Cleaning season

Over a period of the past few weeks, my room has been growing messier. Of course I dislike being in an untidy room but sometimes I just let it be. Then today morning Ramrati, our cleaner-maid, who’s worked at our place for more than a decade, started to complain about how cluttered my room was while she was mopping the floor. She’s in her 50s and I’ve watched her grow old over all this time. What I dislike about her is that at times she talks about unnecessary topics with my mother. My mother gives her tea and food in the morning because she comes to our place very early. This was fairly commonplace activity till the time my dad objected to it, saying that my mother was spoiling her too much.

The problem is that Ramrati and my dad don’t get along at all and strangely, it’s because of her punctuality and in some strange way her love for our family that she still works. My father is not the kindest of and Ramrati is quite good at answering back when treated unfairly. My father and Ramrati have had terrible fights; in a normal scenario the maid would either leave or be fired. Both scenarios have taken place; more than once my dad has told her to hit the road and Ramrati herself has quit three times, the longest for a month but always returned home. My mom sides with her and quite frankly when my father becomes unreasonable, I too have sided with her in the past. Such scenarios have led to a weird tension between my mom, dad and me with my father interpreting it as we both going against him for a lowly housemaid. Not once has he ever acknowledged that he can be outrageously and unacceptably rude. Anyway dad’s not always rude and unreasonable, he a nice guy most of the times.

What I’m trying to say is that I cleaned my room so that Ramrati doesn’t mumble/curse and in the process wake me up early in the morning when she’s cleaning my room. That’s one thing I hate and lose my temper at spontaneously, when I’m woken up from deep slumber by something unpleasant, be it my parents talking too shouting instruction to each other early in the morning or Ramrati incessantly mumbling curses at me. My folks have faced my wrath once due to this habit and I don’t want Ramrati to find out the hard way that I, afterall, carry my dad’s anger genes; oh the big fat male ego!