In love with the help

When supermodel Heidi Klum admitted to being close to her bodyguard Martin Kristen, weeks after her singer celebrity husband Seal had caused a stir when he used unparliamentary language to describe the reasons for their breakup, it once again put the spotlight on the power of proximity and how it influences relationships.

“I don’t know, it just started... I don’t know where it’s going to go,” Klum told Katie Couric on Wednesday’s edition of Katie. She added that Kristen has been working with her family for the past four years and that she trusted him. “I’ve known him for four years. He’s cared for our entire family, mostly for our four children, and helped us tremendously,” Klum said. “I trust him with my children’s lives. He’s a great man, and we just got to know each other from a completely different side.”

Klum isn’t the first star to have begun a relationship with someone on her staff. Madonna, Britney Spears, Prince Charles and even Michael Jackson have had intimate personal associations with dancers in their troupe, personal assistants, their kid’s nannies and even their private nurses.

The vulnerability of stars to this kind of relationship is attributed to the ivory-tower isolation that results in their dependence on and attraction to the people around them.

Many references to this syndrome have been recorded in the arts and popular culture, like The Bodyguard, the 1992 Hollywood production that starred the late Whitney Houston, who played a music star who falls in love with her bodyguard, played by Kevin Costner. Costner stars as a former Secret Service agent-turned-bodyguard who is engaged to protect Whitney from a stalker. The film was a remake of a Steve McQueen-Diana Ross blockbuster, proving that the premise of “employer falls in love with employee” has held a fascination for people over the years and across cultures.

Recently the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel carried a charming and poignant sub plot of a senior citizen — a homosexual Englishman — who comes back to India after many years to search for the servant boy whom he had loved as a child. In the film the men meet and have a heartwarming but brief reconciliation.

But relationships across social divides in India do not always end so charmingly.

Unlike the West, Indian society is not homogeneous, and therefore even though the opportunities for falling in love with “the help” are far more — living as the middle class does surrounded by a plethora of servants — the social stigma is severe.

In Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, the affair of a high-born Kerala housewife with the son of her gardener results in a class war of disastrous consequences, for instance.

And in many middle-class Indian homes, the skeletons of servant-master love affairs rattle tragically in cupboards and are spoken of with horror and fear.

Proximity, of course, is also a reason for that other big phenomenon of our age: the office affair.

Also stigmatised, but not to the extent of domestic master-servant liaisons for obvious reasons, these too are the outcome of people spending large amounts of time with each other and working towards similar goals.

But as common as these affairs are becoming at home or at work, they mostly come with a sell-by date. People who come together because of proximity often find that once the context of that proximity is legitimised — i.e., they are recognised as a couple — they have little in common.

As for Heidi Klum, she says about her newfound love for her bodyguard: “This isn’t exactly a ‘relationship’ yet, though. I don’t even know if I can call it that. It just started.

I don’t know where it’s going to go.”