Sideways on a Scooter (5 page)

I moved into the top floor of an old house with lopsided floors, overlooking a quiet alley and a small park where the local kids played cricket every afternoon. The rent was less than one hundred dollars a month, shockingly low to my New York–trained eye. The landlord called it a
barsati
, after the Hindi word for “rain,” because the top floor is considered the best place to watch the monsoon. The entire place was, in fact, a celebration of the great Delhi outdoors: To get to either the
kitchen or bathroom, both separate outhouses, I had to go out onto the patio and
into
the rain, or whatever was going on outside. During the hot season, which is interrupted only by a brief monsoon and a cursory cool winter fog, dust blew in through the cracks in the windows. There was no point in installing an air conditioner since the cold air would have just leached back out. In monsoon season, the walls of the dank cement staircase literally perspired moisture. The plaster peeled off my apartment walls in giant chunks, and the doors and windows swelled up, so I had to shoulder them closed.

I’d made sure to check that the bathroom outhouse was fitted with a Western-style toilet: The ad had boasted of a pukka—which means “real” or “genuine”—toilet, meaning one including seat, cover, and flush. After months of adopting an athletic squatting stance over Indian-style toilets—holes in the ground lined with ceramic—this felt like a great luxury. It had not occurred to me to make sure there was a tank to heat water in the bathroom, so it wasn’t until my first morning in my new place that I realized there was neither shower, bath, nor hot water—just a single tap of cold running water. Standing on the cement floor of the bathroom, I tried to mimic the bathing technique I’d witnessed at public taps: Fill a plastic bucket with water, scoop it out with a smaller bucket, dump it over you, and scrub furiously. Within minutes, the whole thing was over. Washing, I decided, is one of the few activities consistently more efficient in India than in the United States.

My apartment was invaded by critters as well as the weather. Geckos claimed corners of the rooms; multicolored bugs and cockroaches scuttled across the floors; sparrows sometimes landed, confused, on the tiny kitchen counter. In the mornings, I’d take in the cacophony of Delhi life from the patio as I drank my milky instant coffee, the only thing approximating the stuff that I’d found in the local market. The hoarse cries of the vegetable sellers competed with the screech of the trains pulling into the nearby station; there were always chanting and drumming at a temple somewhere. Much closer were the intimate sounds of my unseen neighbors in the next house over, performing their ablutions: the woman hawking into the sink, her husband hollering at their maid to heat up water for his bath. Layered over their
human noises was another rich bed of animal sounds: the cartoonish squeak of the jewel-green parakeets dancing through the trees; the persistent, head-knocking cuckooing of the aptly nicknamed “brain-fever bird”; the Hitchcockian cawing of the wicked black crows who ruled the neighborhood. One morning I watched an aggressive flock of them intimidate two chattering monkeys out of a neighborhood tree.

I hadn’t been in my
barsati
long before word of a new tenant spread to the nearest slum and the first aspiring maidservant tripped up the stairs in plastic
chappals
. I opened the door to an underfed woman, her hands already folded at her chest in respectful greeting, her face twisted into a plea. She launched into a fast-paced Hindi description of her skills. I could pick out some familiar words—
clean, fast
—from the torrent, but I couldn’t imagine trying to talk to her every day. In any case, I wasn’t yet convinced I needed a maid, despite everyone telling me it was inevitable.

Every middle-class household I’d seen had at least a couple of part-time servants. The idea still made me uncomfortable, though: Not only would I lose my prided American privacy, but I imagined that the acute imbalance of power might quickly transform me into a haughty duchess. So I shook my head apologetically, chanting no at the woman—
“Nahin. Nahin.”
—until she gave up and flip-flopped down the steps, leaving a frustrated trail of Hindi behind her. By sundown, I’d had half a dozen depressingly similar interactions with aspiring employees: drivers, gardeners, and garbage collectors.

A few days later, I heard male feet stomping up the stairs. A short, dark-skinned man paused to catch his breath before he announced himself as “Joginder Ram, building caretaker.” He used the English words with relish, although his responsibility extended only to myself and one other tenant—a senile old lady I’d seen through her open door on the floor below mine. As proof of his stature, he handed me a business card with his name printed across it, and the words
WORK PAINT, POLISH, PIOPE REPARING ETC
.

Joginder’s self-satisfied smile revealed a wad of
paan
lodged, chipmunklike, in his cheek, spreading a red stain from his gums to his lips. He sported a proud paunch over his carefully ironed trousers, and his
hair was henna dyed to hide the gray. All of this imbued him with an energetic and self-congratulatory air. He occupied the back porch of the house next to mine, which was also owned by my landlord, Arun Mago. Since Mr. Mago lived seven hundred miles west of Delhi, in Mumbai, I couldn’t understand why he had granted Joginder squatting rights to no more than the tiny back porch of the house. Later, the landlord told me he was reluctant to surrender more space because city law favors the tenant, and he was afraid he’d never be able to evict him.

The landlord was “Mago-sahib” to Joginder, in an unsettling throwback to colonial times, when masters were sahibs and their wives were memsahibs. Joginder didn’t begrudge sahib’s lack of generosity, because the landlord was his savior in his tale of impoverished migration. Joginder was born in Bihar, India’s most rural state and one of its poorest. His father owned no land, so he worked as a daily wage laborer for those who did. In Bihar, as in much of feudal India, land is power, an inherited right, reserved only for certain castes. Joginder’s village didn’t have decent schools, nor did it have factories to employ the unschooled.

Like millions of other Indian fathers, Joginder’s had no option other than to dispatch his only son to the city to find work. Joginder was ten years old when he clambered aboard the bus. He remembers receiving two instructions: Seek out fellow Biharis and send home money every month. He worked on construction sites and in tea shops, the kind of day jobs at which employers never ask the age of a willing worker. Child labor is technically illegal in India, but no one cares. At night, Joginder would stretch out in a public garden, or on the floor of the tea shop if his employer let him. When he met Mago-sahib and was offered the porch in exchange for keeping an eye on the two houses, Joginder felt as if he’d finally made it. Now that he had his own cooking area, he sent a message back to his family that they should find him a wife.

Two decades later, five of them shared the hot, cramped porch: Joginder, his wife, Maniya, and their three young children. The blue plastic tarp draped across the entrance may have kept out the rain and the monkeys, but the cockroaches and rats were undeterred. Because
their only other choice would be to live in a chaotic
bustee
, Joginder stayed put, and his family stretched their living space out of the porch and into the alley. After Maniya sent the kids off to school, she’d do the laundry at the tap at one end of the lane. During the hottest hours of the day, she’d pull the family charpoy, or string cot, into a shady patch in the alley and sit cross-legged staring into space, the flies collecting on her damp forehead.

Joginder was not one to while the day away on the charpoy. He always seemed busy: From my patio, I could hear him negotiating with his laborers or shouting into his cell phone from the square of shade cast by the buildings in the alley, which functioned as his office. Once the day’s heat abated, he’d hurry over to the market to negotiate with the electrician and plumber. Joginder was endlessly resourceful, which made him an important resource for the neighborhood’s Bihari community; in the evenings, there was often a line of immigrants squatting patiently on their haunches in the alley, waiting to talk to him about their troubles.

The next time I heard Joginder scaling the stairs to my apartment, I knew he must have important business.

“Miss Mirindaah madam!” he bellowed through the door. Like many Indians, he transmuted my name into a popular soda brand, Mirinda, which, I’d discovered, was available in both lemon and orange flavors. The TV ads for the drink featured an enthusiastic Indian making the open-mouthed exclamation “Mirindaaahhh!” And as a result, I was destined to have the last syllable of my name dragged out, and to be asked which flavor I was. I opened the door and stepped back a pace: Joginder had the villager’s habit of addressing everyone as though they were several fields away.

“You must take minimum-minimum one maid!” I tried to beckon him inside, but he shook his head, determined not to stray off message. He continued his monologue, repeating the key words in both Hindi and English, sometimes rhyming them for added emphasis. “Minimum-minimum
ek kumaari
. One maid minimum. For
jaroo-pocha
, sweeping, swabbing, dusting-shrusting. It is top important for Indian lady or pukka English madam.”

I felt bombarded by his aggressive pitch.

“I’m not sure I want to, actually. I’m used to cleaning up myself. No one has maids in the U.S.”

I thought of my mother’s frustrated stories about how she couldn’t make a cup of tea in her Karachi kitchen without insulting the servant, who referred to himself in the third person as “memsahib’s bearer,” even though it was decades after the end of British rule. My parents had been instructed by their neighbors that they were to pay part of the costs of six servants shared by their compound. Each performed discrete tasks: a cook who doubled as a bearer, meaning he brought them “bed tea” in the mornings and did the grocery shopping; an inside sweeper and an outside sweeper; a
dhobi
to wash the clothes; a
chowkidar
, or guard; and a
mali
, or gardener, whose sole job, as far as my mother could tell, was to squat on the patch of grass in their compound and squirt a hose at it.

Joginder peered past me into the living room and made a similar appeal about the importance of hiring help.

“Indian houses very dusty-dusty, madam. And so many problems. You are needing to replace gas tanks for stove. You doing
dhobi
work by hand, washing dishes by hand. No machines. All hand to hand.”

The list of chores was daunting. Joginder gave me the classic wobbling Indian head nod when I acquiesced, the only possible outcome.

“Very good, Miss Mirindaah. I have good maid lady for you—my cousin-sister Radha. She is also coming from Bihar. She is trusts. She is coming tomorrow.”

Aha, I thought. So that’s why he wanted me to hire a maid so badly: It meant a job for a fellow Bihari, and a relative to boot.

Radha showed up right at eight. In the doorway, she gave me a long, hard look. I peered back with equal curiosity. I had no way of guessing her age: She seemed around forty, but probably would have appeared younger if she’d lived an easier life. She was wearing a freshly ironed pale blue sari, and her hair, neatly smoothed into a bun at the back of her head, was partly covered by her sari’s
pallu
, the scarflike fold of
material at the end of the garment. An overbite sent her top teeth skidding out of her mouth. As she kicked off her
chappals
, I noticed that the skin on the soles of her feet was thick and calloused, and her heels were split by deep cracks. In spite of these outward signs of poverty, though, Radha was straight-backed and dignified. She had none of the pleading desperation of the women who’d crept to my door asking for work.

“Namaste, deedee,”
she said, calling me by the Hindi name for “elder sister.” Although she was clearly the older of us, the term was a way to demonstrate respect without using the matronly term
auntie
, generally reserved for married women, and without the sycophancy of memsahib. I don’t know how she made the calculation, but hearing her refer to me as family warmed me to her immediately.

“I am Radha, and I am Brahmin,” she continued. Apparently, my new employee considered it more important to inform me that she was born into the highest caste on the Hindu social hierarchy than to tell me her last name. Later, I realized that she was actually interpreting her name for me; Indians would know instantly that she was a Bihari Brahmin when they heard her last name, Jha.

I could tell Radha was disappointed in my meager furnishings as she walked through the apartment. I hadn’t yet invested in much more than a set of tin plates and cups, a desk and chair, and a daybed with polyester fibers poking through the mattress. She raised her open hands and looked at me quizzically, as if to say, “What gives?” When she’d heard she’d be working for a
feringhee
, Radha had probably envisioned rooms of Western extravagances—or, at the very least, a television set and more than one chair. I didn’t have any cleaning implements yet, either, beyond a couple of scrub pads in the sink. But Radha was a take-charge type, with much of the confidence of her “cousin-brother”—although I found out later that Joginder was neither her brother nor her cousin. They considered themselves related because they came from the same region of Bihar and because Radha had married a man from Joginder’s village.

My new employee was eager to ensure that I bent to her will whenever she could manage it. In this case, her priority was making me purchase
the correct tools. She’d lean in close, until her face was only an inch from mine, and holler a Hindi word—I guess she thought I’d be more likely to comprehend it if she raised the volume. Then she’d squat back on her haunches and release her breath in an audible sigh as she waited for me to understand.

At first, I’d just stare back at her, blank-faced, thinking again how impressed my yoga teacher would be with her flexibility. Clearly, Radha’s comfort in the squat was due not to twenty-dollar New York yoga classes but to years of sitting in fields and alleyways in the posture adopted naturally by so many impoverished Indians. I’d already seen ample evidence, in Delhi yoga classes, that this wasn’t a preternatural national trait, because the middle-class Indians—who, like me, had grown up sitting on chairs—struggled as much as
feringhees
to lower themselves onto their haunches.