A Winter in India

This apartment is 74 feet from front to back, and 20 feet across(1480 square feet, which is about 80% the size of our house in Maine)!! The kitchen floor and the floor in one of the two bathrooms are tiled, and all the rest of the floors are marble. In the front room, the living room, there is a big rug over the marble. Our landlady, who lives downstairs, asked if we wanted her “girls” to clean for us. It was more of an expectation than a question and we were happy to say “sure”. So two women show up every day, including weekends. One, who is about 4 feet tall and who has worked for the landlady for over forty years, washes the entire floor by hand with a 2 by 3 foot wet rag and sweeps the living room rug with a bundle of sticks. She wears a sari while doing this and somehow doesn’t get it wrapped up in the washrag. The other, a young girl who wears a salwar kameez, dusts all of the furniture and cleans the bathrooms. Neither speaks any English, but the older one smiles a lot and chatters away to us in some extremely rapid language. So we smile and chatter back.

They appear at what seem to us to be random times. If the door is unlatched, they just come in and are suddenly here without us even realizing. So, we have quickly learned to at least latch our door.