"Bhabhi, you have given five hundred rupees extra," Jayanti told my wife when she was paid her monthly salary. She works as a maid in our house. She is sincere in her job and my wife is pleased with her work. Later my wife told me about her honesty reminding my wife of an earlier advance payment of the additional amount which my wife had completely forgotten. 

Jayanti is a mother of two. Her husband works as a mason and has a meagre earning. She toils hard and work in many houses to support her family and be able to send her two sons to school. 

Once she narrated an account of how she took a vow to become a vegetarian. She used to enjoy having meat but found that her husband who used to drink turned to behaving wildly after meat consumption which only increased the intake of the booze.  This was having a detrimental effect on the children. Now she prepares only vegetarian meals for her family and things have gradually returned to normalcy. 

Jayanti is endowed with culinary skills and prepares excellent parathas and certain dishes that my wife asks her to prepare outlining the recipes for certain dishes to be cooked in a Bengali way. She comes up trumps in her preparation and the end result is mostly satisfying. 

Like Jayanti there are scores of struggling women out there in the country fighting silently and valiantly for their family. I pray that her story meet with success and her children are able to bridge the divide between the have and the have-nots.