Women's Work

by Megan K. Stack

  I was writing. Lost in imagination, lost in language, I had no attention for the world around me.

  The boys had gone with Mary and Pooja to a neighborhood birthday party. In those days there was always a party somewhere. Ever since I’d turned Max’s afternoons over to the nanny-supervised play group circuit, his social life was more varied and incessant than mine had ever been. With his entourage of baby brother and two nannies, he partied his way through a knee-high version of Gatsby’s rolling bacchanals, skipping from one house to the next with brief breaks for sleep, food, and school. Splash pools, sprinklers, pizza-making parties, trampolines, pet puppies. Garden classes in painting, pottery, soccer, and tae kwon do.

  For me and the kids, this arrangement was brilliant. The stretch of afternoon between nap and dinner was a miraculous window of writing time. An entire room of time, really, inviolate in the architecture of the day. The kids would wake from their naps, then a brief scramble of cuddles and helping with shoes and making sure water cups were full and kissing their hair—and then they’d rush off into the day, leaving me blissfully alone with my manuscript in a clean and empty house.

  I was writing with perfect concentration that day—and so I noticed too late the swell of darkness. These weren’t the bruised clouds of a rainstorm, but something more total, like a fader switch cranking to black over the city. The air in my office congealed into lightlessness. Then I was on my feet and moving through the house. Outside, trees tossed and dogs howled. The wind came up fast and strong, and everything loose went sailing. The neighborhood erupted in slamming shutters and splintering wood and flying tools. Branches shredded clean off trees; trees yanked straight out of the dirt; trash washed against the sides of houses and stuck there suspended by wind. One minute it wasn’t, the next it was.

  Hurricane, I thought. It was the only phenomenon I’d ever seen that looked like this. It didn’t make any sense, because Delhi is landlocked, but the similarity was too perfect to ignore.

  I called Mary, called Pooja, Mary, Pooja, Mary, Pooja. The number you are calling cannot be reached…

  Then my own phone rang, and I pulled it to my face. But it was just another mother whose children were also at the party.

  “I can’t get through.” Her voice was shaking. “And the roof of our shed just blew off.”

  “I’m walking over.” I was already looking for my shoes.

  “I don’t think it’s safe,” she said.

  I couldn’t think about that. The reality had slammed against me in stark detail: I had let my children not only out of my sight, but out of my protection. I usually kept tabs by phone, but now that crucial link was cut. I could not give instructions. I had to depend, blindly, on the judgment of Mary and Pooja.

  And I felt, suddenly, that I didn’t trust them. Not for something like this. They might panic and try to walk home through the storm. They might get into a car. With a natural disaster raging and communications stripped away, I realized the shallowness of my faith in these women, and I was scared.

  Pointlessly, I grabbed an umbrella as I ran out the door. I imagined we’d hunker down at the neighbor’s house until the wind died, and then it would rain. I still thought it was a hurricane—I didn’t understand that it was a dust storm, also known as a black blizzard.

  Outside the wind screamed and grabbed. All around me dust and trash flew. I tucked my chin and stared down to protect my eyes from blowing dirt. Thunder groaned and bellowed overhead.

  On the brick alleyway by the market, the sidewalk tailor struggled to tarp down his sewing machine. Max called this tailor “cut-cut wallah” in homage to his enormous silver scissors and hung around watching him stitch curtains and hem trousers. Now I handed the tailor my umbrella. It was knocking me off balance, and I thought maybe he could use it. He took the umbrella. We said nothing.

  I fought gales all the way across the neighborhood. The swampy completeness of the dark was terrible. It was hot and weird, an abstract painting of a tropical disaster among derelict homes.

  But when at last I reached the party, everything was incongruously fine. The children rolled and shrieked through cool, yellow-lit rooms, trailing their tattered princess dresses and clattering wagons. The nannies sipped laconically on sugared tea. All the trappings of the party lay scattered—platters of cookies and cupcakes; bowls of chips; discarded games. The children chattered and squabbled with exaggerated energy. The storm had heightened the sense of rarity and excitement.

  Max raised delighted eyes to me—Mommy is here! But then he turned and skittered into the writhing forest of children. Patrick squirmed back toward Pooja when I tried to pick him up.

  Mary laughed.

  “They don’t want to go home!”

  It was true. They weren’t scared, and, in fact, they didn’t particularly want to see me since I represented the end of fun. Mary and Pooja had constructed this small pocket of safety on the edge of cataclysm. I shouldn’t have been surprised—their entire existence was, essentially, doing just that.

  At least nine people died in that storm. Walls collapsed; power lines caught fire; uprooted trees blocked the roads. But the odds of survival are always stronger than they look from a distance. We went home and drew baths for the boys.

  The next day Mary reproached me.

  “That cut-cut wallah, he was waiting for you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “You gave him your umbrella to hold and never came back.”

  “No!” I said. “I just gave it to him…”

  “He wanted to get out of the storm,” Mary said. “But he kept waiting for you.”

  “I just wanted to give it to him,” I protested. “I didn’t mean for him to guard it!”

  “He said, ‘How could I leave, somebody will take this umbrella?’ ”

  “Oh God,” I groaned.

  I’ve been giving that cut-cut wallah money every Diwali since. We have money, we make a mess, and then we buy our way forward. Not because it makes things all right, but because it is better than nothing.

  Chapter 20

  Tom was worried, again, about Pooja. The summer heat was especially brutal that year, and he was fretting over her rooms.

  “How can she stand the heat back there?”

  “Well,” I said tentatively, “there’s a ceiling fan.”

  “Why don’t we buy her an air conditioner?” he asked. “How much could it cost?”

  “I’ll find out.” This dialogue was shameful: Once the dogged defender of domestic workers, I was now the cruel skinflint who expected our housekeeper to suffer 120-degree heat with a skittish ceiling fan.

  By the end of the week, I’d gotten a window unit installed in Pooja’s room. Once it was done, I couldn’t believe it had taken us so long. The heat of a Delhi summer is exhausting and disorienting; a physical condition so extreme it qualifies as an existential state. And yet we had housed a full-time worker without this basic gesture of decency.

  At times like this, our life in Delhi gave me the weird sensation that I was an unwitting subject in a psychosocial study. How long before this seemingly decent American family realizes the maid is about to die from heatstroke? I thought of people who abused the “inmates” when assigned to role-play as prison guards in the Stanford experiment. I remembered that normal people tortured other people by electric shock in the Milgram experiment. See how observing the behavior of others has normalized the dehumanization of domestic workers?

  And yet nobody—not even Pooja—seemed to think she was entitled to the air conditioner. Mary gossiped about the machine as if it were a spectacular chunk of jewelry. Pooja thanked us somberly. Fed by this response, we allowed ourselves the self-satisfaction of charity.

  It didn’t last. Soon we heard from our landlord, a gruff Punjabi businessman who lived on the ground floor. He emailed Tom, who forwarded the note to the undersec
retary for household and personnel detritus—i.e., me.

  “It has been brought to my attention,” the landlord wrote, “that you have fitted an AC for your maid in the staff quarter.”

  This wouldn’t do, he said. The electrical wiring couldn’t handle an air-conditioning unit.

  “The load of AC can result in short circuit and fire,” he wrote. “Please get the AC removed immediately as the major accident occur.”

  That sounded right. Given the shoddiness of the servants’ quarter, I could easily believe that the wires were dangerously slapdash.

  “Now I’m worried about fire,” I told Tom that night. “And I don’t know if that air-conditioning shop will do a return—”

  “It’s bullshit.” Tom cut me off.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because—I’m positive.”

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “Ignore him.”

  “I don’t think we can.”

  “He’s not going to do anything. You’ll see.”

  Doubtful, I told Pooja about the landlord’s email.

  “It’s not true!” she cried. “He just doesn’t want me to have air-conditioning because now his driver is also asking.”

  As the mercury climbed and the air conditioner clattered to life, I waited for the next salvo from the landlord. None came.

  I considered removing the air conditioner, anyway, just in case the fire risk was real. But then I imagined Pooja wilting into heatstroke. It was another unwinnable predicament that made all our choices seem terrible. There we lived in a jerry-rigged maze of tangled electrical wires and faulty plumbing and rabid dogs, in a colony without a fire department, congratulating ourselves for giving the boys a fabulously enriching experience.

  The neighbors didn’t like the air conditioner, either. The lady next door sent a guard to complain. Tell your maid her air conditioner is disturbing my sleep.

  This, too, we ignored. This neighbor had once cooed over Max and promised to invite us to her son’s wedding. Once the air conditioner arrived, we were dead to her.

  As we prepared for our summer pilgrimage to America, I felt we were leaving Pooja alone. Too alone. Precariously alone.

  We offered to buy her a ticket back to Darjeeling, but she insisted she’d rather stay in Delhi and rest during monsoon. I didn’t like it. I believed almost anything could happen before we got back: looters could empty our house, Pooja could vanish again, an earthquake could flatten the neighborhood. I always had that feeling in India—that things move too fast and loose, crowds of people and a tangle of tongues and faiths and everybody living on a web of fault lines, so that if you turn your back on something, you must be prepared to lose it forever.

  Pooja was still in the wind, somehow, flying like those uprooted trees in the black blizzard. She hadn’t crashed yet, but I could feel it coming.

  * * *

  ————

  Back in America we swam in the Atlantic and waded in creeks and slurped ice-cream cones at picnic tables. I never stopped moving. I never stopped eating. Somebody handed me a beer. The waves crashed; the boys grew brown and strong; I pulled fresh air into my lungs. My hours were packed with small children and their steady slur of physical needs. Scrubbing baby food from high-chair trays, the stink of sponges in the morning, brooms, crumbs, diapers, shopping. Would you mind please keeping an eye on him while I just quickly…? My mother, Tom’s mother, my sister-in-law: speaking to everybody like they worked for me. Worrying I didn’t know anymore how to talk otherwise to women in a house. I said please and thank you and would you mind, I smiled, but I was assigning tasks.

  I imagined myself into the life of America. There was no nanny to lead the boys away, and so they were with me always. Space never opened around my body. Silence never reached my ears. No minute came for thought. The days were messy, frazzled, and unmanageable, but still I was happy. I liked the long days with the kids. I liked the logistical ease of America. There were public libraries and clean toilets all over the place. Whatever you needed to buy, there was a vast bright store with a big flat parking lot outside. The tap water didn’t make you sick. The air was so clean I imagined it was full of vitamins. Formidable household appliances of the sturdiest materials roared on fat streams of American electricity. The power never failed. The roadways were organized although needlessly aggressive. Organized although needlessly aggressive, in fact, was a good way to describe American life.

  I jogged empty streets before dawn, the sleeping houses strung like night-blooming orchids along the vine of the road, their treacly perfumes leaking into the fading night. The intoxicating stink of fabric softeners and hand soaps and air fresheners, obscene against the green breath of trees at night. But it was all so easy, and it made you sick so slowly, so imperceptibly. You didn’t eat a bad lettuce leaf and puke your guts out; you stewed in a soup of laboratory experiments and plastics and bleach until you had peanut allergies and cancers and superbugs.

  I thought about intergenerational living. It didn’t make sense that our mothers lived alone while we scraped around for strangers to watch our children. Maybe we’d been duped. Maybe we Americans were chum for the global economy, deluded by advertising, getting isolated and crazy so that we’d buy more stuff. Was that possible? In this configuration—each one in his own home—we all spent more money. We needed a washing machine for each house. We needed a car for each house. We needed a house for each house! We got scared, so we needed alarms and guns. We got lonely, so we needed drugs and liquor. We were excellent consumers; the best in the world. We consumed products until we couldn’t store them, and then we consumed containers to hold what we couldn’t store. We consumed food until our fat began to sicken us, and then we consumed drugs and surgeries to right the diseases of our consumption. We consumed so enthusiastically it was killing us.

  All of this bleakness, but America was still my only place. The American night crackled, full of ghosts and brand-new possibility and ancient, wicked things. It moved my blood, the sense of the great darkened land stretching west. I want to buy a pack of cigarettes and drive out into it, to drive until dawn, drinking gas-station coffee and listening to American radio all the way.

  Maybe I’m spoiled because I have nannies and cooks. Maybe you’re spoiled because you have parking lots and public schools and your kids can drink the bathwater. Maybe we’re all spoiled in some way or the other, even if it’s only by freedom or fresh air.

  But everything has its underbelly.

  * * *

  ————

  Back in Delhi the house smelled like tight hot afternoons and dust. The garbage collector who hauled our trash had died while we were gone. He was just a teenager, the younger partner of the father-son team who went door to door, gathering the neighborhood’s trash.

  “How did he die?” I asked.

  “The heat,” Pooja said simply.

  He was a scrawny kid who lurked in his father’s shadow. They wore rags, their too-short pants held up with faded rope. The son was peripheral. His father was the one I always noticed. His hair was greasy, unevenly chopped, streaks of coal and steel over a sun-charred face. Even before his son died, his eyes boiled with such a potent distillation of anger and pain it was destabilizing to meet them.

  They charged us a few dollars a month to collect our garbage every morning. Up and down through the neighborhood they trudged, pushing their rusted, busted cart with its stinking load of rubbish. When I waved they always waved back.

  The pair were loathed and ridiculed. They were Muslim, and they handled trash. It is hard to conceive of more disgusting figures in the eyes of our neighborhood, where I’d heard bigoted remarks about Muslims tossed off thoughtlessly. On top of their religion, the garbage collectors were unreliable. They didn’t keep a consistent schedule; sometimes they didn’t show up at all. Even softhearted Mary had
chewed them out for erratic performance.

  The day the garbage collector died, it was so hot the pavement was melting. They were working, walking back and forth in the sun, and they didn’t drink enough water. The son collapsed and groaned.

  The security guards and drivers, clustered in plastic folding chairs at the gates, looked at him and laughed. At least, that’s what Pooja told us: They didn’t help him, and then he was dead.

  They thought he was drunk. That was the neighborhood explanation. They thought he was joking. As if these tragically unloved figures might suddenly be cutting up, lying down on the excruciating pavement and groaning for a chuckle. And what joke could that be, what possible punch line?

  One morning Mary knocked on my office door. The garbage collector was waiting outside.

  “He is asking some money to bury his son.”

  “I’m coming.” I sat there feeling like I’d been kicked in the belly.

  “The garbage man is asking for money to bury his son,” I texted Tom.

  I wanted to involve him in the awfulness of this visit. I wanted to implicate him, not only in the crime of assigning a cash compensation to the petty horror of our implacable street, but in the underlying sin of our life in this filthy-rich neighborhood of people who sat around and watched a young man’s needless death. I had found myself contemplating all the evil of humanity, and I didn’t want to face it alone.

  “Jesus,” he replied. “Give him five hundred rupees.”

  “Okay.” This was two months’ pay; the equivalent of seven U.S. dollars.

  “Don’t you think?”

  “I think he’ll be glad to have it.”

  I took the money from my wallet. I was tempted to give it to Mary to pass along. I didn’t want to see the father’s face. I shrank from his grief. But I forced myself to go to the door and open it and hold out this offering for the man to accept. I forced myself to look into his eyes. His face was worse than I remembered. It was a face that belonged among cages and torture and the bottoms of dark wells.