Runaway Maid!

The good old days.There were the times in school where imagination of life and the events around us was more real than the real life we were reading.

The times when Nancy Drew was our heroine and Frank from Hardy boys appeared to be the best boyfriend one could ever have.

Add in a little bit of mystery during vacations, and if you were 5 in a group, even though borrowed, it meant, you called yourself "The famous Five".

Summer vacations meant looking for adventures just like Malory towers and keeping secrets like the secret seven.

Let us call this the case of the "Run away Maid"!! This word makes me think of a 100 perspectives on maids right now, but let me try to stick to what really happened.

It was holiday time and my best friend Roshni and I were strolling around the peaceful bylanes of our neighborhood just "wandering aimlessly" as my math teacher would have put it.

A kalakhatta candy and an animated discussion on the insufficient holidays was going on.

We then saw a maid looking about furtively and walking away with a big suitcase in her hand.

Antennas up, we knew that Mummy was away at work and her maid seemed to be taking the chance to escape.

The maid , lets call her Bhagya, started with a slow calm walk and then walked up faster. She looked around to see if anyone she knew noticed her, we ducked behind the big round dust bin just in time to hide ourselves.

She walked across the road to a PCO, ( in the good old days Public Call Office, from where you could make calls) and seemed to pull out a crumpled little piece of paper and make a call.

After some head shakes and a smile on her face, she stomped off to the bus stop.

In a quandary, we did not know what to do, so we split ourselves up, so while Roshini decided to talk to the owner of the phone booth, I decided to follow Bhagya.

Somehow Roshini managed to have a conversation with the owner of the phone booth and collect the counterfoil that gets generated upon completion of the call! That gave us the number of the person that she had called, and generally chatting up with the "phone booth uncle" also helped get some tid bits of information as to what the maid was planning to do.

Meanwhile I had managed to note down the bus number that she boarded.

Put in 2 x 2 together we opened up the bulky telephone directory book and looked up the address that the maid had called.

Evening came and we updated the parents about what had happened in true detective style.

So they were presented with a Smart Sheet mentioning the time she left, call made, the conversation, the address that she had gone too.

Next day had more mystery for us, so I accompanied my dad to see the maid and she seemed quite happy at her new place, so we just came back along. She refused to come back home, since she had indeed run away from us in the hope of better opportunities.

The next few days minus the maid felt like years filled with umpteen struggles. That is just saying the least.

Soon we heard from the maid, this time over a call, asking for us to rescue her from the clutches of her new evil employer, who gave her no food and locked her up in a room.

Turns out that she only came back because we went and saw her. Else she had no way of coming back and would have been at the new house bearing the abuse and everything else that she was subject to.

You would probably agree with me that no matter how tortured you felt and how angry you were about the maid playing truant for several days, the very sight of her walking into your door dissipates all the anger and brings you back to your cheerful self.

Today it is 2 decades since the Runaway maid was rescued and brought back. She continues to stay at our home and is more of a family member now!

Maid rescued or Mom rescued ??!

Either ways 2 decades on, Mom and Maid continue their daily saga!!