The Beautiful and the Damned (33 page)

On 13 February 2009, Esther said with sudden specificity, she left Shangri-La to work in Zest, a new restaurant located in a mall in south Delhi. The salary, at 13,000 rupees, was almost double what she was making at Shangri-La, although money was not the only reason for her changing jobs. The hours were far longer at the new place, starting at noon and finishing at two in the morning, and she worked six days a week. ‘But it’s okay,’ Esther said. ‘In F&B, every day you learn something new.’

A sudden burst of ‘Happy Birthday’ from an adjoining table drowned out Esther’s talk. I looked at the busy tables around us. No one was paying us any attention, although I wondered what they would see if they looked in our direction, at the two young women sitting across a table from me, an older man. We had been talking for a couple of hours, and Esther and Renu needed to leave. Although it was Esther’s day off, she had to go to Shangri-La to pick up some papers from the human resources department. We made plans to meet again, and I offered to give the sisters a lift to Shangri-La. The driver of the car I had hired that day, a young man from Rajasthan, was parked across the street, and he reached around to open the door for me when he saw me coming. I registered the sudden shock on his face when he saw the women accompanying me and realized that they were coming with me. He went numb as I let Esther and Renu
into the back of the car and came around and sat next to him. He hadn’t said a word, but I knew what he was thinking. He had assumed that the women were prostitutes and that I was going home with them. When we stopped at Shangri-La to drop off Esther and Renu, his expression changed. But I could see, as we drove homewards, that he was puzzled by what I had been doing with them in the first place.

The land of F&B, where Esther lived much of the time, was a place of reversed polarities. I began to understand this as Esther and I met over the course of the next few months. Since she worked six days a week, we had to squeeze our meetings into her workdays, mostly at three in the afternoon when there was a lull in the rhythm of the restaurant.

Esther usually sent me a text message to let me know that she could meet. The messages arrived at three or four in the morning, when she had just clocked off for the day and was in a van heading home to North Campus, trying to stay ahead of the early summer dawn. I got used to my phone vibrating under my pillow, displaying messages that were oddly cheerful and bouncy for that time of the night but that seemed to reveal only one facet of Esther’s personality.

I was living with a friend in Vasant Kunj, not far from where Esther worked. I would meet her at the mall in an auto-rickshaw or taxi, and we would drive to an older, smaller shopping complex in Vasant Vihar fifteen minutes away, where we sat at a café and talked.

When I first went to pick her up, Esther had asked me to wait for her at a nearby bus stop rather than at the mall itself, and I wondered if she felt self-conscious at being met by a man, or if the bus stop was part of a familiar routine. After the initial occasions, however, she seemed to mind less if I went right down to the mall. When I got there, I always found it hard to spot her. She tended to hug the wall, staying away from other people, looking small against the vast facade of the mall with its granite, glass and luxury-brand logos. The heat was fierce, about 110 degrees at the peak of summer, and Esther
seemed utterly isolated from the swirl of activity at the mall entrance: uniformed guards shoving their metal detectors under vehicles being taken to the underground parking garage; attendants rushing to take over those cars whose owners wanted valet parking; shoppers in sunglasses making the transition from air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned mall in a burst of perfume and jewellery.

Esther was always dressed the same way, wearing either a blue or green top, jeans and strapped sandals that, with their thick soles, were rather masculine. Her eyes slid blankly over the cars going past her, her face withdrawn and remote, and when she registered my arrival, always a few seconds after she actually saw me, she gave a quick, nervous smile. She then walked hurriedly towards me and dived into the back seat.

When we arrived at the Barista café in Vasant Vihar, Esther stood out among the carefully made-up women meeting their dates or friends. Even though she was the same age as these other women, mostly in their twenties, she looked older, more worn down. She also didn’t know what to order the first time we went to the Barista. When the waitress came to our table, Esther looked self-conscious and said she wanted a Coke. The waitress eyed her with surprise, puzzled that Esther didn’t know that you couldn’t get a Coke at a Barista.

But it made sense, in a way. The view from F&B was about serving, not about being served. It was about what one was able to offer to the customer sitting at the table, across that almost invisible but impregnable barrier of class. At the Barista, Esther happened to be on the wrong side of the table. She would have known everything on the menu, down to the minute details, if we had been at Zest, or at Shangri-La. She would be able to advise customers on what mix of drinks, appetizers and entrées to order. But she hadn’t waited tables at a Barista, and so the menu there became an unfamiliar, alien document, something she hadn’t studied sufficiently.

Esther finally chose an iced drink, frowning at the menu with its abundance of superlatives. Then she asked the waitress, a slender nineteen-year-old, ‘Where are you from?’

‘Manipur,’ the girl replied.

‘I’m from Manipur too. Where’s your home?’

‘Churachandpur,’ the waitress said, easing up a little in her posture.

The three of us chatted for a while about Churachandpur and Imphal, the Barista waitress telling us that this was her first job and that she had been in Delhi for just four months.

‘How much are you making?’ Esther asked.

‘Four thousand,’ the girl said.

‘That’s not bad,’ Esther said.

‘She looks barely sixteen,’ I said when she had left.

‘Oh, she’s not so young,’ Esther said.

Although a franchise café was so intimidating to Esther, she herself worked in probably one of the most expensive restaurants in Delhi. It had been described to me by Manish, the cigar dealer I had visited recently, as ‘the most happening place’ in the city. Manish was less enthusiastic about the Emporio Mall, where Zest was located. ‘It’s a bit imitative. Dubai in Delhi, you know?’ he said.

At the beginning of our interaction, Esther had appeared quite dazzled by the glamour of working F&B at Zest. It was a ‘forty-four crore’ restaurant serving ‘seven cuisines’, she told me, with twenty expert chefs, a ‘mixologist’ from Australia, four dining rooms and a 1,800-bottle wine cellar. The bricks had been imported from China, the marble from Italy, and even the music in the restaurant was sent over the Internet by a company based in the UK. ‘It’s so beautiful,’ Esther said.

There were 408 ‘girls’ who worked at the restaurant, all of them reporting for work at noon and most of them finishing their shifts at two in the morning. Only the hostesses got to leave slightly earlier. The restaurant was divided into seven divisions, one for each cuisine, each division having a staff of seventy and with a hierarchy that started with the manager, continued through assistant manager, hostess, various levels of waitresses who were called ‘station assistants’, and finally ‘runners’ who were at the very bottom. There was a similar hierarchy among the kitchen staff as well, and one’s position in the hierarchy determined how many ‘points’ one had, with more points translating into a greater share of the tips. In the past fifteen
days, Esther said, her division had received 75,000 rupees in tips, of which she might receive around 500 rupees.

Esther was in the middle of the hierarchy. She was a station holder, one of nine in her division. ‘The others are all guys,’ she said, ‘so I have to challenge them all the time.’ Her job was to explain the menu, take orders and serve the food, which brought her into close contact with her customers. ‘They come in with bags and bags of stuff,’ she said, ‘with Louis Vuitton, Cartier, all these names written on them. Sometimes, a customer drops a receipt on the floor and when I pick it up to give it back to her, I’ll see that the amount of money she has spent runs to tens of lakhs.’

The restaurant, in spite of its long hours and stream of wealthy clientele, wasn’t technically open. It was still waiting for its liquor licence from the government, but that hadn’t stopped it from functioning unofficially for the Delhi rich who constituted the restaurant’s patrons and many of whom knew the owners. Zest was part of the holdings of DLF, India’s largest real-estate company, and which owned the Emporio Mall as well as the restaurant. DLF is ‘primarily engaged’, as the Reuters India profile of the company puts it, ‘in the business of colonization and real-estate development’. Like other large Indian companies, it is, in spite of being publicly traded, more or less a family business, and the owner or chairman, K. P. Singh, was in 2008 rated by
Forbes
as the eighth-richest person in the world and perhaps the richest real-estate businessman in the world. But the global downturn had come to India since then. Vijay Mallya, whom I had last seen talking about luxury brands at the Taj Palace Hotel, had fallen off the list of billionaires, losing $900 million of the $1.2 billion he was valued at in 2008. Singh’s fall was less precipitous, down to number seventy-four in the list of the world’s billionaires in 2010, but that still left him one of the richest people in India.

Esther’s part in such wealth was a very tiny one, something like the role of a serving maid at a great imperial palace, one of history’s unrecorded, unremembered millions, a barbarian in Rome. Yet Delhi as an imperial capital was also a postmodern, millennial city where Esther traversed different layers of history every day on her way to work.

She left home at ten in the morning, taking a 10-rupee ride on a cycle rickshaw from her flat to the metro station of North Campus. This was an area dominated by Delhi University but contained within the walls of the old city that had for over two centuries been the Mughal capital of the Indian subcontinent. From North Campus, Esther took the metro, built in the past few years, to Central Secretariat, not far from Shangri-La and sitting at the heart of Lutyens’ Delhi, so called after the Edwardian architect who planned the neighbourhood as a centre for the British Raj in the first decades of the twentieth century. After independence, this stretch of Delhi with its juxtaposition of ministerial buildings, luxury hotels and private mansions became the heart of the Indian government, although a corporate presence has been added to the neighbourhood in recent years. From Central Secretariat, Esther travelled on a bus that took her south, into a wealthy, post-independence part of the city that was expanding into the suburbs of Gurgaon. Her journey across these layers of history involved two hours of travelling, 30 rupees in fares, and three modes of transportation.

Nothing of this long journey and transition through the different worlds of Delhi would be evident once Esther stepped into the locker room of the restaurant. There, she changed into her uniform and put on her make-up of kajal eyeliner, eye shadow and blusher – required by the restaurant of its female staff but items that each employee had to provide for herself. Finally, she would arrange her hair in the mandatory zigzag pattern that represented the letter Z for Zest. At one thirty, she would have lunch along with the other staff. It was usually Indian food, but if the chefs were feeling good, they would throw in a special dish. Since evening happened to be the busiest time in the restaurant, there was never any opportunity for dinner. Nor was there much chance of a break. When Esther was really tired and could steal some time from being on the restaurant floor, she sat and dozed on a chair in the locker room. ‘I could lie down on the floor and go to sleep right there, but they’ll come and wake you up even if you’re dead,’ she said.

Esther’s journey home was easier because an office van dropped her and other workers off, cutting down her travel time by thirty
minutes. She reached her flat at 3.30 a.m., barely enough time to sleep and get ready for the next morning. ‘I feel like a thief,’ she said. ‘When I come home, everyone’s sleeping. It’s a strange job that requires you to be up when everyone else is in bed.’

Esther’s long working hours left her little time for reflection. Yet whenever we met, she liked to talk about who she had become, and was still becoming, in the course of her long journey from Imphal to Delhi. In this vast city, she found herself among a wide range of strangers, and her experience of these people through F&B had given her a body of knowledge that was a blend of prejudice and wisdom, sometimes perceptive and sometimes contradictory.

I asked her if there were women from other parts of India among her colleagues.

‘There are, but you know, I think, those of us who are from the north-east, we’re stronger. I can fight, like that day when I had a quarrel with the manager. The women who are not from the north-east, they won’t challenge authority. But also, they won’t mingle with other people, the way we can. We girls from the north-east are independent, strong.’

‘And what about the men?’

‘The guys are high-profile people,’ she said, laughing.
‘Chota kam nahi karega
. They won’t do small work. But me, what to do? I was not born with a kilo of gold. I have a cousin brother in Imphal. He’s a three hundred and sixty-five drunkard. You understand? He’s drunk every day. When I go home, he asks me for money. What to do? I give him money, but he doesn’t know how much I sweat to earn the money. In Delhi, I have fifty-four cousin brothers and sisters. Most of the girls are working. The guys are all home ministers. They stay at home, do nothing. They’re looking for a good job, the right job.’

In Delhi, Esther often felt conscious of her difference from other Indian people. ‘We have small eyes,’ she said. ‘They can tell we’re from the north-east. Sometimes, the way they think about us, the way they talk about us, makes me not think of myself as Indian. I want them to accept me the way I am, not the way they want me to be.’