Sideways on a Scooter (6 page)

Radha continued to toss words in my direction, and eventually I played along, miming a game of charades for my solemn audience of one. When I’d demonstrate the task—sweeping or mopping—to match the word she’d used, Radha would nod imperiously and repeat it, so I could later recite it at the store. I’d dreaded having to order around a meek, simpering maid, but Radha turned the master-servant relationship on its head. She seemed not to suffer from the all-too-common postcolonial ailment that still afflicts many Indians: the belief that all things foreign are better. Radha knew full well that her American mistress did
not
know best.

My maid had strong opinions about a startling number of things: how I should store food in my kitchen, how I should arrange my furniture, what I should eat for breakfast. If I was in the bathroom when she wanted to ask me something, she’d push open the door like an exceptionally intrusive relative. She’d ignore my protests at being observed in my nakedness at the tap, and linger to chuckle as I scooped and poured.

“I know it’s hard for you
feringhees
to learn how to do Indian things correctly, like bathing and eating with your hands,” she’d say.

Radha pretty consistently treated me like a dim and slightly wayward daughter. No Indian employer would have stood for it, but I found
something comforting and motherly in her bossiness. I sometimes wished I had the Hindi to confide in her about my troubles with adjusting to a culture so different from my own. Even though I couldn’t express this, I liked to believe she understood something of my loneliness and also felt responsible for my welfare.

It was Radha who found me lying on the cement floor, trying to cool my fever after I’d ingested some nasty waterborne bacteria. I’d been sick from both ends for a couple of days, and I shook with weakness as Radha sat me up. She poured lemon water with salt and sugar into my mouth. One friend called this the “Indian slum tonic”—a cheap way of restoring lost salt and minerals.

Radha must have told Joginder I was sick, because sometime later he was standing over me, speaking rapid Hindi. He had to repeat himself several times before I got the gist: There was a problem with the water tank on the roof that pumped unfiltered municipal water into my taps. The lid of the tank had blown open in the wind, and one of the neighborhood crows had drowned in there. I’d been drinking rotten crow remains for days. My jury-rigged filtration system clearly hadn’t been sufficient to conquer the bacteria emitted by a bird carcass. After a while, the neighborhood plumbers arrived. They clambered onto my roof and cleared the crow remains out of my tank. When I recovered, I went up there myself and wired the tank shut with a clothes hanger.

Joginder had suggested I pay Radha twenty dollars a month, the shockingly low industry standard for three hours of hard manual labor each day. Even though Radha was inside sweeper, bearer,
dhobi
, and
mali
all in one, and even though Joginder was her advocate and sort of relative, he urged me not to pay her much more than the going rate. He had a keen understanding of market economics: Overpaying her would skew the wages of other maids in the neighborhood, he pointed out. He also knew that Radha ranked pretty low in Delhi’s maid hierarchy. She was an “Indian-style maid”: She neither spoke English nor cooked Western food nor understood the lifestyle and expectations of non-Indian employers.

Radha was accustomed to cleaning without electrical appliances like washing machines, and also without much more basic tools such as upright mops with handles. She swept the floors and then mopped them on her hands and knees, using a cloth and a natural cleaning fluid that smelled of fennel. It was hard to believe this weird stuff made my floors gleam. She pounded my clothes and sheets against the bathroom floor and swished them around violently in buckets, as
dhobis
do against the rocks in riverbeds across rural India.

Over the years, I gradually doubled Radha’s pay in increments of guilt-induced generosity. When I’d hand her the monthly fold of bills, her supercilious attitude would briefly disappear as she tucked the wad of rupee notes into her
choli
, the blouse women wear under their sari. Nevertheless, money meant nothing to her compared to caste. My maid’s place at the top of the ancient social hierarchy was pretty much the only source of her pride and confidence. I’d read that Indians were choosing their own professions and marrying people from different strata on the hierarchy; this didn’t jibe with Radha’s world and the world of many Indians, in which the caste system still determines occupation, rank, and karma. It is the unseen hand guiding most social interactions, ingrained into behavior patterns and expectations, with innate rules that need never be discussed.

These days, many of the globalized middle class are embarrassed by caste; like child marriage and underperforming bureaucrats, it’s a symbol of the old, preglobalized India. Radha, however, felt no compunction about asserting its primacy in her life. She knew deep in her heart that her Brahmin caste made her intrinsically superior. She’d remind me of it often—that Brahmins are at the top of the pecking order, the highest among the Hindu castes. There are literally thousands of castes and subcastes separating Brahmins from the bottom end of the hierarchy, the group called
dog-cookers
in ancient times because they were believed to be so low as to eat dogs. The British called them
untouchables
because the higher castes considered their touch, even their shadow, polluting.

Brahmins are traditionally priests and teachers, and for centuries, education was their exclusive right. In ancient times, untouchables
were forbidden from hearing the recital of the written word, because the higher castes believed that they would sully any sacred text they spoke or even heard. Until the British took control in 1857, India’s government was hereditary and run by Brahmins. Even today, the upper castes overwhelmingly dominate the professional world; the country’s two hundred million untouchables are disproportionately represented in poverty, malnourishment, and illiteracy. And yet, as though to prove that no rule is without exception in India, here was my maid: a completely illiterate Brahmin who lived in a slum and swept my floors like an untouchable.

Radha was painfully aware that it was beneath her to clean other people’s houses. She tried to make up for it by drawing lines around the tasks she considered unacceptable: taking out the garbage, cleaning the bathroom, and doing the outside sweeping, meaning the staircases, hallway, or street. Dealing with animals was out of bounds, too, I discovered. The highest ranking in Hinduism’s hierarchy of the animal kingdom is reserved for cows, which are venerated as symbols of nonviolence, motherhood, and generosity; Gandhi went so far as to call the cow “a poem of pity.” Next come horses, snakes, and monkeys. When cats appear in ancient Hindu texts, though, they are shown as religious hypocrites. Even rats rate higher; Ganesh, the powerful elephant-headed god, is often depicted riding one.

Urban educated Indians have started keeping purebred dogs as pets, as a sort of symbol of upward mobility, but cats have not benefited from the trend. The only ones I saw in Delhi were brute-faced, prowling the alleys, the recipients of regular kicks from neighborhood guards.

Eager to root myself in my new life, I looked for an animal shelter from which to adopt some of Delhi’s beleaguered felines. The closest I could find was a
gaushawla
, a sanctuary for abandoned, sick, and dying cows rescued from Delhi’s streets. Cow slaughter is banned in most parts of India, and the untimely death of one is liable to spark a furious riot. When a cow blocks the road, drivers descend from their vehicles to move the beast aside with great care. Yet Indian cows do not all receive treatment befitting the sacred. During their milking years, city
cows are cared for so they can supply small dairies; once their milk dries up, though, their owners often abandon them to wander the streets and forage in garbage. The vet at the
gaushawla
told me that these old cows sometimes ingest so many plastic bags in the garbage that their stomachs explode.

She gave me a strange look when I said I wanted to adopt a cat, but she obliged by dispatching a boy up to the roof, where she said she’d seen some. He returned grasping an orange tabby with feral eyes, an infestation of lice and worms, and ears black with dirt. I took her home and gave her three baths. By the time Radha came in, the kitten was curled sweetly on a cushion on the floor. Nevertheless, Radha recoiled with such exaggerated horror that I had to struggle not to laugh. She’d never seen a domesticated cat before; to her, it was as though I’d brought a wild possum into the home she was responsible for cleaning—except worse, because to righteous Brahmins like Radha, animals are considered spiritually impure.

When I brought home a second one, from a litter my vet had discovered on the street, Radha took it as a personal insult. I struggled to calm her: I’d grown up with cats in my home in the United States, I said, and they were meticulously clean. My
feringhee
naïveté forced Radha to revert to her most dramatic invocation of God: “
Ay, bhagwan, deedee
. You don’t know. I know. No Indian would bring this dirty creature into their home.”

I’d filled a box with grimy sand, bilked from a nearby construction site, since the only cat litter I could find in Delhi was imported and heavily taxed under some obscure government pet tariff regime. I put the litter box out on the patio, but that did not stanch her fury. Her eyes darkened at my betrayal, and my nervous Hindi became muddled. Afraid she might quit, I assured her she wouldn’t have to touch the litter box; I would clean it myself.

Taking care of my own garbage presented a new set of problems. A few days after I’d started carrying the used cat litter to the neighborhood garbage dump, I heard Joginder tromping up the stairs again.

“Why you are doing this, madam?” His customary bellow was softened by disappointment. Apparently, people in the neighborhood
were making jokes about the crazy foreign girl who carried her cat crap to the garbage dump. “Garbage collecting is not good work,
deedee
. Only certain people touch it.”

I sighed, wondering whether the complex Indian protocol for caste and pollution would ever make sense to me. Indians rarely discuss such matters forthrightly, but my building caretaker decided it was time to set me straight. He folded his arms, leaned back against the door, and dedicated several minutes of his morning to explaining the complex system for dealing with garbage in Indian cities. The city doesn’t pick up trash cans from the curb, he said, so the job is outsourced to India’s lower castes.

“Garbage is a job for the sweeper caste, madam. But no problem! I have arranged.”

And just like that, I became an active sponsor of the caste system. Uncomfortably, I recognized that by agreeing to pay my untouchable employee just over a dollar a month to do the dirtiest work in the house, I was tacitly agreeing that I and my Brahmin maid were too good for such chores. But if I wanted to fit in to India, I’d have to go along with India’s ways.

When the garbage collector rang the doorbell, I greeted her hesitantly, wary of being too personable and sticking my elbow in the eye of yet another Indian tradition. I’d witnessed Radha shooing away low-caste women in the alley with the same disdain with which she treated my cats. But the untouchable smiled widely as she held out her plastic bag, the identifying tool of her trade, and introduced herself. Maneesh was scrawny from centuries of malnutrition, the kind of thin I had never seen before coming to India. Her
salwar kameez
was grubby and wrinkled, a sure sign of someone on the bottom rung, since India’s ubiquitous press wallahs charge only a rupee—about two U.S. cents—to iron a piece of clothing with their antiquated coal-fired appliances. She’d taken some care in her appearance, though, wearing rings on her toes and colorful metal bracelets right up to her elbows—symbols of a married woman. They clattered up and down her arms as she went from room to room collecting the trash. Without a twinge of shame or
indignation, she stooped to sift through the litter, picking out the cat poop with her hands inside a plastic bag.

Later, Joginder told me that Maneesh’s husband was a drunk who beat her; she supported him and their two sons by collecting garbage, cleaning bathrooms, and mopping the floors at half a dozen houses. As an uneducated untouchable, her job options were limited. Few families would hire her to work in the kitchen. My servants represented the extreme ends of the caste system, and that was always apparent—even when they sat gossiping together, squatting on their haunches in the kitchen. Once, I overheard Radha asking Maneesh in a low voice whether she came from the Valmiki subcaste, one of the groups of untouchables that traditionally dispose of human excrement. Maneesh assented amiably that indeed she did; her family had collected garbage for generations.

I came to look forward to Maneesh’s midmorning ring of the bell. I’d linger to chat in the doorway after she arrived. Even before my Hindi improved, these conversations weren’t a struggle, because she almost always said the same thing: “How are the cats,
deedee
? Is the black one still acting crazy?” Sometimes Maneesh even stroked the cats, giggling nervously at their purring sound; but Radha never came around to them. To her, they were always
shay-tann
, the Hindi word for “terror,” which was all the more amusing to me because it sounds like the English word
Satan
. When the black one—whom I’d named Kali, after the Hindu goddess of destruction—slinked near the folds of Radha’s sari, she’d give it a vicious swipe with her broom.

I’d been trying to work out how to tell my maids about Benjamin. He’d emailed that he was coming to stay with me for three months, and I knew I needed to ensure that my domestic workers not judge me a boyfriended woman. So I resurrected that useful Hindi phrase
“Mehre patee aungi,”
my husband is coming.

“Wow,
deedee
!” said Maneesh, breaking into a grin, which exposed a mouthful of wonky teeth. “We didn’t know you were married! Did you know, Radha-
deedee
?”