I first met Mary when I was a young bride. We inherited her along with the flat -- and the fading art deco sofa set -- from my husband's grandparents. Short, plump, with a pair of saucer eyes set in a weather beaten face, and a shock of white hair screwed into a tight bun, she soon let us know who was mistress of the house. Winning her over was a long, arduous battle. Mary, you see, had a plastic fetish. I would open cutlery drawers to find every piece individually wrapped in newspaper, then bound tightly in at least three plastic bags. Unravelling them would be like stripping Mary down to her very soul. She would grab the falling bags and stuff them under her cupboard. "From where I come, Baby, these cost 25p a-piece" she would say reproachfully. When our friends come over for tea, Mary fixes them with a gimlet eye. "Half cup or full?"she demands testily. "Don't waste tea, baba, it costs money." And she walks half a mile every week to claim our quota of kerosene from the ration shop. "But we don't USE kerosene, Mary!" I once yelled in exasperation. "What does that matter?" said the old lady calmly. "Its ours, isn't it? Besides, if we don't take it, that chap at the ration shop will sell it in the black market, see if he doesn't!" She was born Vincentine D'Silva in the tiny, dirt-poor village of Savade in south Goa. The fifth of eleven kids, she left home virtually unnoticed at the age of ten and slipped into Bombay to begin a life of servitude. A Parsi family hired her for Rs 3 a month, and rechristened her Mary, because they couldn't be bothered to learn her name. So Mary she will be, till the end of her days. Solid, dependable, hardworking and honest, our aging work horse has never been sacked from any job: she merely moved on when her employers -- mostly cantankerous old Parsi couples -- emigrated or died. Somewhere between jobs, she married a young Goan chauffeur who wooed her with her first box of talcum powder, and was widowed three days after the wedding. It sounds bizarre in this age of lap top computers and digital cameras, but our Mary can't tell the time, can't count the change a shopkeeper gives her, or read a single letter.Yet she runs my house with immaculate precision. And awakes like clockwork at 5.30 every morning to bathe, change into her blue silk frock with the lace ruffles, wear her only pair of gold bangles, and catch the English service at the nearby Church. (There is a Konkani Mass, attended by gaggles of young Mangalorean maids at 7 am, but Mary prefers to listen to the Lord's Prayer in more respectable company with the local memsahibs). Then back home to don her patched cotton dress, and do the only thing she knows best: serve others. Last week, Mary came home from Church in a flutter. The padre had said that the country was going to war. Many men had already been killed. We were impressed: after all these years Vincentine D'Silva was actually talking politics! "Oh dear!" I said solemnly. "Whatever shall we do?" Mary looked contemplative. "I think you should buy some milk powder" she said. "With this war on, those doodhwallahs won't get us any milk. And then how will you have your morning tea?" Diya Parakh, a Bombay-based travel writer, plans to begin work on her second book soon.
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