Sideways on a Scooter Read online

  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 overbi
te 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.

  Radha continued to toss words in my direction, and eventually I played along, miming a game of charades for my solemn audience of one. When I’d demonstrate the task—sweeping or mopping—to match the word she’d used, Radha would nod imperiously and repeat it, so I could later recite it at the store. I’d dreaded having to order around a meek, simpering maid, but Radha turned the master-servant relationship on its head. She seemed not to suffer from the all-too-common postcolonial ailment that still afflicts many Indians: the belief that all things foreign are better. Radha knew full well that her American mistress did not know best.

  My maid had strong opinions about a startling number of things: how I should store food in my kitchen, how I should arrange my furniture, what I should eat for breakfast. If I was in the bathroom when she wanted to ask me something, she’d push open the door like an exceptionally intrusive relative. She’d ignore my protests at being observed in my nakedness at the tap, and linger to chuckle as I scooped and poured.

  “I know it’s hard for you feringhees to learn how to do Indian things correctly, like bathing and eating with your hands,” she’d say.

  Radha pretty consistently treated me like a dim and slightly wayward daughter. No Indian employer would have stood for it, but I found something comforting and motherly in her bossiness. I sometimes wished I had the Hindi to confide in her about my troubles with adjusting to a culture so different from my own. Even though I couldn’t express this, I liked to believe she understood something of my loneliness and also felt responsible for my welfare.

  It was Radha who found me lying on the cement floor, trying to cool my fever after I’d ingested some nasty waterborne bacteria. I’d been sick from both ends for a couple of days, and I shook with weakness as Radha sat me up. She poured lemon water with salt and sugar into my mouth. One friend called this the “Indian slum tonic”—a cheap way of restoring lost salt and minerals.

  Radha must have told Joginder I was sick, because sometime later he was standing over me, speaking rapid Hindi. He had to repeat himself several times before I got the gist: There was a problem with the water tank on the roof that pumped unfiltered municipal water into my taps. The lid of the tank had blown open in the wind, and one of the neighborhood crows had drowned in there. I’d been drinking rotten crow remains for days. My jury-rigged filtration system clearly hadn’t been sufficient to conquer the bacteria emitted by a bird carcass. After a while, the neighborhood plumbers arrived. They clambered onto my roof and cleared the crow remains out of my tank. When I recovered, I went up there myself and wired the tank shut with a clothes hanger.

  Joginder had suggested I pay Radha twenty dollars a month, the shockingly low industry standard for three hours of hard manual labor each day. Even though Radha was inside sweeper, bearer, dhobi, and mali all in one, and even though Joginder was her advocate and sort of relative, he urged me not to pay her much more than the going rate. He had a keen understanding of market economics: Overpaying her would skew the wages of other maids in the neighborhood, he pointed out. He also knew that Radha ranked pretty low in Delhi’s maid hierarchy. She was an “Indian-style maid”: She neither spoke English nor cooked Western food nor understood the lifestyle and expectations of non-Indian employers.

  Radha was accustomed to cleaning without electrical appliances like washing machines, and also without much more basic tools such as upright mops with handles. She swept the floors and then mopped them on her hands and knees, using a cloth and a natural cleaning fluid that smelled of fennel. It was hard to believe this weird stuff made my floors gleam. She pounded my clothes and sheets against the bathroom floor and swished them around violently in buckets, as dhobis do against the rocks in riverbeds across rural India.

  Over the years, I gradually doubled Radha’s pay in increments of guilt-induced generosity. When I’d hand her the monthly fold of bills, her supercilious attitude would briefly disappear as she tucked the wad of rupee notes into her choli, the blouse women wear under their sari. Nevertheless, money meant nothing to her compared to caste. My maid’s place at the top of the ancient social hierarchy was pretty much the only source of her pride and confidence. I’d read that Indians were choosing their own professions and marrying people from different strata on the hierarchy; this didn’t jibe with Radha’s world and the world of many Indians, in which the caste system still determines occupation, rank, and karma. It is the unseen hand guiding most social interactions, ingrained into behavior patterns and expectations, with innate rules that need never be discussed.

  These days, many of the globalized middle class are embarrassed by caste; like child marriage and underperforming bureaucrats, it’s a symbol of the old, preglobalized India. Radha, however, felt no compunction about asserting its primacy in her life. She knew deep in her heart that her Brahmin caste made her intrinsically superior. She’d remind me of it often—that Brahmins are at the top of the pecking order, the highest among the Hindu castes. There are literally thousands of castes and subcastes separating Brahmins from the bottom end of the hierarchy, the group called dog-cookers in ancient times because th
ey were believed to be so low as to eat dogs. The British called them untouchables because the higher castes considered their touch, even their shadow, polluting.

  Brahmins are traditionally priests and teachers, and for centuries, education was their exclusive right. In ancient times, untouchables were forbidden from hearing the recital of the written word, because the higher castes believed that they would sully any sacred text they spoke or even heard. Until the British took control in 1857, India’s government was hereditary and run by Brahmins. Even today, the upper castes overwhelmingly dominate the professional world; the country’s two hundred million untouchables are disproportionately represented in poverty, malnourishment, and illiteracy. And yet, as though to prove that no rule is without exception in India, here was my maid: a completely illiterate Brahmin who lived in a slum and swept my floors like an untouchable.

  Radha was painfully aware that it was beneath her to clean other people’s houses. She tried to make up for it by drawing lines around the tasks she considered unacceptable: taking out the garbage, cleaning the bathroom, and doing the outside sweeping, meaning the staircases, hallway, or street. Dealing with animals was out of bounds, too, I discovered. The highest ranking in Hinduism’s hierarchy of the animal kingdom is reserved for cows, which are venerated as symbols of nonviolence, motherhood, and generosity; Gandhi went so far as to call the cow “a poem of pity.” Next come horses, snakes, and monkeys. When cats appear in ancient Hindu texts, though, they are shown as religious hypocrites. Even rats rate higher; Ganesh, the powerful elephant-headed god, is often depicted riding one.