One fateful Friday night we booked a room at the Imperial Hotel. This iconic landmark is a colonial dreamscape of palm colonnades and art deco pilasters and gilt-framed renditions of gallant Indian soldiers and yet more gallant British soldiers; elephants and temples. The lawn drinks more water than entire Delhi neighborhoods. The partition of India was negotiated at the bar. Tom wanted to go, and I sort of wanted to go, too, at least I wanted to want to go. But I was anxious, and Pooja could tell.
“Ma’am,” she said as I packed my smallest suitcase. “I’ll sleep in the house.”
“That’s okay. Mary’s sleeping here.”
“Mary sleeps so deeply,” she said. “If something happens she won’t wake up.”
“You don’t mind?”
“Mary and I will both sleep here,” she said. “I’ll feel better.”
“Me, too.”
I smiled indulgently at Pooja’s dedication to our kids.
* * *
————
Just before we left for the hotel, I made a crucial strategic mistake. In a last-minute spasm of parental wistfulness, I suggested to Mary that, after we’d finished sleeping late and lingering over breakfast, she could bring the kids over for a dip in the fabulous marble swimming pool. I’ll call you, I said. I should have known this was a bad idea.
The next morning we were still stupefied in sheets and dreams, thick hotel curtains yanked tight against the dawn, when my phone bellowed.
“What the fuck?” moaned Tom.
“It’s Mary.”
“Hello?”
“Oh,” Mary yelled. “We are here.”
“What?” I blinked around the gloomy room. Was I dreaming? Nightmaring? “Where?”
“Kids were too excited.”
“You’re in the hotel?”
“Kids were too excited, waiting at home. They wanted to come.”
“You’re—where? In the lobby?”
“Yes, Madame.”
“Um.”
Tom stared at me. The warning in his eyes was empty. We were trapped.
“I’m coming.”
I hung up.
“Tell her to take them home.” Tom had the muted hysteria of a prisoner who has exhausted his last appeal.
“I can’t. Imagine how crushed they would be.”
“Why did she do this?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did you tell her?”
My complicity, of course, was also in question.
“I told her,” I said resentfully, “that I would probably give her a call. Once we got up. To bring the kids for swimming.
“Later, I told her,” I added.
“She’s ruined the whole thing,” he grumbled.
“I know.”
“The whole point was to get some sleep.”
“I know.”
* * *
————
Dreams uprooted and breakfast invaded, we took the boys swimming and then went home. Everything, including ourselves, looked dingier and drearier after the exquisite hotel. Dust on the stairs. Streaks on the walls. A black bag of trash awaiting pickup on the landing.
In the kitchen Pooja stirred soup, fried chicken dumplings, and smiled to see us. We sat down in the dining room for a family lunch. While the kids ate, my eyes ran idly over the shelves. Skimmed, caught, retraced, and stopped. Somebody had moved the liquor bottles. The Jameson was on the wrong shelf. The Johnnie Walker Black had been dragged forward.
I opened my mouth to call Pooja, but my voice died in my throat because I suddenly remembered the trash bag on the landing. It was a small incongruity that now seemed significant. We never left our trash outside lest stray cats rip the bags and scatter the garbage.
Leaving Tom and the boys chattering and chewing, I walked through the house and out the front door and picked up the trash bag.
Clank.
I gave it a shake.
Clank, clink, clank.
I unknotted the bag and there, nestled among soggy tea leaves and stinking paper towels and wilting cucumber peels, lay two empty bottles of cheap whiskey.
I fetched a trash bag from the kitchen, ignoring Pooja, who puttered over the stove. I slipped the bottles into the bag and, pressing them together so they wouldn’t clash, hid them in a little-used cupboard in our bathroom.
I knew it was Pooja. In my mind, she was already fired. But there remained crucial questions. What if strangers came over? What if there were men? And my babies here—I had to know. And that meant I had to get Mary to turn state’s evidence.
With trembling hands and quaking heart, I read storybooks to the boys and tucked them in for a nap. By the time I called Mary into the dining room, Pooja had gone home for the afternoon.
“What happened last night,” I said coldly.
“No,” she laughed nervously. “Nothing,” she said quickly.
“Please don’t lie.”
“No—I was sleeping—Pooja was here—”
“I know something happened.”
“I didn’t see. Nothing happened. You know I always say my rosary—”
“Who was here?”
“Nobody. Pooja and me.”
“Who was drinking?”
“Nobody was drinking.”
“Wait.”
I returned with the bottles and banged them down on the table. The crash made Mary jump a little, and for a moment I was afraid I’d shattered the glass. That’s when I noticed the rage sloshing around inside of me.
“Tell me the truth.” I took the bottles out of the bag. “Or I’ll fire you.”
She looked at the bottles, my face, the bottles again. Anger rushed and poured through my veins.
“I should fire you,” I told her. “Whatever happened was your responsibility. I left—you—in charge of my kids.”
She was quiet. I was also quiet. I was ready to be quiet all afternoon.
“It was Pooja,” she finally said.
“Uh, yeah,” I sighed. “That much I understand.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Who was here?”
“Nobody,” Mary said. “Only Pooja and her sister.”
“They had a party?”
“Not a party. Just Pooja’s sister was here.”
“Nobody else.”
“Yes, before God. You know I am a Christian woman and I can’t—”
“If I find out later that somebody else was here—”
“It’s not like that.”
“And I will find out. The landlord put those cameras on the door—”
“Nobody was here.”
“I told you Pooja’s sister couldn’t be here,” I said. “I told both of you.”
“If Pooja’s sister comes, what can I say?”
“What can you say?” Anger so hot it could sterilize a wound. “You can say, ‘Nobody’s allowed over. We’re babysitting.’ And if they insist, you could pick up the phone and call me. That was your responsibility.”
“What can I do?” Mary began to cry. “We are ayahs. If I call you then all the others will say I’m bad. I shouldn’t do like that.”
“You don’t work for them. You work for me.”
I didn’t let on that, in my secret hidden heart, I was not unsympathetic. Mary would remain among these women long after we’d left India. She relied upon them for job leads, housing, or a cash loan if she hit the skids. There was a legitimate, self-protective need to remain a community member in good standing. But I didn’t want her to intuit my sympathy. I wanted her to think that, whatever she did, I would find out—and I would avenge.
“I don’t want to fire you,” I said. “You have been very important to me.”
“I don’t drink.”
Tears filmed my eyes. I was deliberately manipulating Mary. I was also speaking with unfiltered honesty. Both were true, both at once. I was showing Mary my buried fears, but I was doing it strategically. I wanted to leverage my vulnerability to make her more trustworthy. To protect our family by bringing her closer to our side.
I was so tired.
And the main problem was still there. I’d have to fire Pooja.
* * *
————
The next day was Sunday, Pooja’s day off. I considered calling her, but Tom convinced me to leave it alone.
“Wait until Monday morning,” he said. “When the kids are gone.”
“What if Mary told Pooja what happened?”
“I’d say there’s zero chance she didn’t tell her.”
As soon as Pooja walked into the house on Monday, I knew she knew. Without a word or a glance she took her place at the kitchen counter, face to the window and hands slicing fruit as if they belonged to somebody else. I fried eggs and soaked oats in milk. Silently we made breakfast together for the last time.
Tom went to work. Max went to school. Mary arrived and took Patrick to a toddler art class.
“Pooja,” I said. “Let’s talk.”
We sat at the dining room table.
“Did you talk with Mary?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And?”
“No problem, ma’am. I’ll leave.”
This was not what I had expected, and it shut me up for a minute. I thought she’d beg for her job, shout in protest, throw things or curse. Her calm indifference was disorienting. When my voice came, it was too high.
“That’s it? You’ll leave?”
“What can I say? Once the trust is broken it doesn’t work anymore.”
“Well, did I misunderstand something?”
“I don’t know because you talked to Mary,” she said. “You didn’t talk to me.”
“I’m talking to you now.”
“You could have called.”
So that was it. Crazy as it was, she was angry with me.
“Would it have made any difference?” I asked.
“If it’s like that, no.”
“You want to tell me what happened on Friday?”
“My sister came.”
“I told you your sister couldn’t come.”
“She was sleeping at my house, and she was bored. She brought me some food, and then she went away and came back with the whiskey. She was drinking, but I wasn’t drinking with her.”
“Mary said you were.”
“Mary was sleeping.”
“And you drank my whiskey, too.”
“No, ma’am.”
“You did, though. You didn’t put the bottles back properly.”
“Maybe we knocked against them.”
“Pooja,” I sighed. “This is beneath us.”
“Yes, ma’am,” she muttered. “Anyway if the trust is gone I don’t want to stay here.”
My rage was spent. Her feelings were hurt, and I had an irrational sense I’d wronged her.
“Pooja,” I said, “do you want to keep your job?”
“Yes, ma’am.” For the first time, Pooja looked like she might cry. “Nobody would like to lose their job.”
“I planned to fire you, but somehow I don’t want to.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing myself say. The wall had broken down between my thoughts and the utterances of my mouth. Suddenly the bottles didn’t seem important. Her sister had come, bored, with a little whiskey. Hadn’t my own parents and grandparents cheerfully boozed their way through my childhood?
“Okay.” Pooja was leery and incredulous, watching me from the tails of her eyes. She would fire herself, I realized, for this infraction. How foolish I felt! Smart enough to figure out what had happened and yet weak enough, delusional enough, to try to change the shape of the truth.
“I’ll call you,” I said.
I sent her back to the quarter. I called Tom.
“I just talked to Pooja,” I said, “and somehow the story doesn’t seem quite so bad.”
“Oh really?” In the background phones rang, meetings grumbled. I’d called Tom in his den of facts to plead my fantasies. “How so?”
“Well, her sister was just there. And she cooked them dinner, so Pooja let her come over and eat. And then she just kind of brought the whiskey, so Pooja drank with her. But it wasn’t Pooja’s idea, I mean that’s what she said, and for some reason I just had the feeling she was telling the truth. Like it was a misunderstanding. Maybe we’re making too much of it.”
In the silence that followed, I heard the futility of my argument.
“How is that different from what we already knew?” Tom finally said.
“Well, I mean, intent. I guess.”
“It’s the same story. Nothing has changed.”
“I guess you’re right.” I was marveling, because it was true. It was exactly the same story. I’d called Tom in a rush, as if new details had come to light. But nothing had changed.
When I called Pooja, I could tell she’d anticipated this result. She knew Tom, and she knew it was over.
“I’m sorry.” This time I was crisp and firm. “I couldn’t save your job.”
* * *
————
We gave her a little time to move, and enough money to keep her things in storage until she found a new job. And then it was over; she was gone. It was the second time we’d lost Pooja, but this time there would be no return.
“My thoughts keep turning to Pooja, wondering if she’s found a room and how she’s doing,” I wrote to Tom. “I miss her.”
“I hope she does well,” he said. “But she made her decisions.”
A beat passed, and then he, too, softened.
“I felt sad this morning as well, wondering if she’ll see candidates coming in and feel like, for all her work, she’s quickly replaceable,” he said. “The problem, for me, was that I couldn’t imagine her staying and it working out.”
“I know.” I couldn’t disagree. “She had to go.”
I’d fired Pooja just when I needed her most: my agent returned the manuscript with suggestions for revisions. I struggled to concentrate, staring at page after page of Track Changes, trying to find the stamina to face these scenes and characters yet again. Worrying, all the time, about Pooja. The draft was starting to remind me of some moth-eaten piece of mangy fur that I’d been stitching and clipping and fluffing for years. I hated the feel and shape of it.
I withdrew from work by watching Pooja’s Facebook feed like a soap opera. She made an oblique reference to changing jobs. “If you weren’t happy with yesterday, try something different today” read a slogan she copied onto her wall. “DON’T STAY STUCK. DO BETTER.”
“time for a change….wish me luck…..” Pooja had written over this picture.
This was, of course, a normal and predictable reflex. She was saving face, covering up the humiliation of getting fired for squalid misconduct. I understood, but I was irritated. I couldn’t help thinking we were the “yesterday” that hadn’t been good enough.
Later she posted again: “Finally back to Gurgaon…….feeling so relaxed, peaceful n happy….yippee!!!!!!!”
She posed on a terrace, lush greenery all around. Wind in her hair, eyes hidden by enormous sunglasses, she scowled at the camera. She was wearing my old shirt: a flowing white peasant blouse with china-blue embroidery. A pretty piece of clothing, but stained. I’d put it aside for donation, but Pooja had snagged it for herself. Something about the sky suggested the sea
. But upon inspection, I couldn’t see any water. The frame was so tight she could be right here in Delhi. I was always falling for these illusions of hers. I didn’t know how far the illusion went. Maybe Pooja had always been some other person. I wanted to think so, now that she was gone. Now I scanned her Facebook page, hoping to see evidence that she was no great loss.
“Hot…hot…hot. Enthralling…enticing…Mesmerizing,” commented a man in aviator sunglasses.
A minute later, he was back: “Senorita is lookin Creme de la Creme.”
“thnx for ur lovely comments,” Pooja purred.
“Awesome!!! Enthralling,” the man continued.
Maybe Pooja had a new boyfriend.
I turned to Mary for information, but Mary had run dry.
“Have you talked to Pooja?” I tried to sound casual.
“No, Madame.”
“You should call her,” I said. “I’ve been wondering how she’s doing.”
“She didn’t pick up my call.”
“You think she’s mad?”
“I don’t know,” Mary said, with a crumpled wince of a grin that made me think she did, indeed, know.
“Don’t worry,” I told her. “She’ll get over it.”
* * *
————
When I invited Mary to move into the backyard quarter, I didn’t even consider the possibility that she might not accept. Mary was our most senior employee, and by far the most diligent and loyal. She’d have lived there all along if not for her boyfriend. Now that he was out of the picture and the rooms stood empty, I assumed she’d move immediately. I was already looking forward to the return of an onsite babysitter.
But when I brought it up, Mary balked.
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