‘A meme that almost made me quit my family WhatsApp group’

Later the purveyor of the maid meme, my cousin in Kerala, messaged me privately to clarify that he had definitely not intended any disrespect towards Indian maids. It was a joke, he said, maybe not even a very funny one, that was pointing to a more hopeful future, where familiar routines would return. Life wasn’t routine right now. It was almost two o’clock in the morning in India and he’d just got back from a shift in a hospital where he works as a frontline doctor, tending to patients with Covid.