India (48 page)

Liberal, urban India, the face foreigners often see, is held up by an edifice of staff. A while ago I was dining with an eminent communist in Delhi and found he had sent for his cook from his home town by train for the evening—a journey of around forty-eight hours—rather than risk having his dinner party spoilt by a replacement chef. It is not unheard of to be having a conversation about, say, the evils of colonialism or child labour, and realize midstream that your interlocutor is serving you a cup of tea via the hand of a fourteen-year-old servant. In another house, a boy of ten is spoon-fed apple pie by a member of staff, not because he cannot do it himself but because he is tired after a tuition class and sees nothing strange about being treated like a little prince. A girl of sixteen will order her maid to serve every last item on to her plate, and even to squirt the tomato ketchup on the side. Then, midway through the solo meal, she will shout: “Replace it! It’s cold!” or “Bring me more ice!” During an evening in Mumbai a while back, the host, a normally affable person, interrupted our dinner to shout across a roomful of people at his elderly uniformed bearer or butler: “Narayan, why the hell are you looking at me? Don’t you look at me.” And Narayan, in his white turban, turned his face away.

The relationship between servants and employers can be cruel, but equally it can be a happy one, the richer party contributing towards the
cost of family weddings and even paying for the education of children, the encounter leading in some cases to the offspring of the poorer party joining the professions themselves and employing staff in turn. In some houses, the servants are wholly integrated into the life of the home, and it is like a successful and friendly working collaboration, with everyone having their own assigned role. Servants sometimes live in quarters attached to the houses of the better-off or in lodgings constructed on the roof, with men and women in segregated dormitory-type rooms. In some residences, they nest in storerooms or alcoves. I came down in the morning while staying in one house (though this was in truth in Dhaka, which stopped being Indian in 1947) to find two servants asleep on blankets on the kitchen floor, and a third sleeping in the tight little corridor leading to the kitchen. They had their home villages, miles away, but this floor was now their accommodation.

Since the cost of employing servants is low, staff will not usually be there to demonstrate wealth, only to make a certain form of living easier. Those with a social conscience might keep the servant-employer ratio at 1:1, so that a couple with one child may have a cook, a cleaner and perhaps a driver. The ratio will sometimes be closer to 3:1 or 4:1. So a wealthy couple with one child might have a driver each, a pair of rotating security guards, a cook, assistant cook, maid, laundry maid, cleaner, ayah and gardener. In extended families, the servants will form a complete shadow world. A cook told me he had worked for a joint family of forty members, with constant counter-instructions coming to the servants from brothers, aunts and feuding sisters-in-law; his sole job had been “atta cook”—making things out of flour like chapattis, puris and paranthas. In one Nagpur family, a rich young woman was preceded wherever she went by a maid of about her own age. “We’re just like sisters,” she said. But would your sister sit on the floor beside you and press your feet and rub them with oil while you chat away to your friends, some of them carrying bags that cost exactly twice the maid’s annual salary? When travelling abroad, these practices can cause complications. A drinks distributor who went on a free trip to the Swiss resort of Interlaken was shocked to find he could not treat the staff at his hotel like his household servants back home. Grabbing a young receptionist by the collar when his demand for fresh towels was not met late in the evening, he was disconcerted when the man called the police. “He was scared stiff when they took his fingerprints,” the tour escort reported later, gleefully. “He behaved perfectly after that.”
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Servants are everywhere, even when they are doing their best to disappear. A maid on a stairway will press herself against the wall in a way that
is so self-effacing she might not be there. An old man takes his belly for a walk in a park, tailed by a phone-carrying attendant, who is doing nothing but being present in order to show his master’s connectivity. In DLF Emporio, a Delhi mall which has Jimmy Choo, Rohit Bal, Just Cavalli, Salvatore Ferragamo, Tod’s and all the rest, you can see maids and ayahs gathered by the fountains, waiting. In restaurants you can see them seated on benches near the entrance, dandling infants, and you can sometimes see the ayahs disappear with their charges into the bathroom, for fear the child’s noise might disturb the parents. The omnipresence of dispensable servants, seen through doors you may not pass through, makes a certain kind of existence possible. Servants fetch, carry, polish, iron, sweep, wash, shop, fix; they are slimmer and darker than their employers; they look childlike but profoundly adult, as if they have had to work like adults since they were children. They move without assurance, and the expectation is that they will always be there, to facilitate a certain way of life.

As family structures that have been in place in India for centuries alter and fracture, and social mobility increases, household arrangements are changing. People complain it is impossible to recruit a reliable maid, and that word-of-mouth recommendation no longer works. Home loans are making it feasible for couples to set up independent households in a way they could not have done a generation ago. In the 1980s, if you wanted a home loan you had to open a bank account and pay in a monthly sum for an agreed term before the bank manager became convinced you had the “savings habit” and would process the application. From 2002, banks began to sell mortgages more vigorously, with loans of up to 100 percent of the value of the property, using floating interest rates. Demand grew, and most of the borrowers were young. Residential property was becoming more affordable than ever: in 2006 a house in a Mumbai suburb typically cost five times a person’s annual income, as against twenty-two times in the mid-1990s.
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As more people moved to two- or three-bedroom apartments, building developments and new towns and cities sprang up across India.

With the different housing arrangements came a fresh demand for servants, who were demanding higher wages. The spread of smaller households meant it could no longer be assumed that a member of the extended family would always be present to keep an eye on the various members of staff. Often people found themselves employing servants who had come from far away—from the south to the north, or from the north to the
south. In some cases they had come from outside India’s borders. Despite new forms of technology and communication, the practical mechanisms to check who they were, and whether they were trustworthy, did not exist. For Rajesh and Nupur Talwar, a middle-class couple who employed a cook and a maid, the lack of knowledge about the people in their home was to destroy their lives—aided and exacerbated by the administrative dystopia of the state of Uttar Pradesh.

Their daughter, Aarushi Talwar, was murdered in her bedroom on the night of 15 May 2008. She was a few days short of her fourteenth birthday, a star student at Delhi Public School in Noida, a talented dancer and a keen reader. She had suffered stab wounds to her head and neck. The story of what happened to Aarushi, as reported by a voracious media over the two days following her death, was presented as a salutary tale for every middle-class Indian parent.

It was presumed her killer was Hemraj Banjade, a Nepali household servant who had drunk most of a bottle of whisky, broken into Aarushi’s bedroom, assaulted and murdered her. He was missing, and a cash reward of Rs20,000 was offered for news leading to his capture. The killing was said to have been done with a khukri, a curved Gurkha knife. In the words of one report, the case was “an eye-opener to the vulnerability of Indian homes and the murderous tendencies of the domestic servants.” It listed examples of respectable families who had been attacked by their own staff: a child slain by a driver, an old woman killed by a greedy maid. The moral, according to the author of this article, was that police verification of a new servant’s identity was essential and that “domestic servants are exposed to temptation when the dwellers talk of money or jewellery or other financial secrets in their presence.”
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The fact Hemraj came from Nepal was an additional lesson, since north India had many Nepalese household workers, and there was a porous border between the two countries.

The Talwars lived in a second-floor apartment in a housing colony populated largely by naval and air force families in the “green city” of Noida, on the outskirts of Delhi. Aarushi’s parents were both successful dentists in their mid-forties, and had met and fallen in love at medical school. Her mother, Nupur, was an orthodontist, and her father, Rajesh, was a dental surgeon. Aarushi’s maternal grandparents lived nearby. In the family photographs and video clips that were shown by the media, they appeared to have been a particularly happy unit—the mother, father and only child. As television channels broadcast and rebroadcast their story, the Talwars looked like everyfamily, the one that had suffered the inconceivable fate
other families feared. Viewers of the rolling news could watch mother and daughter holding parrots at a bird park, father and daughter playing by a swimming pool, Aarushi dancing with her school friends and flicking her hair shyly when she saw she was being filmed. Her distraught friends set up a page on Facebook: “R.I.P.
Aarushi.”

The Talwars were, before their tragedy, the successful family next door. Instead of one of the parents being a popular dentist, they both were. Instead of having a child who did all right at school, they had a pretty daughter who topped 90 percent in her exams. Their home, Noida (New Okhla Industrial Development Authority), was an aspirational city that had been planned sector by sector for a modern middle-class lifestyle. Noida had a huge mall called The Great India Place, several new metro stations connecting to Delhi, and restaurants like Domino’s and Papa John’s. It was full of children, many of them slipping in and out of tuition centres after school and going gaming at Future Zone, or playing pool or table tennis at the many kids’ clubs.

Aarushi’s body was found by her parents on a Friday morning. “Rajesh started shouting and screaming,” her mother, Nupur, said later. “The maid came and called some neighbours, and the police came. The police were fine then. They were so certain about what had happened that the senior officer said, ‘It’s an open-and-shut case. The servant has done this. Send a team to the housing colony where the Nepalis live, send a team to the railway station and send a team to Nepal to his village, to see if he’s gone there.’ I was senseless, I couldn’t cry or scream. I was inanimate, like a stone. People were in and out of the place: police, neighbours, relatives, onlookers, the media. There must have been a hundred people in our home that morning.”
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The next afternoon, a retired police officer who lived nearby came to pay his condolences. In India, after a death, a house will fill with friends, neighbours, acquaintances and family, all come to pay their respects. Diyas—burning wicks floating in bowls of oil—will be set in front of garlanded pictures of the deceased. In this case, the officer appears to have been just plain curious, or ghoulish, since the Talwars did not know him and they were not at the apartment when he visited. He found his training taking over while he was there: he reconstructed the sequence of the crime and noticed bloody marks in unexpected places. It seemed to him something was wrong. “I checked Hemraj’s room and the bathroom and then noticed the bloodstains on the stairs leading to the terrace,” he said later. “When I reached the door, I saw that it was locked and then I broke open
the door [with the assistance of the police] and found Hemraj’s body lying in a pool of blood on the floor. He had a slit mark on his throat and many injury marks on his body. His body was severely decomposed.”
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Hemraj Banjade, the servant, had been lying dead on the roof terrace in the scorching summer sun for almost two days, and the police had failed to notice.

Once again, reporters and film crews from Delhi were swarming around the property: a faithless servant had become a murder victim, and a tragedy had become a mystery. The country grew riveted by the case. It was a growing media obsession, and everyone became an expert, with their own explanation of the double homicide. Endless theories were constructed as to what might have happened. Since there was no sign of forced entry, the presumption was that Hemraj had known his killer or killers. There seemed two likely explanations. The first was that Hemraj had been trying to protect Aarushi and been killed for his pains. The second was that Aarushi had seen somebody attacking Hemraj and been killed as a witness.

The pressure on the Noida police to solve the case was intense. They had to find the murderer, and fast. Their failure to investigate or even to secure the crime scene the previous day was a shocking demonstration of incompetence. It became known the police had allowed the media and even passers-by to enter the Talwars’ apartment after Aarushi’s body was found. All forensic evidence had been compromised or destroyed, leaving them with no leads. They were assailed by questions: Why had they not bothered to check the terrace? How could they have bungled so badly? Two years earlier, the Noida police had been in the news for failing to detect a serial killer who was murdering children, and now they needed to get a quick result if senior officers were to avoid a transfer to some obscure rural posting. Although the city was next to Delhi, it fell in the jurisdiction of Uttar Pradesh, where police had a reputation for being criminals in uniform who did nothing unless they were paid a bribe.