by Dave Prager
But all jams eventually loosen, and at some point in the morning my taxi would cross into Gurgaon, make a right, pass the dead crow, pass the gorgeous kingfishers, and open up to a straightaway where, looming in the distance before me, was the second office building in which I worked. Part of a development called DLF Cyber City (which was named after the corporation responsible for much of the way Gurgaon is today), it was sixteen massive stories tall, with aqua-green windows and a giant architectural flourish that ran diagonally up the side of the structure and cantilevered out five stories above and beyond the building itself.
This pompadour was little more than a steel skeleton when we moved in. In fact, for the first couple of months, this building was like the second Death Star: what appeared to be an active construction site was actually . . . well, certainly not fully operational, but operational enough that our business could function, although not without certain hardships. Though we’d moved in late October, it wasn’t until February when there were enough operative elevators to accommodate the building’s workers. Until then, only four elevators served sixteen floors, with each one assigned a separate call button. If I wanted to ride one up, I’d have to press ‘down’ on four different panels and then ride the elevator down the third basement—because it would invariably be too full to enter by the time it returned to the ground floor. Most days I just walked up the four paanstained flights of stairs and through the unfinished hallway, admiring how my co-workers’ fresh footprints stood out so starkly against the sawdust-covered slate tiles.
The first time they switched on the air conditioning in our office, clouds of construction dust billowed out of the vents. This surely shortened the lifespans of both the computer equipment and of most of my co-workers, who sat at their desks and covered their mouths and worked anyway while the office boys ran around with futile dust rags. (The expats in the office were the only ones who abandoned ship, sprinting for the food court.) After the dust stopped billowing, we discovered that the air conditioner was apparently unable to operate at anything less than arctic capacity. It blasted icy air with such intensity that everyone wore scarves and hats for weeks until they got it fixed.
In spite of these initial difficulties (and others: there was nowhere to wash dishes but the men’s room sink; all the office taxi drivers had to wait for our calls in the third basement parking garage, about two levels lower than mobile phone signals could reach; and clear glass had been installed as urinal barriers, which made for some awkward male moments), it was eventually a well-built and modern office. My favorite aspect of it, though, had nothing to do with its construction. It was the fact that our finance head, Sudhakaran, insisted that the “Gayatri mantra” be repeated over the loudspeakers for at least an hour every morning. Even though the tape was so old that it would speed up and slow down with alien vibrato, I found it soothing and comforting. It was the ideal soundtrack to put the traffic stress behind me so I could focus on the day ahead. Jenny and I would hear this mantra all over India, emanating from market stalls as vendors prepared for the work stress, drifting through bicycle rickshaw stands as drivers bathed on the sidewalk, and accompanying the hiss of the chaiwallah’s propane stove as the morning crowd gathered around for a quick hit before work began. Each time I heard it, it made me happy for the day ahead.
The ground floor of our building was given over to expensive restaurants, pompous nightclubs and arrogantly upscale furniture stores. A few other buildings in the area boasted food courts for common workers that—joy of joys!—even had coffee shops. I’d often jump out of my taxi before reaching my office, Frogger across the road, get my coffee, and then walk down the sandy shoulder towards my building, weaving around parked bicycle rickshaw drivers who’d pat their seat to entice my patronage, vendors selling nimbu pani or raw cucumbers, and boys washing dishes for sidewalk dhabas. After climbing the stairs or shoving into the elevators, I’d reach my desk in the corner of our open office, sip my coffee, and behold our spectacular bird’s-eye view of the shamelessly inadequate four-lane road that serviced this and the dozen other buildings in the area.
I was mesmerised by the way the traffic patterns shifted and danced. The morning rush would loosen around 11 a.m., transforming the tightly packed chaos into loosely packed chaos, which would by four o’clock loosen further still into something that nearly approximated flowing traffic. That four o’clock road would beckon to me with its seductive promise of a swift journey home, if only I could escape the office before the sun went down, the traffic came out, and the air polluted up. But I was never able to answer the call of the momentarily open road, and the transformation of the road home into the parking lot to nowhere cranked my blood pressure each time. (The stoic outlook I eventually adopted towards traffic only calmed me when I was actually in my car.)
In those pre-commute moments, when the chorus of honking would penetrate the plate glass windows, the only thing worse than seeing the endless line of headlights awaiting me was not seeing it: a road completely empty in one direction meant some catastrophic accident had occurred somewhere down the line, and the unexpected backup on top of the regular backup would ensure that my driver would be at least an hour late. I’d find myself yelling at any co-worker responsible in any way for the fact that I was still in the office after 7.30 p.m.—anyone whose work I had to approve, or whose meeting I had to attend, or whose input I needed to finish a task.
But working late was ingrained in my office’s culture for two reasons: first was Murali’s management style, which decreed that no team could leave the office until each team member had finished their work and every other member had approved it. As frustrating as this was, I have to admit it was also the only way we could ensure quality control. But the second reason drove me crazy: no one but I actually seemed to be in any hurry to get home.
Most of my team members, including the married ones, had far more space and freedom at the office. So many of them actually preferred to be at work. Even after their work obligations were fulfilled, and even after all their teammates were ready to go, people would still happily dawdle.
This theory was bolstered one Friday night when I chose to take the office taxi home. Our office had contracted a fleet of Indicas and Innovas to criss-cross the city transporting employees who didn’t own cars or who didn’t want to depreciate them by bouncing down to Gurgaon every day. I saw Friday night as the beginning of the weekend, so I longed to be home in time to take advantage of it. But I guess most of my co-workers saw Friday night as an opportunity to have fun with office friends without the burden of getting up early the next day. It took forty-five minutes from the time everyone in my cab said they were ready to leave until the time everyone actually got into the cab. The decision was immediately made that we should stop for booze (which I was in favor of), but only I seemed frustrated when the booze quest stretched into a bathroom stop, a cigarette break, and a gossip session at the side of the road. After the vodka, Limca and bags of roasted dal were finally purchased, and once drinks were poured and passed around to everyone (including the driver), we slowly wound our way up the back roads of Vasant Kunj, stopping for at least one more bathroom break before finally reaching the Outer Ring Road in twice the time it would have taken me in my own cab.
When the group voted to stop for kebabs somewhere near Safdarjung, I gave up. I said my goodbyes to their furrowed brows, flagged an auto and zipped home. It’s true that they wanted to enjoy their Friday night as much as I did—but whereas my Friday night began the moment I stepped through the door of my flat, that’s when their Friday night was over.
In the spring, my company split into two parts, and half of us moved to a new office. (Sudhakaran’s morning mantra, alas, didn’t join us.) Though the split had officially taken place at the start of the new year, our half of the company had been allowed to stay put while our new office was being renovated. This created some uncomfortable corporate tension during the subsequent months of cohabitation that included delayed pay chec
ks, parties to which only half the office was invited, and awkward carrom games between the principals of the two companies in which their friendly banter was belied by steely-eyed concentration that made it clear both men were staking their manhood on its outcome. And in one infamous incident, one of my team members was accused of stealing paper towels from the bathroom for “personal use.” Outraged by the accusation, this co-worker responded by stealing the office phone from the security guard’s desk (which was an act that seemed logical to him at the time). The head of our now-former company, who was nominally in charge of this office, responded by banning this employee from the premises.
The bosses then spent two days yelling at each other. Finally, the other boss agreed to let our employee back on condition that Jagdish, the office security guard, would henceforth search all our bags as each of us left for the day.
Jagdish, who along with half of the office peons defected to our company when we finally moved out, was always very apologetic as he went through our bags. Fortunately, no more paper towels were ever reported missing.
Now, readers of this book who have never worked in India may have done a double take at a word I used in the last paragraph: “peon.” In the West, that word holds connotations of economic oppression. But in Delhi, “peon” was actually the official job title for the lowliest workers in our office, as printed in my company’s employee handbook, which also explained that while regular employees could be reimbursed for taxis on nights they worked late, peons could only be reimbursed for bus fare. Peons were responsible for an office’s manual labor, no matter how menial—and it could be extremely menial, as I discovered during one of my first days in the office, when one of my new co-workers hollered across the room: “Harish! Pani!”
It wasn’t an unfriendly shout. It was the same tone of voice I’d use to holler across our flat to ask Jenny if she’d seen my iPod. From across the office, Harish looked up, his face neither surprised nor perturbed by the request. And though the person shouting was closer to the kitchen than Harish was, Harish nevertheless walked past him and emerged holding a glass of water on a tray. He waited patiently at the shouter’s side while the shouter ignored him for a moment, for two moments, for one more moment, and then took the glass from the tray.
Every business has peons, or office boys, as they’re also called. Uneducated and unskilled as compared to the rest of the employees, they’re hired to do whatever is required so that the skilled workers can maximize the time spent using their brains. They wash dishes, fetch tea, make copies, move tables, empty trash bins, clean desks, courier documents, hand out cake and pour soda during office birthday celebrations, mop up any cake that spilled as it was ceremoniously smeared on the birthday person’s face, go down to the chaiwallah to pick up cigarettes for anyone who runs out, and journey to Café Coffee Day to bring back cappuccinos for everyone in the office except themselves. When my colleague Bharat bought a new motorcycle and when my colleague Tapan had a child, they both brought sweets to celebrate their fortune with the office; but it was the peons who took them from person to person, offering the box and telling us whom they were from and why. One day Bharat brought in a lassi as a gift for me, and he had the peon carry it over—even though Bharat sat only fifteen feet away.
Peons exist because of India’s glut of unskilled labor. The excess labor supply pushes wages down to the point where it’s cheaper to hire someone to fetch water for employees than it is for employees to spend thirty seconds getting it themselves.
At first, I was horrified by the existence of peons. And I was shocked by what I viewed as my co-workers’ exploitation of them. One late night, we ordered McDonald’s for dinner and left the conference table strewn with wrappers. But when I grabbed a trash can and started clearing the table, my co-workers restrained me: cleaning was the peons’ job, they said, and the mess should wait for them until the morning. This was common practice: I’d often arrive early in the morning to find the office strewn with dirty plates bearing piles of last night’s chicken bones. Even though the basement had a rat problem and this mess might bring them sniffing around upstairs, it was the peons’ job to clean, so the employees left the plates for them. “Please don’t do this, Dave,” Bharat said, laying his hand on my arm as I swept up the McDonald’s wrappers anyway.
Because how could I demean a fellow human being by making him do something I was perfectly capable of doing myself? When I needed a drink, or a pen, or a photocopy of my passport, I would get up and get it myself—not just because I was uncomfortable with asking someone to do something so trivial, but because I wanted to make a statement: that I was enlightened. That I was everyone’s equal. That I didn’t believe in class or caste or hierarchy. That I didn’t think my relative wealth made me too good for a little manual labor.
But the peons didn’t like it. They’d eyeball me suspiciously as I’d wave them away from the copier, staring with distrust at my broadest and most egalitarian of smiles. They’d hover as I’d press the green button, clearly unhappy that I was encroaching on their domain. I couldn’t understand why. Couldn’t they see that I was the only one treating them with respect?
Eventually, I saw things from the peons’ point of view: that this strange gora had flown all the way from America to make them redundant.
What if everyone in the office adopted my misguided enlightenment? An office in which everyone microwaved their own lunches and straightened their own papers wouldn’t need to employ peons at all. And what then? Their jobs were demeaning, no doubt about that, but at least they were being demeaned indoors, in air conditioning, during normal business hours. Refilling staplers and clearing McDonald’s wrappers is a hell of a lot better than guarding a cold ATM vestibule or walking up a ten-story ramp with a load of bricks balanced on their heads.
With this perspective, I realized that the more I asked the peons to do, the more job security I gave them. I wouldn’t be demeaning them by giving them work—I’d be supporting their families. So when I arrived in the morning, I’d seek out the peon sweeping the office, hand him my dirty coffee mug, and tell him “Saff karo.” I’d give another peon a prescription and 200 rupees and instruct him to go pick up the medicine at the pharmacy (although “instructing him” usually entailed asking my co-worker Anurag to translate). When I needed a pen or a paper clip, I knew whom to call: the supply closet wasn’t my domain, it was theirs. More than that, it was their livelihood.
My company’s third office was in Udyog Vihar, which is an industrial neighborhood a highway across and a generation removed from DLF Cyber City. The fact that we shifted here, instead of into another of DLF’s sparkling high-rise buildings, was striking testament to the divergence between Western and Indian perceptions of status. Paul, the French-American who headed up our office, probably selected this former manufacturing space with our company’s Paris office in mind. That office was a spectacularly converted factory full of exposed wood, brushed metal and old equipment repurposed as modern art. It had artistic cachet as a rejection of the standard twentieth-century office milieu; Paul obviously wanted that image here in Udyog Vihar.
But Paul didn’t consider it from the Indian standpoint. Westerners have been desensitized to the office aesthetic by decades of mind-numbing meetings in high-rise conference rooms. In Delhi, though, so few people have had the opportunity to work in skyscrapers that there was no cultural currency in rejecting them. It’s far more desirable to work in a brand-new high-rise than a twenty-year-old gray cement box in an industrial neighborhood, no matter how fluorescent green and pink the walls were painted.
Just like nobody understood why Jenny and I wouldn’t want to live in a 4,500-square-foot penthouse on the twenty-third floor of Hamilton Court, nobody understood why Paul would force our company to endure such a huge step-down. But it was his decision, so we all glumly said goodbye to our former co-workers in Cyber City, packed up our computers and the shoddier of the two carrom boards, and moved ten more minutes down the road. My route to
work shifted slightly: instead of driving the packed stretch through Cyber City’s skyscrapers, I’d now turn right at the urology hospital and cut through the residential neighborhoods to the northeast, lurching over a dozen speed bumps until we reached the point at which we’d meet NH-8’s massive twin flyovers.
To enter Udyog Vihar from that point, we had to follow a four-lane-wide turn-off for a quarter of a mile in the shadow of the flyover. Because the city hadn’t installed traffic lights despite the four lanes of traffic, our passage was regulated by traffic police who would let each direction flow for five-minute bursts. Between bursts, paused in the welcome shade, I could hear the traffic atop the cantilevered concrete behemoth flowing smoothly above towards points deeper in Gurgaon. The price of their swift passage was paid by those of us down here: a restless mass of cars and cycle rickshaws and motorcycles all jostling for advantage, Udyog Vihar beckoning from the sunlight beyond, everyone but the beggars impatient for the policeman to blow his whistle and let us through to our offices.
In the cumulative hours I sat at this eternal intersection, I memorized the scene. I knew the ripped circus posters. I knew the cops with Rajasthani mustaches curled up the sides of their cheeks. And I knew the people who called the weedy median home: the withered men with faces wrinkled from a lifetime spent staring into the sun, the exhausted migrant women, the undiscourageable children, the little girl whose full-length skirt was smeared with dirt but not enough to hide the vibrant mustard yellow of the material. We all shared the same daily ritual: I sat in my car, the cops whistled at us to wait or waved at us to go, the engines idled, the exhaust pipes coughed, the cycle rickshaws wove through the cars, and the migrants sat and stared or walked through traffic and begged.
Then one day, a new sight broke the monotony of the ritual: a woman, her two-year-old son and her battered suitcase.