Delhi (7 page)

Those were the longest ten days of my life. I started to look further and further away from the fashionable neighbourhoods. By the end, I'd seen more flats and more slow-motion serial episodes than any mortal should ever have to, and felt dirty right down to my soul. The Roys started to suggest I should go through a broker, a shady-sounding figure who would carve off at least a month's rent in fees.

It was chastening. I'd imagined the city would bow down to me like some visiting dignitary. Instead I was more like the Hindustan Ambassador. This is not some top-hatted diplomat but an automobile, plump, white and ponderous like a beluga whale. It is iconic: ‘virtually indestructible', with great goggling herbivorous eyes; the design was actually poached from an old Oxford-built model, the Morris Oxford III. For years the Ambassador was the pinnacle of aspiration, with a seven-year waiting list; its swollen bonnets are still frequently gilded with the telltale flags of official government power; and it was recently crowned the world's best taxi by
Top Gear
. The only problem is that nobody wants to drive one anymore. In 2012–13, 1,895,471 passenger cars were sold; only 3,390 were Ambassadors. The days of its unchallenged dominance are gone.

Just when I was abandoning hope and about to move into a hostel—where the landlord's first sentence was ‘Don't worry, I'll tell your parents if you die'—I found the flat. Granted, it was in the distant, soulless southwestern suburb of Vasant Kunj. Approached across an area of dusty forest (which led occasional city-mouse auto drivers to plead, ‘Madam, you take me in jungle. Very far, very dangerous, you give more'), it is a sprawling low-density area just south of Jawaharlal Nehru University's safari park of a campus. The Kunj—as nobody calls it, despite my Australian housemate's best efforts—bustles like a genteel ant hive in the morning and is pitch black and paranoid at night, the only sounds the clatter of the nightwatchman's stick and the roar of drunk drivers on the road to Gurgaon. It was a long way from my lofty central dreams. But the flat was light and airy, and the Roys were about to be evicted.

‘I'll take it.'

Joyously, I threw my useless smart-phone onto my new bed. It hit with a sharp crack and fell apart. On closer inspection, the mattress appeared to be a solid block of stone, benevolently engineered by Gandhians to strip sleep of all pleasure. It also turned out to lie under a gigantic flight path. If we can infer international status from the reasonableness of the times planes pass overhead, Delhi is the grovelling Igor-like minion of America.

But it was Home. Stage 1 on the journey to becoming a Dilliwalli was complete. I fell asleep dreaming of Aeroflot crash landings and urban myths of frozen poo plummeting from the sky.

4

H
ANDS

Any woman who understands the problems of running a home will be nearer to understanding the problems of running a country.

—Margaret Thatcher

T
he next morning, I was woken by an eruption right by my head. A crash, followed by a long insolent goat-like bleat. This was the discreet entrance of Kamala, the most formidable and uncooperative maid in the whole subcontinent.

She started shovelling dust onto my belongings. Groaning, I inched off the stone mattress in a joy of semi-paralysis, and tried to work out how to reinvent myself as an independent young researcher. Kamala eyed me with cheerful malice, and began blasting out tinny Bollywood tunes from her phone.

This was the morning ritual for the next few months—apart from the times when Kamala mysteriously didn't turn up for several days in a row, and then reappeared without explanation. Despite working in an Anglophone flat for two years already, she had resolutely refused to learn any English word except ‘Morning', a greeting which she imbued with such withering diphthongic sarcasm that it sounded like a genealogical insult. With equal resolution she refused to recognize any of the sounds I emitted as anything resembling Hindi. Instead, she simply spoke more quickly and more loudly in her eccentric accent, until eventually giving up with a facepalm of disgust.

Less than five foot tall in bare feet (horny toenails painted) and curly black hair, Kamala cut a formidable figure. She was built like a wrestler, slapping dough and clothing in thick hands. She periodically let loose a throaty chuckle apropos of nothing, shaking her head so hard her earrings clicked. Several times a morning, her phone would ring and she would make it absolutely, eye-rollingly clear that she was gossiping about our idiocy. I once caught her red-handed in the bathroom, chainsmoking cheap hand-rolled
bidis
. She regarded me silently, took another drag, and tapped the ash into the laundry bucket.

As a result, Kamala's employment was characterized by a profound and humiliating asymmetry—on my part. My final realization that I was the beta female in the relationship—and quite possibly in life as a whole—came about two months in. She offered me a lychee, and I was strangely touched.

‘Thank you,
dhanyavad, shukriya!
' I waggled my head so hard I almost choked.

She looked at me strangely, and ate several herself. Then she turned, threw the orange-brown rinds on the floor of the flat, and swept haughtily out.

I crouched and swept up her rubbish, filled with a strange feeling that prefigured my ice bar bemusement.

At our lowest ebb I even consulted the great Victorian classic
Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management
. Managing the help, Mrs Beeton proclaimed darkly, was ‘the greatest plague in life'. It is, of course, an especially female role. I learnt that I must be like the commander of an army, and that I ought to wear silks of a grave hue. There wasn't much else.

Oxford colleges are old-fashioned in many ways, not least the continued existence of ‘Scouts' who clean the rooms. In the UK I'm an anachronistic weirdo—and quite possibly immoral—because someone arrives each morning to deliver post and take out the bin: a wonderful woman called Sue, who always bears enormous earrings and chunks of gossip. In India, however, it's still common for middle-class families to have at least one servant, often several. Reliance on them is deeply ingrained. These are the people who keep the city running.

Kamala's part-time appearances were enough for us, but vast inequalities in income mean that it's feasible to hire a maid, a cook, a driver, and a nanny if you're so inclined. The monthly salary of a chauffeur for six days a week, for example, might be only around £100, plus a little extra for meals on evenings out. A maid will be considerably cheaper, especially if you avoid going through a middleman firm. For both, though, foreigners often end up paying salaries an order of magnitude greater, much to their chagrin and the irritation of locals who claim they distort the labour market. Of course, the cheapest of all is the unpaid labour of the daughter-in-law—but that's for another chapter.

Trained and experienced staff fetch higher prices. Expats trade them for their skills in speaking English or chefing up French hors d'oeuvres. Otherwise it's a slow process, like the army breaking down and resocializing new recruits. I witnessed a Delhi-born friend ‘breaking in' a new driver with good-humoured curses as he stalled and overrevved and tried to put on his own music over hers.

As we stepped out of the hot car, she glanced worriedly back at him settling for a nap inside. ‘I'm not sure he'll think to open a window. I hope we don't come back to find him baked alive.'

It's frighteningly easy to get used to. Within weeks I found myself speaking like a nineteenth-century aristocrat. Over cocktails with some jaded longer-term expats, I congratulated myself for my thoughtfulness and generosity. ‘Of course it is such a
crowded
country. One does like to create employment where one can.'

I jangled the ice in my drink, and continued, ‘You
must
come and visit the new flat. Kamala's
vegetables à la dérision
are simply delicious.'

It is so much easier to be hospitable, to tell visitors grandly, ‘For us, the guest is God, as the natives say', when someone else is washing the dishes. And it is so easy to find yourself barking orders and bitching to other wealthy women about the effort of it. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the mirror of the bar, hazy in the tasteful evening lamplight. All of a sudden I realized my silhouette looked just like a colonial memsahib, lacking only a parasol. If this was Stage 2 of Dilliwallahood, I wasn't sure I wanted it.

The next day Kamala didn't show up again. Her phone rang and rang, with no answer, despite the fact it was perpetually suckered onto her hand in our flat. I was torn between resentment of a work ethic that involves one day's work being skipped every fortnight, relief that I didn't have to cook or do the laundry, and sympathy for the low wages and dull work.

We weren't good people to work for, I don't think. We might have been less dictatorial, but we never understood things like when to give festival presents and what recipes to suggest and that occasional random days off will be taken. Along with the other
firangi
in the flat I was largely clueless, while Alpha Housemate, the flat's Bengali chieftain, ruled with an iron fist.

Don't get me wrong: Kamala had any number of redeeming features. She was wonderfully no-nonsense: when I was still in denial that I'd killed the second of my plants, foolishly thinking the green bits were the mark of a living organism, she hacked every root and shoot out, and then watered the pot. She was impressively unfazed by the motley collection of half-naked refugees—friends, siblings, indeterminate others—who sporadically graced our floors, and would sweep dust over their sleeping forms with the exact same level of enthusiasm with which she swept it over my laptop.

There wasn't a cowed or obsequious bone in her body. Fittingly, Kamala means ‘lotus', a plant whose seeds are ‘tungsten-tough' and can survive a thousand years; whose flower can regulate its own temperature and manipulate pollinators; and which possesses a hidden solution for everything from piles and insomnia to erectile dysfunction. Redolent of purity and divine beauty, it is a symbol of Vishnu and Lakshmi.

Lakshmi: the goddess of wealth. Workers like Kamala are the backbone of India's prosperity. Like most other domestic workers, she was part of the vast iceberg of India's informal economy. Over 90 percent of Indian jobs exist in this murky category, without rights, without pensions, without a written contract, often without holidays or even regular hours.

Let's put this in context. Ask anyone from my Yorkshire hometown what the contemporary Indian economy is like, and they'll tell you it's founded on the IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) sectors. (That is to say, they'll complain about call centre workers who inform you their name is Mike and unconvincingly discuss the weather in Basingstoke and last night's
Britain's Got Talent.
) In this story, half of all India's workforce is allegedly made up of software technicians stealing jobs from the hardworking chaps of Newcastle or Arkansas.

In reality, even the most generous estimates suggest that the sector directly employs only 3 million people in a workforce of half a billion. Even then, many of these are so-called ‘cyber coolies' like my ex-housemate in Bangalore. Her name actually was Lakshmi, though it had brought little wealth. She was large and quiet and always dressed in grave shapeless kurtas. She proudly called herself a ‘BPO' worker, though she wasn't sure what BPO stood for. Despite her commerce degree and command of English, she was bussed in and out to work long, dreary, monotonous nights at a call centre. Constantly monitored, abused by customers, and made to operate in an American timezone half a world away: unlike most, Lakshmi had lasted more than a handful of months. But at weekends she slumped on the sofa like a zombie, staring dead-eyed at the TV even after the power was cut, too tired even to wonder why she hadn't found the promised BPO husband.