Remember the glorious days when if you needed help around the house with cooking, cleaning or keeping the garden tidy, all you had to do was send off to Talawakelle and a six year old from the family tea estate would be yours for the rest of his or her life?

Yours to adopt and teach a variety of life enhancing skills – basic English, or how to take the Alsatians for a walk without losing them or the art of baking scones for tea. Yours also to keep up till three in the morning till the last guest has left and then expect up at six to grate the coconut for the master’s breakfast pol sambol. Yours to beat up or violate if that was your thing. Yours, in fact, to do with as you pleased.

It’s not half as easy nowadays. The young men have better things to do than work as domestics in Colombo and you can’t hire girls under eighteen, by which time they’re already ruined by watching too much Shakthi TV. They eat more and want money to buy perfume and Sunday evening off every week which is not at all a good thing because then they go for walks in Wellawatte and find boyfriends. This opens up multiple potential problems such as forbidden sex in family bedrooms during family holidays, leading to pregnancy and a sorrowful return to the estate and everyone annoyed as hell. Or the boyfriend turns out to be a burglar with a prison record. Worst of all, he might want to marry her and then they both fuck off back to Talawakelle to open a kadé and you have to start all over again from scratch.

And the absolute worst is the bloody New Year when everyone’s maid goes off home back to wherever village swearing to come back when the holidays are officially over. (That’s usually a week later once you’ve factored in The Day, The Day After The Day and The Day In Lieu Of The Day That Was A Sunday etc). But of course they never do show up on that Monday (no phone call, nothing…) and there you are, back from the 5 star beach hotel in Passekudah, husband gone off to catch up with the boys and you’re trapped at home with three hyperactive kids and no one to cook, clean or accompany them to Otters.

Sometimes you have to think, you know, how much simpler life was in those days.