Camera in New York: Aparna Talaulicar Camera in Mumbai: Puneet Gautam Produced, Edited and Directed by: Aparna Talaulicar

Maid to Stay grew out of a five-minute video, A Place to Stay which was a profile of an Indian domestic worker working illegally in New York. The viewer heard her talk about her situation while seeing only her hands in close-up doing various domestic chores. Cleaning the toilet, washing windows, mopping floors, doing the dishes and so on. This choice of form protected her identity, but it also made her become representational. One did not get to know her as an individual but empathized with her and with countless other faceless women who share her situation.

I produced this as one of the projects at the New School in New York, where I was in the Media Studies M.A. programme. While making this piece I learnt a lot more about the life of the woman who participated in it as well as other women who belonged to an organisation of domestic workers. I decided to continue working on this subject and chose it as my thesis project topic.

This time, I wanted to delve deeper into the lives of these women. The earlier project had been created out of two meetings with the subject and just one shoot. I wanted this to be more participatory and evolve out of the time I spent with some of the women who were willing to share parts of their lives with me. I did not want to plan formal shoots with a large crew and a planned list of questions. Instead, I planned to carry a little Hi-8 camera with me when I visited them and to shoot spontaneously and whenever they were comfortable with that. As also in the former piece, I wanted to stay away from a third person narration and from using my voice to convey my own impressions or opinions about the women. The narrative would be their narrative, expressing how they felt about their situation, and not my analysis of it. I thought that the only bits where I might resort to a third person narration or graphics was to convey legal or statistical information.

Most of the women I came across worked in South Asian homes where there was no concept of fixed hours of work. A 'servant' was expected to do pretty much everything that needed to be done in the house without being sensitive to her right to adequate breaks, enough food, a decent hour to end the work. Or even basic human rights such as the right to be treated as an equal, to sit on the sofas or chairs rather than the floor, to have a life outside the home.

Many were illegal and therefore underpaid and in a position of total dependence on their employers. Not just because of their legal status but also because they were in a foreign country where the simplest thing, such as making a telephone call might be inaccessible because of language difficulties.

But the women tended to put up with situations like these because they needed the money (even if it was way below the minimum wage) they earned here to support their families back home. They longed for home and their families but were in this peculiar position of feeling that they can help their families best by being so faraway from them. Even a visit home, now that they had overstayed their initial visas would mean that they could not return to the U.S. This meant their families losing that financial support.

To me, it seemed like a self-enforced exile with all the emotional trauma of a political refugee who has lost his or her home and has little access to it or hope of ever returning. While interacting with them, I got the sense that these women were living in present tense, that they had written off their own lives and were living only to make things better for a family they hadn't met in years and with whom they weren't too much in touch. Being in contact would make things harder to bear up with emotionally. The idea of 'a better future', something to look forward to didn't really exist. For them, a better future, or even what could theoretically constitute a better future was unimaginable. So they would simply focus on the day-to-day and somehow, get by.

I wanted to tell more than one person's story so that there was a sense of how widespread this problem is. But I didn't want to be repetitive. Everyone's experience of the work itself and employer's attitudes was quite similar, so it was hard to organise my material until I began thinking in terms of letting each story express different aspects of the problem. Each woman would have a 'role' in the documentary.

In terms of structure, I went to the edit suite without a plan because I just couldn't seem to think it through in detail, in terms of what should come first, what should follow, and so on. I had just worked out my beginning. I had a letter written by a domestic worker who didn't want to participate in the project in any other way, but she didn't mind me using this letter as long as her name did not appear. She had written it to her employer while running away from an abusive job situation and happened to keep a copy. It was a very emotional letter, and I used the words over visuals of the wash cycle at a laundromat. Seeing the text over the clothes turning slowly and then faster and faster helped link it to the idea of the trapped, closed-in lives these women lead. The trickling foam, the times when the clothes disappear from view and one only sees streaks of white bubbles over black, all of these conjure up the sense of being trapped and unhappy.

This beginning was like an introduction, with the title, Maid to Stay appearing just after it. I was still unsure how to proceed after this. I didn't want a structure where each story is told one at a time. That seemed like it would be boring. So initially I tried working out ways of intercutting the stories. It was a messy attempt, and I kept getting stuck. One way of moving ahead was to just tell each person's story entirely, so that it made sense and then maybe later on breaking that up. But after I began to edit that way, it just made sense to stay with one person and then move on.

My presence in the piece is in terms of my voice asking questions, or at moments when I am directly addressed. As it happened, I used a shot of myself with Elizabeth, where she's showing me photos taken in the U.S. and I ask her questions about the pictures. Later one only hears my voice asking something every now and then. Another way in which I'm present is in the framing with most of the women. They look directly at me, and therefore into the camera as they speak. The comfort with which they talk and sometimes joke with me points to a relationship I have with the person the viewer is seeing.

A technical factor that contributed to this is the little camera. Although I may have compromised a bit in terms of picture quality, I think using a big shooting set-up would have severely compromised on the content. Many of the situations I was shooting were fairly personal and intimate. Also, the spaces were rather small. So to have had even one or two extra people, a big camera, a tripod, lights, would have seriously altered what was taking place. The little camera in contrast, with no other equipment other than an extra microphone sometimes was much easier for the women to get used to. They got accustomed to me hanging around with a camera and it didn't come in between as an obstacle in the interaction.

In terms of approach something which changed fairly early was the decision to move away from an investigative approach where there is an attempt at a certain kind of 'objectivity' where it becomes necessary to get "both sides of the picture". I don't feel this approach necessarily helps in understanding a problem, or even one side of it. Talking to employers about how they felt for instance, or getting their response to the alleged ill-treatment for instance would not have added much to the way the women felt and how they experience their situation. And the women's situation - something emotional and subjective was what I wanted to document. Maybe it was important to know more about their legal rights, policies regarding immigrants and so on. But what I had got into in all the stories was very far from the objective things of the outside world, such as policies for instance. These things certainly have a bearing on the women's lives, yet they felt very out of place in this work. I told myself that this project doesn't have to be about everything that happens to be relevant to the women's lives. There had to be boundaries, and mine left out the kind of factual, practical information that a regular investigative documentary would have had.

I think the video is strong as it is, and hopefully seeing it would provoke some viewers into finding out more about the issue, and then they would pick up some of the elements I left out, and much more.

Aparna Talaulicar is a graduate from St. Xaviers College, Mumbai. She is a journalist turned independent documentary filmmaker.