Maiden Escapades

Well, to understand this article, you will need to know a bit about me, and my family. I live in a nice big house, with a nice big family. A family obsessed with education and qualifications. To the point, that when I was a kid, my nanny’s daughter, who was probably 15 at that time, was forced to not stop her education after the tenth, but continue further. She’s a pretty successful nurse now, and has managed to stabilize her family, financially. Also, the head of my family, my grandmother, had to fight her entire family to get a decent education…and like they say, you come to value things more, if you’ve had to fight for it.
So, now, 22 years later, we’ve got a new maid, to handle the household. She’s a very sweet person, and really takes care of my grandmother well. She’s 17 and was forced to start working to support her family. Before the flame throwers begin, let me clarify that this isn’t child labor. Children over the age of 14 are allowed to work…yeah…we checked.
So yeah, 17 year old, working to support family and all that jazz...not something entirely out of the ordinary in India. Here’s the kicker…she wanted to study further! And I don’t know how, but my mother found out that she wanted to! And so we searched all over the place, to find a Marathi medium college that would accept her. She wanted to take up Arts and study psychology! We found one about ten minutes away, and after a lot of persuading and requesting, we managed to get her enrolled into that college.
Now, this girl barely knows her Hindi, let alone her English. I have to speak to her in Marathi…and let me tell you, I don’t exactly excel at it. I mix up Marathi with Gujarati and Hindi and eventually end up talking to her in sign language.
So getting such her girl to pass her HSC exam, where English in a 100 marks paper, did seem a little tough. And thus, we tried to use all the tricks that worked on us as kids when we were learning the language.
We gave her picture books and stuff, which would help her learn the language. And then, we encouraged her to start reading the newspapers and ask us if she didn’t understand anything.
Problem is, we didn’t fully think this bit over. You see, the newspaper that comes to our house has a supplement called Bombay Times. That supplement is a purely entertainment paper, where the front page is usually adorned by the perfectly made up face of some celebrity. And star struck as my maid is, it is the first thing she looks at.
So every single day, I will have the Bombay Times shoved under my nose, with a demand to explain the article of choice. Here are some of the craziest examples so far:

1. A few days back, there was a picture of Shahid Kapur with an actress on the cover. I think the actress was Priyanka Chopra, but I’m not too sure. She got the paper to me and asked me whether the article was trying to say that the two are getting married. It didn’t…the article was trying to say that they are appearing in a movie together.
2. There was an article about how Aishwarya Rai Bachan took her daughter to Dubai. This time, the question asked to me was whether they went by an airplane.
3. There’s a TV show called Balika Vadhu, whose actress had given an interview to the paper, listing out her favorite drink, shopping place and whatever. After I explained it to her, I was told that the woman was not a nice person, because she married Jagya, who was married to someone else earlier. And then she asked me whether the actress was married in real life.
4. This one takes the cake. It happened today. Her favorite TV show is Bade Ache Lagte Hai. The lead actress gave an interview to the newspaper saying how TV shows before this one also showed sequences which depicted sex, and so she didn’t see how her show was a big deal. My maid asked me what it meant. And this time, I really didn’t know what to say. So I randomly made up an interview…listing what I thought were the actress’ favorite drink and shopping destination. And then, I was asked another question. “Lagn Jhala aahe ticha?” (“Is she married?”)

So that’s it…I have officially shifted explanation responsibilities to my mother. Let her deal with this! I’ll be happily sipping on my orange juice while I watch mama trying to make up random explanations like this!