Recasting India (15 page)

What is happening is a complete renegotiation of the social contract of domestic labor. Anuradha cannot—unlike my mother in the old days—ask the cook to help out with the ironing from time to time or to water the plants. But on the flip side, she has no reason to feel obliged to pay for the schooling of the maid's children—as my mother used to.

Singh calls it the mental shift from “servant to service.”

Anuradha agrees. “It is a gradual process. Some of my neighbors still ask me why do you have to pay service tax for hiring servants? But it is a professional service—it is trained, all the verifications are done, and there is always a replacement. None of that is my headache—so there is a cost to that.”

Around this pitch of convenience, Singh has built a business plan. “We realized that people would be willing to pay if the quality is really good. But for good-quality people to stay, the pay has to be good but that's not enough. We have to give them an opportunity to straighten their spine.”

This is curious phraseology but curiously accurate. In the hierarchy of Indian class, subservience is often as much a physical manifestation as a cerebral attitude. Like the Japanese, Indian courtesy requires a small bend at the shoulders with folded palms to make an
A
in front of the chest.

A bent spine personifies deference.

But this supplication takes new forms of servitude as we go down the class ladder. Singh's employees, almost all of them, are regularly beaten by their husbands at home. They often arrive with cigarette burns on their arms, or a black eye, or bruises everywhere. Singh employs a nurse full-time.

Sometimes in the middle of the night, when they have been beaten and then thrown out of their homes, maids come and stay overnight in two rooms on the top of the office. They stay for a day, maybe two. Then they go back, to the same husbands, the same homes. I asked Singh why her employees don't leave their husbands, and she said, “Because then they have no protection. I don't condone this. It is a very complicated reality in which these women make tough choices. And their rational for this choice is ‘What one man is doing, rape and physical abuse, every man will try to do.' In their world, without a man, a woman becomes public property with no defense. I am just repeating what reason the maids give to stay with their abusive husbands. We give the employee a basket of services, which helps support them through these tough realities.”

To reach the office of The Maids' Company you have to cross the border dividing Delhi and the state of Haryana and travel for about five kilometers until you come to the Galleria Market. With its single-storied shops in a rough oval around a fountain, the Galleria is known as Gurgaon's Khan Market. Khan Market is the most expensive market in Delhi. Khan Market, once a quiet bookstore-filled neighborhood frequented by politicians, diplomats and bureaucrats who were lucky to get government accommodation in tony, tree-lined central Delhi, has now become a bursting, overpriced bazaar. But it still retains some pride-of-place clout—it is the only such market in the heart of the colonial capital that was built by British architect Edwin Lutyens in the early twentieth century.

In the constant competition between the two cities, things in Gurgaon are often referred to as “Gurgaon's this” or “Gurgaon's that.” The Galleria Market is one of the nerve centers of Gurgaon. Two giant, swish apartment blocks lie beside it—Hamilton Court and Regency Heights.

The lane opposite the Galleria slips between row houses and a few shops, and the second left leads to a quiet three-storied house with one wall painted pink. The road outside is slightly broken but the paper banners on the walls and the garlands of flowers on the door make the office of The Maids' Company festive.

Singh sits on the second floor in a small sun-swept office behind a chipped wooden desk with a well-worn swivel chair behind it. A couch fills the other side of the room. I asked Singh if she keeps it deliberately understated. “I wish it were,” she smiled, “I just can't afford any better.”

In 2013 her turnover touched one crore rupees ($168,000), still small but the impact on her 200 employees has been enormous.

The first time I went to the office of The Maids' Company, I sat in the accountant's room beside Singh's room to talk to her employees. Lakshmi Bala Das does not live with her husband. She is 45, maybe 50. She is not sure. She is from the Nadia district of the eastern state of Bengal.

Her husband, she said, does not do anything. He has been ill for a long time. There is something wrong in his stomach, something also in his legs. He used to work in the fields, but now he just sits around in their village hut in Nadia. Das earns Rs 8,500 a month in Gurgaon. She has two sons. One of the sons lives in Delhi, another in Gurgaon. Both of them are married.

Das lives with the younger son and his wife. The children don't give her any money. “I give my younger son one thousand rupees every month. When they fight, my younger son and his wife, I leave the house and come to The Maids' Company office. I can stay here for a day or two until the fight calms down. And every time I visit my older son, I give him some money.”

Up to this point, Das and I were having a fairly easy banter. I was asking, she was answering, it was moving along deceptively easily. Now she stopped. She was so silent that I hesitated to immediately spring another question.

Then Das said she also sends her husband money each month—though she wouldn't tell me how much. “He has bought a mobile phone with the money I send. He calls me every day but he does not ask when I will go back to Nadia—he knows if I don't send money, he will not get food to eat.”

And just like that, the spine seemed to straighten slightly.

Singh's partner in the business is Indu Bagri. She is 41 years old and has been a social worker all her life. She is from Udaipur in Rajasthan. Bagri is Singh's alter ego; she is quieter then Singh and is the sort of person who exudes a sense of warmth but also complete control. Bagri also speaks fluent Hindi, an invaluable grassroots skill. Singh is less fluent, even though Hindi is her second language. Singh also speaks Punjabi, which is the language of her parents. Singh and Bagri met when Singh was working at SEWA. Bagri “organizes” the supply of manpower on which The Maids' Company is built and heads the women's cooperative. When they arrived in Gurgaon from Ludhiana in Punjab, Bagri had never been to the place, and Singh had never worked there. Bagri went from slum to slum, gathering women around her, winning their trust, dealing sternly with their husbands, especially if they were drunk, and talking to them about a different kind of domestic service. Service, not servant. “I am able to talk to them easily and freely because I never judge and I never assume anything,” says Bagri with a smile. These are lessons her own life has taught her. Bagri's human-rights lawyer husband travels very frequently across Rajasthan and needs to be away for long stretches, so the couple lead independent lives, something unheard of in their sort of traditional village backgrounds. He was the one who was in the nonprofit sector and encouraged Bagri to work even though he comes for a very conservative family where the women veil themselves from the men. Bagri was the first woman in her own and her husband's family to work and has broken a lot of stereotypes of the classic Hindi-speaking Indian woman.

When, after just a couple of months, the first 200 employees of The Maids' Company suddenly failed to turn up at work, it was Bagri who went hunting for new recruits and negotiated with some of the old ones. What had happened was that the first clients had offered each of the maids a couple hundred rupees more, and they all quit en masse. “I had to explain to each of them what they really get if they work with us. Respect is a tough thing to explain to those who have never had any,” says Bagri wryly. Within a month, the office had filled up with staff again.

All this helps Bagri understand women like Soni Parveen, all of 20 years old. Parveen was a Hindu Brahmin, the highest caste among Hindus, until she fell in love and ran away with her father's Muslim tenant. Her father was a shopkeeper and had given his daughter that rare thing—an education through Class 10 (10th grade).

But the daughter ran away and converted to Islam to marry her lover. These days he works at odd jobs—and beats her frequently. But Parveen, who has a radiant smile, refuses to leave him. And each month she dutifully puts her salary of Rs 10,000 in her husband Salim Khan's hand. Her parents, she says, are not sure exactly where she is, though she sometimes talks to them on the phone.

I ask Parveen why she does not leave her husband—and why she gives him her salary. “He respects me. I bring in money,” she says simply. “Without money there is no respect.”

Later Singh explains, “Without the money, there would be much more beating and maybe he would even have left her. Where would she go then? It would be much worse for her.” She says that she doesn't condone this. “This is again a tough choice made in a complicated reality. We can only offer support in various forms so they see another choice but beyond that we can't change their choice. I hope that with a few years of economic empowerment they will start to make a different choice.”

Singh says all kinds of nuances she could never fathom are now immediately apparent to her. Consider this almost Malcolm Gladwellian question—why do maids in Gurgaon never want to cook but only clean?

Cooking pays more money. Cooking is often less strenuous physical work. “But the reprimand that a maid receives for cooking something wrong or badly is far more than the reprimand for washing something wrongly or leaving the floor dirty.”

To be at the office of The Maids' Company is to stand at the fault line of India's class war; behind me on the company's soft board stretch the names of buildings that define the dream of a town—South City, Aralias, Magnolias, Palm South City, Westend Heights, Pinnacle, Central Park, Princeton Estate, Wellington Estate. The residents wanted a piece of America, and though the town has failed them in many ways, they hold on to the promises made to them, trapped by the nomenclature.

One of the biggest problems Singh faced in the first few months is that maids would be dropped at the gate of the apartment block by the office van but would not reach the flat. “Many of them were very scared of elevators. They had never travelled in such (to them) magnificent, enclosed, silently swishing-away spaces. Some pressed the wrong button and went somewhere else—then panicked. It was literally out of this world for them,” says Singh.

One day I went to The Maids' Company on their payday—usually the first Sunday of the month. As I entered, a shy middle-aged lady called Jogmaya, as employee of the month, got a present—fabric to stitch a new
salwar kameez.
Then a voice on the CD player sang, “
Blue hai paani, paani, paani, paani, paani; aur din bhi sunny, sunny, sunny, sunny
…” and the women danced, mimicking Bollywood actresses with oomph-y expressions. They dragged Singh to the dance floor. She was lithe and beautiful in a sari, making sharp moves that were a cross between hip-hop and bhangra. The coffee mug she left behind on the table beside me said,
Super Kudi
—“Super Girl” in Punjabi.

 

The cow peed in riverine spurts, sloshing pale urine that seeped into the dust, making it dark. “See—turning like chocolate color,” said the man beside me happily. Srikant Bangar, 30, stared at his cow with the kind of unadulterated affection Lord Emsworth bestowed on the Empress of Blandings in P. G. Wodehouse's novels.

I am in Hiware Bazar,
¹
a six-hour drive from India's financial capital, Bombay. To travel to Hiware Bazar, one drives out—preferably at first light as I did, to avoid the paralyzing Bombay traffic—along the Bombay-Pune highway for about three hours. This is one of the best expressways in the country and was India's first six-lane highway when it opened in 2002.

The road snakes across the Sahyadri mountain range on the Western Ghats, and on a good day, you can do the trip from Bombay to the university and automobile town of Pune in two hours flat. For years it was one of the few pieces of infrastructure that India could be proud of, but the month I went to Hiware Bazar, the expressway was in the news for the wrong reasons.

The pitch of protests against illegal and usurious toll collection—more than Rs 500 for one round trip to Pune—had reached violent levels. Two prominent opposition parties, the Shiv Sena and the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, had asked its supporters not to pay the toll. This often translated into riotous attacks on toll booths by party activists. Some research showed that travelers were being charged thousands of crores more than what they should pay through illegal tolls imposed by a nexus of government leaders and real estate developers.

But even so, travel on the expressway is one of the few, and very far between, pleasures of good public infrastructure in India. From Pune, Hiware Bazar is another nearly three-hour drive toward the town of Ahmednagar—the village is located just before the town. This road is like the old highways of India, crowded and often pockmarked—none of it resembles the Bombay-Pune expressway corridor.