ডাকবাংলা

The humble ‘pochha/nyakra/ghar mochhar kapor’ that was used to mop our floors was one of Covid-19’s first victims. I remember, sometime in 2018, asking our household help Barunadi whether she wanted to switch to a mop with a stick, which she could dip into her balti to clean the floors. I had seen some of these at Spencer’s and thought it would ease her work. Barunadi would not have to crawl around the house with a cloth to clean floors, and my conscience would don a halo of humaneness as a sensitive ‘boudi’. But Barunadi would have none of it. She mocked the mop and dismissively said: ‘Eta diye kaaj hobey na… ami parbo na.’ She added that it was for the lazy domestic who did not want to bend and work. The halo of back-bending industriousness was firmly back on her head, as I returned to my crossword, grappling with the irritation of being snubbed.

Back then quite a few kaajer mashis would have said the same thing across India. However, in March 2020, as lockdown was imminent and part-time maids were rendered unavailable by the halt in transport, mops stormed into Indian homes. The ‘new normal’ had entered our world and the mop was a supporting actor in the changes it wrought.

Towards the end of March last year, it was me and not Barunadi who had to get on all fours and mop the house. Or it was the man of the house, since he was completely useless in the kitchen, who would have to handle cleaning floors and dusting! 

Brands immediately came to the rescue of beleaguered women and bewildered men. Scotch-Brite, the dishwashing sponge-and-scrub brand brought out a mop that was an immediate bestseller. Then came the mop-and-bucket where you could squeeze out the excess water as well. This was from a brand called Gala, but others soon followed. Suddenly, cleaning floors became civilised and the need to get ones hands dirty was out of the equation. In fact, mops like the one Svenson used in the Archie comics, with a stick similar to the one Harry Potter played Quidditch on, seemed to make the most icky and painful of household tasks kinda cool.

Today, many maids have come back to the adoring and relieved embrace of middle-class homes that had to cope for months without domestic help. They must have looked in the corner of the kitchen for the nyakra near the bucket, only to find the slender vision of the mop handle! Almost all of them have now got used to it, and the crawling maid is hopefully soon to become a relic of our past. 

Barunadi, sadly, did not come back to work after the lockdown. She had a hipbone fracture early in the lockdown and her grandsons decided to stop her going from house to house working. It was only then that I discovered that she did not need to work, but perhaps liked to have some money of her own, and possibly was habituated to going from house to house working. I will never know whether Barunadi would have been stubborn about going back to the nyakra, but her replacement is happy with the mop. I have earned my halo of goodness — an upheaval called the pandemic brought about a small revolution in my home.

Illustration by Suvamoy Mitra

Read in Bengali