Running a household is in many ways like running your own little country. You are responsible for coming up with fiscal budgets, economic policies, foreign policies, immigration control lists, border encroachments, diplomatic relations with the neighbouring states and, on occasions when your tacky neighboring state thinks that it’s socially acceptable to put a goat outside your bedroom window, initiate truly perilous skirmishes. It takes a very real effort to keep a household going, and the whole ordeal can sometimes seem like you’re constantly swimming towards the gleaming shores of a promised land just out of reach.
The Promised Land is a wonderful place, home to many alien-technology equipped developed kingdoms. These countries are filled with happy, smiling populations; their gardens have no weeds and their septic tanks are always working. There, the electrical wiring hums with infuriating constancy and the plumbing works so beautifully it brings tears to your own ducts. In the Promised Land there is never a food shortage or grocery list of things that were forgotten in the check-out aisle. No, here gourmet food appears as if by magic surrounded by dancing plates and cutlery, and there is never any dirt on the floors.
'Cook at a Kitchen Table with Dead Game' by Frans Snyders - Oil on canvas - 17th century (circa 1634-1637)
I am currently at war with Zia-ul-Haq
My house is not like the houses in the Promised Land. My house is a poor nation with a propensity for ruthless civil wars. My house is, simply, my house.
I am currently at war with Zia-ul-Haq. I mean, as a country I think we are all in a kind of existential war with the fascist-religious legacy of General Zia, but I am literally at war with my cook Zia-ul-Haq. His usually surly disdain for any housework has escalated in the last few months into a brazen campaign of indifference that has ruined everything. Food is rarely ready on time and when it is, it is cold and stale. He offers to clean the lounge a few times a week, but lately he has started sweeping the floor with a broom and leaves the dirt in a passive-aggressive mound in the corner as if to say “Yeah, so what?”
The thing is: Zia is not beholden to me. He was my grandmother’s cook, and when she died he sort of ascended into a firmament of familiar permanency for my mother and aunt. He will never be sacked. He can literally set fire to the house and my mother will find ways of condoning his behaviour. My mother’s loyalty to the memories he carries means that he knows that I know that he knows I can’t touch him.
In fairness (before the domestic workers union comes at my throat) I do not ask much of Zia. He shows up when he pleases, cooks a lunch, and that’s it really. Because my house is small and I work from home, I encourage him to leave by 3 pm to be with his family. You’d think he’d be happy with a full salary for two hours of work, but no, Zia does not like this. And I know his dark heart. If he goes back to his family, he has to take care of his children and ailing father, and he really doesn’t want to do that. He’d rather sit in the kitchen with his phone. And so he concocts elaborate excuses as to why his presence is necessary in the house.
When I renovated my kitchen a few years ago, I had dreams of being able to sit in it myself while having coffee and reading the news. I like to cook, and thought I’d be doing nothing else in there. It didn’t occur to me that I’d have to do battle with an ancestral spectre to make myself a cup of coffee. Small things add up over the months, and I have settled into a perma-war. Now Zia and I just look at each other with undiluted loathing across the stovetop.
We are caught in a cycle, he and I. I can’t fire him because he has tenured position in my family and he knows it, and I suppose in the same way he can’t actually tell me to sod off (though he demonstrates daily that actions speak louder than words). Today he didn’t come in at all. No phone, no text. It is not the first time, and part of me is so relieved not to have a negative energy in my house that I immediately put on ABBA and began dancing.
Perhaps the Promised Land is a myth. Perhaps no house runs perfectly, and maybe every house has its Zia. (Yes: perhaps every Zia also has is Evil Classist Employer to reckon with.) All I know is that my little country is happier and healthier without this traitor in its midst and I am resolved to figure this situation out one way or another. But even as I say that, I know –as we all know here in Pakistan – that in a fight between Zia-ul-Haq and the country, there are no winners.
