What does it mean to labour, and what is our relationship to our labour?
For our 2025 Asian Heritage Month feature, we’re revisiting Kirti Bhadresa’s “Tuesday Girl,” first published in Room 45.4 Baby, Baby, Baby!.
Tuesday Girl
by Kirti Bhadresa
She calls me by the day of the week as if surprised to see me: Ah, the Tuesday Girl. When I leave, she will drop a coin into my hand. This woman has brown skin too, but, you know, less so.
The cleaners come in a pair, Fridays and Mondays, readying the house for the befores and afters of weekends—the parties. The handyman, when needed, is scheduled for Thursdays. The cook comes every morning to make the day’s meals, often enough to be called by her name. The washing is done on the second day of the week and always has been. I got this job because I was recommended by the last Tuesday Girl.
Scrub some things by hand in the basement, most goes into the cranked machines, knot my skirt so my hem doesn’t drag on the way up the narrow stairs from below ground to the rooftop terrace, carrying the things that need whitening in the sun—dishtowels, linens, undergarments mostly.
It’s already hot. There’s nothing of a garden but a few empty pots in the corner, a shriveled palm. Clotheslines stretch across, high enough that I stand tall to reach them. The cleaners sometimes come here to eat their lunches and leave traces of themselves, a smattering of ash and a crushed cigarette end in a tin can, an arrangement of two chairs and a crate table. I imagine them looking out toward the same point on the horizon. I look there too.
Throw dripping linens over the taut line before pinning them in place with wooden clips, the damp slapping my skin like my children do when they want my attention. My own shirt is wet under my arms. The line bows.
I glance out as I work my hands. This is the closest I come to freedom, looking out from above. Quiet, light and shadows, the far away sea rippled and blue, birds with outstretched wings ride the breeze lazily. By the time I give my sister a share of my pay for watching the children I make hardly anything. But how I will miss this one day a week of looking not up but away, down. From my own low house my feet touch the earth, our wishes are cast from ground level.
Last night my husband came home, shoulders rounded with shame, so today, coin in hand, I’ll give my notice, find something that fills all the days of the week until he gathers his dregs of confidence again and finds new work. I’ll recommend, maybe, a new Tuesday Girl. Maybe my sister.
Linen dries within an hour in the gentle barely breeze. I sit on one of the chairs and look out as the cleaners did. Breathe. White flags clapping, my slow leaving, unpinning, taking down, folding. Pause, looking out once more, mostly skyward.
Check out our Asian Heritage Month statement and reading list here, or revisit Room 45.4 Baby, Baby, Baby!
