So What's Cooking?

OK, time to own up. My cook and cleaning ladies didn't turn out to be the dream-come-true I had imagined. They had a fight and decided to split, leaving me in a fix.
The story goes thus:

Apparently the Cook is a permanent resident who was till recently a lonely housewife from South India, and so some months ago decided to give one of her apartment rooms up for rent to another Indian in order to have some company. A student from Hyderabad (India) responded to the ad, took up a room and they became friends. Soon afterwards the student proposed that they make some extra money working in houses instead of sitting at home -- result, they became Cook and Cleaner respectively and placed the ad that I found and responded to. Other than myself they also got a couple of other customers. So far so good.

OK, now apparently the Cleaner (student) was herself quite sick of being in Australia and missed home. A number of her university friends gave her the 'brilliant' idea to apply and get loans from different banks, take the money and split back home to India and start a new life. She proposed this to the Cook who freaked out and said nothing doing - she has 2 kids in school and is half-way through her citizenship process - she also asked the Cleaner to vacate her place as the trust had dwindled with this crazy scheme proposal. There the trouble began.

The Cleaner, who by now had had access to the Cook's whole house, had obtained her bank account details as well as PIN numbers, and applied for bank loans using the Cook's details! Not only that, she booked a one-way flight to India as well - the Cook only discovered all this by accident when she got a call at home at a time she was supposed to be out, by the bank asking for a reconfirmation of some detail, following which she searched the Cleaner's room. She immediately called up her husband at work, who came home and they confronted the Cleaner in the evening - a very ugly scene after which she vacated overnight, and without even paying some $500 that she owed them.

During this whole time both of them kept calling me with their own versions, each trying to keep me as her customer (they still need money I guess). As if I would get involved.

Back to square one for me.
Wanted: come-at-home desi Cook. Clean record required, No hanky panky schemes please. Any takers?

Ganga chali Pardes

First major thing I resolved to do after landing in Sydney was to try find a cook and a cleaning service. The web is full of cleaning service agencies across Australia, but not a single decent cooking service provider ! How inconvenient! So I began to ask around from acquaintances and any desi I know in Sydney, only to be given 'that look': a desi come-at-home cook? That doesn't happen here buddy, we all do our own cooking...kinda made me feel like that Indian movie heroine who goes to a foreign land where anything she tries to do she gets told, "Ganga, yeh vilayat hai, yahaan aisa nahin hota...".
Bechari paindoo Ganga.

Kyun nahin hota bhai? This only made my resolve stronger...finally after a few days of turbo web searching I finally chanced upon this obscure site where two Indian women had put an ad about their combined cooking + cleaning service, and at rates much lower than the cleaning-only agency rates. Viola! I called them up and within a day I had both services, twice a week.

Where others continue to come home after a long days' work and spend the next few hours toiling in the kitchen then downing it and falling dead in bed, I get steaming hot biryanis and niharis, do my reading and writing, put my feet up and enjoy every evening.

So who's laughing now. Ganga yeh pardes hai, yahaan bhi sab kuch ho sakta hai. Hmph!