Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  One of my taxi drivers told me that room and board are not necessarily employee perks, like the Friday morning bagels in my New York office. At Birender’s stand, half of this driver’s 200-rupee-per-day salary was deducted for the food he ate and the canvas tent he slept in. This seemed to be a common arrangement between employee and employer; and while it made sense from the perspectives of both bosses and employees, it also created some perverse incentives on either side. For the bosses, every rupee they skimp on accommodations is multiplied by the quantity of their workforce into pure profit. And for the employees who might face both joblessness and homelessness once the task is finished, their only incentive is to make each job last as long as possible. Which is why we came home at two o’clock one very late night to find an exhausted Anya feeding her dogs in the driveway. She’d just finished spending her third full day managing the laborers painting her apartment, and this was the first moment she’d had to do the rest of her household chores.

  “Three days to paint a two-bedroom apartment?” we’d scoffed. “How can it possibly take so long?”

  It took so long because the laborers had every incentive to work as slow as possible. If Anya hadn’t been hovering over them all day long, it would have probably taken them even longer. After all, it took three days for the painters Shankar hired simply to paint our spare bedroom. While Anya had had to pester her painters all day to achieve her level of productivity, the painters in our flat were managed by Shankar’s main office boy, who spent three days running up and down the stairs between Shankar’s office and our flat in his attempt to do two full-time jobs at once. The moment he’d step out of our door, the painters’ pace would slacken noticeably.

  When we first got to Delhi, it was the beggars who broke our hearts. But as we grew to better understand the city, we began to feel worse for the laborers. Those who suffer the most, we realized, are not the ones making drama (and profit) of it.

  This revelation came on a frigid night a few days before our first Christmas: as I was escorting the last of our holiday party guests to their cars, the neighborhood guard rushed up to me and began pleading for something in Hindi. I couldn’t understand what he wanted, of course, but one of my guests could. “He’s asking if you have any paper to burn. He’s cold.”

  I was staggered. While Jenny and I had spent the last few weeks whining because our electric heaters weren’t as powerful as the steam radiators back in Brooklyn, this sixteen-year-old guard had been burning empty plastic chai cups to keep warm, just three stories below our bedroom. I quickly ran upstairs and gathered all the paper I could find for him. And then, after I locked the bungalow’s front gate and returned back upstairs, I stepped on to our terrace to look at him. Warm in my heavy winter jacket, I watched him rub his hands together above a fire he wouldn’t have had if I hadn’t happened to walk my party guests to their car.

  I realized why his plight moved me so much: because the people whose misfortunes have become their livelihoods—the dislocated children, the crippled men, the withered mothers—aren’t the poorest people in this city. The poorest are all those who endure inhuman professions because they have no other choice.

  Like this guard. As in many Delhi neighborhoods of a certain class, our front doors were watched over by private guards while we sat on our sofas and slept in our beds. Our daytime guard was a smiling, round-faced fellow who looked around forty-five and shared his name with India’s fourth-richest man. His days were spent chatting with passing servants, raising the simple metal arm that blocked the road whenever a vehicle needed to pass, and sitting on the plastic bus-station-style chairs that, along with a simple open-air shelter and a single light bulb hanging from the tree, were the only comforts the neighborhood association provided for him and his night-time counterpart. The changing of the guard happened sometime after sunset, when the night-time guard—we cycled through a few, most of them teenagers—would take over. The flow of traffic would cease by midnight, at which point he’d slam shut the iron gate that closed off our street. And from then until sunrise, his job was to sit next to the gate and open it for any vehicle that honked to pass through.

  That was his whole job: sit, wait, and snap to attention when honked at.

  In winter, we’d see him shivering or dozing fitfully when we’d come home late. We’d open the human-sized door built into the gate as quietly as we could so as not to wake him. We pitied him for being cold, but we also pitied him for being bored: his whole livelihood was to act as a human motion detector. A simple machine could have done his job just as well, but he was far cheaper than a simple machine. Economics gave him no choice but to accept a job sitting in the cold from an employer who provided no jacket and no firewood, and who didn’t pay enough that he could afford protection against the chill beyond the ratty blanket he’d wrapped around himself.

  Human motion detectors are everywhere in Delhi. In the third basement of my company’s DLF Cyber City building, a young woman was employed to stand near the elevators and direct anyone unclear as to how to get to the lobby above. All I ever saw her do was stand and stare at cement walls while businesspeople conversant in the way elevators worked pressed the button without assistance. In my office a few floors above, our guard Jagdish would staff the reception desk from before the first person arrived until after the very last person left, sometimes pacing the reception area in his efforts to stay awake. Outside a trendy bar in GK-II, we saw the same bushy-mustached guard each and every time we passed by for eighteen full months; the entirety of the professional existence of this fifty-year-old man was to open the door for anyone coming in.

  To us, this is true suffering: enduring physical misery and abject boredom because, in an economy so tragically oversupplied by labor, there is no other choice. Being trapped in all-consuming circumstances that exhaust the body or destroy the soul yet teach no useful skills, contain no possibility of advancement and provide no trajectory out. True suffering is endured by a sixteen-year-old guard who sees stretched out before him a lifetime of huddling in the cold, opening the gate and not much else.

  The same economic structure that has peons making copies and children washing dishes for sidewalk dhabas is the reason Ganga was part of our household. Growing up middle class in the US, maids were something Jenny and I saw only on sitcoms or in movies like Mary Poppins, in which silent servants attended caricatures of the disgustingly wealthy who’d complain about “the help” even while taking crystal glasses off silver trays being held by them.

  Nobody we knew had any “help.” Our parents taught us both that everyone was equal and that nobody was above manual labor, which is why my siblings Eric and Susan and I were responsible for a roster of household chores that increased as we grew older: cleaning the dishes, making our beds, folding the laundry, mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, and doing whatever else our parents could find for us to do when Married With Children was on and they didn’t want us to watch it. The closest we came to having a maid was the cleaning service my mom hired twice a month to scrub the bathtubs, wax the floors, and do the other jobs that were worth paying someone else to do. But even that somehow increased our workload: on the evenings before the service was scheduled to come, my mom would run around the house ordering all of us to “Clean up!” because “The cleaning lady is coming tomorrow!”

  Aside from that indulgence, both Jenny and I were raised to believe that it was both extravagant and exploitative to hire someone to do what we were perfectly capable of doing ourselves. And just as I was uncomfortable telling a peon to make a photocopy, neither could I imagine telling a maid to peel my orange and butter my toast. But two things changed our outlook on maids: first, we saw that in this vast oversupply of labor, it’s almost a social imperative for wealthier people to provide livelihoods for those who would otherwise have none. That’s why Shankar would pay someone just to change a light bulb or tighten a screw. Because whole families were supported by the meager earnings such labor provided.

 
; The second thing that changed our opinion of maids was realizing how wonderful it was to have one.

  It was terrific. Once Ganga came into our lives, dirty dishes would just disappear from the sink. The toilet would suddenly be disinfected and shining. Clothes that might have languished at the bottom of the laundry basket instead appeared pressed and folded on our bed. Dust that had been building up in the corners when we left for work would be gone when we returned. Food would magically appear in the refrigerator. Sheets and towels would magically freshen. Toilet paper rolls would magically replenish. And all this with a maid only three days a week!

  We originally hired Ganga solely because we’d read that it was the obligation of rich foreigners to do so; her cooking had been an unexpected windfall. We were initially quite uncomfortable telling her what to do, and our discomfort was exacerbated by the fact that a woman our age was calling us “sir” and “ma’am.” (Such a difference the accident of geography makes: but for the country of our birth, Jenny and I were living the glamorous life of expat travel while Ganga had two kids and managed rich people’s households for a living.) But as the benefits of having a maid revealed themselves, and we realized the relative lightness of Ganga’s responsibilities as compared to most maids in the neighborhood, we grew at ease with our decision to employ her. I even began fantasizing about life with full-time help—or better yet, with the full complement of household staff that the folks living the lucky expat life in Lutyens’s Delhi were surely enjoying. I imagined my staff lined up in the foyer at 6:01 p.m., when I’d march through my door. “Good evening, sir,” they’d say in unison, knowing that my slippers, sherry, and pipe would be due at 6:02.

  But Ganga made life pleasant enough, and that Mary Poppins lifestyle comes at a cost: we’d overhear the exhausted housewives—expat and local—commiserating over Khan Market coffees about their difficulties commanding platoons of maids, cooks, gardeners, drivers, guards, garbage collectors and toilet cleaners. Not only were there the challenges of making sure they were all doing their jobs properly—had the closet been dusted? was the toilet cleaned below the rim? did they put too much salt in the food again? my god, did they look through our underwear drawer?—but there was also the internal politics: this one refuses to take orders from that one, that one refuses to share food with this one, and all sorts of servant-on-servant power struggles.

  Ganga’s impact on our lives went beyond her dal makhani, though. She taught us about the responsibilities of those who are fortunate (even as we enjoyed the benefits that came with it). Ganga considered herself lucky in life, and her self-image manifested in the concern she showed not just for her family, and not just for Jenny and me, but for everyone less fortunate than her. She imparted her outlook to us, training us in recycling habits that far surpassed the mandates of the Bloomberg administration. Our copies of The New Yorker were saved for her children’s English lessons. Our old clothes were given to her neighbors. Glass jars, torn purses, inside-out umbrellas—anything that could be reused, repaired, or repurposed was to be put aside for her thoughtful redistribution.

  Especially food. This was, to her, a household’s most valuable resource. When Jenny threw away a gallon-sized container of granola because she found a mouse dropping in it, Ganga took it out of our bin and gently chastened her, tactfully explaining that our view of spoiled food was not a universal one: “People still want it.”

  Shilpa, the bungalow’s garbage maid, shared a similar outlook. One morning she rang our doorbell and, holding up a week-old container of yogurt she’d pulled from our trash, began shouting at us in Hindi. We couldn’t understand her words, but we certainly got the gist.

  We tried to be receptive to their training. Our challenge was with food that we were sure had spoiled in our refrigerator. Even though we knew people were hungry, we didn’t want anyone getting sick from our moldy mangoes or the jar of liver pâté that I left mostly uneaten in the refrigerator for months because it was so incredibly gross. In these cases, we couldn’t take the shame of Ganga or Shilpa’s disapproval; we’d walk up Aurobindo Marg to throw it away ourselves, tossing our anonymous plastic bags and disappearing before anyone could connect us with such ostentatious waste, hoping that the cows would get to it before the ragpickers did.

  Ragpickers are yet another manifestation of Delhi’s labor situation. If there are rupees to be found in garbage bags, there are people whose livelihoods were structured around finding them. “Ragpickers” is a catch-all term for anyone who makes their living as a scavenger, whether they recover vegetable scraps to feed their goat or metal bits to sell to recyclers. As economic actors, ragpickers ensure that very little waste in Delhi is truly wasted—anything that can be broken down into component parts and sold for profit is done so by garbage maids like Shilpa, by kabadiwallahs who cycle around the neighborhoods, and even, as Sam Miller recounts in his book Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity, by the hordes of adults and children who pick over Delhi’s massive landfills.

  Unfortunately for all those actors, though, the cheap labor situation keeps a great deal of what Americans would consider trash from entering the waste stream at all. This is more than just Ganga’s redistribution of our old socks; in a culture in which every rupee is considered against the potential recurrence of historic ruin, repairmen of all levels of cost and expertise exist to ensure anything short of a melted tiffin box can be repaired instead of thrown away. (And even my melted tiffin box was probably resurrected somewhere along the line.)

  America has repairmen, of course. But our cost of labor drastically raises the price-point at which goods become candidates for repair: in the US, anything cheaper than a mid-range DVD player or a window air-conditioning unit doesn’t make much sense to get fixed. This is obvious when walking down a Brooklyn sidewalk on trash pickup day: lining the streets are stereo speakers, blenders and old televisions that would mean business for any Delhi repairman but just aren’t worth it in our economy. (It does create opportunities for creativity, though, like when I picked an old Macintosh computer out of the garbage, gutted it, filled it with dirt, planted flowers in it, and entered it into a local decorating competition. It was a finalist!) The same goes for clothes that don’t fit: we’d stuff them into neighborhood charity boxes, despite knowing that the so-called charities were just selling them to Africa by the ton. Even furniture would just be put to the curb for the city to deal with, or for neighbors to collect before the city could get to it.

  (I saw nothing wrong with this practice, but my grandparents certainly did. For years after they learned that the sofas in my college apartment had been scavenged from the sidewalk, they entertained themselves by sarcastically admiring every piece of discarded furniture we’d pass in their car. “Look at that one, Dave! No banana peels on it or anything. Want us to stop?” There were times when an item they’d point out would actually pique my interest, but even if I could have gotten it on the train back to the city, I knew they’d never let me hear the end of it; so I’d just laugh with them and gaze wistfully as we drove by.)

  We never found any “good trash” in Delhi. Nothing good ever made it as far as the curb. If it was recyclable, someone would scavenge it. And if it was fixable, it would certainly be fixed. That goes for furniture and for computers, but it also goes for far cheaper items. I’d pass a half-dozen tailors in the market, each one of them capable of and eager to take my measurements, pop the seams on the too-big Indiana Jones T-shirt I’d bought in Thailand, and reassemble it to fit my figure for the cost of a spool of thread back home. I’d also pass by at least three electricians sitting in closet-sized shops overflowing with spools of wire and dusty motors from appliances long since disassembled. After just 150 rupees and two days, our toaster would be toasting again.

  Of course, repairmen in Delhi have the same incentives as anyone else in the low end of the economy. So a month later, my T-shirt’s stitches would fray, our toaster would short out once more, our water tank would stop automatically refilling, our air con
ditioner would break down, our backup power supply would fail, and each repairman would have another customer.

  So why doesn’t America have sidewalk tailors, human motion detectors and maids for the middle class? It’s not because we’re any more enlightened, egalitarian and morally superior. It’s because in our economy, mechanical motion detectors are cheaper than human ones. Simple as that.

  Which is why we think that India’s days of cheap repairmen, red-light economies, child labor, and office peons are numbered. Because as India’s economy grows, its middle class will swell, its supply of labor will equalize, and two things will happen: labor will command more money for menial jobs, and the market for menial employment will shrink as people find it more economical to do things for themselves. India’s economy will feel more like America’s.

  It will take time, of course, and it will require staunching the flow of migrants to the city (240,000 people a year, by the city’s estimates),4 which will in turn require economic growth in other parts of the country to reduce migratory incentives. But we believe this will happen, and that much of what we wrote about in this chapter will cease to exist. This is the future we see for India: a far more prosperous society in which more children have to do their own household chores but far fewer children live on the street.

  We think that future generations of Indians will experience childhoods that mirror ours, including career paths that begin with lousy teenage jobs. I remember my colleague Anurag’s reaction when I told him I’d spent the summer of my sixteenth year picking up discarded cups of tobacco spit at the movie theater: he angrily told me to stop lying, except he used words he wouldn’t want me to put into print. “My grandmother would roll over in her grave,” he told me, “if I had to sweep a movie theater.” But this was the case: between the ages of sixteen and eighteen, I was employed to sweep movie theater floors, mop restaurants after closing time, and dig up weedy gardens in the hot sun. (I was also hired for a few wonderful months to sort old comic books at the local collectables shop. I worked alone in the back room with no supervision for a few hours after school each day, happily reading what Superman had been up to in the early 1980s before putting his bygone adventure in the appropriate box and moving on to Green Lantern.) Jenny followed a similarly mundane career path in her teens: she took telephone orders at a fast food pizza place, straightened hangers at a discount clothing shop, and cleared dirty dishes from tables in an Italian restaurant.