Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 5/5

Decisively bridled by cleanliness, yet dithered in her expressions,

The fine lines of her hand scrub the tiles to perfection,

Drawing the curtains back from crenellations to a corps de ballet,

On thinks, how her pellucid-self assembles everything in disarray?

Awkward, yet anorak, her eyes leave not a speck of dirt,

Carrying her appurtenances, she solves the mysteries of unspoken rules.

Dulcet and full of pride, she walks the alleys of unnamed passages,

In awe, she takes a bow for the humble appendages.

She is Molly, The Maid!

Compelling and mystic, ‘The Maid’ by Nita Prose is a door to the indispensible energy of Molly who works as a cleaner at the ‘Regency Grand Hotel’. She despises anything bedraggled, and she must let the bleak & bleary go off with the hag-ridden dust. She empowers herself to be the bee in the hive to strenuously prepare the honeycomb, albeit the profligacies around make her question her own percipience and promiscuous heaps of perfidy.

Is she blimey in her tone?

Why her blather is often secretively holding the truths of life?

Her joy for cleaning is perhaps a state of bravura, often judged as a left-over particle in briquette. She feels her conscious, stands by it; all she is trying to do is to clean what is unworthy and unpalatable.

Will she be successful?     

‘The Maid’ goes beyond Molly and her idea of perfection. The ubiquitous dust is like those unresolved emotions capable of piercing a ‘harmonious state of bliss’. How does it feel to lose your worth that is the sine qua non? It amounts of denigration of self, like a tongue sticking out to chop-off someone’s honor or dehumanize the all-pervading humility. What it requires is healing—healing of the inner turmoil that ambushes as a spear-headed storm. When we heal the bludgeoned part of us, we become a bit more worthy to our soul.

Molly clears off everything left questionable and violable inside the hotel rooms until a bedlam strangles her to the core. The dead body of Mr. Black in the room surfaces a blowpipe of accusations and condemnations. Molly, the dabhand and the impeccable, cuts the corner and is made to look like a lampoon. However, the unjustified trial finds Molly in a gauntlet of brevity and self-restraint physiognomy.

“When you clean the blockages inside you, what comes out is a perceptible impulse to find the true you. “All the way from disport to doom, Molly is reminded of her Grandma’s wiseness; to act in accordance to it is the responsibility she owes.

‘No one is too high or low for common courtesy’

‘Good things come to those who wait’

‘There is nothing you can ever do but your best’

These pristine words of wisdom from her Grandmother take her journey forward; to sing the tunes of uprising emotions and to let the silhouette of demons dance their way to a apocalypse.

Nita Prose has articulately dressed ‘The Maid’ as a dewlap of bleak judgments by ‘others’ and how precipitously the ‘other’ makes her drop like a burning coal in the open cauldron.   

Mr. Black, the spearheaded property paterfamilias is dead!

Ms. Giselle Black is bleary and full of remorse!  

Rodney is the dabhand at the bar, Molly is fond of him, however, he is the slithering snake on the pine.

Mr. Preston, the doorman at the hotel, carries a soft corner for Molly, nevertheless, comes out as a block & tackle to fix the crevice.

Juan Manuel is bedeviled by some miscreants. His emotional prolapse is a cause for his unruly clanger. 

Mr. Snow, the owner of the Regent Hotel, is fixed to save his own soul from the bludgeons.

Their disenchanting and disreputable agony comes in the grasp of Detective Stark who finds Molly to be a boneshaker. The twist & turns of ‘evidence’ fall as a rusted lock to be broken with a hammer. The caboodle, however, turns out to be torrent of dishonesty and deceit.

Unputdownable and full of intrigue, ‘The Maid’ is about Molly’s certitude of perfection and conscientiousness. A ‘murder’ turned as an outré; the felony bringing forth the cloak-and-dagger, the intrepid justifications leading to impressionistic rebuttals—all engulfed in casuistry to be broken by unassuming cogency.  One asks as the pages flutter to see through the prism of reality,

‘Does Molly, the maid, in the cliffhanger of a ‘murder’ find her ‘true-self’, to be finally liberated from the perpetual perturbations of the ‘other’?

TAKE AWAY

A gripping and lively murder mystery!!