Esther’s flat was at the end of a narrow alleyway, on the top floor of a building. From the faces of the pedestrians, I could tell that this was one of the areas, like Munirka in south Delhi, where people from the north-east were concentrated, bunched together for a greater sense of safety. It was also an area where, because of its proximity to the university, the landlords were willing to deviate from the marked preference in Delhi for well-off, upper-caste Hindu tenants. The flat, up a narrow flight of stairs, was small, with two rooms in a railroad arrangement opening out to the roof. There was a narrow passageway leading out from the last room, with a kitchen and bathroom on one side, the view from the roof overlooking houses crammed close to each other.
The rent was 6,500 rupees and the Punjabi landlady, Esther said, was quite nice, although that depended a little on her moods. It seemed to me that, even though Delhi was expensive, Esther was paying more than the market rate for her place. The extra amount was a sort of unofficial tax imposed upon ethnic minorities and the poor by the landlords of the city, who know that such people aren’t welcome in most neighbourhoods and can therefore be charged a higher rent while being provided with fairly rudimentary facilities.
The flat had been decorated in a functional manner. The room I sat in was crowded, containing a bed, an old-fashioned CRT television and a refrigerator. This was where Esther and her two sisters slept, while in the outer room, far more bare, a brother made his bed at night. The brother, five years older than Esther, was not home when I visited. Esther had an older half-brother who was married and lived in Imphal as well as a younger brother who was studying engineering at a private college in Bangalore, an expensive education into which the parents had directed most of their savings. The brother who lived with Esther had a master’s in sociology, but although he had applied for many jobs and taken countless exams, he remained unsuccessful in finding employment.
Mary was the eldest of the three sisters, four years older than Esther, and she had a job at a call centre in Gurgaon. Unlike Renu, who was excited to have me visiting and seemed eager to show me around, Mary looked tired. She was lying on the bed fully dressed, watching television as she waited for the call centre van to pick her up.
I thought of my own brief foray into the call centre world and the sinking feeling with which I had clocked in, sitting down at one of a row of computers and reaching reluctantly for the headphones that would connect me to angry or upset people in England. That was a time when call centre work was talked up as an exciting profession, part of the new India. The media no longer referred to call centres in this manner, and few of the people who worked there saw it as more fulfilling than being a clerk in a government office. The outsourcing business wasn’t doing quite as well either, Mary said. She had received a smaller salary increase this year than in the past, and the kind of calls she made had changed in nature.
Mary worked in collections these days, and when she arrived at the office in Gurgaon, she would start calling American customers, threatening them with repossession of their cars because they had fallen behind with their loan payments. It was a sudden, reversed camera shot of the American recession, viewed from a flat in a slum-like neighbourhood in north Delhi. It was unpleasant work, Mary said, but she did it to earn a living. I would later find out from Esther that Mary was a disappointed person. She had left call centre work, hoping for a different life, and she had returned to it only because her dream hadn’t come true. But I didn’t know this at the time, and as Mary headed out to work, I thought of the strangers she would connect with, people who were falling behind, who were part of a wave of foreclosures and job losses, and who would never know anything of the young woman calling to remind them of their failures.
Renu had been waiting impatiently to show me her plants. ‘Even the landlady admires them,’ she said. ‘I give her seeds and plants, but then she comes back in a few weeks and says that they’ve all died. I don’t know what she does with them.’ Renu’s plants sat in earthen pots along the narrow passageway leading out to the roof. They looked healthy, a gathering of aloe vera, spinach and what Renu called ‘Naga coriander’. Sometimes, she said, she bought celery from the market and replanted the roots. She had gathered seeds from a lemon tree on the street and planted those and although it was still small, she was hopeful that it would eventually start producing fruit. In order to make sure that her plants grew well, Renu went to the municipal parks in the winter, to the areas where gardeners burned dead leaves, gathering soil that was therefore rich in ash. It was Renu’s way of creating a touch of Manipur in the alien city in which she found herself.
Renu also did much of the cooking. She looked at Esther and said slyly, ‘She’s telling you about her problems and how hard she works. You should see her when she comes home from work in a bad mood. They fight at work, we suffer.’
‘You, you have a good time at home, what do you know?’ Esther said. ‘I’m so tired sometimes. I don’t have the energy to go out and get a recharge card for my mobile. I have to beg Renu to go and get it for me. She won’t do it unless I bribe her. A hundred-rupee note.’
Renu laughed and began serving us the rice and fish curry she had cooked. ‘There’s some pork in the fridge too,’ Renu said. ‘Do you want some?’
She served me the pork, cubes with fat glistening on them, the way I liked it. I felt relaxed and lazy after the meal, and thought about how paradoxical the situation was. The warmth and hospitality the sisters displayed was characteristic of the north-east, but it was the urban anonymity of Delhi that had allowed them to entertain me, a man from a different ethnic group, in their house.
As we talked, I also noticed how much more optimistic Renu was about the future than her sisters. She didn’t have to work long hours like Esther or Mary, and she was in that sense not yet worn down by the world. She talked about how she occasionally went to church, something neither of the other sisters did. She visited the Methodist Church on Lodi Road, which rented out the space every week to the Tangkhul Baptist Church to which the sisters belonged. Renu sang in the choir, but what she really liked about church was the way it created a home-like space, with feasts that involved familiar food. In other ways, however, Renu seemed to have adapted far better to Delhi than her sisters. Her Hindi was more fluent and she dressed with ease in a salwar kameez, looking much like any middle-class young woman from Delhi. Her ambitions too revealed a sense of freedom in how she imagined her future. She wanted to become a journalist and was interested in doing a one-year course at the YMCA.
The course seemed rather expensive to me, with the fees amounting to 37,000 rupees. ‘Who’ll pay for it?’ I said.
Renu laughed.
Esther, who was sitting sleepily in the chair after her meal, pointed at herself. ‘Who’ll pay? Me. Who else is there?’ Then she looked at her phone and said we should head back south. She had to report for work in an hour.
5
Women did not have it easy in Delhi, whether they were local or from other parts of India. The recent globalization of the city had indeed created new opportunities for some women, especially those working as waitresses and sales assistants. The same globalization had also allowed the use of ultrasound technology to abort some 24,000 female foetuses every year, resulting in a skewed sex ratio of 820 to 1,000 in Delhi. It was into this contradictory realm that women from the north-east arrived in their search for work, and the media was full of stories of them being assaulted, molested and killed, of mobs encircling the rooms they rented and beating women up while the police looked on. For its part, the Delhi Police had issued a ‘manual’ for people from the north-east living in the city, whose guidelines included:
— Bamboo shoot … and other smelly dishes should be prepared without creating ruckus in neighbourhood.
— Be Roman in ‘rooms’ … revealing dresses should be avoided.
— Avoid lonely road/bylane when dressed scantily.
One afternoon, I met up with Lansinglu Rongmei, a lawyer who had s
tarted the North-East Support Centre in 2007 to help people facing violence and discrimination. We went to the same café where I usually talked with Esther, and the waitress from Churachandpur served us. Lansi was stocky and energetic, her lawyerly cautiousness alternating with a sense of regional pride that made her talk about the cases she took up of people who had been bullied or violated. She was from Dimapur, a small town in Nagaland, but had gone to high school and college in Calcutta. She had moved to Delhi to study law and now practised in the Supreme Court, but after fifteen years in the city, she still didn’t feel fully at home.
‘Going from Nagaland to Calcutta wasn’t so much of a culture shock,’ Lansi said. ‘I felt they didn’t judge you as much. In Delhi, they do. They size you down and they size you up. What kind of a gadget do you have? What kind of a dress are you wearing? What kind of a car do you have? When I was a law student in Delhi University, I had friends from southern India, and from Bihar. I felt that Biharis, whom they call “Haris”, are sometimes targeted no less here than people from the north-east.’
I asked her what it was like to be a lawyer in such a place.
She thought about it and said, ‘The racism is very subtle sometimes, but it’s there. Still, the Supreme Court is a pretty cosmopolitan place. When I am presenting a case there or at the High Court, I can wear shirts and trousers, and they won’t judge me for it. But if I’m at a district court, I have to wear a sari or a salwar kameez or they’ll be prejudiced against me.’
Lansi’s confidence and legal profession allowed her to deal with the city in a way that wasn’t possible for many of the women who arrived here from the north-east. Lansi could voice her anger, as she had done in an article where she had described eloquently how ‘both boys and girls [from the north-east] are grabbed from behind and asked: “Chinky, sexy, how much?” ’ The article had made me want to meet her and find out more about the kind of cases she dealt with at the support centre, but Lansi was less combative in person, more reflective and funny.
The support centre had been set up, Lansi told me, with the help of local church leaders. She herself was a practising Christian, but she emphasized that the cases of harassment they came across were not limited to Christians and neither was the assistance provided by the centre. They had a helpline that people could call at any time, but the helpline was really the mobile numbers for Lansi and a colleague of hers. Lansi took out a few visiting cards with the numbers on them, pausing briefly to pass one on to the waitress from Churachandpur. The waitress looked surprised but slipped the card into her apron, and Lansi began talking about the kind of cases she dealt with.
She told me about two women working for a Pizza Hut outlet who had not been paid their salary for three months, and who, after repeated complaints, were informed that their dues would be released in instalments; of a woman locked inside her apartment by the landlord; of another woman taking Hindi lessons from a man who insisted that she make him her boyfriend — a euphemism for wanting sex — in order to improve her Hindi. The harassment moved easily along the bottom half of the class ladder, targeting semi-literate women who worked as maidservants as well as the more educated ones with jobs at restaurants.
It was possible to see a pattern in Lansi’s stories, of the clash between women from the north-east and local men, two disparate groups thrown together by the modernity of the new India. It was the sudden explosion of malls and restaurants that had created jobs like the ones at Pizza Hut where men and women worked together; it had drawn thousands of women from the north-east, prized for their English and their lighter skin; it had also stoked the confused desires of men from deeply patriarchal cultures. From the names of the Delhi neighbourhoods that Lansi mentioned — the areas where women had been harassed, assaulted, raped and even murdered by landlords, colleagues and neighbours — it was possible to tell how they had been villages not too long ago and had been haphazardly absorbed into the urban sprawl of Delhi. These were neighbourhoods where the local women went around wearing veils while the men eyed the outsiders, lusting after them and yet resenting them, considering themselves to be from more superior cultures while also feeling that they were less equipped to take advantage of the service economy of globalized cities like Delhi.
But just as not all men in such neighbourhoods were violent towards women, there were also men who were seemingly more modern, more capable of benefiting from the new economy and who still turned out to be predators. The case that bothered Lansi the most was that of a young Assamese woman who had worked at a food stand in Gurgaon with her boyfriend. It was a stand selling the Tibetan dumplings called ‘momos’, ubiquitous in all Indian cities these days. One of the customers at the momo stand, a middle-aged executive working for a multinational, offered the woman a job cleaning his apartment.
‘The girl had come straight from a village,’ Lansi said. ‘She was so naive. And I think the boyfriend encouraged her to take the job. She went to clean the apartment and the man locked her up and raped her. He kept her there for days, raping her while going to work every morning as usual.’
Eventually, the woman managed to escape and approached Lansi. Because this had happened in Gurgaon, Lansi had to fight the case at the High Court there, something that worried her. The Gurgaon High Court was not as cosmopolitan as the Delhi High Court, Lansi felt. She thought it was more patriarchal, more prejudiced against women from other parts of the country. In the end, it didn’t matter because the woman refused to testify in court and the charges were dropped. Lansi assumed that something had gone wrong between the filing of the case and the trial. She thought that the executive had very possibly paid money to the woman’s boyfriend and used him to put pressure on the victim, but this was a guess, something Lansi had been unable to verify. When she went to talk to the woman again, she found the momo stand locked up. The couple had apparently left Gurgaon and gone back to Assam.
Esther’s experience of Delhi had been nothing like the people Lansi had talked about. She was smarter, tougher and perhaps more fortunate. Yet the initial sense of optimism she had conveyed to me, especially about F&B, gave way gradually to a more complex reality. If Esther had left home, she had done so as much out of a strong sense of independence as out of a need for employment. ‘I’m a graduate,’ she had told me the first time we met, clenching her fist to emphasize the point. ‘Why should I have to depend on my husband for money?’
But Esther’s independence in Delhi had turned out to be a strange thing, with others depending on her. ‘Most of my friends in Imphal didn’t finish graduation,’ Esther said to me at the Barista café a few days after I had talked to Lansi. ‘I did my degree and came here to work. But still, in spite of the money I make, I have to think twice before I do anything. I am not a hi-fi type, you know. I have a prepaid phone, on which I spend about three thousand rupees a month on refills. That’s the only luxury. I don’t have money to buy new clothes or even a pair of chappals.’
Although Esther’s salary at Zest was 13,000 a month, the money was not just for herself. She paid a major share of the rent and household expenses. Mary contributed too, but she earned less than Esther. Renu didn’t work and neither did the elder brother.
I asked Esther if she resented her brother.
‘How can I be angry with him?’ she said. ‘He’s so good to me. He massages my neck, clips my nails, washes my hair. Sometimes, he’ll get aloe vera juice from Renu’s plant for me to put on my hands.’
Yet Esther couldn’t help getting frustrated with her situation and how all her hard work hadn’t resulted in a significant improvement in her life. She talked resentfully at times of her bosses — all men — and sometimes even of the women who worked with her. ‘There’s this friend of mine who works at the restaurant, but she’s also a call girl,’ Esther said. ‘I asked her why she does such a thing and she said she needed money. But I need money too, yeah? I don’t stoop to selling my body because of that. If you go to Munirka, you will see some of these girls from the north-east
waiting around. They have the taste of money and do these things to get the money. It feels so shameful. I can’t even look at them. I keep thinking that other people will consider me to be just like them.’
Her attitude was unsympathetic towards the women who might be working as call girls. ‘Look, you have to be extra careful if you’re a woman. It’s not like it is for boys. At work, these younger girls who do F&B, they have no sense sometimes. There are staff parties, and the boys try to get you drunk and come on to you. The younger ones, they let them. Me, I have a sharp tongue. I say, hey, stay away from me, but these young girls just don’t care.’
Even though Esther had earlier talked about how she resented the way people in Delhi were prejudiced against women from the north-east, she herself sometimes exhibited a similar attitude. ‘Sometimes, I wish I looked different,’ she said. ‘I wish I had bigger eyes. That I looked more Indian.’ She began to tell me about how when she had worked at Shangri-La, she had seen the most beautiful woman in the world.
‘Who was that?’ I asked.
‘Priyanka Gandhi,’ she replied dreamily, naming the heiress apparent of the Congress Party, a woman descended from a long line of prime ministers, part Indian and part Italian. Esther had been filling the water glasses at the table where Priyanka Gandhi was having lunch with her husband. ‘She was so beautiful,’ Esther said, ‘so fair that she looked transparent, as if she was made of glass. I watched her drinking water and it felt like I could see the water going down her throat.’
6
The home that Esther had left behind was a long way from Delhi. She had told me that her family lived in a rented house near the RIMS hospital in Imphal, and even though I hadn’t seen the house, it wasn’t hard for me to picture the setting. The last time I had been in Manipur was in December 2007, flying in from Delhi with a short stop in Guwahati, the capital of Assam. Those of us going to Manipur weren’t allowed to get off the plane at Guwahati. While the Guwahati passengers disembarked, the rest of us sat on the plane while policemen came on board with metal detectors, checking that every piece of luggage in the cabin belonged to a passenger still on the plane. Then the aircraft took off again, flying low over hills and ridges thick with forest cover until it came down over Imphal Valley with its small, rectangular agricultural plots and slender bodies of water edged with dark conifers. The airport was new and clean, but as soon as I stepped outside I found myself facing soldiers in black bandannas bristling around a ring of armoured jeeps with gun turrets cut into the roofs.
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