The help

I read an amazing book last year.   It was called The Help by Kathryn Stockett.  It told the story of some southern, African American maids right around the time of the equal rights movement. It is a great book, and I thought it was an appropriate title to borrow, and compare my current life to, now that I live in India and have help of my own.

I woke up yesterday morning to a text from our maid/cook, Lady S.  She had texted me, “Hi mam it’s Lady S sorry I am not coming today my dothar not filing well. Can ill cam tomorrw.“  Now, she speaks English quite well, but I know that people speak English much more frequently than they write it.  Her spelling still surprised me, however, as she can read and follow a recipe great (trust me, I’ve eaten the results). But what really surprised me after the long text was what she said to my response, “thanky mam”.   It just sounded like it was from a classical novel set in America a couple hundred of years ago.  

It really made me think about how awkward (to me, at least) the entire situation is here.  We have this woman, with a set of keys to our home, who comes in each day, without a contract, or health care, and she orders our food, orders our water, cleans the house, does our laundry, waters our plants, makes our beds, makes our meals, and we pay her a grand total of $178 a month.  And that is good money.  Foreigners always overpay the help.   And her English sounds like something that could probably be taken from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  Something is wrong with this picture.  What century are we living in? It really disgusts me to even be participating in this charade.   But it isn’t as though it helps her if I don’t hire her.  I’m not sure what I should even feel. 

I haven’t been to her home, but my driver, Driver A (who is quite chatty), happened to mention a few details about his home to me.  He has one bed that he, his wife, and teenage son share.  They have a TV.  They eat chicken biryani quite frequently. He does make a bit more money, $245, plus overtime, but he also works 10-hour days, whereas Lady S works about 3-4 hours a day.  Yesterday, for the first time, he bought his very own cell phone. Previously, people had just given him their old phones to use. 

In the book, The Help, bathrooms are a huge issue.  People had to have segregated bathrooms, even in the home. Maids couldn’t use the same toilet as the family.  Most of the nicer apartments we saw here in India, while apartment hunting, were the same way.  Certainly not separate but equal, which has been proven to not exist, anyway.  It is like Plessy v. Ferguson was transplanted here, and never overturned.  The bathrooms we saw were disgusting.  In America, the kitchens are so important.  Here, they are just extensions of the maid’s quarters, and thus have cheaper floor tiles and counters than the rest of the home.  Many are even partitioned from the home, so you can shut your cook inside and forget about her.  I feel like I stepped back in time.  To a worse time period. 

Driver A, when he wants to use a restroom (well, toilet as they are called here), must travel to a building complex, like a rest area on the highway. He can’t just walk into McDonald’s and use it.  Or walk into a hotel.  He told me he isn’t even allowed in those buildings.  Now, I find that incredibly hard to believe, but I can’t just look at someone and tell that they are the help rather than the people who hired the help. I wasn’t born here. Both Driver A and Lady S are clean and well-dressed.  Driver A even has a few threadless T-shirts.  So I’m not sure I buy that story completely.  But that is what I was told. 

I, on the other hand, can waltz into any building and use their bathroom.  It is easy and convenient for me.  So unfair for him.  In south Mumbai, where there are very few of the rest area-like toilets, he might have to go 15 to 20 minutes away to go to the bathroom.  A previous ambassador, who used one once in an emergency, told me they were absolutely disgusting. 

This isn’t to say there aren’t disgusting bathrooms in the States.  We all have our preferred gas stations based on bathroom-quality.  But any one of us can use said bathroom.  I have even seen homeless people bathing themselves in Starbucks, although I would guess that they, perhaps, are shoed away rather frequently.

I went shopping yesterday morning with Driver A.  He mentioned that Lady S had called him that morning, asking for my phone number.  Driver A told me Lady S’s daughter had a school program today (they do a lot of school things on Saturdays here). 

So she lied to me. She told me her daughter was sick, but really, she is at school doing some banner thing. It makes me so upset.  I’m sick of feeling like I can’t trust anyone here.  I’ve already caught both the landlord and our driver in a lie.  And now her, too.   What was so hard for her?  Why couldn’t she just tell me she wanted to go to daughter’s show?  Have I in any way come across as some mean person who wouldn’t let her watch her daughter perform? 

It is really lousy, because now I have to have a conversation with her about how she can’t lie to me.  Also to stop putting our underwear on the line instead of the dryer.  But I am a non-confrontational person, so I really do not enjoy having a maid and driver.  Certainly not this have-a-serious-conversation aspect, at least. Having a maid and driver are SO much more work than I expected. You have to constantly write down what activities you do with them each day (did Driver A get overtime?  Did he pay for parking? Was it after 8 so he gets dinner money? Did he buy gas? Did I pay for that delivery of toilet paper or did Lady S, etc), so that at the end of the month, when they tell you what they want you to pay them, you know if it is true or not.  I know the people who previously employed them would find occasional errors, and they trusted both of them.  And I don’t trust either of them.

Here I am, stuck in a foreign country, for another 10 months, surrounded by people that I don’t actually trust.  People who have keys to my home.  Who have the keys to my car.  Who, by American standards, I am underpaying. What a weird system.    I guess it is easy for me to say it is weird.  I just wonder how many people in India think it is weird.  Weird is relative, anyway.  But what book, fifty years from now, will be written in India about The Help?

Lady S is from a fishing caste. She young (27), has two daughters (8 and 3), and is very beautiful.  She must be fairly modern, too, because she has some highlights in her long hair. She is taller, too, than what I would guess is the average height of an Indian woman.  She always wears fun-colored salwaar kameez to work.  Each day she take off the dupatta  (scarf) and hangs it on the doorknob, which I like. Those things just get in the way.  It makes her look like a no-nonsense type of gal.  She seems nice, and normal enough to me.  She cooks pretty well (although her chicken was really tough last night) and she taught me how to make chapattis (the round, flat piece of bread that you eat with basically every meal- it is your silverware) when I told her they were awful as a re-heated dish.   Well, I didn’t say awful.  I just said they tasted better fresh. Before the ‘daughter is sick’ lie, I got along with her fairly well. 

Driver A, on the other hand, could be the Indian version of David Hyde Pierce’s Niles Crane from Frasier.  If I were a playwright, he’d have a TV show.  He looks like him (well, the Indian version of him).  He acts like him.  He is completely neurotic like him.   Driver A does have a much better love life, of course. He is 35, been married for 14 years, and has a kid of about the same age. 

Driver A is small and skinny.  He has short black hair with a slightly receding hairline and bald spot. He wears an overly large silver-colored watch each day.  I always wonder where he got it, because it clearly doesn’t fit. Was it a gift passed through the family?  Some day, when he doesn’t drive me crazy, I’ll ask.   He has a very nice smile, and loves to laugh and talk.  About anything.  Music, politics, the best places to shop….but his favorite topics are money, and his previous employers. 

Driver A is a Muslim, but his wife works outside the home.  He also loves to drink, which he doesn’t tell his wife.  He goes to booze parties and tells her he is still driving me around (great, he doesn’t even mind telling lies to his wife, who knows what he’ll say to me). I really want to fire him, but when I spoke with the person who owns the home we are renting, he told me that, relative to the typical driver in Mumbai, he is great.   

Now, Muslims, of course, believe there have been many great Prophets to spread the message of God. Jesus, of course, being one, but the most recent being Muhammad.  I am fairly certain (in only a semi-sarcastic manner), that Driver A believes his past employers are the most recent Prophets, because he worships a framed photo they gave him and tells me of their glorious teachings (and how I could be better, like them) each day.  It is absurd. Even the day his wife made us the biryani as a gift, he gave it to me, telling me something along the lines of, “it is like I am giving it to them by giving it to you”.   

Of course, one of Niles Crane’s best characteristics is the fact he is neurotic.  Driver A, on our very first day together, with him as my official driver, told me he hasn’t slept in two days due to depression of his previous employers leaving.  That is when I learned he sits and worships the framed photo of them, which is adorned with a light, just like artwork at the museum.  He sat, crying, not eating or sleeping, for two days straight.  And he admits this to me, that he hasn’t slept in 48 hours, on our first drive together!  It doesn’t exactly promote confidence in him.    

Each day he complains to me about money, whether it be the foreign people who stole his jobs, or how much money he made working a certain party, or as a valet person for the night.   I am sick of it.  It is fine if you want to tell me about your family, or your trip to Malaysia. But please stop telling your employer your wages from previous jobs. 

Our car’s fuel pump broke on the 3^rd day or so of his being my driver.  The circumstances around everything, at first, looked highly fishy, and that is when I found out he lied to me.  It was out of fear of losing his job, not fear of “I did something wrong” (at least according to the home owner who has known him for years), but still, knowing he lied doesn’t make me put much trust in him.   He spent that night in tears, not sleeping, too.  And he tells me this! He is the most emotional man I have ever met. 

He knows where everything is located, which is great. Anything I want he knows.  It is amazing, since there is nothing as awesome as Meijer here.  But he is a pretty bad driver- we’ve been in two very close calls already, and it has only been two weeks.  One of them was definitely his fault for not paying attention, too. 

Driver S, the guy who, in the past, drove me from Chowpatty to school each day for two weeks, was a much better driver.  And didn’t cry in front of me.  He didn’t whine for more money.  He even refused some of my bigger tips.  I really miss him.   Driver S didn’t argue with me.

Last night, after going to a concert, Driver A refused to pick us up!  He wanted us to walk to the car (wherever it was parked) because he couldn’t be bothered to come to the main road where we were standing and waiting for him.  He is our driver.  I don’t care if he wanted to stand by the car and wait for us.  His cell phone didn’t work for 15 minutes after the concert, so we walked towards the street, for a cab, so we could go home if he never put his darn sim card back in the phone (which I know is what he was doing, because he’d been playing with it the entire day).  And then he had the gall to talk back to me when I told him he was our driver and it is part of his job that he should come to us when we call him rather than ask us to walk to his location.  Especially because we were standing on the main road, on the way back home, whereas he was on some side road off the beaten path.  I was so mad at him.  I really wished I could fire him. 

I wish I could go back to a normal, American life where I can walk where I want, when I want.   Where books like The Help are stories that are mostly in the past, not a large part of modern life.