The Colmar was surprisingly free from roaches, and that was probably due, in part, to the efforts of the Hindu cleaning woman. How she cleaned bathrooms and floors in a sari was beyond us, but we determined early on that it would be advisable to get on the good side of her. She seemed to be very authoritative and, besides, we were leaving a lap-top, our passports and spare money every day in a flimsy cupboard with a cheap padlock, while we went to the beach. And she had our room key. We tipped her fairly liberally, and I was always giving her little things, such as cashew nuts. She had a preference for pink saris, and she wore pink lipstick and even a pink bindi dot. An opportunity was never missed to inform us, in very limited, broken English, of how hard she had worked to clean our room, and how over-worked she was in general (not exactly true). She accepted our praise of her good job as only her due, and her smile, when she gave one, always had a little trace of a sneer behind it. But she was pleasant enough, and actually, quite amusing, in a frustrating kind of way. This was because she had a penchant for extremely dramatic, excessively corny, Indian soap operas.
We noticed that whenever she was cleaning a room, she would always crank the ceiling fan up to airplane speed, and then turn the volume of the TV up to max. We also observed that, when she had the good fortune to be cleaning one of the few air-conditioned rooms, she would close the door, crank up both the air and the TV, and spend a very, very, very long time cleaning that particular room. What she was actually doing was taking a prolonged “break,” eating her lunch in the blessed coldness of the room, and watching her favorite soap – this was her idea of bliss.
One day, however, we came back to our room from the beach a little earlier than usual; about 4:00. The manager had given us a new TV the previous night, because the original one was all snowy when we tried to watch BBC, and the new one had a better-than-average picture. The maid apparently thought so, too, because there she was, sitting on the bed right in front of it, completely engrossed in the violent intrigue and complex love affairs of Ravi and Deepa, or whatever. We could hear the TV blasting even before we reached the top of the stairs. I rather expected that she would be a little sheepish about being caught out slacking off, enjoying our room and watching her soaps – but not so. In fact, we ended up being held hostage in our own room, because she wanted to finish watching the end of the serial. “Just 5 more minutes!” she excitedly exclaimed, shouting over the volume of the sound (which she made no attempt to modify) that this was the best “serial” in Hindi that ever was. We were just dying to take off our swim suits and jump in the shower to wash off the sand and salt, but we had no choice but to wait, much longer than 5 minutes, as it turned out, until the end of the show. She seemed to think nothing of this and, in fact, acted as if we should feel privileged to be privy to this art form that she was sharing with us. We were amazed at her audacity, but at the same time, vastly amused. . .it was hilarious, actually. This experience also illustrates the meaning of the common phrase in India, “Just 5 minutes,” which can mean anything from 10 minutes to half an hour, Indian time.