Date: April 1, 1998
Subject: Servant News and New Apartment
Dear Family and friends,
Let me try to bring everyone up to date. I am writing this on April Fools Day (really!) and have a little extra time at the end of my day due to a surprisingly light workload. On that topic, briefly, I am really enjoying my work. One of the high points has been getting to know the local employees. They are, first of all, very, very good at what they do. Second, they are fun and interesting people, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and even a few Christians. I know it will be hard to leave such great people with whom I will have worked so closely, when the time comes in two years.
About our servant situation: many of you received a typewritten letter composed by Anita with impressions of Bombay and the account of our servant’s death. If you did not get one, write my father and I’m sure he’ll send you a copy. As she described in her letter, our servant, a very nice 55 year old Muslim man, died in his sleep a few weeks ago. It was very traumatic for us. I was a part of the group who first found his body, and who dealt with the initial issues like what to do with the remains, contacting the next of kin, and dealing with his possessions. Yesterday I had the emotionally wrenching experience of meeting his widow and two of his sons to deal with financial issues. Nita and I had discussed our responsibility. Legally, we had no responsibility besides the month of pay we had owed him. In reality, we wondered about issues like what sort of retirement plan (or insurance!) would a person who had earned the equivalent of $60‑$80 a month have been able to have? Also, the family still has two of five children unmarried and alas, they are girls which means expensive weddings (many Indians go into debt for a wedding like Americans go in debt to buy a car or a small house). I ended up paying for all the related expenses of the wife’s travel to and from her native place in the South of India, the storage of the remains, long distance phone calls, funeral expenses, burial, etc. I also gave them another almost full month’s salary. What they really were hoping for was for me to give one of their adult sons a job. He is a driver but speaks virtually no English, making it really tough for him to get a job with anybody I knew. I said I would do what I could. The two sons and their mother were obviously grief stricken and also respectful of the Sahib (pronounced saab, like the car and I’m referring here to me) who sat before them. Fortunately, we had the conversation at work where one of the local employees spoke their native tongue (Tamil…from the south of India) and fluent English. When the conversation was concluded, one of the sons folded his hands toward me (an act of thanks/respect/greeting/farewell/honor in India; if you see news footage of Indian politicians or if you watched the movie Gandhi you saw this), then he got down on the floor in front of me and touched my feet with his folded hands, a gesture of extreme humility/honor/beseeching/etc. I was very uncomfortable, but folded my hands, (properly) in response. Very powerful.
We Americans are so thoroughly taught and so completely believe our notions of the equality of all people, it is hard, at least for Anita and me, to be served, respected, stood in awe of, feared, watched, etc. Having a servant (we have a new one now) is tough because he or she is there to work 10 hour days for us, are satisfied to sleep in (from our view) tiny, inadequate servant’s quarters, not air-conditioned, etc., and yet know that their job is to do our will. It is appropriate and expected for the servant to cook and wash dishes while we entertain a guest with chips, salsa, and drinks (like yesterday evening), or that we do things like play games or chat around the table while the servant does the dishes. It’s the same with a driver. It is his job to take us to a place and then wait for us to be finished, usually at some social event, even if that means hanging around with the car for two, four, six or more hours. We share a driver with two other people. We each pay 1000 rupees a month, which is the equivalent of $25.00, from each of us or a total salary of $75.00, and 40 rupees an hour (a buck) after six and on Sundays as overtime. Also, this driver is very, very good and we hope to keep him when our own vehicle arrives. Anyway, servants are there to serve us and to a certain degree, at least to our faces, honor us. I am not sure that they even expect thanks (though we always give it), and many guards and others here at the Consulate are very uncomfortable going through a doorway before us, or letting us open and shut our own car door.
We are in our new apartment. Even by upper-class Bombay standards it is very, very nice. The place was extensively redecorated by the owners. It has wood floors in the bedrooms (a rarity and even minor miracle in Bombay!) marble counter tops, bathroom trim, and floors, and loads of mahogany colored built in hutches, shelves, beams in the ceiling, etc. It has the equivalent of central air-conditioning with units outside the apartment and three separate air handlers which funnel air through discreet vents built into the ceiling. The vast majority of our colleagues here have only window units. The place has a nice, big airy living/dining room and a view of the Arabian Sea. Each room includes a telephone which functions as an intercom plus has a servant call button. The kids each have a separate room and they are glad of that! We also have a built in bar.
We have been very occupied with unpacking. All our stuff arrived in good condition, and now we are eating salsa and chips and watching taped Simpson’s episodes. We also have a 110 tape library we collected as we prepared to move here. Now we are working through getting enough transformers (the voltage here is 220 and our appliances are 110), getting hooked up to the Internet from home (applications take time) and all the plethora of other things.
The disparity between how we live and how our servants live is jarring.
Our new servant is named Patsy Singh. By her name you can tell where she is from and who she married. Patsy is a Christian name. Singh is a Sikh name. She is a Christian from Kerala who married a Sikh from Punjab. She is very good. Today she went for a physical/lung/x-ray/ lab work, normal for employers to require of newly hired servants though we, of course, paid for it.
love to all of you,
