Sideways on a Scooter (14 page)

The news that I’d have an Indian housemate blunted Radha’s glee, though. She knew that with an Indian employer around, her reign as head of my household would come to an end, because no Indian woman would endure her imperious behavior. Geeta had long suspected that Radha took advantage of me because I didn’t know how to manage her. She also thought I was crazy to have so few people working for me. It was high time to correct both ills. Like the stereotype of the bossy Indian housewife, Geeta began piling on unasked-for advice about how I should supervise my new home. Under the pretext that Priya wouldn’t be comfortable there without some semblance of middle-class living, Geeta instructed me to expand my employee roster.

“Having people to do things for you is one of the advantages of India, Miranda. No need to feel guilty about it; just start hiring.”

With Geeta’s help, I soon had Asma to wash the staircase, Ajay to do odd jobs around the apartment, and K.K., my favorite from the taxi stand, as a part-time driver. Finding people willing to serve your needs, however specific, is never difficult in a city full of the chronically underemployed.

Learning how to oversee them was more of a challenge. Even with Geeta and Priya’s help, it only seemed to make my life more complicated to have servants around. I’d never managed anyone before, let alone negotiated the complex caste hierarchies among Indian employees, and I was surprised at how much patience and skill it required. For the first time, I could sympathize with Indian housewives’ complaints about how overworked they are—not from doing the chores themselves but simply from managing the servants. I could also understand why expats often hire from embassy-approved lists. Such employees have had a police check, can cook fettuccine Alfredo, and are supposed to take a professional attitude toward their work.

Most Indian servants behave like poorer cousins who have agreed to be your slave for a year. To Geeta and Priya, who’d grown up with full-time cooks, maids, and drivers, the employer-servant relationship seemed perfectly natural. Both hailed from middle-class Brahmin families, so it went without saying that others would do their dirty work for them, but since both came from the low end of the middle class, they had relied on underage workers from the villages: easily available, cheap, pliant labor. In many Indian homes, servants are essentially indentured. They are kept on call day and night, housed in a tiny slit of a room in the back of the house, and granted meals and vacation time only on their masters’ whims. Yet these relationships are often affectionate. Geeta’s childhood cook, for instance, had witnessed all the major events of her life—always present, never participating—and she considered him part of her family. Of course, she still had to keep him in line.

“You give a finger and they’ll take an arm,” Geeta informed me. “Even the best servants. You need to show them who’s in charge.” She couldn’t help but add, “Which you have not done with Radha.” I protested that Radha was a good worker, but my self-appointed household advisor was unmoved. “Many things are difficult in India, Miranda, but finding a good worker is not one of them. You’re paying Radha what she’d earn working for a whole family. She knows you aren’t going to fire her, because you let her get away with anything.”

It was true; I’d failed to play the role of chiding memsahib to Radha. Now that Geeta had urged me to hire K.K. part-time, I was finding it similarly awkward to manage him. Still, having him around was a panacea to many of the hardships of being a single lady in Delhi. He saved me hours I would have spent bargaining with rickshaw wallahs; he could understand my American-accented Hindi; and he knew Delhi’s streets, which was important because I had to drive all over the city for interviews, and the geography of the city still flummoxed me. K.K. also lent me protection from late-night eve-teasing dangers. When I stumbled out of a bar into the hot glow of a Delhi midnight, he was always waiting for me outside. I’d rap on the car window, interrupting his sleepy cell-phone prattle with his wife back in his village. He’d twinkle his eyes at me, never judgmental or annoyed, no matter how late it was.

“I am paid for the waiting, madam,” he’d say when I apologized.

If Radha knew the color of my underwear and what I looked like in the morning, K.K. knew me in other intimate ways. He knew how late I stayed out and in whose company; he could tell when I was frustrated or sad, and when I was, he’d sometimes crack jokes at me in the rearview mirror to cheer me up. K.K. and I had quickly bonded over the fact that we were the same age. I kept up a running commentary on this simple alliance between us—“You have three children and I have none!” and “You own two houses in the village, and I own nothing more than a bicycle back in New York!”—because it would win me a flash of his charismatic smile in the mirror, and I would feel myself soften into his reflection.

No matter how much I asked him about his wife and kids, there was no way I could ever know K.K. as well as he knew me, or make our relationship more equal. Still, he made an effort to open up his life to me, unlike Radha, who seemed scarcely able to endure my lists of questions. Once, when my mother was visiting, K.K. drove us three hours outside Delhi to his village—“the most best village in India!”—and put us up for an entire weekend in his family’s farmhouse. He stocked up on bottled water, because he knew
feringhees
couldn’t drink from the
village well, and whiskey, because he knew Western ladies drank alcohol, although the idea of my mother—however adventurous—downing shots of Royal Challenge is in the realm of the ridiculous.

When we arrived, K.K. sent his wife off to bring us fresh buffalo milk in grimy metal cups. There isn’t much point in drinking bottled water if you’re also drinking unpasteurized milk in cups teeming with bacteria, but my mother and I forced it down, warm and frothy and animal-smelling. The satisfaction on K.K.’s face when I complimented the beverage was worth the resultant days of diarrhea, though I’m not sure my mother would agree. She was grayish green for most of the weekend.

In his farmhouse, K.K. was the confident master of his own domain, receiving foot massages from his wife and ordering his younger brothers to take us on a tour of his fields. But to show his respect for us, he would eat only after we did; he and his brothers sat with us, overseeing each bite. K.K.’s wife waited behind us—her strong body tensed, her hand on the serving spoon—to dish out more
matter paneer
or egg curry when one of the men saw space open up on our plates. When my mother heard the buffalo baying outside the window, she’d lurch to the pukka Western toilet that K.K. had proudly shown us—complete with toilet seat and lock on the door. I forced myself to eat for both of us.

In the morning, after stuffing us with his wife’s
paranthas
—thick, fried breads filled with cauliflower or potato—K.K. swallowed a few mouthfuls of
chai
and nodded a formal farewell to his family assembled at the gate of his feudal farmhouse. Then he opened the car doors for his two memsahibs, and I was no longer the guest in his domain, but once again his employer.

When I reported from Pakistan or Afghanistan, my drivers would join me in casual restaurants for kebabs, but that isn’t acceptable in class-obsessed India. K.K. insisted he preferred the drivers’ canteens to sitting at a table with me in a restaurant. I can remember us eating together only once in public. Even though it was a cheap roadside café, so deeply entrenched are India’s hierarchies that the tea-boy actually scoffed when my driver sat down beside me and ordered
chai
. I wanted
to smack that boy, but K.K.’s lowered eyes spoke of such shame that I quieted myself. It wouldn’t have helped his case to have a
feringhee
girl trying to defend his manhood.

Geeta and Priya had been conspiring. One morning, Priya informed me that she and my household advisor had decided it was time to present Radha with her own key to the apartment.

“We’ve decided it’s the best way to give her a sense of her responsibility to the household,” she said.

I’d long ago decided to surrender to the two of them when it came to household stuff. When it came to managing the staff, they were almost always right. When I handed Radha the key, a rare smile escaped as she tucked it into her
choli
, as though her smile had been released with a puff of air from inside her sari blouse.

“Now I won’t have to wait for you to wake up and let me in,” she said.

Priya didn’t allow Radha to linger in the moment, though. She and Geeta had a precise, multistep plan of action, and she’d reserved this morning for informing Radha of her new status and the accompanying duties. Next up was to inform Radha that she was to be responsible for buying the vegetables and dusting the bookshelves and tables. She was to adopt the role of press wallah as well as
dhobi
and iron our clothes after washing them and hanging them to dry. No more would our clothes smell of the press wallah’s hot coals; Priya had an electric iron, and she dedicated several mornings to showing Radha how to plug it in and work the buttons.

Last of all, Priya informed our maid that she would have the honor of cooking for us. Upper-caste Hindus consider the kitchen the most sacred and pure part of the house, and, Priya reminded Radha, many do not like non-Brahmins to even set foot inside the kitchen. Priya made a real effort to impress on Radha that she should be flattered by this new chore.

“I grew up with a Brahmin cook, and I prefer to eat food cooked by other Brahmins. So it is only because you are Brahmin that we want you to cook for us. Geeta will be having meals here too, and she’s
traditional like me. In fact, she will prefer to take her meals here now, because Nanima’s maid isn’t a Brahmin like you.”

Radha’s expression was solemn. She knew well how momentous this occasion was: being handed Brahminical responsibilities by her new Brahmin employer. My maid already proudly adhered to the strictest upper-class rules about maintaining the purity of the kitchen. She’d only eat food she’d cooked herself or that had been prepared by Brahmin hands on the grounds of a temple. After her husband died, years before, Radha had restricted her diet further; Brahmin widows are supposed to live a life of deprivation. Even on the hottest of days, she would refuse a glass of water from my apparently impure kitchen, preferring to go thirsty until she could drink water from her own. It didn’t make any sense, because her water came from the same filthy municipal source as the water in my taps, and, unlike mine, was not filtered. But I guess she believed her Brahmin sink somehow made the city water more pure.

I had to hand it to my household advisory committee: Radha actually thanked Priya for adding to her workload. I’d never have guessed it would happen, but the new tasks seemed to make my uppity servant feel more important: She started arriving to work earlier, humming to herself as she set the day’s vegetables on the counter and planned out our meals.

We invited Geeta over for our first Radha meal: a creamy spinach dish called
palak paneer
, slightly sweet tomato chutney, and hand-rolled chapatis. Although it was pure vegetarian North Indian food, cooked by the immaculate hand of a fellow Brahmin, Geeta just picked at it.

“It’s hard for me to get used to Bihari cooking.” She curled her lip as she said the word Bihari. “My mother taught me our family recipes. That’s real food—the Punjabi dishes I grew up with. Not too spicy, not too oily. Priya will tell you. She’s just as particular as I am about having her own kind of regional cooking.”

Priya nodded sympathetically, though I was relieved to see that she’d made more progress than Geeta had on her plate. I dreaded having to explain to Radha in the morning why so much of her food had
gone uneaten. I didn’t really understand how they could have such a problem with Radha’s cooking—to me, Punjabi vegetable dishes tasted scarcely different from Bihari ones—but I’d learned that many Indians have exacting palates. Radha was honored to cook for us, for instance—just as long as she could cook the dishes she’d grown up eating. She would argue fervently that Bihari food was better than Punjabi food, as though it were an objective matter.

Food has long been the custodian of regional, religious, and caste specificity in India. It is only in the last three decades that globalization has started to take its uniforming toll on Indian cuisine. In the years that Geeta had lived in Delhi, her friends and colleagues had started eating out more regularly. Even in restaurants that advertise themselves as “pure veg” or “pure Brahmin,” they cannot know the caste of the kitchen workers. Geeta had made it clear that she considered this a negative side effect of India’s modernization; still, she wasn’t a purist like Radha, who claimed she’d never once been spiritually polluted by “taking a meal outside.”

Parvati had little in common with Radha other than her preference for traditional home-cooked vegetarian food. She and Vijay would happily “take whiskey” at the Delhi Press Club, but rarely would they eat there, because they considered restaurant food inferior in quality and cleanliness. Parvati went to extremes to keep globalization out of her kitchen. Like Radha, she shunned store-bought and packaged ingredients. She made her own yogurt out of fresh milk, and chapati out of wheat she bought in bulk; the vegetables she prepared were all fresh and locally grown. Her kitchen was as low-tech and traditional as Radha’s: She cooked exclusively out of three tin pots and had no electric mixers or processors.

Parvati was also particular about doing the cooking herself—she only occasionally outsourced sous-chef duties to her part-time maid. She never used a cookbook; she’d memorized dishes by watching her mother as a child. And yet each of the North Indian dishes she made—lentil dals, bean dishes, vegetable curries—required half a dozen
spices to achieve a subtle complexity of flavors. Even though she used the same spices night after night, somehow each dish tasted different from the other. She’d begin by roasting them in a pan, then grind them with a mortar and pestle; she’d fry them in a specific order to achieve the right blend of flavors. Parvati measured in pinches, handfuls, and lidfuls and seasoned the dishes instinctively, by taste and smell.