Delhiwale: Guarding a Delhi garden

Mamta Singh on manning a central Delhi landmark during the ongoing pandemic

In these times of coronavirus, many people are advised to work from home as much as possible. But not all jobs have this luxury — say if one’s a hospital nurse, or an airline pilot, or a newspaper reporter, or a security guard.

And that’s why guard Mamta Singh is manning her post, checking the tickets of visitors as they step into this balmy central Delhi garden filled with few people this afternoon. “At least these days I don’t have to get my kids ready for the school in the morning,” she says, explaining that their school is closed due to the pandemic.

In her early 30s, Ms Singh is dressed in blue shirt, black pants and a tie in stripes of red and blue. The parting in her hair is covered with red sindoor (traditional vermilion red). Her black shoes are polished so thoroughly that you can almost see your reflection. She has a plastic chair to sit but is obliged to get up to check the tickets each time a person approaches the entrance. There’s no rush at the moment and the kind guard finds time to respond to a few queries.

“Very often in the morning he prepares the breakfast while I get busy with the children,” she says, referring to her husband. Pratap Singh is a “supervisor mechanic” in an automobile firm. The couple, natives of the mountainous Bageshwar in Uttarakhand, live in south Delhi’s Dakshinpuri. During the day when both of them are at work, the children are looked after by Ms Singh’s sister, who lives in the facing house.

It is a fact of Indian society, cutting across social and economic divides, that in households where both husband and wife have day jobs, the wife still ends up doing most kitchen chores.

Not true in Ms Singh’s case.

“Whoever among us manages to reach home early starts with the cooking,” she says, shrugging her shoulders with a smile. And eventually, both she and her husband end up sharing the kitchen work daily. Although sometimes when Ms Singh has to stay late at work, her husband does the entire cooking alone. Today Ms Singh is hopeful of reaching home well in time. And now two visitors arrive. She politely checks for their ticket and smiles, reflexively gesturing towards the entrance.