Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  PASSAGE TO

  INDIA

  Chapter 11

  I agreed to move our family to India with one explicit condition: I would hire domestic staff guiltlessly and lavishly. I’d outsource shopping, meal planning, cooking, cleaning, and laundry. It was Tom’s career that pushed us into India, but I was determined that my work, too, should benefit. I set out to arrange a household where I was free from everything except spending time with my children and writing.

  Once again, global economics were on my side. Labor in India was even cheaper than in China. The salary of a full-time worker, generously paid by local standards, made almost zero impact on our household budget. And so, on our very first day in Delhi, I started searching for a nanny.

  We’d touched down in the dead of night. My first glimpses of India had been ill-lit vignettes framed in taxi windows: market stalls tarped for night; wild dogs staggering in gutters; bodies dead asleep on pavement. Everything indistinct in the queasy glow of sulfur streetlights and gathering rain; everything falling slowly apart in the monsoon molder. At last the taxi had stopped before a tower of serviced apartments that was very clean, very modern, and annexed to a great gleaming behemoth of a shopping mall. We’d brushed our teeth with bottled water and fallen into a dreamless stupor, all three and a half of us stretched across the king bed: Tom, Max, and heavily pregnant me. Tom’s phone alarm had chirped in the morning. He showered and disappeared.

  I looked at Max, and Max looked at me. What could he understand of this enterprise—moving countries, shipping goods, carrying a baby in my stomach?

  “You want breakfast?”

  “Yeah!”

  At the buffet I piled his plate with rubbery pancakes, greasy chicken sausages, sliced papaya, and pineapple. The coffee was sour, but I drank a pot all the same, milk curdling in the cup.

  Back in our suite I opened the curtains and examined the city by day. Misgiving crept through my gut. The landscape did not match my imagination.

  Tom had visited Delhi years earlier. He’d described flocks of green parrots nesting in palm trees, crumbling Mughal tombs, wild sprays of tropical flowers. He’d invited me to fly to India and visit the Taj Mahal, but news broke in Beirut and I hadn’t gone. India had lingered between us ever since as a symbol of romance and missed chances.

  Now I was greeted by faceless towers and vacant lots. With its bland architecture and listless men and drifts of rubbish, this part of Delhi resembled a hundred other vaguely postapocalyptic towns I’d never hoped to call home.

  And there was much to do. Tom had immediately rushed back into full-tilt reporting work, so the project of settling our family fell to me. We had no house, no car, no babysitter, no nothing. No nothing, and everything took forever. Everything involved taxi rides through choked streets to cramped markets where shops could be reached only via precarious stairs. The walkways were crowded and cars loomed close and Max wobbled on his feet, so I’d hoist him onto my hip and stagger upstairs, lugging a swollen belly and a toddler the size of a German shepherd.

  I needed a cell phone and a SIM card. I needed a doctor to deliver my baby. I needed to figure out where to buy groceries so I could fix lunch in our tiny kitchen. I needed a power strip. I needed to take the power strip back and exchange it for one that worked. I needed bleach solution to soak our fruits and vegetables. I needed fruits and vegetables. I needed to go back and find out why they hadn’t activated the SIM card. I needed passport pictures. I needed to go back and pick up the passport pictures. I needed to go back yet again and pitch a total pregnant lady fit so they’d finally activate the SIM card. I needed mosquito repellant.

  In our spare time, Max and I cruised Delhi with a real estate agent. She wore pantsuits and carried clipboards and was optimistic about everything. We toured shining, brand-new apartments near Deer Park and elegant webs of shadowy marble in Jor Bagh and stiff colonial parlors in Golf Links.

  The rent was too high; the commute too long; the street too noisy. Tom had announced that he wouldn’t live next to a construction site—and now I realized that virtually every block in New Delhi was under construction. We kept looking, and looking more.

  * * *

  ————

  Then Mary came to us.

  I started to write “we found Mary”—but that doesn’t feel true. Mary cannot languish until found; she must have been the one who did the finding. She is the taker, the chooser—a woman of action and decision, always and ever, amen.

  She came to us from a throwaway line on a listserv: “She is a wonderful lady, handles kids and babies extremely well.”

  I knew the brevity of this ad was probably a bad sign. Most outgoing employers expiate their guilt with reference letters so lavish they qualify as fiction. The women are “amazing,” “fabulous,” “indispensable”; they are a melding of Mary Poppins and Florence Nightingale, so DON’T MISS YOUR CHANCE to hire them!

  This false advertising, of course, only heightens the disillusionment when these saintly figures feed the kids Tootsie Rolls and microwave popcorn for lunch or fill the cabinet with unwashed dishes or give everybody food poisoning.

  But I was a beggar, not a chooser—pregnant and exhausted and desperate for childcare. I called and she came.

  Other candidates had sniffed and twitched, peering anxiously around the hotel suite as if our temporary home was a harbinger of familial instability.

  Not Mary. She sat with her feet firmly planted, rested her hands on generous thighs, and regarded me intelligently from a broad, calm face. Her family roots lay in the borderlands between Bhutan and India. She had studied with the nuns in Darjeeling. She was a widow with two teenage children who had been raised in Assam by her mother-in-law.

  I waited for the catch, but it didn’t come. Mary had always cared for twins. She’d worked for years in the home of the U.S. consul general. She’d taken courses in first aid and child development. She was fluent in multiple languages. Her police verification had been done, and she’d undergone a background check in order to work on the grounds of the American embassy.

  I told her I wasn’t sure where we’d be living but named some of the neighborhoods under consideration.

  “No problem, Madame.”

  I explained she’d have to start working for us in the hotel suite, which I understood was unorthodox and awkward.

  “No problem, Madame.”

  “You don’t have to call me Madame.”

  “Okay, Madame.”

  “No, I mean really—”

  “All right, Madame.”

  “Oh…” I was too embarrassed to continue.

  For five and a half days a week, she’d get a starting salary of 15,000 rupees a month, or about $235. To her monthly pay we’d add 500 rupees for her phone usage, plus another 2,000 for bus money and lunch—a total of about $40. We’d pay her medical costs, and twice a year we’d give her $50 to buy clothes. For overtime, which she was free to take or leave, she’d earn $1.50 an hour. She’d get a pay raise after six months, and every year thereafter.

  Mary didn’t quibble, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d done my research, and I couldn’t find anybody who paid more. I’d heard of full-time domestic workers in Delhi earning as little as $100 a month.

  Mary explained, in turn, her only condition: she didn’t want to live in the servants’ quarters that come attached to many middle-class Delhi apartments. Her husband was a Nigerian man she’d met through church, and it would be uncomfortable—really, it would be impossible—for him to live among the servants of India.

  “People are a little bit racist,” she explained gently.

  I assured her we didn’t care where she lived.

  She came like that. She came barreling, bellowing, smiling. She forgave us our ignorance.

  One Saturday morning, torrential rain pounded the city. Max stood in the window and ma
rveled over the blur of endless silver: “The rain is on!” he cried.

  Mary phoned. “Rain is too much. I won’t be able to reach.”

  “Mary can’t come because of the rain,” I told Tom.

  “What?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  “Call her back,” he said. “Let me talk to her.”

  I handed him the phone. “Mary!” he said. “Listen, you need to come to work today. I don’t care how you get here, but you’ve got to come.”

  “What did she say?” I demanded disapprovingly as he handed back the phone.

  “Nothing. She said okay.”

  “Are you sure—” I groped for words.

  “She can’t just miss work every time it rains,” Tom interrupted incredulously. “We can’t set a precedent like that.”

  News alerts flashed. Mary’s neighborhood had flooded. The subway was closed. Buses couldn’t pass. State of emergency.

  “Oh God,” Tom said. “Why didn’t she say how bad it was?”

  “You made it sound like you’d fire her if she couldn’t get here,” I said crossly.

  We called to turn her back but couldn’t get through. Tom fretted and frowned, pacing guiltily by the windows and dialing Mary’s number over and over. I played quietly with Max.

  At last, a knock on the door. Mary was soaked to the skin, her pants rolled up to her knees. I braced myself for a fiery denouncement and resignation.

  “I’m so sorry,” Tom blurted out. “I didn’t understand how serious the rains were. I never would have made you come—”

  “Okay, sir, okay,” she said.

  And then she laughed from the bottom of her stomach.

  * * *

  ————

  When Max napped, everybody took a mandatory break. This forced rest was a remnant of my former mania to preserve silence: I’d repackaged my anti-noise patrols as a generous allotment of “downtime” for all. I’d withdraw into our bedroom to work on my book, and once she was convinced that I really, truly didn’t want her to do anything while Max slept, Mary took to curling up on the sofa and slipping into snores.

  One afternoon she sprang up and headed for the door. “I’ll go for toilet.”

  “What do you mean?” I leaned sideways and stuck my head into the living room. “Go where?”

  “Downstairs, they have a bathroom.”

  “But we have a bathroom here. Two bathrooms.”

  She looked confused. “I’m not comfortable.”

  “Oh!”

  I floundered. Either she was warning me that a particularly outlandish assault on our senses was imminent (in which case, by all means, go to the lobby!), or she had been taught that her lowly servant’s bottom shouldn’t sully our sanctified toilets.

  Mired in an unwanted contemplation of Mary’s private needs, I regretted saying anything at all.

  “Well I mean—” I stammered. “If you’re not comfortable, of course—”

  “You don’t mind?” she interrupted.

  “If you use our bathroom? Of course not!”

  “All right,” she said shyly.

  Watching her disappear into the bathroom, I was slapped by sadness. Mary had been treated as an untouchable—banned from the family toilets. Used to the more assertive and plucky ayis of Beijing, I was taken aback.

  I was new to India. I didn’t know yet that domestic staff are routinely forbidden to sit on their bosses’ furniture, drink from their cups, or eat from their plates. I didn’t understand that, for millions of women across India, domestic work was not a path to upward mobility, but a life sentence. Society deemed them more respectable than sex workers, but only just. Their willingness to work in other people’s homes marked them as dirty and undesirable.

  I didn’t know any of that, but I would learn.

  * * *

  ————

  A scene from my past life as a reporter materialized down the street: throngs of journalists and network satellite trucks crowded the road. Curious to know which international news event was unfolding at the courthouse by the mall, I texted Tom at work.

  “It’s the rape case,” he replied.

  That was all he had to say. The rape of Jyoti Singh was an internationally decried outrage. I’d even known there was a mall involved, but I hadn’t realized—and now wished I hadn’t learned—that it was the very same mall we now called home. Jyoti Singh was twenty-three years old. She was lured onto a bus and raped with metal rods until her organs were shredded, then dumped for dead on the side of the road. Now the rapists were on trial just down the block. This was one of our first windows onto India.

  I sensed there was also something unusual brewing within the hotel, but at first I couldn’t put my finger on it. At breakfast I noticed a statistically improbable concentration of babies and gay couples. Most of the couples were white foreigners who did not appear to know one another but were still bound by a camaraderie from which our family was tacitly excluded. They exchanged meaningful looks, stopped to admire the babies, and muttered into one another’s ears. Slowly I gleaned the truth from fragments of overheard conversation: a prominent surrogacy clinic stood nearby, and the hotel was popular among couples traveling to India to claim their newborns.

  The families were frazzled, jet-lagged, and mired in the multinational bureaucracy required to take the babies home. Some of them had been stuck in limbo for months. And then there was me, staggering under the burden of an unmistakably inhabited womb. As I heaved myself into a chair for breakfast and deflected Max’s daily pleas for doughnuts, I was not oblivious to the double takes: Are you kidding me? I was simultaneously the embodiment of a physical state that had been denied my fellow guests, and a noisome and not-so-picturesque glimpse into their future as parents. A heavily pregnant mother and a terrible two-year-old among the desperately infertile—just my luck.

  But then, after many isolated days, a stranger finally shattered the cone of silence around us.

  “Good morning,” trumpeted a cheerful American accent.

  I looked up. A middle-aged man stood over our table, head tilted with birdlike curiosity, mug steaming in one hand.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “And good morning to you.” He turned to Max.

  “Hello,” muttered Max.

  My new friends were a kindly American professor and his husband, a sweet-natured European doctor who helpfully lectured Max about protein and vitamins. They were trying to take their newborn out of India. The United States had proven complicated, so they were now shooting for Europe, where they’d camp out at a grandmother’s home while tackling the American problem.

  I didn’t know what had inspired them to approach us, and I was too starved for conversation to care. I described the travails of house hunting; they bemoaned the months they’d lived in the hotel. We lingered over breakfasts, bolting one mug of coffee after another.

  Within a few weeks, they were gone.

  “Racing out” read the hand-scrawled note. “Managed to book flight. Very nice to meet you and Max. Please be in touch.”

  I was happy for them. They had been truly empathetic, reaching out because they could see, even through their own frustrations, that I was having a tough time. They’d been jovial and kind with Max. They’d been considerate, leaving a note when they could have vanished off to the airport. These were people, I thought, who would make great parents. I was glad they’d found a way to complete their family.

  But after all the time I’d spent contemplating motherhood and the erasure of women, I also found the pervasive atmosphere of surrogacy unnerving. The women who carried the babies were nowhere to be seen in the hotel. Their bodies were rented as incubators by rich families from around the planet. The fetuses of wealthy parents took oxygen from their circulatory systems and siphoned nutrients
from their blood. The embryos leached calcium to make bones, leaving soft teeth and weakened skeletons. But these women were not mothers; the babies were not theirs—the children were grown for export.

  I tried to imagine lacing my hands over my pregnant belly and knowing I had no right to love the creature stirring within. I tried to imagine, but came up dry.

  I wasn’t condemning or condoning—the reality was simply beyond my imagination. Some women—even most—must pass through the process with perfect pragmatism. We all sell something—why not a womb? The money is good; the money is badly needed.

  “I don’t like it,” Mary said flatly.

  I had asked during Max’s nap: Do you know what these families are doing?

  Oh yes, she’d certainly known. Mary knew about surrogacy from the supply side. She knew women who’d carried babies for cash.

  “The money is good. But once the baby comes, nobody takes care of these girls,” Mary said. “They do it over and over. They get sick. They die young. They give them the money and send them away. I have seen this too many times.”

  The words came out fast, spilled into air. Then she caught herself. I’d asked her opinion without revealing my own. She’d seen me chatting with the couples downstairs.

  “But I don’t know,” she added quickly.

  “I think you do know,” I said. “I think you know more than me. But—these guys here—this clinic is very reputable. I think it’s probably not as bad as what you’ve seen.”

  You’re right, but it’s not our fault. My friends and I are clean. Of course, you are right, in general, but it has nothing to do with us, specifically.

  I’d heard the stories, too: Women kept hostage in dormitories lest they harm the payload in their bellies, forced to display swelling bumps to faraway couples via Skype.

  But some women couldn’t get pregnant and some couples didn’t have a womb between them. Adoption was tricky. The world brimmed with unwanted babies but it was arduous, slow, and expensive to acquire custody of a child. Some Indian families starved girl babies rather than waste food on them, and yet it was both costly and logistically complex to adopt a baby. It was all arranged so poorly, giving everyone so few choices. And I myself had wanted a baby desperately.