Inside a shared home, the gap between employer and servant is kept up through everyday habits rather than open rules. One side eats first and the other later, from food portioned out for them; one sits on chairs and the other on the floor; one drinks from glass and ceramic and the other from steel set aside for them. One side uses first names while the other answers with titles like sir and ma'am.
Paid help at home is one of the few places where the very rich and the very poor live side by side every day. The closeness does not shrink the gap; the household is organised around keeping it. When abuse or crime comes to light in such homes, it shows how wide the divide underneath really is.
As more middle-class city women take paid jobs outside the home, households come to depend heavily on hired help to do the domestic work they used to do. That demand pulls poor, often unschooled women in from villages across the country. One group's entry into paid work rests on another group's migration into service.
Young girls brought to the city by so-called aunts and uncles to work as round-the-clock help can end up almost, or actually, locked in. Living inside the employer's home with no fixed hours leaves them with no space of their own and no way out. For others the same work is a ladder: some housekeepers earn enough to put their children into office jobs.
People who hire help often carry two opposite attitudes. Some are uneasy that one restaurant meal costs them more than they pay the person who cleans their home. Others treat the help as a group of likely thieves. Both reactions grow out of living closely with someone whose life is so much poorer than one's own.