Daya

I spent most of my days over the next week propped up in a wicker chair on the back patio bolstered with pillows and blankets off the bed. We didn’t have a couch, loveseat, or comfy chair. Looking out over the lush landscape and down into Kandy town I felt a little like a WWII soldier injured in the Pacific arena and recovering on some exotic location. “Why won’t you take pain medication?” Dan asked, watching me wince as I settled myself back into my chair.
“I need to have the pain,” I explained. “I know that the anti-inflammatory aspect of Ibuprofen, or “Vitamin I” as my dad calls it, would help,” I conceded, “but I need to be reminded of how much it hurts. If I take the meds and don’t feel the pain then I’ll just go out and run like three miles.”
“But you aren’t exercising today, you know you can’t,” Dan reasoned.
“Yes, but I need to feel why,” I countered. “I need to know how to sit, how to lean over, what makes it feel worse. Plus Ibuprofen tears up my gut,” I added.

Over the course of the week I journaled, started to read an academic biography of the Buddha, and caught up on my podcasts while convalescing on the patio. It became harder and harder for me to focus on the book without falling asleep as the week wore on, even though I was finding the material more interesting. I started to feel dizzy whenever I stood up. I saw a picture of a cupcake in one of my lengthy internet diversions and wanted to reach into the screen to eat it. I wanted to eat a whole box of cupcakes and curl up in bed. Dan was working feverishly on a paper for a journal submission. Under the pressures of organizing so much diverse material he wasn’t doing too much better, not shaving or brushing his teeth in the morning. He was tired of cooking and didn’t feel up to interacting with the outside world, so we subsisted on canned foods and delivered pizza

Even though my back was improving, it became harder for me to complete my little everyday tasks. I made the breakfast more slowly and had a difficult time getting back up to clean up the kitchen, lingering at the table. I stopped sweeping the floor, allowing the onion skins, little leaves, and dead bugs to accumulate. I turned my back to the majority of the patio so I would not have to see the mango leaves and flowers covering the green cement floor. If you walked to the far end of the patio it smelled like a low creek bed. On Sundays the woman who does the cleaning downstairs, Daya, comes up to do our laundry and sweeps the floor. Daya was a woman in her thirties, slim and muscular from a life of physical work and hiking up the hill to the house from the bus station. I figured that I would leave it for Daya, even once I could stoop over without pain.

We had two options for laundry. We could pay Daya 4 bucks to do the laundry and clean up, or we could pay about the same and send to laundry out through Malik’s hotel, just down the hill. If Daya did the laundry then she hung it up on the line on the patio. I would have to bring it all in at night to the line in the guest room and then put it out again the next day. It usually took about two days to dry. I also had to put the bathroom towels and the kitchen towels out on the line all day every day if I wanted anything to dry and not rot. If we sent the laundry to the hotel then it would be gone for four or five days. Sometimes I had to call Malik and inquire about it. While the laundry was at Malik’s, however, line was open for the towels. Best of all, the laundry would return dry and neatly folded.

Trying to rotate in the sheets and towels resulted in a fair amount of laundry, so after a few weeks in August Daya offered to come up during the week after 3 PM to do some of the washing. She spoke only Sinhala, so she negotiated with Dan. After her first day’s work she asked for the whole day’s pay. Despite her only working half a day, Dan went ahead and paid her the whole 4 bucks. “You have to realize that Sri Lankan women are raised to manage servants,” Dan explained as we sat at the kitchen table drinking our tea after she left. “We Westerners just don’t know how to handle servants. No way would she have gotten that full day’s pay out of a native Lankan. We already pay her too much, I know she gets more like 300 Rupees from Madam downstairs. I was so uncomfortable with the whole thing. It’s not really that much money and I just wanted it to go away.”
“I know, it’s true,” I agreed. “I know a couple of people back in the States who have maids, but they just come a few times a week and do a set number of things. Daya and the cook are down there all day every day. The maids in the States usually work for an agency and work in multiple homes, so there isn’t this close relationship thing. Plus, they’re accountable to the agency. If your maid does a bad job, you report it to the agency. Besides, I don’t even know how to tell someone to clean this house. She asked what we needed her to do on that first day and I just didn’t know. This red wax floor, I don’t know how to handle this thing. Our bathroom floor drains directly to the outside through a hole in the wall, does that mean you can just hose it down?” I asked.
“Who knows,” Dan replied. “Daya is just so convenient, it would be hard for us to get someone else in here and she knows that.”

After two more weeks, now into September, Daya made the case to Dan that when she worked downstairs she got lunch and tea. She asked for 70 Rupees to get a lunch packet at the local hut shop when she worked on Sundays. So on Sunday morning before Dan and I left for the gardens I would carefully set out her tea things and leave 70 Rupees for her. We stopped using the hotel altogether and for over a month everything ran smoothly until one Monday in late October when the landlady, the “Madam,” rang our doorbell. Dan went to answer while I stayed at the computer. I could hear her talking to Dan in English down the narrow hall leading to the door. Like most English speaking Sri Lankans I could easily understand her, but she had difficulty understanding our American accents. “Why don’t you just speak Sinhala to her?” I asked Dan after a previous convoluted occasion. “She would be insulted to speak Sinhala,” Dan replied. “That’s the language of servants here. She probably speaks to her friends in family in her Sri Lankan English. Next to that, British English would be the easiest to understand for her,” he explained. As I listened to Dan talk to the Madam I wondered what our accents sounded like to her.

“She asked us not to ‘encourage’ Daya to come up here during the week, it has been causing problems with the cook downstairs,” Dan relayed to me frowning as he stood next to my little wooden writing desk.
“Well,” I replied. “Then that’s just what we’ll tell Daya when she checks to see if she can come up the next day. We’ll throw it back to Madam.”
“Ok,” Dan agreed with some reservation.
“The cook,” I repeated. “I just can’t get over the number of servants people have here.”
“Labor is cheap,” Dan replied as he crossed his arms and shifted his weight. “You see how I have to cook here. Everything here is from scratch. There are very few appliances here to speed things up. No dishwasher, no Kitchen Aid. There is no ready-made counter at the Whole Foods. And nobody eats out here. To really do Sri Lankan food right someone has to be starting breakfast the night before. It’s an around the clock job.”
“This sure ain’t no café culture,” I agreed. “There are those lunch packet things, but those’re so vile.”
“Those places really skimp on ingredients,” Dan explained. “More people are getting appliances now, for the kitchen and things like washing machines. I never saw a drip coffee pot until this trip. More things are available now.
“But still no dryers,” I replied. “I mean, my yoga instructor is married to a school teacher and they employ two full-time live-in servants. In that socio-economic bracket in the states they’d be doing their wash at the Dud’s and Suds. I’d give anything for the Duds and Suds now,” I mourned, remembering the combination bar and laundry mat my dad used when I was growing up.

When Daya came the next day to ask if she could work on Wednesday afternoon, Dan told her that the Madam had asked us not to allow her. “She looked visibly shaken,” he commented. The next day I got into the shower with the big blue bucket myself to wash my sarees and the choli tops that went with them. Dan had his research assistant, Thilak, over to the house to translate some interview tape. If I had been in the States it would have been no big deal, just me doing a little laundry while Dan worked. Here in Sri Lanka I felt a bit demeaned to be doing servant’s work in front of Thilak, but I tried to just focus on the task at hand. Having the laundry soap in bar form made it actually pretty easy. I washed, rinsed, wrung, and hung out the laundry myself. On my next trip into Kandy I bought more clothesline to string up on the patio so that Daya could get the rest done on Sunday. I figured that once a week would work out just fine.

On Thursday Daya came to the door and excitedly told Dan that she could in fact come during the week, but she would just have to charge more, 450 Rupees instead of 400. She told Dan that the Madam was concerned that she was working too hard to get all of her work done on the days she came up here, so she deserved the extra money. “Brilliant move!” I thought. “She’s just upped the price a bit for psychological purposes so that we will not want Daya here during the week!” I exclaimed. I decided to speak to the Madam myself and cut out all of the middle men. As it happened the Madam came by that evening. “So, are you concerned that Daya is working to hard up here during the week?” I started.
“No,” the Madam explained, looking like a confused, plump, Siamese cat. “It was just causing problems with the cook you know,” she said with a head waggle implying “you know how these servants are.”
“So, when Daya comes on Sunday we are to pay her 450 Rupees?” I asked.
“Uh, yes,” Madam replied, still with the confused look on her face, I couldn’t tell if she didn’t understand me or if she just wanted to look that way.
“But before we paid 400 Rupees for Sunday, what has changed?” I asked.
“Uh, huh?” Madam replied, looking more confused. She broke me with her projected ignorance.
“Ok, but on the half-day during the week, it is ok if she comes?”
“Yes, she can come,” the Madam replied.
“But on those days shouldn’t we only pay her half?” I asked. The Madam just looked at me in silence.
“Ok, so, that’s what we’ll do.” I replied with a head waggle and we said goodbye.

I came back into the apartment, feeling defeated. “How’d it go?” Dan asked.
“I think that with the extra line we can just use Daya on Sundays,” I replied. “Let’s just do that. If she asks to come up during the week then we’ll tell her that we don’t need her. 450 is the price,” I added, defeated. “I don’t know if there was a problem with the cook, or if it was just a con to get more money for Daya.” I finished.
“Who knows,” Dan remarked, turning his attention back into the computer. I tried to tell myself that this was 50 cents, but the principle of it all irritated me. Daya didn’t come up that week to ask for a mid-week shift.

On the next Sunday Daya was not able to finish all of the laundry, but since I was hurt I figured that I wouldn’t be going anywhere or working out, so that would be alright. Dan didn’t have any small money, so we had to pay her in a 1000 note and she promised to bring change on the next weekend. Despite not finishing the laundry that Sunday, once again Daya did not come up for a mid-week shift. While I convalesced rather than do my own mid-week wash, I allowed every single piece of underwear between the two of us to become dirty. By Saturday my back was better but I was writing things in my journal like: “Today its cold and rainy, I am almost non-functional. It takes all of my effort to do simple things like cleaning up,” and “I have felt bad all day and now I am crying.” Daya came by on Saturday while I was in bed in a vegetative state and Dan answered the door. He came back into the bedroom quickly and said “she wants to do the laundry today and then she has come late tomorrow, so she can do the cleaning then.” A single clear thought rose out of my mental fog, I asked “Does she think she’s getting paid a full days work for both days? Is she trying to break her Sunday up into two days of double pay? I really don’t want anyone in the house right now anyway,” I finished.
“Good point,” Dan replied. “I’ll just tell her to come late tomorrow and do what she can do,” he answered and went to report back to Daya.

We made arrangements with the Madam to let Daya in after we went to the gardens. I left the laundry it bags in the usual place, set out her tea, and tucked her lunch money under her tea saucer as we left. It would be my first outing in over a week and my first attempt at running again in over two weeks. Dan and I both had researched Jataka stories to tell and discuss. We made it around the perimeter of the park without too much suffering and my back felt fine. When we got home I didn’t see Daya’s shoes outside the front door and I knew. No laundry.

All of our important clothes were dirty. It would take the hotel at least five days to turn the wash around. The apartment was filthy. Despite the fact that we had just gone food shopping, Dan decided that he was still burned out on cooking. Any stray endorphins from the run seemed to vanish.