Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  (On an unrelated note, Sam’s article also featured one of the greatest descriptions of love ever put to print. The same waiter went on to tell Sam about his unrequited adoration for a woman in his central Indian village: “When I am with her, I feel like I am in an AC room.”)

  We wasted a significant portion of our first ten days in Delhi searching for a wireless router so we could access both the Internet and our couch at the same time. At that point, we hadn’t yet learned about the existence of Nehru Place. And the electronics store in Khan Market barely lived up to the name—a keyboard here, a PlayStation there, but apparently wireless routers were too specialized for their inventory. Frustrated with the fruitless search and dreading the possibility of a long Diwali weekend tethered so archaically to a single Ethernet cable, we mentioned our problem to Shankar, our landlord. We knew that his company did something with technology, so maybe he’d know where to go.

  Shankar’s son Rahul just picked up the phone. Our doorbell rang exactly thirty minutes later with a man bearing a router like he was delivering a pizza.

  A love of India flooded our hearts.

  New York is a city of two-month waits for a dentist’s appointment and cancellation charges if we don’t show up. Of surly cashiers who pretend not to notice us standing directly in front of them. Of postal employees hidden behind two-inch-thick bullet-proof glass and even thicker attitudes. Of hospital emergency rooms that are empty of attendants, with nothing but a clipboard for us to put down our names and seats in which to wait while our friend Jeff clutches his burned hand and asks Jenny if she has aspirin in her purse. Of drugstore employees so notoriously unpleasant that our friends Andrew and Heather could dress as them for New York City’s Halloween parade and everyone at whom they pretended to yell—of all races, from all neighborhoods, representing all classes—immediately got the joke.

  I once watched a customer in line at a Brooklyn supermarket suggest to the cashier that she could “smile a bit more.” The cashier immediately began screaming for her manager—and the manager actually took the cashier’s side.

  But not in Delhi. The Land of Router Delivery! Customer service as we’d only seen on Leave It to Beaver! When we needed our teeth cleaned, we could make appointments for that very afternoon. When we bought house-plants, a guy bicycled them to our bungalow and carried them up to our flat. The video rental store would knock on our door to collect overdue movies and then present a binder full of DVDs for subsequent home entertainment. The liquor store would assign someone to carry our beer home. Our accountant would come to meet with us in our living room. The bank representative would promise to call us back with information the next day—and he actually would!

  But as deeply as we came to love Delhi’s customer service, our first instinct was to resist it. We were both accustomed to New York’s style of customer service, in which any drugstore employee asking “May I help you?” was doing so only because her manager was watching. When Jenny and I traveled to friendlier parts of the US, we’d actually be suspicious of employees’ sincere offers of assistance. “Why is that guy smiling at us?” I’d whisper to Jenny upon walking into an Albuquerque Walgreens. “Oh my God, why is he actually walking us to the shampoo aisle? And did he just say ‘You’re welcome’?!”

  So the first time Jenny entered a Delhi pharmacy, she had no desire for any interaction with the employees beyond getting a finger pointed towards the shampoo aisle. But instead of giving her directions, the employee she’d queried requested that she wait at the counter. She complied, her initial confusion turning into—yes, anger—as the employee gathered up a single representative of each of the brands on the shelf and then returned to hold them out to her, one by one. And then he did the same thing for hand lotions, and then bath soaps. Later, at the housewares store, a salesman presented her the coffee makers and the kitchen plates in the same sequential manner. Then it happened while buying shirts in the mall. Then while buying pens in the stationery store.

  We found ourselves dreading the act of shopping simply because of the attention we knew would be paid to us. Even if we could convince the employee that, no, we needed absolutely no assistance identifying our preferred brand, and that we were perfectly capable of wrapping our fingers around bottles ourselves, the employee still followed two paces behind, ready to spring to assistance. If we picked a bottle of Finesse, he eagerly handed us a bottle of Pantene for comparison.

  We fought back. We’d dash into the pharmacy together, split up, and rush around to find the lip balm, never making eye contact with the employees who were chasing after us around the store. We hated the attention, we hated the time that those employees spent helping us, and we hated feeling obligated to buy something because those employees had spent so much time paying attention to us. Why, we’d think, standing outside the pharmacy and plotting our separate routes through the aisles—why can’t they just treat us like normal customers?

  Finally, we realized what was happening: they were treating us like normal customers.

  This is the difference between India’s human-scale retail and the corporate-scale retail in the United States. Back home, almost every store we went to for our daily needs was a national chain functioning on a national scale. Individual customers and individual employees were fractions of decimals of cash flow and labor expenditure, which meant that they were insignificant in the macro view of the parent company. Neither the employees’ performance nor my satisfaction would impact the company’s billions. That’s why an employee could roll her eyes at our request for help without getting fired: she has no stake in the company beyond her $7.25 an hour, and she knows her manager would rather lose a customer than fill out the termination paperwork, much less find a new employee who actually has a positive attitude. What’s more, every one of us knows that the company sees its employees as trained seals who are pressing buttons, and that their jobs are secure only until the company trains actual seals to do the same thing. The expectations of all parties are lowered accordingly.

  But in a Delhi store, the connection between an employee’s behavior and the owner’s profit is direct. Not only because a mom-and-pop store needs every customer it can get, but because the owner is usually bent over his ledger right there by the cash register, watching the transaction over the rims of his glasses. There’s also the pressure of intense competition—for the owner, who knows that any successful company can expect its competitor to open next door and take the same name; and for the employee, who knows that in an economy with such an oversupply of labor, he’s lucky to have a job at all.

  Most importantly, though, Delhiites simply expect a level of respect New Yorkers have long since given up on.

  Our frustration with exuberant customer service faded once we understood its purpose: it was because stores genuinely wanted our business.

  And once we realized that we were valued as customers, the next logical step was to start taking advantage of our value. And so we learned to bargain.

  In the retail environment in which Jenny and I grew up, the price tag is the price tag. Houses and cars are open for negotiation in America, but just about everything else is rung up at cash registers by bored teens who wouldn’t have the authority to make a counter-offer even if they knew what one was. This is why Wal-Mart stores are found on every corner not already occupied by Target stores: Americans value convenience over price. We want to buy our clothes, electronics, auto parts, home furnishings and pet food all in the same place. By prioritizing convenience, that means that none of us would ever price a basket of goods at Wal-Mart and then offer the Target manager a few dollars less for the same bundle. Instead, while we accept that Target’s margins may be slightly higher on garden hose and Wal-Mart’s may be slightly higher on toothpaste, we believe the difference will be worth less than the extra time spent driving to the other store. We have faith that the invisible hand has pushed the price down as far as it can go, and we rarely give it a second thought.

  That’s why it was so c
hallenging for us to bargain in India. Not just because we didn’t know any bargaining techniques, but because we actually discovered in ourselves a culturally imposed taboo against bargaining. To our sensibilities, bargaining felt like we were insulting the seller. Like we were trying to cheat him. We were far more comfortable just asking for the price and paying what we were told.

  Then we realized that the salesmen were smirking at our backs every time we accepted their first offer. Bargaining, we finally understood, is built into the price tag. If we accepted the first price, we weren’t respecting them—we were just hurting ourselves.

  And so we attempted to bargain. It was ungainly at first—laughable, really—but we eventually figured it out. And while the techniques we learned were common sense to anyone who grew up here, they were a revelation to us.

  Our most basic tactic was this: whatever it was we wanted, we shouldn’t show it. Once the seller knew our intentions, his price would grow remarkably inflexible, and only if he truly thought we’d walk away would his price begin to shrink. We discovered this entirely by accident when I made inadvertent eye contact with a vendor selling poster-sized maps of the city in the Basant Lok market. He held up his wares and quoted 300 rupees. But as soon as we walked past, his price instantly fell by fifty percent. The further we walked away, the lower his price fell, until suddenly he was shouting a number that was a sliver of his original price, and we decided to become owners of the same obligatory wall map that Murali would mock in every expat living room he visited.

  The only flaw in this technique is that the seller had to believe we were serious. More often than not, we’d walk out of a shop expecting the salesperson to call after us but hearing only the door clicking shut. We’d look at each other and then sheepishly slink back in to pay his price.

  We started supplementing this technique with the goodcop-bad-cop approach, which meant that one of us would eagerly pursue an item while the other would adamantly oppose it. This, too, we learned by accident. Walking through Connaught Place one evening, I spotted a street vendor’s bootlegged copy of Lonely Planet India just as Jenny spotted something she coveted just as enthusiastically: a McDonalds in which she could use the toilet. As I began expressing interest in the book, she began pulling at my sleeve, and the more urgently she tried to drag me away, the more the vendor improved his price.

  I learned our most effective tactic by watching my colleague Dipankar work the guys who sold beanbag chairs in abandoned M.G. Road storefronts. We’d taken the office taxi up the road to make this purchase, knowing that the two beanbags would turn our shared cubicle into the hippest corner of the office. After we picked out the ones we wanted, the vendor named his price. And then Dipankar countered with the five most devastatingly effective words anyone could utter to a Delhi storeowner: ‘Can I have a discount?’

  Those five words almost unfailingly knocked ten percent off of whatever we were buying. At the vegetable stand, with the custom tailors, buying a stereo system—all we had to do was ask.

  Dipankar was a master at this technique. He would apply it in places I’d never imagine, like at a party I threw for my co-workers at a restaurant in GK-II. As soon as Dipankar saw the number of people at the table, he turned to me and said, “Did you ask the owner for a discount?”

  “No,” I replied. “Why would I do that?”

  Dipankar laughed as he got up from the table. “Because that’s what you do.” He flagged down the manager, pointed out all the people I had gathered in his fine establishment, and asked for a discount on food. Which he received. Just like that.

  Jenny and I applied this technique to lower the prices of hotel rooms, guided tours, furniture, and bootleg DVDs in Delhi, south India, Nepal, and even Singapore. All we had to do was ask. The worst they could do was say no; the best they could do was often much better than we expected. I’m pleased to say that the students became the master: at the goodbye party Jenny and I had at a Defence Colony restaurant just before we left Delhi, I flagged down the manager, pointed out all the people I had gathered in his fine establishment, and asked for a discount on booze. And when he only offered two-for-one on hard drinks, I pressed him further and got a thirty percent discount on beer.

  In fact, this technique taught us to see the world differently: everything, we suddenly realized, was open for negotiation. When it came time to move out of our Delhi flat, we proposed to our landlord that he halve our final month’s rent if we found another foreigner to take our place; he agreed so readily I realized we should have asked for a full month’s rent as our fee. When we took our bargaining skills to Singapore, we got twenty-five percent knocked off our monthly rent and a further forty percent off the apartment broker’s fee simply by asking: “Can we have a discount?” And when we needed a new computer, we found ourselves walking out of Singapore’s Sim Lim Plaza with a free keyboard, a free mouse and free RAM simply because we asked the first vendor for a discount and then played his offer against the other vendors in the complex.

  Because Delhiites are such relentless bargainers, business owners have to worry about their margins. This may be why so many of the city’s stores and nearly all its markets—even the upscale ones—were generally in need of renovation.

  To put it politely.

  I don’t mean this as a foreigner’s clichéd sniff of disdain. Instead, I wonder if in a bargain-obsessed culture, poor lighting or a dirty floor or a dust-covered display might actually give some bargaining leverage back to the business owner.

  After all, bargain-minded shoppers would look at a store with mood lighting and waxed counters and calculate how much their purchase price would be marked-up for upkeep. The store next door, with inventory strewn all about and mosquito civilizations evolving in puddles on the sales floor, obviously applies none of its revenue towards aesthetics. Strategic dirt could actually convey the impression of costs cut to the bone, which could then allow the business owner to credibly claim his prices to be as low as he could go. The environment may send goras like me scurrying for the nearest mall, but given the poppadumthin margins that must exist—especially in the trade-specific markets, where everyone sells the same inventory and the same service—an unkempt environment could actually be a competitive advantage.

  According to our neighbor Anya, the neighborhood around Hauz Khas market is among the oldest residential developments in south Delhi. It was surrounded by fields and farms when she would visit her grandfather as a child. Back then, Aurobindo Marg was a road to nowhere that bisected nothing. And the homes across the street from our flat—which now house a group of merchant families in circular competition to buy nicer cars and throw louder weddings than the next—are still groves of trees in Anya’s memory. Hauz Khas market boasted “a temple, a milk guy, a bread guy, and not much else.” When Anya’s grandfather first moved there, he could have never expected his quiet exurban neighborhood market to one day boast a store selling three different brands of Swiss muesli, Delhi’s “first openly gay-friendly unisex hair salon,”4 and an Americastyle coffee lounge in which an upper-class youth in his mid-twenties set up his keyboard every Sunday to serenade patrons with karaoke renditions of “Summer of ’69,” “Hotel California,” and the theme from Friends.

  These days, Hauz Khas market is typical of many of south Delhi’s local markets. We could pick up pomegranates from the fruitwallah, carrots from the veggiewallah, yogurt from the Mother Dairy stall, kitchen sponges from dry goods store, and bread from the guy who sold loaves out of the three-wheeled bread truck that he parked directly across the sidewalk from Prakash General Store, which sold the exact same brands of bread. We could get signs made, keys made, frames made, eyeglasses made and clothes made. We could buy plastic chairs from the guy who sold all forms of plastic furniture except plastic tables, which we had to buy from another guy down the street. There were two butchers to choose from, if we had been at all enticed by the bloody rows of meat on the counter with no refrigerators in sight. Some of the stores in Hauz Khas
market were modern and shining, with fluorescent light spilling out of spotless windows onto freshly swept sidewalks. Others were prehistoric and dusty, with inventory sprawled across the floor in piles so ancient that it seemed like the pile had come first and that the store must have been constructed around it.

  Hauz Khas market is also typical in its tension between yesterday’s India and tomorrow’s India. As of 2009, organized retail made up about five percent of India’s $450 billion retail industry,5 with the vast majority of India’s commerce still being conducted by sidewalk vendors on busy streets or at mom-and-pop shops in chaotic local markets. It’s mostly still subsidence retail, to coin a phrase: businesses that are making just enough money to survive. But by 2013, organized retail is expected to nearly double in size,6 and Hauz Khas market demonstrates not only how this change manifests in practice, but where the future is headed.

  Let’s go for a walk through Hauz Khas market. There’s Mayura Clothing (“Tailors of Distinction”), in which wizened men toil behind pedal-powered sewing machines and the owner records his sales in the same ledger book he’s used for twenty years. Fifty meters down the road is Freelook, a J.Crew-esque store with a J.Crew-esque logo, air conditioning, plate glass windows, and digital cash registers. (Although Freelook does still employ traditional retail cost-cutting measures: when we open the door, the salesperson rushes to turn on the lights and the music that are kept off to save on electricity.)

  We walk further. There’s Hans Raj Narang Plastics, which can’t be missed thanks to the bare-chested male model on the Amul Macho underwear billboard above its entrance who demonstrates just how snugly Amul Macho underwear fits around a man’s most macho protrusions. The inside of this plastics store is lined with ten-foot shelves and lit by a bulb strung over the dusty blade of a motionless ceiling fan. Every item in the store seems twenty years old and deteriorating fast. In fact, roughly one-third of the plastic party cups we bought there had degraded so much on the shelves that they dribbled vodka and orange juice onto our guests’ shirts. And the plastic forks they sold us had been previously used and half-heartedly washed; we should have known better when we saw that the package was sealed with staples. The proprietor inside scowled at us every time we set foot in his store, as if our desire to exchange money for plastics was some sort of unforgivable imperial arrogance. He’d refuse to help us find any of the items we were looking for, and he’d only grudgingly ring them up if we actually found them. How will he compete when India’s version of Bed, Bath & Beyond finally opens?