The Hope Factory

by Lavanya Sankaran

  Behind her, she could hear cooking vessels being banged about, the noise seeming to increase in volume. The sink was filled with dirty plates and dishes, and Shanta wandered between them and the pot of sambar simmering on the stove for the servants’ lunch.

  “It’s nice to see,” Shanta addressed the kitchen stoop, “that some people have the time to relax.” Silence, then the slamming of a cupboard door, a rising catechism of complaint.

  “I hope,” she said, “that the driver’s wife is proving herself useful upstairs?

  “She must be very grateful to you,” she said, “for your suggestion, and the chance to polish brass with uplifted mortals like yourself, instead of assisting a simple soul like me.

  “There is no need,” she said, “to suppose for one moment that I am not capable of attending to my duties in the kitchen. I have fed and cleaned after this family for so many years now, I can do all this and more, sister! All this and more! But then,” said Shanta, banging stainless-steel cooking vessels down, “hard work is something that only few of us understand! Not all of us feel free to put down our work and stretch our feet and relax while all others toil about us.”

  Kamala felt her own blood heat, her temper begin to flash and sparkle. She did not look around. “You mind your own business, sister,” she said.

  “If only I could!” said Shanta. “But it seems, even that is not allowed to me. I am forced to mind everyone else’s business as well. Vidya-ma seems to be in a very generous mood, in her desire to employ people and disburse rations to all and sundry. Is it my job, then, to press food into the mouths of all the young rabble of the neighboring slum? Am I to slave myself to the bones, till my very fingers collapse with arthritis, just to feed the son of every woman too lazy to prepare food for her own family?”

  “Guard your mouth, sister!” said Kamala, her control snapping at this reference to her son. “You speak as though the weight of preparing the food for the entire party rests on your shoulders. But that is being done by others. You are here to feed us, who are working around the house till our very bones dissolve into puddles of fatigue. And if you choose not to, akka, I am very happy, I assure you, to let Vidya-ma know that on your behalf. Allow me to provide you with that small service. I am happy to oblige!”

  Shanta did not reply. Kamala rested her head against the wall and wondered if a drink of hot water would help. Behind her the kitchen grew silent. The back courtyard too seemed wrapped in sympathetic quiet. It was usually a scene of constant noise and activity—clothes were washed and hung to dry, the door to the servants’ bathroom always opening and closing, the whole area moist and wet—but today, all the staff were busy inside, the square granite clothes-washing stone stood idle, the drying lines were light and free of their normal burden. The only noise the soft buzz of flies that hovered ceaselessly and excitedly over the large bin that held the kitchen garbage. Vidya-ma insisted that they keep the garbage bin well covered, but Shanta never really bothered.

  The cramps struck again, and Kamala doubled over, resting her head on her knees.

  And it was in this position that she was discovered by Vidya-ma. “Kamala! What is the meaning of this!

  “How can one rest while others toil? On a day like this, when all have so much to do. Even I have not stopped for a second, no, not even paused for a drink of water, but you! Relaxing like a queen. I cannot believe this! Such a nerve! If you are not interested in this work, why don’t you just go home now?”

  Kamala stood up. She placed her teeth on her lip to control the quivering and kept her eyes lowered. Vidya-ma’s ankles were covered by her jeans, but her naked foot peeked out, soft and scrubbed, with toenails painted a jewel red.

  They had quickly collected a small audience, freshly arrived for their lunch: Kamala could sense the triumph in Shanta’s face, the eager curiosity in Thangam’s, the nervous fright in the driver’s wife, and, just beyond, Narayan, his eyes worried and angry.

  Vidya-ma, spleen emptied, turned her attention to Shanta. “So, what did you want me to see?” The cook led her meekly to the table where the tablecloths and napkins lay ready for inspection. “Yes, that one,” Vidya-ma said impatiently. “I already told you so this morning.”

  She left and the frozen tableau relaxed—Thangam and the driver’s wife went to the sink to wash their hands; Shanta patted the stacks of napkins in some satisfaction; and Kamala walked out of the kitchen to squat in the courtyard, angry tears rolling down her cheeks. She felt her son’s arms about her shoulders.

  “So mean!” he said, in an angry whisper. “How could she do such a thing!”

  “I tell you. She is like that!” said Kamala.

  “It is the height of meanness. Especially when you have been slaving all day long.”

  “Yes,” said Kamala, comforted. “It is.”

  “Could she not see that you were not well? Your sickness is written upon your face.”

  “She is not one to see anything that does not suit her.”

  “Then why must you work here? I do not like it, Mother!”

  Kamala was touched. She pushed her son’s hair back off his forehead. “There will always be someone like her, you know. In any job.”

  “But you have never said anything about it! From your words, I thought she was nice!”

  Kamala stared at him. “When did I say so! I have always cursed that she-demon, Shanta.”

  “Not Shanta!” said Narayan. “Vidya-ma. She’s not nice. She’s mean! She does not care.”

  Kamala was shocked. “No, Son. Don’t say that. It is all Shanta’s fault. She is the one who brought her down here, on purpose to get me into trouble. She is a she-demon, that one.”

  Narayan shut his mouth, but his face still carried doubt.

  seven

  THE NEW HUMAN RESOURCES MAN had him cornered, pinning Anand to his desk with stratagems—“We should take, sir,” the HR man’s eyes were alight with mad sociological schemes that raised his hair in little black and gray tufts behind his ears, “the entire management to off-site. There is a place near Mysore which is having very good facilities for off-site. Rope climbing, coracle racing.” Anand regarded him doubtfully; he had hired the Human Resources manager to handle things like pay and perks and absenteeism; this man spent all his energies organizing picnics.

  “Very good for bonding, sir,” said the HR man. “For teambuilding.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Anand.

  “Oh, very good, sir.” The HR man seemed to take this for unabashed consent. “I will organize…. And there is a candidate here for that post of systems engineer. Mr. Ananthamurthy has seen him, and he requests you also to please interview. You are able to see him?”

  Anand hesitated. He had a myriad list of things to do, but the expanding factory fattened steadily on a diet of new employees, and Anand gained a quiet pleasure from the quality of people who were beginning to seek employment with them. “Okay,” he said. “Quickly.”

  He glanced at the day’s headlines. THE LOK AYUKTA ANTI-CORRUPTION RAID YIELDS TWO CRORES IN BRIBES.

  STRAY DOGS ATTACK FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD, BUT STILL TOLERATED. “It is not in our Hindu culture to kill animals,” said a neighboring resident.

  VIJAYAN—NEW HOPE FOR INDIAN POLITICS? with a photograph of the politician in question waving from a podium.

  In the frivolous party pages, there was a photograph of his friend Vinayak, looking pleased and cool and prosperous at an art auction and, on the same page, Anand’s father-in-law, clutching a glass of gin and tonic with vulpine satisfaction. Harry Chinappa’s hooded eyes were ringed by dark dissipation; with his artificially blackened hair and his prominent hooked nose, he resembled a dissolute bird of prey.

  Anand thrust the newspaper away when the interviewee entered the room. The young applicant was slender, bespectacled, and dressed in striped shirt and tie. His hair was parted on the side and neatly combed over, possibly with Brylcreem, for he introduced no odor of coconut oil into the room. According
to the notes scribbled by Ananthamurthy, he belonged to a Gujarati bania caste and, therefore, was probably vegetarian, home-loving, and good with numbers. He perched nervously in front of Anand’s desk.

  “Your good name?” The applicant, Anand noted, was about twenty-six years old, with the requisite four years of experience, and fluent in Kannada, as well as Hindi and Gujarati and English. “Born where? Oh, came to Bangalore as a child, is it? Father is doing what?”

  For Ananthamurthy, caste and community were important hiring considerations, but Anand tried to guard against this. He himself had married out of caste—and that, in his mind, was a sign of progress, of stepping away from the rigid brahminical mind-set of his parents. Of course, there was still a tendency to hire the familiar, that was a natural impulse; if he analyzed his employee lists, he saw that most were Kannadiga or at least South Indian, some were brahmin—but, as leavening, there were three Muslims, two Kerala Christians, and several North Indians. In fact, if one considered the new machinery consultants, there were even two foreign—Korean—faces wandering around. As a welcoming gesture, special food was brought for them from the Korean restaurant in the city, and when Mr. Ananthamurthy, in a further gesture of first-day hospitality, decided to eat with them, he found the visitors unwrapping sea leaves, fish, and chicken, the unpalatable smells spreading across the table and staying the consumption of his own strictly vegetarian tiffin.

  Mr. Ananthamurthy was conservative in his habits, consuming a large home-cooked meal in the morning and carrying to work a small steel tiffin box packed by his wife and daughters to shield him from the perils of oversalted canteen food. But, in truth, the factory canteen food was tasty; the same dishes were served to workers and managers alike (which Anand personally insisted upon): a good everyday menu of vegetables, dal, rice-sambar-saaru, chapattis, a mixed rice such as chitranna bhath or lemon rice, curds, and a sweet. Fully vegetarian, of course, for that was the preferred way. Indian manufactories might work to upgrade their production methods to international standards, but they were still populated by old-fashioned people with old-fashioned values; one could not argue with that. As Ananthamurthy had discovered, in the call centers and software development offices in the city, things were different. There they introduced American-style ways: fast food, casual attitudes, fun games, crazy decorations. This was apparently done to create environments that no employee would dream of leaving, but of course, that did not work either. Employee turnover continued unabated, like water swirling down an unplugged sink.

  It took, on average, three months for new hires to lose their bewilderment, six months to find their feet, and one year to become fully reliable. And then, just as one could put them to work in a thorough fashion and turn one’s attention to other things, they came in blithely ready to quit—citing other job offers, or stress, or nonsense like that one giddy idiot who quit the accounts department to write a book. Employers, it seemed, had to make themselves attractive to potential employees in new and unprecedented ways, as though they were products stacked on supermarket shelves and seeking out buyers.

  “You are married? Children?” The good employees usually were. Marriage and children forced a seriousness upon them, prevented them from scurrying from job to job, tempted by any passing incremental offer like a woman of easy virtue and no discrimination.

  “Yes, sir. And with two children, sir,” said the applicant, adding considerably to his own worth. “But I am fully willing to travel, if necessary, sir.”

  Unfortunately, the thoroughness with which the young man had prepared for the interview had also made him acutely aware of his own market worth. He was asking for 20 percent more than Anand had planned to pay.

  In the abstract, Anand fully approved of such a thing. This was what happened when a society slowly moved out of poverty. Better pay, better lifestyles. It still had the power to astonish him, that he should bear witness to this transformation, striking him afresh every time he wandered into a hypermarket, the rows of products from around the world that were on sale; it moved him, even as his children obliviously shopped for the things they took so much for granted—so different from the small two-type-biscuit, three-type-sweet, one-type-pen kaka shops he had grown up with.

  But practically, it made him cautious and thoughtful when he hired. This systems engineer, though, appeared to be worth it. Anand signed a note to the HR man approving his hire.

  THAT AFTERNOON HE RECEIVED a call from his mother, telephoning to complain about the plumbing. The commode kept backing up, she said, and the plumber, in the nature of plumbers, was recalcitrant, inefficient, and mystifying in his proposed solutions. What did Anand think she should do? Over the years, she had taken to calling him on such things, everyday matters, bypassing his father, who seemed content to spend his days in a banian vest and dhoti, discussing philosophy and the importance of not giving in to material desires while Anand solved his plumbing problems from a distance of a hundred miles. “Okay, Amma,” he said. “Okay. I’ll attend to it.”

  Each month, without his father’s knowledge, he sent money to his mother, depositing it directly into her account; his father never checked account balances.

  “How is he,” he said now.

  “Same,” his mother said. “Prostate giving trouble, so maybe the doctor will advise surgery…. Are you eating well?” she said. “And sleeping? … Don’t work too hard.”

  “Okay, Amma,” he said, knowing that this standard maternal exhortation hid a complete ignorance of what he did for a living.

  Anand’s father could never comprehend or approve of his son’s choice of profession, which he felt sacrificed learning for profit. Years before, visiting Anand’s first factory unit, he could not hide his shock and disgust. He had never returned for a repeat visit; his son’s work became a topic he refused to discuss.

  Anand had never forgotten, never forgiven his father’s shame. When his new factory was scheduled to open, he nevertheless dutifully called to invite him to the opening ceremony.

  “You should come,” he said.

  “Is it?” his father replied. “But isn’t that the week of Guruprasad’s daughter’s wedding in Hubli …” Anand did not argue with this stated conflict with a function of a distant cousin his father had always despised. Instead of pressing his parent as was expected, he said:

  “Is it? Then you should go for that.”

  His father had not attended the factory inauguration; the resultant distance between Mysore and Bangalore had stretched from a hundred miles to four years. Naturally Anand’s mother could not visit her son’s factory without being disloyal to her husband, and if the increased amounts Anand was depositing in her account indicated his growing financial stability, she made no mention of it, functioning between the two men like a secret agent, marked by guile, covert phone calls, and essays of great diplomacy.

  “I’M GOING OUT FOR half an hour,” Anand said casually. The trick lay in making it sound uninteresting; an outing that would not register on his wife’s sensitive social radar. “With Vinayak …”

  “Vinayak Agarwal?” she asked, looking up from her magazine. “Will his wife be there?”

  “No … he wants my help …”—he aimed for vague and boring—“on some engineering matter.”

  As he hoped, she immediately lost interest.

  Unfortunately, Vinayak, like Vidya, had his own set of socializing concerns; he wanted to meet at the new pub that was the latest in latest things. It would be noisy and crowded, not conducive to the kind of discussion Anand had in mind, but he did want Vinayak’s help and could not quibble.

  The Latest Latest Bar was located in the ELIPT Mall—its name was supposedly an acronym for the names of the four brothers who built the mall, but a local wag had immediately expanded it to Extremely Luxurious but In Poor Taste, an opinion that Anand found difficult to disagree with. Shiny escalators swooped upward in a space seemingly imported from shrieking Dubai; an amazement of gilt and a fresco-covered ceiling in a mock-up o
f the Sistine Chapel: Man reaching upward, milky-eyed with greed, the Creator’s hand holding out not the promise of life at the tip of a finger but, Santa Claus–like, a gift wrapped in paper and ribbons, the angels clustered behind him carrying the urgent promise of more: handbags, perfume bottles, designer-labeled shopping bags. Let there be Lights—and an explosion of spending.

  Anand was the first to reach the bar, submitting to the lazy security check and fighting his way to a corner of the bar counter. He ordered his beer and sorrowfully contemplated the bowl of olives that accompanied it. What, ultimately, was the magic of the olive that allowed it to flourish at the expense of other condiments; that took it from being a local fruit in a regional cuisine—probably once plucked and eaten by sweat-streaked, tree-climbing schoolboys in Italy before angry farmers could chase them away, much as he had raided nellikayi gooseberry trees in Mysore, dipping the spoils in salt and chili powder for a stolen after-school treat—and raised it to the status of an internationally hallowed bar food? He ate one: salty, squashy, cold, and green.

  “Want to order some snacks, sir?” The bartender was dressed, like the other bar employees, in a white shirt, black pants, and red Converse shoes. SELVADURAI, his name badge said. Anand shook his head and noticed with relief the large figure lumbering in.

  Vinayak levered his bulk with effort onto the barstool next to Anand. “Shit! These things are damn uncomfortable.” He placed an olive in his mouth and looked around, but all the tables were occupied. “Whiskey please, yes, that Aberlour is fine, and some paneer tikkas and masala nuts … What do you mean, no masala nuts. No tikkas also? Let me see that menu…. Okay, fine, bruschetta and, yeah, grilled mushrooms. Okay with you, Anand?” Anand nodded; he didn’t actually care. Vinayak was a strict vegetarian, having apparently attained his size on ghee and dal-bhatti alone. Food and drink ordered, Vinayak relaxed and inspected the other people in the bar. He waved at someone at a distant table. “See that guy? He got that large government order apparently by providing whores to the minister involved. What a pimp job, yaar …” Like his namesake, Ganesha, Vinayak was gifted with a potbelly, a penchant for prosperity, the cunning to market a stroll around his parents into a world odyssey, and a long, trunk-like nose perfect for poking into everyone else’s affairs. “Are we seeing you at Chetty’s party this weekend?”