You don’t have to know her to see the gentleness and strength in her face. For almost fifteen years Sharda has had the unenviable job of keeping my apartment clean and everything organized exactly to my fussy specifications. Sometime over all the time I’ve known her, she decided, quite on her own, that my house and my general welfare was entirely her responsibility. Don’t get me wrong, she has enough troubles of her own. A battered wife who had her head smashed repeatedly into the wall by her husband, she still has extreme headaches and hemorrhaging. Now a widow, she looks after a family of seven. With all her worries, she will still insist on coming to work when she’s ill, when it’s raining hard, and when it’s a public holiday.

All the more unsettling then to hear what I did today. A friend of mine was having a regular routine sort of day when her domestic help suddenly began kicking and screaming, accusing her of never having fed her or paid her any money for all her work. The woman, from one of those agencies, threated to call every relative she had on the planet, along with the police and the prime minister. She did indeed manage to gather a huge crowd who began to try and break down the front door of my friend’s apartment. My friend beat her to it and quickly called the Haryana police herself. I can’t even begin to imagine how harrowing an experience she went through for the next few hours. With her terrified three-year-old daughter. It’s even more chilling to think of what could have happened had the maid lost it, so to speak, when my friend was at work. There was apparently some desperation for money at work here because the maid had first said she wanted to sell her kidney. When my friend threatened to call the girl’s family – chaos followed.

For now, things have quietened down. The police had the sense to see that the maid’s story and accustations didn’t seem to add up. The agency also confirmed that she had received her money every month. All the same, this is beyond frightening.