{"id":1858,"date":"2011-03-19T07:51:58","date_gmt":"2011-03-19T12:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=1858"},"modified":"2011-03-29T13:20:36","modified_gmt":"2011-03-29T18:20:36","slug":"bombay-letters-5-april-1998","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/?p=1858","title":{"rendered":"Bombay Letters 4 – April, 1998"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Date: April 1, 1998<\/p>\n

Subject: Servant News and New Apartment<\/p>\n

Dear Family and friends,<\/p>\n

Let me try to bring everyone up to date.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 On that topic, briefly, I am really enjoying my work.\u00a0 One of the high points has been getting to know the local employees.\u00a0 They are, first of all, very, very good at what they do.\u00a0 Second, they are fun and interesting people, Hindus, Muslims, Parsis, and even a few Christians.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

About our servant situation: many of you received a typewritten letter composed by Anita <\/a>with impressions of Bombay and the account of our servant’s death.\u00a0 If you did not get one, write my father and I’m sure he’ll send you a copy.\u00a0 As she described in her letter, our servant, a very nice 55 year old Muslim man, died in his sleep a few weeks ago.\u00a0 It was very traumatic for us.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Yesterday I had the emotionally wrenching experience of meeting his widow and two of his sons to deal with financial issues.\u00a0 Nita and I had discussed our responsibility.\u00a0 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\u2011$80 a month have been able to have?\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I also gave them another almost full month’s salary.\u00a0 What they really were hoping for was for me to give one of their adult sons a job.\u00a0 He is a driver but speaks virtually no English, making it really tough for him to get a job with anybody I knew.\u00a0 I said I would do what I could.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I was very uncomfortable, but folded my hands, (properly) in response.\u00a0 Very powerful.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It’s the same with a driver.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We share a driver with two other people.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Also, this driver is very, very good and we hope to keep him when our own vehicle arrives.\u00a0 Anyway, servants are there to serve us and to a certain degree, at least to our faces, honor us.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

We are in our new apartment.\u00a0 Even by upper-class Bombay standards it is very, very nice.\u00a0 The place was extensively redecorated by the owners.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The vast majority of our colleagues here have only window units.\u00a0 The place has a nice, big airy living\/dining room and a view of the Arabian Sea.\u00a0 Each room includes a telephone which functions as an intercom plus has a servant call button.\u00a0 The kids each have a separate room and they are glad of that!\u00a0 We also have a built in bar.<\/p>\n

We have been very occupied with unpacking.\u00a0 All our stuff arrived in good condition, and now we are eating salsa and chips and watching taped Simpson\u2019s episodes.\u00a0 We also have a 110 tape library we collected as we prepared to move here.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

The disparity between how we live and how our servants live is jarring.<\/p>\n

Our new servant is named Patsy Singh.\u00a0 By her name you can tell where she is from and who she married.\u00a0 Patsy is a Christian name.\u00a0 Singh is a Sikh name.\u00a0 She is a Christian from Kerala who married a Sikh from Punjab. She is very good.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

love to all of you,<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Date: April 1, 1998 Subject: Servant News and New Apartment Dear Family and friends, Let me try to bring everyone up to date.\u00a0 I am writing this on April Fools Day (really!) and have a little extra time at the … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[57],"tags":[81,243,239,244,242,241,82,240],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1858"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7390,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1858\/revisions\/7390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thelifeliterary.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}