The Beautiful and the Damned (34 page)

She thought for a while and then told me of the event that had led
her to leave Shangri-La. ‘I worked hard there, and pushed myself to learn F&B. Then, on 23 November 2008, I was working the afternoon shift. At 10.30 p.m., I finished work. The rule is for the hotel to drop you off if you’re working late, so I took a hotel car, with a new driver. In north Delhi, a drunk man in a cream-coloured Maruti Esteem jumped through a red light and rammed into our car. The hotel driver, he just ran away, leaving me there.’

Esther was in the back seat, writhing in pain. She dragged herself out of the car on to the road, but although there were people around, no one came to her help. Finally, a couple walking by stopped and approached her. They asked her where she was from. They were from Manipur too, and the woman was a nurse at the Ram Manohar Lohia hospital. They took Esther to the hospital, where she needed twenty-three stitches in her head.

She still had a scar on her forehead. She lifted her hair so that I could see the bunched-up tissue on the right side of her forehead. She had lost three teeth. ‘The ones I have now, they’re all duplicates,’ she said. ‘The people from the hotel came to see me and the first thing they wanted to know was when I was coming back to work. I said, “I can’t even get up from bed by myself, and you want to know when I can work?” ’ She was in the hospital for a month, and the hotel, after some initial fuss, covered her medical costs. ‘They put me on painkillers, on a saline drip, and for one month I just lay in the bed. I got fat, and my weight went up from fifty kilos to sixty-five. That’s how much I weigh now. My back hurts if I stand for long, and of course, in this job you have to do that all the time. When I went back to work, I began to feel bad about being at Shangri-La, and that’s when I started looking for another option.’

One day, I met up with Esther in the morning. Instead of going back home, she had stayed over with a friend in Munirka, my old neighbourhood. She had permission to report at work a little later than usual and the plan was for us to visit her flat in North Campus, then come back south together.

I picked her up near the Rama Market, the spot where for years I had waited for the 620 bus to take me to my office in Connaught Place. I remembered how I would walk through the alleyways of Munirka, passing an open-air auto repair shack where, in spite of wanting to avoid the sight, I would invariably find my gaze drawn towards a man whose entire nose was missing, possibly eaten away by syphilis. I remembered taking a bus back from work that, just before it came to Rama Market, ran over a bicyclist while speeding through a red light. The bus hit the man, braked, skidded off its path and jumped across the divider into the opposite lane, careening through the traffic and the pavement on the other side, slowing down a little when it hit some trees and bushes before slamming into a wall, the shattering windows sending shards of glass through the bus.

Esther was silent as the taxi driver began the drive towards North Campus. We left south Delhi behind and began crossing the central stretch of Lutyens’ Delhi. The sun was bright and harsh, but the trees and flowers around the bungalows of the area made everything look cool and comfortable. We crossed the entrance to the Santushti Shopping Complex, where Manish was no doubt sitting in his cigar store, being pleasant to his wealthy clients. We approached the Delhi Gymkhana Club, and Esther asked, ‘Are we near the prime minister’s house?’ We were indeed, as was evident from the armed men and police jeeps everywhere. She looked out of the window as if she hoped to catch a glimpse of the prime minister himself, but then she sank back into the seat and became quiet. When she spoke again, she sounded wistful.

‘Some day I would like to have a car,’ she said. ‘My father has a bicycle. He’s old, but that’s what he uses to ride around the town. Sometimes, he’ll double-carry and take my mother out on the bicycle. My mother doesn’t like it. She’s quite fat now, and it’s hard for him to pedal with both of them on the bicycle. One day, they fell down, and my mother was so angry.’ Esther started laughing. ‘She said, “I’ll never go with you on your bicycle again.” ’

We entered the northern end of Delhi through the walls of the old fort city. The wall retains little of its former glory; it may still be impressively thick, but the strength of a fort wall doesn’t mean much
in a modern age. There were bricks missing in the wall, and when we came to the old city, there was no imperial splendour, just poor people negotiating a series of crowded streets and alleys.

Esther’s flat was at the end of a narrow alleyway, on the top floor of a building. From the faces of the pedestrians, I could tell that this was one of the areas, like Munirka in south Delhi, where people from the north-east were concentrated, bunched together for a greater sense of safety. It was also an area where, because of its proximity to the university, the landlords were willing to deviate from the marked preference in Delhi for well-off, upper-caste Hindu tenants. The flat, up a narrow flight of stairs, was small, with two rooms in a railroad arrangement opening out to the roof. There was a narrow passageway leading out from the last room, with a kitchen and bathroom on one side, the view from the roof overlooking houses crammed close to each other.

The rent was 6,500 rupees and the Punjabi landlady, Esther said, was quite nice, although that depended a little on her moods. It seemed to me that, even though Delhi was expensive, Esther was paying more than the market rate for her place. The extra amount was a sort of unofficial tax imposed upon ethnic minorities and the poor by the landlords of the city, who know that such people aren’t welcome in most neighbourhoods and can therefore be charged a higher rent while being provided with fairly rudimentary facilities.

The flat had been decorated in a functional manner. The room I sat in was crowded, containing a bed, an old-fashioned CRT television and a refrigerator. This was where Esther and her two sisters slept, while in the outer room, far more bare, a brother made his bed at night. The brother, five years older than Esther, was not home when I visited. Esther had an older half-brother who was married and lived in Imphal as well as a younger brother who was studying engineering at a private college in Bangalore, an expensive education into which the parents had directed most of their savings. The brother who lived with Esther had a master’s in sociology, but although he had applied for many jobs and taken countless exams, he remained unsuccessful in finding employment.

Mary was the eldest of the three sisters, four years older than
Esther, and she had a job at a call centre in Gurgaon. Unlike Renu, who was excited to have me visiting and seemed eager to show me around, Mary looked tired. She was lying on the bed fully dressed, watching television as she waited for the call centre van to pick her up.

I thought of my own brief foray into the call centre world and the sinking feeling with which I had clocked in, sitting down at one of a row of computers and reaching reluctantly for the headphones that would connect me to angry or upset people in England. That was a time when call centre work was talked up as an exciting profession, part of the new India. The media no longer referred to call centres in this manner, and few of the people who worked there saw it as more fulfilling than being a clerk in a government office. The outsourcing business wasn’t doing quite as well either, Mary said. She had received a smaller salary increase this year than in the past, and the kind of calls she made had changed in nature.

Mary worked in collections these days, and when she arrived at the office in Gurgaon, she would start calling American customers, threatening them with repossession of their cars because they had fallen behind with their loan payments. It was a sudden, reversed camera shot of the American recession, viewed from a flat in a slum-like neighbourhood in north Delhi. It was unpleasant work, Mary said, but she did it to earn a living. I would later find out from Esther that Mary was a disappointed person. She had left call centre work, hoping for a different life, and she had returned to it only because her dream hadn’t come true. But I didn’t know this at the time, and as Mary headed out to work, I thought of the strangers she would connect with, people who were falling behind, who were part of a wave of foreclosures and job losses, and who would never know anything of the young woman calling to remind them of their failures.

Renu had been waiting impatiently to show me her plants. ‘Even the landlady admires them,’ she said. ‘I give her seeds and plants, but then she comes back in a few weeks and says that they’ve all died. I don’t know what she does with them.’ Renu’s plants sat in earthen pots along the narrow passageway leading out to the roof. They looked healthy, a gathering of aloe vera, spinach and what Renu
called ‘Naga coriander’. Sometimes, she said, she bought celery from the market and replanted the roots. She had gathered seeds from a lemon tree on the street and planted those and although it was still small, she was hopeful that it would eventually start producing fruit. In order to make sure that her plants grew well, Renu went to the municipal parks in the winter, to the areas where gardeners burned dead leaves, gathering soil that was therefore rich in ash. It was Renu’s way of creating a touch of Manipur in the alien city in which she found herself.

Renu also did much of the cooking. She looked at Esther and said slyly, ‘She’s telling you about her problems and how hard she works. You should see her when she comes home from work in a bad mood. They fight at work, we suffer.’

‘You, you have a good time at home, what do you know?’ Esther said. ‘I’m so tired sometimes. I don’t have the energy to go out and get a recharge card for my mobile. I have to beg Renu to go and get it for me. She won’t do it unless I bribe her. A hundred-rupee note.’

Renu laughed and began serving us the rice and fish curry she had cooked. ‘There’s some pork in the fridge too,’ Renu said. ‘Do you want some?’

She served me the pork, cubes with fat glistening on them, the way I liked it. I felt relaxed and lazy after the meal, and thought about how paradoxical the situation was. The warmth and hospitality the sisters displayed was characteristic of the north-east, but it was the urban anonymity of Delhi that had allowed them to entertain me, a man from a different ethnic group, in their house.

As we talked, I also noticed how much more optimistic Renu was about the future than her sisters. She didn’t have to work long hours like Esther or Mary, and she was in that sense not yet worn down by the world. She talked about how she occasionally went to church, something neither of the other sisters did. She visited the Methodist Church on Lodi Road, which rented out the space every week to the Tangkhul Baptist Church to which the sisters belonged. Renu sang in the choir, but what she really liked about church was the way it created a home-like space, with feasts that involved familiar food. In other ways, however, Renu seemed to have adapted far better to
Delhi than her sisters. Her Hindi was more fluent and she dressed with ease in a salwar kameez, looking much like any middle-class young woman from Delhi. Her ambitions too revealed a sense of freedom in how she imagined her future. She wanted to become a journalist and was interested in doing a one-year course at the YMCA.

The course seemed rather expensive to me, with the fees amounting to 37,000 rupees. ‘Who’ll pay for it?’ I said.

Renu laughed.

Esther, who was sitting sleepily in the chair after her meal, pointed at herself. ‘Who’ll pay? Me. Who else is there?’ Then she looked at her phone and said we should head back south. She had to report for work in an hour.

Women did not have it easy in Delhi, whether they were local or from other parts of India. The recent globalization of the city had indeed created new opportunities for some women, especially those working as waitresses and sales assistants. The same globalization had also allowed the use of ultrasound technology to abort some 24,000 female foetuses every year, resulting in a skewed sex ratio of 820 to 1,000 in Delhi. It was into this contradictory realm that women from the north-east arrived in their search for work, and the media was full of stories of them being assaulted, molested and killed, of mobs encircling the rooms they rented and beating women up while the police looked on. For its part, the Delhi Police had issued a ‘manual’ for people from the north-east living in the city, whose guidelines included:

One afternoon, I met up with Lansinglu Rongmei, a lawyer who had started the North-East Support Centre in 2007 to help people facing violence and discrimination. We went to the same café where I usually talked with Esther, and the waitress from Churachandpur served us. Lansi was stocky and energetic, her lawyerly cautiousness alternating with a sense of regional pride that made her talk about the cases she took up of people who had been bullied or violated. She was from Dimapur, a small town in Nagaland, but had gone to high school and college in Calcutta. She had moved to Delhi to study law and now practised in the Supreme Court, but after fifteen years in the city, she still didn’t feel fully at home.

‘Going from Nagaland to Calcutta wasn’t so much of a culture shock,’ Lansi said. ‘I felt they didn’t judge you as much. In Delhi, they do. They size you down and they size you up. What kind of a gadget do you have? What kind of a dress are you wearing? What kind of a car do you have? When I was a law student in Delhi University, I had friends from southern India, and from Bihar. I felt that Biharis, whom they call “Haris”, are sometimes targeted no less here than people from the north-east.’

I asked her what it was like to be a lawyer in such a place.

She thought about it and said, ‘The racism is very subtle sometimes, but it’s there. Still, the Supreme Court is a pretty cosmopolitan place. When I am presenting a case there or at the High Court, I can wear shirts and trousers, and they won’t judge me for it. But if I’m at a district court, I have to wear a sari or a salwar kameez or they’ll be prejudiced against me.’