The Dishwashing Nightmare

We all have had a string of housemaids while in India. And then when some of us moved to the United States we became our very own Housemaids. The queen of the kitchen and the toilet bowl, this interesting transition is alien to those back home, fooled by the glamorous Facebook photo updates from the Malibu beaches and the Brooklyn Bridges. That woman smiling with her million-dollar-software-engineer husband at Brooklyn Bridge was just scrubbing her newly acquired American non-stick with Ajax Super Strong Lime two hours ago. That was probably when you were getting your hair blow-dried and fabulous at the local salon for five hundred bucks. That's ten dollar for our Brooklyn Bridge lady. And the only thing she's getting for that much money here is her next order of Ajax super strong lime 40 ounce pack from amazon.

You are contemplating between Karim's biryani or Rajinder's chicken tikka for dinner. She is deciding whether to launder or to pack tomorrow's lunch. You decide both and enjoy a delicious dinner with friends or lovers or family. She decides laundry first and then tomorrow's lunch. Suddenly you realize, damn, I forgot the reshmi kabab. She remembers, damn, I forgot to clear out the kitchen. Ouch, that reshmi kabab was a dreadful miss.

Mrs. Malibu beach on the other hand or shall I say other coast is having a fancy dinner party with her other Indian friends at her place. Her newly acquired four hundred dollar Pottery Barn couch, spruced up with cushions dressed with mom-in-law-made crochet covers, is the center piece of the evening. Of course she and her husband spent all of friday night building that from scratch when Mr. Malibu got a frightful sprain in the back that murdered the prospects of any other kind of heavy workouts for the rest of the nights to follow. She tagged the photo "our new couch" under the album "LA Life". Then she tagged her entire gang of family and friends over different tiny corner's of the body of her priced possession. So, when you were checking out that picture, relaxing on your equally fabulous free-home-delivered-and-built couch, leaving a comment on her picture and wondering why it wasn't yours, she was loading her dishwasher with the aftermath of her dinner party and staring at the cycle timer with exhausted eyes.

The Facebook myth of the "American Dream Accentuated" gets fucked up when you get here, fall for the charming beauty of America, the luxury of choosing from a hundred and fifty brands of everything when suddenly your decaf medium roasted Jamaican coffee mug, low fat skimmed milk yogurt serving dish and mildly sweetened organic honey coated cereal bowl from the previous day come tumbling over you like a great tsunami wave and hit you on your head. Well then all you can do is smile, load the dishwasher and fool yourself with how the Ajax Super Strong Lime dishwashing liquid smells just a little bit sweeter than good old Vim Bar.