Geetanjali Krishna: Mrs B's bathroom battle

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Until the great bathroom battle happened, everyone thought Mrs Bhasin was quite a sensible sort. She lived on a diet of lachrymose television serials and home made chocolates when she wasn't fasting for something or the other. Even her house was typical "" once a bungalow in a green South Delhi colony, it was now divided into four 'builder' flats. Mrs B doted upon her little servant boy, Ramu, who looked suspiciously under age but declared he was way over. "Ramu makes such divine food for me when I'm fasting," she'd say, adding "he brings flowers for my temple and even sits behind me when I say my prayers!"

The love was too good to last. Ramu lived in the servant's wing on the terrace "" four tiny rooms with asbestos roofs and a common toilet that, unfortunately, always smelt like one. One day, he hesitantly mentioned the problem to her. "Don't talk of such unclean things just when I'm about to start my prayers!" she said. That was that. Ramu decided to take matters into his hands. He told all the inmates of the servant's wing he'd clean the loo everyday, if they paid him Rs 200 a month.

So that is how Mrs B found him the next day, when she went upstairs and peeped into the servants' wing (she was a bit of a voyeur, you know). "I went to call him for the grand pooja on the first day of the Navratras," she later recounted to her husband tearfully, "instead I found him on his knees, scrubbing the floor of the stinky, wet toilet...to think he was going to bring me flowers for my temple with those dirty hands!"

She ran down to her apartment, apoplectic with anger, all piety forgotten. "I won't have that dirty boy in my house again!" she told her husband. Mr B liked his peace but still tried to make his wife see reason. "I'll tell him to bathe properly before he enters our house," he suggested. But Mrs B was like the avenging goddess she prayed to everyday. She decreed the boy was never going to set foot in her house again.

Meanwhile Ramu sat glumly in his room. He didn't believe he'd done anything wrong, but understood his employer was angry enough to fire him. Thinking fast, he reckoned his best bet was to first question the logic of it all. He went to Mr B first.

Did he seriously believe that when Ramu used a stinking dirty toilet, he was cleaner than he was after bathing in the toilet that he'd cleaned? His employer looked a little shame-faced, but said that his wife needed to be convinced, not him. So Ramu went to his mistress, cleverly moving to another line of defence. He protested that the older servants had forced the menial job of cleaning the loo on him. Then came the trump card: "if I go," he said, "I'll be so worried about you having to cook, clean, do the dishes..."

The next day, Mrs B locked the servants' loo. She said it was to punish the other servants for having coerced a young boy ("just a child!" she called him) into doing their dirty work. After a week of begging, pleading and smiling through gritted teeth, the neighbours finally had the disputed structure unlocked.

Meanwhile Ramu has resumed his position in the Bhasin household. As for the loo, it has remained clean ever since. And somehow nobody "" neither the Bhasins, nor the servants and certainly not the artful Ramu, seems to want to know how and why.