Postcard from Kolkata Covid has exposed the great fiction of middle-class life in India

I f you are well-off in Kolkata it’s easy not to see things. As a child, I used to love watching the sun set over the city’s glinting horizon from the windows of the 13th-floor apartment where I grew up. I didn’t look at the slums below. And until the coronavirus pandemic, many of us gave little thought to the fact that our own homes contained a stratum of impoverished workers: servants and maids, cooks and drivers, breathing the same air, now dying the same deaths.

I can’t imagine my own life without Saraswati and Nageshwar. Saraswati was hired 42 years ago to help my mother change my sister’s nappies, to hush her tantrums and make the household its tea. She was spiritedly maternal, scolding us when we didn’t eat properly. Nageshwar’s affection was quieter. No one, not even he, remembers when my mother employed him, but “more than 20 years” is something we have all been saying for over a decade. It has been years since anyone called Saraswati an ayah (maid) or Nageshwar a naukar (servant). When asked, my parents and I are fond of saying “They are both like family to us.”

I never interrogated this claim until 2019 when I moved back to the family home after a few years living in Mumbai. At the start I revelled in the comfort of never having to lift a finger. In Mumbai I had employed a cleaner part-time, but we hardly ever met. In my parents’ flat, Saraswati and Nageshwar were always there, diligent and attentive. Saraswati spread an extra layer of butter on my toast each morning. When making my bed, Nageshwar made sure he smoothed every last crease. They treated me like a king.

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