We are a fourth-generation Anglo-Indian family on Wheeler Road. When my mother could no longer manage the kitchen — she is eighty-two and has been cooking for this family since she was seventeen — we were genuinely frightened about what we would lose. The food in our home is not interchangeable with anything. It is our grandmother's yellow rice recipe. It is the mulligatawny we have had on every Christmas Eve since 1958. When Philomena arrived for the trial, she made the pepper water from memory — no recipe, no prompting — and it tasted exactly the way it should. My mother, who has not been easy to please in eighty-two years, cried. Philomena has been with us for nineteen months. She is not the cook anymore. She is part of the family history.

My company posted me to Bangalore from Stockholm for a two-year assignment. My wife and I had never lived in India before and the first three months in our Lavelle Road flat were genuinely difficult — the food transition was a larger part of that than I expected. We found Rent A Maids 247 through a colleague who had used them for a year in Koramangala. Our cook Jayalakshmi does two things we did not expect: she makes a pasta on Fridays that my wife says is better than most restaurants in Stockholm, and she has slowly introduced us to south Indian cooking in a way that feels entirely comfortable, not overwhelming. My wife can now distinguish between a sambar and a rasam by smell alone. That is, genuinely, because of Jayalakshmi.

My father came home from St. John's after a triple bypass in September. The cardiologist gave us a diet plan that was simultaneously the most important document in the house and the most anxiety-inducing — zero room for error, very precise quantities, specific cooking methods for each category of food. I was trying to manage it myself while also returning to work. We called Rent A Maids 247 on day nine after discharge. The cook they sent — Sumithra — had worked in a household with a dialysis patient for three years previously. She read my father's diet chart in the car on the way to our flat. She has not once made an error in six months. My father's latest cardiologist review was, in the doctor's words, "better than expected." I attribute a meaningful part of that to Sumithra's consistency.