s condescensions. My cousins outgrew this clarity quickly and adopted the household’s choreographed disdain, but I clung to it a little bit longer, perhaps only because I was chosen for an ally. While others performed bourgeois adulthood in the majles—back straight, voice clipped, laughter rationed—I fled to the maids’ room, where Rukmini let me lick batter off mixing bowls and Zahra taught me curse words in Swahili. Their play had no agenda. They didn’t care if I mispronounced thamar or didn’t act ‘manly’ enough or made a faux pas; they only cared that I shared my chocolates.

My shyness, which adults treated as a defect to be cured, became a kind of currency there. I could never meet their eyes and muster the arrogance to command, and at any rate, I harboured a terror of human scrutiny. At family gatherings, I’d hover in doorways, sweating through my crisply ironed ghutra, while aunts clucked about my ‘sensitivity’ as if it were a rash. But the servants recognised that trembling. Fatima, our Indonesian cook, would catch my eye across the room and jerk her head toward the kitchen in a silent offer of refuge. We’d sit on upturned crates or plastic chairs, shelling peas as she muttered commentary on the guests. They never called me brave for enduring those years when my shyness was crippling; nor did they ever frame our alliance as rebellion. Survival for them was too ordinary a task for grand labels. But they showed me how to exist in the margins—how to carve pockets of ease in a house that demanded constant performance. Decades later, when I read James Baldwin’s line about the “gaze that flinches,” I thought of Suwaida’s hands, cracked from bleach, pressing a cold cloth to my forehead after a panic attack. No one had touched me with such uncomplicated care before. What they made of this quivering boy-child, I cannot say; only that they responded never with the robotic deference reserved for others but with a tenderness that seemed to say, We see you. We, too, have known the weight of existing as ghosts.

All alliances between unequal parties end in silence. I learned this the day my cousins trapped Suwaida in the pantry, their taunts sharpened by the confidence of boys who’d never been told “no”. They called her a witch, a negress, kallu—stone in Malayalam, a slur for her dark skin—and accused her of shouting at my little cousin. She stood motionless, a stack of linen pressed to her chest, her face a study in practiced neutrality. I hovered in the doorway, mute, my throat thick with shame. To defend her would’ve meant exile; to join them, self-betrayal. We both knew the rules. When they tired of the game and stalked off, she resumed folding towels, her hands steady as ever. Only the sheen in her eyes betrayed her. “You are good,” she later said, “You’re not like them”, handing me a cup of chai she’d sweetened with extra jaggery. Her absolution stung more than any insult. Goodness! How was I, the mute witness, good? Virtue was just another luxury the powerful could afford. What virtue in a solidarity that evaporates at the first chill of consequence?

Still, she clung to me as a friend. During breaks, she’d pull a photo from her sari blouse—Priya at six, grinning in a school uniform two sizes too big—and whisper stories of her village: the way monsoon rains turned their dirt road into a river, the smell of jackfruit curry simmering over coconut husks, the petty feud between her uncle and a neighbour over a rooster’s crowing rights. Her nostalgia had edges. She laughed describing the landlord who’d skulk around their hut at night, then paused, studying my face, to add, “But we threw mango pits at his head!”

By sixteen, I no longer slipped into the maids’ room. I called her Suwaida instead of khala, my voice flat, eyes skimming her shoulder as if she were a piece of furniture. She adjusted faster than I did. When she handed me my morning chai, her fingers no longer brushed mine. When my cousins mocked her accent, I stared at my phone, thumbing through apps I didn’t care about. The worst part is that she let me. She made it easy, this unspoken pact to pretend we’d never hunched over her daughter’s letters, that she never had once cradled me through fevers.

Years later, in London, I’ll catch a whiff of jaggery or hear the lilt of a Malayalam folk song and feel the old shame rise like bile. I’ve rehearsed a hundred apologies, but what would I even say? That I’m sorry for the way I stopped meeting her gaze? That I miss the way she’d snort at my terrible Hindi, her laughter muffled by the laundry she was folding? That I still check every crowd for a woman in a faded cobalt sari, though I know she’ll never leave Qatar? Still, I cling to a half-superstitious conviction—a child’s faith, perhaps—that our paths will converge again. When they do, I imagine her not as the aged servant of popular caricature, limping down the stairs carrying household items over her head, but as she exists in my memory: cross-legged on the floor, her sari a splash of cobalt against the drab walls, her voice weaving tales of flooded villages and neem trees as I, once more the turtle-boy with downturned eyes, lean in to listen. We would laugh again, I think, and never speak of what came after. We would simply inhabit the old secret pact between the boy child and the maid. Let the years insist she’s aged and that I’ve grown cold. Some part of me will always be hunched on that floor, clinging to the childish heresy that once you give someone love, it cannot be unmade, and that that a boy who learned to see the world through her eyes might still, in some old hidden corner of the universe, deserve the gift she gave.