Seventeen Years in the Same Kitchen, and Then the Family Moved to Perth

The cake had my name on it

The cake was lemon, because Mrs Pillay knew lemon was my favourite, and somebody had written THANK YOU NOMSA across the top in blue icing that ran a little at the corners because of the Durban heat. It was a Saturday in March. The boxes were already stacked in the passage with words like FRAGILE and KITCHEN and DANIEL'S ROOM written on them in black koki, and I had packed most of them myself, so I knew exactly which one held the good teaspoons.

I am fifty-six years old. I started in that house in Glenwood when I was thirty-nine, when Daniel was still in nappies and his sister Priya was learning to write her name on the fridge with magnets. I washed school uniforms for seventeen years. I knew which stair creaked, which tap dripped if you did not turn it hard to the left, and that Mr Pillay liked his tea so weak it was almost an apology. When the family told me they were moving to Perth, I smiled and said I was happy for them. That was true. It was also the first time in my working life I did not know where I would be on a Monday.

They gave me the cake, and an envelope, and a long hug each. Priya cried more than I did.

A house is a strange thing to lose

People talk about losing a job. Nobody tells you about losing a house that was never yours. For seventeen years my hands knew that kitchen better than my own. I knew where the light fell at eleven in the morning, and I would move the ironing board to follow it.

The first week at home in Umlazi I woke at five every morning anyway. I made my tea and stood at the window with nothing to iron. I cleaned my own two rooms so many times that the floor started to look surprised.

The envelope held three months of wages and a letter of reference that made me sound like a saint. I put most of the money in the bank and a little in the tin above the stove, and I told myself I would find another house before it ran out.

My nephew asked the question

My nephew Sibusiso is twenty-four and works in a call centre in Durban North. In April he was sitting at my table, scrolling, and he asked me if I had claimed my UIF yet.

I laughed at him. I said UIF is for factory people, for people with payslips and big offices. He put the phone down and looked at me the way his mother used to look at me when we were girls and I said something foolish.

"Auntie," he said, "did Mrs Pillay ever give you a payslip?"

She had. Every month, in a brown envelope, folded in three. I had kept every single one in a plastic Checkers bag in the bottom of my cupboard because my mother taught me never to throw away anything with your name and a number on it. I had never really read them. Sibusiso took the bag out, tipped seventeen years of payslips onto my bed, and showed me the small line near the bottom that said UIF, with a deduction every month, and a matching amount from Mrs Pillay.

She had registered me. All that time. She had never said a word about it and I had never asked, and the money had been sitting there in my name like a coat left at somebody else's house.

Learning the shape of the forms

I want to be honest that I felt stupid. Then I felt angry at feeling stupid, because nobody had ever explained it to me, and I am not a person who is careless with paper. Sibusiso said that was the point, that many domestic workers do not know, and the employers sometimes do not know either, and that is why so many people get lost.

He did most of the reading. He searched for how UIF claims work for domestic workers, and we sat at my kitchen table with my reading glasses and his phone, and he read the requirements out loud while I wrote them on the back of an old calendar. My ID. My bank details, stamped. The proof that I had stopped working through no fault of my own. A declaration from my employer.

That last one frightened me, because my employer was now in Australia, eight hours ahead and busy with a new life. But I sent Mrs Pillay a WhatsApp, a bit shy, and she phoned me back that same evening. She was embarrassed she had not explained it before she left. She filled in what was needed and emailed it to Sibusiso within two days, and she said, "Nomsa, I am so sorry, I thought you knew." I told her I knew now, and that was what mattered.

The day at the labour centre

I went to the labour centre in town on a Wednesday in a dress I usually keep for funerals, because I wanted to look like someone who should be taken seriously. The queue went out the door and along the wall.

Sibusiso could not come because of work, so he made me a list on his phone of what to say, and he told me that if it became too much there were UIF consultants who help people put the paperwork together, and that it is not shameful to ask. I held on to that like a bus ticket. In the end I managed it that day, slowly, with a young man in the queue helping me find the right window.

What the waiting taught me

It did not come overnight. There were weeks of checking and of Sibusiso refreshing a page while I pretended not to watch him.

While I waited, I kept busy. I started doing Thursday mornings for an old man in Berea who cannot bend to wash his feet anymore. But he calls me Mrs Dlamini and offers me the good biscuits, and that is something.

When the first payment came in, I did not jump around. I sat on the edge of my bed with the bank SMS on my phone and the empty Checkers bag beside me and I cried a little, the way I had not cried at the farewell. It was not a fortune. It was simply mine, from my own work, put away a few rand at a time by a woman who did the right thing without making a show of it.

What I tell the women at church now

Now when a lady at church says her madam has retired, or the family is selling up and going to the coast, I ask her one question. Did you get payslips? Look at the bottom line. I tell her to keep every brown envelope. I tell her there is no shame in getting UIF assistance from someone who understands the forms, because the money is not charity, it is hers.

Priya sends me photos from Perth. Mrs Pillay sent a picture of her new kitchen last month and wrote, "It is not the same without you shouting at the kettle." I printed it at the chemist and stuck it on my fridge, with a magnet, the way Priya used to.

I still wake at five. But now I make my tea and I sit down to drink it.