I went back down the stairs. When I reached the lobby on the ground floor, I passed the woman I had taken to be a model. But now I understood that I had been mistaken. She had been trying a pair of shoes on, using the vast expanse of the lobby to check out how they looked and felt on her feet. The people I had taken to be photographer and make-up artist were just her friends.
8
Esther had a boyfriend, someone she had come to know while working at Shangri-La. He had been one of the extroverts in the F&B crowd there, handsome, with an eye for women. In the beginning, Esther had turned down his many requests to go out with him. She had found him attractive, she told me, but she had been uncertain about his intentions. He was too fond of women, and she wasn’t sure if he would be loyal to her. She became his girlfriend only after he stopped flirting with other F&B women, reassuring Esther that he was quite serious about her.
It was natural that Esther would want a companion. But she was also a cautious person. She didn’t want to become like some of the other women in F&B: a few were call girls; there was a colleague at Shangri-La who went out regularly with a Japanese businessman whenever he stayed in the hotel; and there were those who gave in too easily to their male colleagues and then got dumped by them.
Esther proceeded slowly, going out with the man, the two of them gradually becoming involved enough to start thinking about marriage. But Esther hadn’t told her parents about her boyfriend. Her sisters knew him and liked him, but her brother was disapproving. The boyfriend wasn’t from Manipur. He was a Bengali from Orissa, and a Hindu as well, which bothered Esther a little. ‘I don’t want him to become Christian,’ she said. ‘How can I ask someone I love to change his faith? On the other hand, I believe in the Church. That is my way. So we will each stick to our own religion, but the children, I want one boy and one girl, I want them to be brought up as Christians.’
Two years earlier, not long after they started going out, Esther’s boyfriend had received a job offer from a hotel in the United Arab Emirates. His parents came from Orissa to Delhi to see him off, and Esther met them briefly. The parents did not know she was seeing their son, but he called them from UAE and told them that Esther and he were thinking about getting married. The parents, according to Esther, were surprised. ‘His mother said, “Oh, I should have guessed from the way you were looking at each other.” ’ But the parents accepted their son’s decision, and although Esther and her boyfriend weren’t certain about where and when to get married, they began talking more decisively of their future together.
It was a long-distance relationship, hard for Esther in many ways, but she had encouraged him to take the job at UAE. ‘I miss him, but I don’t want to hold him back,’ she said. ‘It is important for a man to go out into the world.’ He was coming back on a brief visit that summer, and she was excited at the prospect of seeing him after so long. She had arranged to take a week off work to spend time with him.
I wanted to be around to meet the boyfriend, but I had already made plans to go to Andhra Pradesh during the week he was going to be in Delhi. When I finally returned to the city, the boyfriend was already back in UAE.
Esther and I met at the Barista café. She had a new mobile phone, a bright red gadget that she played with as we talked, but she looked even more tired than usual. The visit had begun very well, she said. Her boyfriend had been tender and loving. He had brought gifts for her sisters and for her, including the new mobile phone. He had also spent an entire afternoon with Esther and her sisters at their flat, high-spirited and entertaining as he told them about his life in UAE. He’d talked about wanting to come back to Delhi, but Esther had insisted that he stay on in UAE because he was earning much more there. He had also brought up the prospect of Esther getting a job there, but she had said that wouldn’t be possible because she couldn’t leave her family behind.
‘But all the time while he was talking to us, he was on his mobile phone, you know, always texting,’ Esther said. ‘So when he went to the bathroom, I picked up his phone and looked at the messages to see who he was texting with so much. I couldn’t believe it. It was this girl at the UAE hotel who had written to say she was missing him, and he had written back saying that he loved her. Imagine that, he’s sitting with me, having a good time with me, and all along, there’s this other girl he’s thinking of and whom he loves.’ Esther stared into the distance. ‘The guys are not satisfied with just one,’ she said. ‘It’s like that with the ones I know at Zest. They’re flirting with one girl at work, with another on their mobiles, and with one more when they leave the restaurant. “What is it with you guys, yeah?” I tell them. They say, “Just enjoying life, yeah. Come on, Esther, relax.” I tell them go to hell with their enjoying life.’
When Esther confronted her boyfriend, he was contrite, asking her to forgive him. Esther returned all the gifts, including the jewellery he had given her and the phone, but he left everything with Renu, asking her to pass them on to Esther after he had gone back to UAE. Since then, he had been calling and texting Esther to ask if they could be together again.
Esther took out the new phone and showed me a picture of the boyfriend. He was quite handsome, and I could see why women might be attracted to him. Esther tapped through the menu to show me one of the messages he had sent her. I had been expecting something transparently fake, but the message was quite touching: ‘Just one more chance, Esther, and I’m yours for life, I promise.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ Esther said. ‘Whether to get back with him even though I don’t trust him any more, or to break up even though I miss him so much. Sometimes, it seems to me that this just keeps happening over and over again to all the women in our family.’
Esther’s elder sister, Mary, had been engaged to a man in Imphal. She had left her call centre job in Delhi and gone back home, where the wedding preparations had been in full swing when they discovered that the fiancé was engaged to another woman at the same time. Mary cancelled the wedding, came back to Delhi and took up another call centre job. She no longer talked about getting married, Esther said. Renu too had had a boyfriend in college, someone she became quite attached to, and who suddenly broke up with her. Esther talked about her mother, who had been with another man and had a son with him before being abandoned by the man. She had married Esther’s father later.
‘How was your father about that?’ I asked.
‘He’s a very good man, he loves my mother and my half-brother. My half-brother is as much a part of our family as any of the other siblings.’ She wanted my advice about what to do with her boyfriend. ‘I’ve never done anything like that to him,’ she said. ‘I have opportunities too. I work, I am independent. I look at boys, sure, and I think, “Oh, that one’s nice. That one’s bad.” But it doesn’t go beyond that.’
9
One afternoon, Esther took me to meet a friend of hers in Munirka, someone with whom she occasionally stayed over. I had been curious about how the neighbourhood had changed in the years since I last lived there. There had been plenty of people from the north-east when I was a resident of Munirka, but few of them were single women. It had been an unsafe area for women, with sexual assaults not uncommon in the deserted stretches of land between the crowded village and the university campus.
As Esther and I approached Munirka, there was much about the neighbourhood that seemed immediately familiar, from the unkempt park on our right to the garbage dump that sat at the beginning of a row of concrete buildings. Some of the buildings had become larger, with decorative flourishes like fluted metal bars on the balconies, but they still stood cheek by jowl, with little alleyways separating them from each other. People could still jump from one balcony to another if they wanted to.
I slowed down when we came to the building where I had lived. It was unchanged, the passageway in front of it deserted at that time in the afternoon. I felt no sense of triumph that I had seemingly moved up since I lived inside that one-room flat, its back door opening to a sheer dro
p. The neighbourhood became more crowded as we went further in. There were little groups of local Jat men and those from the north-east, keeping their distance from each other. The men from the north-east worked night shifts at call centres, while the local men were either unemployed or running small businesses that did not require their presence at that hour. The street running past the buildings was still a dirt track, but the buffaloes that had wallowed there had vanished, giving way to cars and motorcycles. The young Jats who stood around looked like prosperous street toughs, wearing branded jeans and sneakers, occasionally sending a glance sliding up the body of a young woman emerging from a building.
Esther’s friend Moi lived a couple of buildings down from my former residence, up on the third floor. We climbed the narrow stairwell of the building, passing flats whose doors had been left open because of the heat. Moi’s single-room flat was almost exactly like mine, from the size of the room to her belongings. There was a cheap mattress on the floor, probably bought from Rama Market; a portable red gas cylinder with a burner attached to it, something easier to get than the regular gas cylinders that required an immense amount of paperwork; and an odd mishmash of crockery, cooking utensils and clothes.
Moi was from Churachandpur, slim and stylish in jeans and T-shirt. She shared the flat with two of her siblings – a brother who worked at a laundry and a sister who was a waitress at a café in IIT Delhi. We sat on the floor and chatted about how Moi had come to Delhi. She had moved around a lot, working in Arunachal Pradesh as a teacher and a warden at a school, in Calcutta for a Christian charity, and in Chennai for another charity doing relief work for people affected by the tsunami in 2004. She had moved to Delhi the year after with a job at a children’s home in Noida, which she had followed with a position at a call centre for two years. It had been hard going, she said, working evenings and nights at a call centre while living in Munirka. One evening, while waiting for a van to pick her up, she had been harassed by men in a car asking if she was available for the night. On another occasion, two men on a motorcycle had grabbed her arm, trying to drag her on to the bike and letting go only when her screams attracted attention from passers-by.
At work, Moi had been a ‘precollector’, making calls to American customers falling behind with their payments.
I asked her what it had been like.
She responded with a surprisingly good rendition of a deep masculine growl. ‘Tell me the colour of the panties you’re wearing,’ she said.
The two women started laughing.
Moi eventually left the call centre because her employers wouldn’t give her the two weeks’ leave she needed to go home. Since then, she had been looking around for work without much success, and she was considering returning to a call centre job since it was relatively easy to get one.
Moi’s life sounded to me like a strange combination of Victorian and millennial motifs: on the one hand, there were all those children’s homes and boarding schools she had worked at; on the other, there was her job as a precollector talking to men on the other side of the world. But the same was true of Esther, I thought, as we left Moi’s flat and walked out of Munirka. She was so modern in some ways, with her job at a fancy restaurant and a text-messaging boyfriend from a different religion and ethnicity who worked in a faraway country. Yet there were other forces acting upon Esther’s life that made her look back home, towards possibilities that seemed to have little in them of the new India.
The break-up with her boyfriend had left Esther worried and depressed. When I had first met her, she had been confident about her F&B work. She had said she was better at the work than many of her peers. She knew the menu inside out, knew what to suggest to customers and how to serve the food correctly. Even when she talked about quarrelling with the manager, that was part of her ambition, of wanting to become an assistant manager.
These days Esther spoke differently about her job. ‘I wanted to be a doctor, not this F&B. Sometimes, I want to go back home, but what is there back home? If I go home, what will I do? But this job has no security, no pension.’ She told me that she had taken an exam for a government schoolteacher’s job in Imphal. The salary was 14,000 rupees, and it came with benefits like a pension, as well as a form of security that did not exist in F&B. Her mother was a schoolteacher too, and what Esther sometimes wanted, after all her independence, striving, exposure and mobility was a simple repetition of her mother’s life.
‘My mother wants me to take the job if I get it,’ Esther said. ‘I got through the exam, but the interview is still left. I’ll take the train home, which will take three days, give the interview, get back on the train for another three days, and come back to this F&B. If I get the interview call, that is.’ She began talking about home. ‘You know, once I flew home to Imphal, and my parents came to get me at the airport. They had become so old that it was painful to see them. I feel scared about them, I think, “Kitna din wo rahega?” My mother has a nerve problem, she shakes her head like this.’ Esther demonstrated how her mother’s head shook. ‘My father has memory loss sometimes. And me, after all these years in Delhi, I have forty-two rupees in my bank account. At times I’m fed up. I think I’ll go back. At least I won’t have to pay rent in Imphal. Then sometimes, I think I won’t go back to Imphal, but maybe just get out of Delhi. I want to go to Simla.’
I remembered how I used to feel that way when I lived in Munirka, when I felt the need to get out of the city and went for a brief holiday to the nearby hills of Uttaranchal or Himachal Pradesh. But Esther didn’t have that option. ‘I haven’t been able to go to Simla even for a week’s holiday,’ Esther said. ‘I made plans so many times, but every time I had to cancel. At work, I sometimes get sick of the people I am serving. Sometimes, there are fights at the station because no one wants to go and serve a party that’s come in. Everyone can tell they’ll be difficult. Once, a Korean couple left a two-rupee coin for us as a tip. At least that allowed us to have a good laugh. Last night, a party of Delhi ladies came in. They ordered the Indian appetizer platter. The platter weighs two and a half kilos. I had to hold it with one hand, while with my other hand, I held the tongs with which to pick up the food. My back was hurting, the platter was so heavy, and when I got to the ladies, none of them would let me put food on her plate. They were doing that Indian thing, “Pehle aap, pehle aap. No, no, serve her first,” and so I would go to the next lady, who would refuse and send me on to the next one and it went on and on until I was so sick of all of them.’
Esther had now begun looking for other jobs, even in Delhi. She wanted something that offered permanence and regular hours, something that demanded less of her body and was not as susceptible to the whims of rich customers. On the last day I met her at the Barista café, she told me that she knew a man who was a member of parliament. He was from the Congress Party, she said, one of the youngest MPs in the country. She had come to know the man through his Mizo girlfriend, and he had hinted that he might be able to get her a job in the parliament.
It was a possibility that excited Esther, but she was worried that he might ask for a bribe in exchange for the job. She was expecting to meet with him later that afternoon. ‘If he wants money, I’ll have to say no. I don’t have any money,’ she said. Esther decided to call the MP to find out when he wanted to meet.
The conversation was brief. ‘You’re too busy today?’ she said. ‘You want me to try again in a few days?’ She put the phone down and shrugged. ‘Sometimes, I really regret why I joined F&B,’ she went on. ‘My elder brother wanted me to study further and get a job with the central government. Sometimes, I think I want to do that, study something, maybe get an MBA through correspondence. But that would cost me at least eighty thousand rupees. And the problem is that now I know the taste of money, I cannot go back to the student life. I called a friend recently who works in Taj Mansingh. She’s also fed up with F&B. But we were talking, and I got scared. If I change jobs, what if, in the future, I regret leaving F&B?’
I dropped her off in front of the mall, watching as she vanished inside that vast building. It was nearly dusk, and the lights were on everywhere, each luxury-brand logo carved out on the wall bathed in its own glow. When I went home, I decided to look up the Congress MPs from Agra to find out more about the man who had held out the prospect of a job in the parliament for Esther. It would be nice if it came true, I thought – if a young woman from the border provinces who was smart, hard-working and good ended up working in the building that was the symbol of India’s democracy.
I looked for a long time on the Internet, sifting through the names, political parties and constituencies of the various MPs. There were no young Congress MPs from Agra.
No one at all with the name Esther had given me.
Acknowledgements
Because the names of a number of Indian cities have been changed in the past decade, I would like to clarify that the place referred to in the introduction as Gauhati is now known as Guwahati, just as Calcutta is known as Kolkata, Madras as Chennai and Bombay as Mumbai. I would also like to note that some of the material in this book has appeared, in a different form, in the Guardian, n+1, the Review section of The National in Abu Dhabi and in the anthology AIDS Sutra. The book itself was written in a superb programme called Scrivener, which I cannot recommend highly enough.
I am grateful to an extremely large number of people for making this book possible. I would like to thank everyone who spoke to me in the course of four years of interviews, especially the people who appear in the narrative and to whom I am grateful for their willingness to open up their lives to a stranger. I have interpreted those lives in my own subjective fashion, of course, and further straitjacketed them into the themes and movements of the narrative. I would therefore like to note that the minor role occupied by Vijay Gudavarthy in the book in no way does justice to the major role he played in my journey through Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh. I am glad that I found a generous, knowledgeable and perceptive friend like him in a place so new to me.
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