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Literary Review
Dreams and denial
LAKSHMY RAJEEV
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This is a novel that deals entirely with internal life.
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Diary of a Maidservant: A Novel; Krishna Baldev Vaid, translated from Hindi by Sagaree Sengupta, OUP, Rs. 395.
A rainy evening a couple of years back. The road was clogged with water and it was dark. Posing as poetic and sensitive, I asked my daytime maid: “Your day’s work is done and you must be feeling sad to go back, to your home in the slum an
d to your realities, after having spent your day in a bungalow?”
After a moment’s pause she asked me: “Amma, you know people richer than you; do you feel the same when you come back to your home after meeting them?”
Waving her hands, smiling, she vanished into the dark. I was stunned. I have never underestimated anyone’s mind ever since
Many have been drawn to the plight of the poor and the deprived. This has been a recurrent theme for most of the major Indian writers but The Diary of a Maidservant is the book that seems to speak only to me and forever. It is brilliantly attractive, delicately written, grimy, terrifying, supremely perplexing, and somehow plots to make the reader feel small.
Internal life
This is a novel that deals entirely with internal life; it is a teenaged domestic maid’s delicate and sensuous diary entries. Shano, the protagonist, drops out of school to work as a domestic hand. At a casual suggestion from Mrs. Varma, the mistress of one household, she begins to keep a record of her thoughts.
Gradually, she gets addicted to this habit and begins to enjoy probing her own mind and the motives of her various employers and fellow domestics. She begins to develop a deeper relationship with her own self in addition to analysing her experience of the external world.
And it is nothing but the truth, in Shano’s own words: “There’s no one I can share everything with. I can’t write everything down here, either. I’m sure there’s no one who tells someone else everything they think. Telling someone else everything is the same as stripping naked in front of them. Could I take all my clothes off in front of someone? I’ve never even stripped in front of myself, though I often feel like it. Sometimes when I’m cleaning Fatty’s filthy bathroom,I get a sudden urge to take everything off and bathe. And sing while doing it: O friend, look at my lovely curves! Fatty would go crazy if she was outside and heard me.” The readers go crazy too listening to the thoughts and fantasies of someone they know so closely and whose thoughts never mattered.
And it becomes special as it develops. “After writing about yesterday, I don’t feel like writing about today anymore. And nothing in particular happened today. Actually, nothing special happens on any day. But when I write, it begins to feel as if whatever I’m writing about is special.”
I found it haunting at the time of reading and I am still haunted by its honesty and levels of emotional life. The author, Krishna Baldev Vaid, is over 80 years. He accesses the mind of a teenage maid at the speed of lightning and provides us with details — a teenage maid’s dreams and denial. A sensitive maid in the ever-narrowing New Delhi who struggles with her passion and lack of it in reality
Haunting
Reality becomes haunting and there is a nagging sense of disbelief in your own nature and one doubts whether it is imaginary or whether the author copied the words of some intelligent maid, without a pause, even capturing her breath and smell between the two covers of a book. He has an extraordinary command over these thoughts and it works.
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Literary Review
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