I was liked better than Tom, but that turned into a disadvantage. Tom’s clothes were ironed, folded perfectly, and arranged in storeroom-tidy stacks beneath dangling lavender sachets in his wardrobe. Mine were wrinkled and wadded haphazardly into overstuffed drawers. If Tom asked for a cup of tea, people scurried. I’d listen to the cups clattering with envy and annoyance—we could ask people for tea? If I wanted a cup of tea, I fixed it for myself.
And I accepted these conditions—an imbalance of my own creation—with pure hypocrisy.
At night, when the staff had left us alone in our shining rooms and Max was sound asleep, I excoriated Tom for his rarefied status. I blamed his tone of voice and carriage for reeking of patriarchal authority. I never copped to creating the character of “Sir.” I wasn’t even fully conscious of having done so. Instead, I implied—falsely, unjustly—that Tom was a closet chauvinist whose attitudes had been detected and embraced by the like-minded residents of India.
Now Mary wandered off to await the decree of Sir. I turned to my laptop and tried to get back to work, but I was distracted. The lottery tickets stuck in my mind. Once again, the cynical, suspicious tendencies I’d nurtured as a journalist took over. Maybe Mary wasn’t a pious widow. Maybe she was a hustler. I decided to check out her story.
A few clicks, and I’d tracked down a handful of parish phone numbers for a Catholic church in Faridabad. After a few disconnected lines and busy signals, I finally got through.
“Hello, my name is Megan Stack and I’m—um—” I stammered to the secretary who answered. Muscle memory had taken over; I’d started to introduce myself as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times. I coughed weakly.
“I want to check whether there is a lottery,” I continued, realizing how peculiar and pushy I sounded without the journalistic excuse.
“Sorry?”
“A lottery.” I spoke very slowly lest the confusion be linguistic. “Is there a lottery?”
Silence.
“Because somebody tried to sell me tickets.”
“Tickets?”
“Tickets. To build a church.”
“A church?”
“A new church. In Faridabad. New church. This is Faridabad, right?”
“This Faridabad, yes.”
“So. Somebody tried to sell me tickets. To a lottery. For a new. Church. I wanted to know. If it’s true.”
Silence.
“Do you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you find out?”
“You call back in five minutes.”
I called back in five minutes. Again in ten minutes. Again in fifteen minutes. Nobody answered.
I sat on the couch and felt terrible. I’d already gotten fond of Mary, and already she’d started tinkering with my nerves. She interrupted when I tried to explain. She hung up the phone when I was still speaking. She talked too loud, and she never stopped moving. Her pointless hurrying gave me a wild, disoriented feeling. I wanted her to come into the rooms carefully and slowly, to adapt herself to our family, the way we spoke, the way we did things.
Instead she told stories and created situations. She wanted to involve me in her things. She wanted to involve herself in my things. She wanted to make herself useful, to make me useful, to rearrange raw materials.
That night I told Tom about the lottery.
“Sounds weird,” he said cheerfully. “Let’s not do it.”
“Okay.”
“Unless you want to,” he added. “I’m not the Catholic in the family.”
“I don’t want to.”
“A thousand rupees is pretty steep for a lottery in these parts,” he mused.
“That,” I agreed, “is what I said.”
The next morning I tried to keep my tone light.
“Oh, Mary,” I said. “Tom said we shouldn’t do the church lottery. I’m sorry.”
“Okay, Madame,” she said quickly. “No problem.”
* * *
————
Here is what I knew about Mary at first: She was Bhutanese. Her first husband was dead. Her current husband was a Nigerian migrant who bought human hair from temples and sold it to craftsmen who made wigs and extensions.
She never missed church on Sunday morning. She attended monthly all-night prayer vigils that she believed were the secret to health and luck. She prayed the rosary twice a day. She took Mother Teresa’s autobiography off our shelf and curled up to read while Max slept. After a few weeks, she finished with Mother Teresa and picked up a travel book about Bhutan. I watched her pore over the pages.
“Bhutan must be beautiful,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“I’ve always wanted to go.”
“You should go.”
“What is it like?”
“It is very nice.”
The longer I knew Mary, the less I understood her. She mangled information and botched basic instructions. If I asked her to turn the water heater on, she turned it off. If I told her to feed Max anything but those drumsticks, she’d feed him nothing but those drumsticks. There was some failure of hearing or comprehension or memory—or maybe, I sometimes thought, she just couldn’t stop rushing long enough to listen.
It was confusing, because she was also brilliant. She never forgot a face or the location of a home, no matter how long ago she’d visited. She could name, with uncanny accuracy, the location of a broken Hot Wheels car or the castanets from my college flamenco class or any other small object gone missing in our rambling apartment. “In the cabinet next to the sink, beside the potatoes, in a pink bowl,” she’d say. And she was right, always right.
She was a glib talker; she could make anything sound good. Non sequiturs, clichés, abstract declarations—they all fell from her mouth sounding like ageless wisdom.
“If everyone is happy, then who will know sadness?”
When she said that, Mary was folding blankets over the sides of Max’s bed, propping his stuffed animals against the wall. It was morning, and Mary was telling me a jerky and discontinuous story while she tidied the bedroom. She’d been an orphan. Her brother was gay. Her husband had died in a motorcycle crash.
“This is woman’s life,” she said.
There was nothing left to straighten. Everything was put away. Mary fiddled with her fingers, shifted her weight, gaze climbing the walls of Max’s room.
“What did you do after your husband died?”
“My mother-in-law,” she said. “I asked her, ‘What should I do?’ She said, ‘I will take care of the children, you go to work.’ ”
Mary’s mother-in-law had quit her job in the tea fields, taken custody of her grandchildren, and handed Mary over to an “agent” who recruited village girls to work as maids in the city. The mother-in-law had raised the children ever since while Mary earned the money.
“Did you want to come here?” I asked.
“It was okay.” Mary laughed uneasily.
“But it wasn’t your idea.”
“In our culture, the mother-in-law decides.”
“Even when your husband is dead?”
“Even now,” she said. “If I need to make a decision, I should go to her and ask.”
The agent had brought Mary to Delhi by train and deposited her at the home of an Indian family.
“Thank God, they were good to me,” Mary said.
At first she never spoke of her early working days except to say, flatly, that men were brutal by nature and that it was simply impossible for a woman to live alone in the Indian capital. It took her two years of work to pay back the agent, she told me. Only then was she free.
“This is life,” she said. “This is God’s will.”
As far as I could understand, Mary’s mother-in-law had seized Mary’s children and sold Mar
y into a sort of bondage. But Mary didn’t see it that way. The agent had incurred great expense, Mary pointed out. Naturally, she needed to be repaid.
“So if your husband hadn’t died—” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. I waved a hand to indicate the child’s bedroom, our house, the stretches of New Delhi beyond.
“I would never be here working,” she said plainly. “A woman from a good family does not do like that unless something happens. I would be in my village, in my own place.
“This is life.”
She kept saying that. This is life.
“Mary,” I said. “You’ve been through so much. I honestly can’t imagine.”
“Yes,” she smiled nervously. “If everybody is happy, then who will know sadness?”
When I type these words of Mary’s or repeat them out loud, I realize they lack meaning. But when she spoke them, her thick sturdy fingers lost in the work of my home, I heard the prayer of a woman who could not dream of riches or prestige or fairy-tale love. Still she got up every morning and tried.
“Children are children,” she said when I pointed out behavioral shortfalls. “They change according to their age.
“It’s not easy to become mother,” she told me by way of comfort.
Small words stuffed with centuries of human truth.
She smiled to herself, eyes downcast, a universal goddess enjoying a private joke. The children were passing through, we parents were ephemeral figures, but Mary would stay.
* * *
————
“Madame,” Mary cried one day after taking a hurried call. “My husband is coming! He bought buffalo meat for you!”
Mary always talked in bursts of exclamation.
“What?”
“He is coming on the metro!”
“What? I—”
“You said you wanted red meat!”
“No! I didn’t!” The exclamation marks were contagious. “When?”
“The other day you were saying, because you are pregnant—”
Now I remembered: I had complained to Mary that I’d gotten weak and anemic in India, where my diet was vegetarian with a side of chicken. I had confessed that I missed beef—yes, I had! I had not, however, asked her to buy meat for me.
“No, I meant—I didn’t mean you should buy some.”
“No problem,” she said. “He was buying anyway for himself. I told him to get some for you, too.”
She looked at me expectantly. I imagined the sweaty hovel where this meat would have been cleaved by some unclean blade; pictured it packed into a plastic bag and carried among shoving and sweating crowds on the metro, and my stomach rolled over. How to get out of this?
“That was really nice—”
“No problem, Madame.” She smiled smugly, and I was stabbed by irritation. Mary and her husband couldn’t shop for our household. Maybe next time it would be, what, some rusting piece of kitchenware, a stray puppy—
“—but I don’t want the meat. I’m sorry.”
“Oh…”
“I didn’t ask you to buy it, and I just can’t use it right now.”
“Okay.” She studied her fingers, laced together as if she were praying, and I had the horrible feeling that she was about to cry.
“Next time, please don’t buy me anything unless I really, specifically ask you to.” I tried to keep my voice gentle; it caught in my throat.
“No problem,” she said.
I shrank away. But I was right, I told myself, I was right!
It was all so embarrassing and petty and yet inescapable; it made me feel right and wrong at the exact same moment.
* * *
————
“Madame.” Mary had come so quietly I didn’t hear a footfall until she was at my elbow. “Anybody is looking for cook? There is a boy in my church—”
“A child?”
“What? No, no. He is grown.”
“Like how old?”
“I don’t know.” She flapped her hand. “Twenty-five, maybe thirty.”
“So, a man.”
“Yes, Madame. A boy—”
“Mary, uh, we don’t usually say ‘boy’ unless somebody is a child.” I sounded priggish, but my head was full of the racial connotations of my homeland. “It’s confusing,” I added lamely.
“Okay, Madame. So this boy—”
“Man.” It just came out.
“Yes, Madame. This boy is sleeping on the floor with people from church. I feel pity for him.”
“What does he want to do?”
“Cleaning, cooking. Whatever is there.”
“He has experience?”
“Yes, very good experience. He worked a long time for an Italian family but they left India. They loved him so much.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see if anybody is looking.”
I gather, from the works of Somerset Maugham and E. M. Forster, that the life of the expatriate colonial was once replete with tennis clubs, daylight gin and tonics, and recreational racism.
Nowadays, the life of the foreign neocolonial has been conquered by the Internet. I haven’t played tennis since leaving the United States, and tonic no longer contains quinine—and the racism, while still detectable, has largely been repackaged as progressive-minded critiques of the country at large.
What we do have, we foreigners abroad, are listservs. If you’re not on at least one listserv in your city of residence, it’s like you’re not even there. If you want to buy a used household appliance rather than pay a steep import tax, or recover some of the money you egregiously overpaid for some whimsical baby trifle by selling it on to the next sucker, or find out where to stay with small children on that one island where there might be endangered turtles—you consult a listserv.
Listservs are also the preferred method to advertise domestic staff and fish for applicants. It was easy to dig up a few job leads for Mary’s friend, then send his phone number to the families who were hiring.
“I don’t know this person,” I stipulated. “But he is a friend of our lovely nanny and supposedly he has lots of experience.”
The next day Mary came to me glowing.
“Rajesh is going for interviews,” she enthused. “He is saying thank you. He is praying for your family.”
“Tell him thanks.”
“He is saying, ‘Your madame is good.’ He’s so happy.”
“Thanks,” I repeated. “It’s really not a big deal.”
The next day Mary came back for more.
“Madame,” she said. “Anybody is looking for nanny?”
I helped two more job seekers that week, and even more the next. A couple minutes of my time, a few lines typed. No problem. In exchange, Mary allowed me to bask in the glow of my own benevolence. Half her church was reportedly praying for me.
“She doesn’t care about people, not like you,” she said one day, describing another employer. “You have a soft heart.”
“You’ve helped a lot of people,” she said another day. “You’ve done a lot of good.”
Eagerly I clung to these flatteries. I was still dead-eying the traffic-light beggars to get them away from the car, but at least I was also helping impoverished strangers find work. And then some more strangers, and still more.
Matching workers with job openings didn’t cost me anything, and in theory it was a respectable practice. But I began to doubt myself. I couldn’t put a finger on the source of my unease, but the entire arrangement had started to smell fishy.
I imagined the mothers of New Delhi chirping over their masala chai, comparing notes about this suspicious new American woman who kept chiming in with random candidates for baby nurses and kitchen help.
Oh yes, she emailed me, too!
And you should
have seen the woman who came for the interview.
Really?
She was terrible.
What a waste of time!
Maybe that lady—what’s her name? Megan something—maybe she’s running an agency or something…?
Maybe we should report her to the administrators…?
Mary’s phone chimed constantly, and the conversations lengthened. I watched through the window as she followed Max abstractedly through the park, haggling on the phone while he poked in mud puddles.
“I know this sounds crazy,” I told Tom that night. “But I almost feel like she’s turned it into a business. Like she’s taking a cut.”
“I had,” Tom replied, “exactly the same thought.”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Just the way she always seems so intent about it.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, tell her to cut it out,” he said. “She needs to be paying attention to Max, not dealing on the phone all the time.”
The next time Mary came and announced, “Madame—” I cut her off.
“Mary.” My tone was unnecessarily curt, strangled by discomfort. “I need to stop helping your friends find jobs. It’s getting to be too much.”
Her face fell.
“I have a lot of other work to do,” I added. “And so do you.”
“Okay, Madame,” she said, recovering quickly. “No problem.”
“Mary?”
“Yes?”
“I feel like you’re on the phone a lot when you’re with Max.”
“No, I never do like that.”
“It’s okay if you need to take a call, but you shouldn’t have long chats when you’re watching him.”
“I never do that.”
“Okay,” I said disingenuously. “Good.”
Chapter 14
Our household in Delhi was unfinished. We’d barely furnished the flat, half our things were still in boxes, and it would be many months yet before we bought a car. But my pregnancy had reached its end. The new baby would have to join us in all our half-done domesticity.
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