The Servant\’s Quarters by Taamra Segal

Like countless others in the city of Delhi, I live with my family and in our home there exists a room given the mundane and simultaneously grand title of the ‘Servant’s Quarters’. When this house in a gated community was bought, almost 15 years ago, the main purpose of this particular room was to house any maid that would work for us. It’s not a tiny room as the name may suggest, and comes with a lovely view of a large patch of empty government-owned land where construction of the dreaded multi storeyed monstrosities that pocket this city has been banned. Although, as I write this, a slum is stealthily creeping its way across, but being an eternal optimist I choose to see only the parts not yet destroyed, still in the majority thankfully.

Over the past decade my family and I were based abroad and so never hired a maid except the temporary find to clean for us when we visited Delhi once a year for a few weeks (and what a feat that search was! This is Delhi after all). Now since the servant’s quarter was not being used for its original purpose, it seemed to take on the natural avatar of dumping ground for unwanted items found around the house. My father’s old LPs, family photo albums, unused electrical appliances and piles upon piles of dusty books. Belonging, as I do, to a family of readers and authors, poses a heavy burden, literally.