Jubeda and Bishnu, my two house elfs...

Jubeda is the wife of Chunky, the gardener, and Bishnu is married to a guard of the Netherlands Embassy. Jubeda is cleaning the house (and yes...the stories about dust everywhere ARE true so I am very happy that she does) and Bishnu does the cooking and the ironing.
The first day they started they were on my doorstep at 7.30 a.m., ready to start unpacking boxes. Of course that was not entirely what I had in mind, still dressed in my again-found bathrobe and still completely overwhelmed by the size of my house...and obviously, control-freak that I am, I had wanted to unpack my boxes myself so I could really think quietly about what to put where. But this is India, and in India the best thing to do is simply letting things happen because trying to control things simply does not work. So there they were again at 8.30, unpacking things and demanding that I immediately tell them where to put them. True, I have never unpacked anything so fast...no idea where the stuff went, though. It will be somewhere in this huge house but as walking from one end to the other takes 5 minutes, I gave up looking. One fine day I will have located everything - until then, we'll make do.

Currently we have a better rithm - they come at 10 a.m. (which gives me time to dress properly and quickly do whatever I want to do alone, very pathetic I admit) and then I have to discuss the day, their work, my schedule and -still am not used to it- what I want to eat for dinner. Bishnu can cook Indian, Chinese, Nepalese and Bhutanese. She doesn't know how to cook western food yet, but we agreed I will teach her. She is a very good cook so I am hopeful Italian etc. should be no problem, though we will have to write the Hindi translations on all my herbs...the other day we spend half a day figuring out what the english name of Bunyapata was...cilantro, as it turns out.

With Jubeda I speak Hinglish (Hindi + English) which makes her laugh all the time, so I can only guess what I must be saying (?!). She swipes and mops and dusts and has switched off the water heater in our shower twice now (and obviously we find out in the morning when we have shampoo in our hair). She is very sweet though, and tries very hard to understand what I am asking her to do. Every once in a while she shows up with a beautiful golden stripe in the parting of her hair; apparantly a Muslim way of showing that you are married. Very elegant. Bishnu wears a red dot and sometimes a red stripe in her hair...Hindi way of showing that you are married. I wonder what colour they figure I should wear...orange?