How I met my maid

Since I blogged about my current neighbours who happen to be hookers of a kind, and in that post I also mentioned the year when I stayed in a place where my neighbours were truck drivers, carpenters and guards, I thought I'd elaborate a bit on that little phase of my life. I had two dogs then - Stuart and Lisa. Yeah, Lisa was still alive; I had taken her from college and she was with me for about two years, before her uterus started developing problems and I had to get her operated, which wasn't too successful, and she eventually succumbed to it. I found her lying next to the road, a little distance from the house, as if she had come a distance looking for me before her body gave way. I sometimes feel that I let her down in more ways than one. Lisa was buried outside the courtyard of that house anda flower sapling was planted on her grave, and this reminds me that I should go and check on it sometime soon. Lisa was the sweetheart of college. She used to attend classes with my roommate Karan and me, but well, more about Lisa later.

This place was a hostel for labourers of sorts. It had about 54 rooms, and each room had a tiny attached bathroom and a sad excuse for a kitchen, and there were 54 of them one next to the other, in two floors. Each room was 2500 rupees. Most of the rooms were occupied by carpenters, truck drivers, plumbers, guards, etc. and there were usually between 5-10 people sharing one room, with several mattresses on the floor. Since I needed some open space for the dogs, and a lot of landlords weren't okay keeping dogs, I decided to try this setup for a while. I was somewhat of a superstar over there, as I had taken up two rooms there all by myself, had a motorbike, and could speak in English as well! The landlord's name was Babbal, a true Jaat. This house was bordering DLF phase 3, one of the last houses in the bordering Nathupur village. There was a Bangladeshi basti nearby, where Babbal and his brothers would go each day with a bottle or two of whiskey to hunt for some young bangla women. They were usually successful, as some drunk Bangla would readily exchange a bottle of whiskey for a night with his daughter, and when they didn't, the brothers used force, coz they had the whole village behind them. It is said that once some policemen made the mistake of coming to question them because of a report written by someone, and they got thrashed and pelted with stones till they had to run. No policeman was seen in the vicinity post that.

There was also a guard who use to take care of the entire complex, and his name was Kaushal. Kaushal used to work for Babbal, and if he didn't do his work well, used to get locked in a vacant room and thrashed with either a belt or a hawaii chappal, whichever was more easily accessible at that moment. Kaushal used to open the gate when I came back home at night, fill water in the underwater tank, and do odd jobs for me when I asked him to. He also took care of my dogs when I was not there. I made a lot of friends while I lived there. One was called Kundan, an electrician from Bihar who used to work as a contractor with DLF, fixing electrical wires in DLF buildings. There was another called Bablu, who along with Kaushal had a fancy for two single ladies who had rented one of the rooms by themelves. One of them was a Manipuri girl who was having an affair with a married Jaat from the village, and the other was a single mother called Meera, whose husband had left her with a son and run away with another woman. Bablu used to work with Maruti at that time. I was still in touch with him many years from then. Another crazy character I met over there was Bipin, a taxi driver from Haryana who used to work crazy hours and go with barely any sleep for days together. He was working for his sister's wedding, and had to save up as much as he could by driving as many hours as he could.

Being friends with him had its benefits, as he used to pick me up from the railway station each time I got back from my visit home (although he had to accept a fare for it), and then we would have fun talking about all sorts of stuff sitting in his car. It was from him that I heard the word 'Gashti' for the first time, and all I could think of at that time was that it had a strange resonance with the word 'Geisha', and they both kinda had a similar meaning. We would talk about his village, my hometown, our dreams, philosophies of life, etc. His philosophy was very simple. He was out there to have fun, and was always looking to get a pretty girl to his room while his roommates were out on duty. Once he even got a girl in there, and Kaushal and I made life hell for him by repeatedly banging at the door while he was at it inside. He obviously wasn't very happy about it and didn't speak to us for a few days. We also used to tease Meera's son, Siddhant, who was a cocky lad of 4, and had been spending a lot of time in the Bangla basti and had picked up abuses in three langauges - Hindi, Haryanvi and Bangla. He would not listen to his mother at all, and if she tried to hit him, he would just abuse the hell out of her. So we used to wait for times when we found him alone, and then either lock him in the car or douse him with water from the hose, till he would cry and apologise for being such a spoilt brat.

Babbal and his brothers, Bipin, Bablu, Kaushal and I would also play cricket on the weekend evenings with a tennis ball, and later Babbal would tell us about how Gurgaon was 20 years ago, and how, with the arrival of the corporates, the land rates shot up overnight, and all the farmers became millionares. He was one such beneficiary, uneducated and rich, had 5 or 6 cars in his courtyard, and owned several other plots of land besides the arrangement we stayed in. He would tell us about how powerful his family was and how no one could dare to lay a finger on him. He would also get really drunk on some days and when he couldn't (or didn't want to) find a Bangla girl, would sometimes try to get into the room where the two single ladies stayed. They would therefore lock themselves in every evening before he got too drunk, and then just refuse to open the door no matter how much he insisted. Somehow, when a lot of the tenants would come out to witness the commotion, he would decide to let go and head off to the basti instead. Kaushal and Bablu, like I said had a thing for Meera, the single mom, and somehow, Kaushal had his way with her before Bablu did. Kaushal one day told me that Meera had quit the factory where she knit sweaters, and asked me asked me if I needed omeone to cook and clean for me, and when I replied in the affirmative, he brought her over to cook for me. She made some delicious potato fry and some fresh poori which I hogged, and she was thus employed. Since she had a thing going on with Kaushal, and Kaushal used to call me bhaiyya, she, by extension, became Bhabhiji, as she is still known to my friends and family.

I lived in that setup for about a year, post which I had had too much of Gurgaon and its frequent 18 hour power cuts, murky hard water, polluted air, congested traffic and lack of a cultural life. So I moved to Vasant Kunj with my former crazy roommate - Samir Krishnamurti - stories of whom must eventually follow as well. After a year or so of staying there, Kaushal called me up and said that Bhabhiji had quit another job in a factory and couldn't pay the rent where she lived. Moreover, Babbal was getting more and more menacing since she hadn't paid the rent for the previous month. So he asked me if I could keep her as a domestic help where I lived. I consulted my roommates, who were glad about having domestic help, and so she arrived, and worked for me for the next 5 years. I had a tough time schooling Siddhant and ridding him of all his bad habits. It took a while for me to make him learn to read and write enough for him to be able to go to school. He joined school a couple of years later, much older than his classmates, and struggled intially, but with time and a lot of additional tutoring, he moved on to class 3, at which point Bhabhiji got an offer from one of her friends to join a call centre (before you gasp in disbelief, let me tell you that she joined them as a lady guard). They were paying her more than I could, and she felt it was a better choice for her.

This is the story of my maid, Bhabhiji, who I met during an interesting phase of my life, and the reason I kept her for so long was because she was really good to the dogs, and loved them like her own children. I could leave the house and go for months together on my foreign trips with IBM, and not really worry about how the dogs were. I spoke to her a few days ago and she said that she has enrolled Siddhant in another school, but was afraid that she might not be able to afford his education. I have left the option of returning open for her and her son. The rest of course is yet to transpire...

 

Of hookers, road-trips and induced unemployment

I am writing this as I was woken up by a couple of hookers who just returned from a night-out somewhere and got locked out of their own house because the guy sleeping inside was stoned and passed out and wouldn't wake up to open the door for them. I managed to help them get in by trying to break their door open, in the attempts of which one of the stoned people inside woke up and opened the door. It's been a rainy night and the sun has not quite risen yet, and I am here awake and unable to go back to sleep, and this is quite as much of an attempt to get back to writing as it is to find something to do in my second month of voluntary unemployment. This also happens to  be a self-imposed pivotal moment in my life as I complete three decades on this planet very soon, and the promise that I made myself ten years ago of finding myself or my calling by the time I'm 30 is perilously close to being realised or disappointed (although I will be 30 for a whole year :D). Anyway, so I took a month off to travel around north India, missed a train to Allahabad and thereby the Mahakumbh which was happenening after more than a century or so, missed another flight to Chennai to meet my nonagenarian grandaunts coz I got too drunk the previous night. Well, these things don't surprise those who've known me for a while, but these are habits that I must definitely change. Losing phones, wallets, cards, consciousness, etc. is not something I want to take with me into my thirties.

I sometimes look at all the people I know, what they are doing with their lives, how they deal with various things in life, and I see many people caught up in the mundane regularities of the everyday, and some that strive to break away and seek meaning in this ever increasing mess we have created for ourselves. I do a bit of both I guess. Organised religion is almost certainly not the answer, and no matter how much they ccall independent seekers of spirituality 'whores of convenience' or whatever it's euphemism might be, I think I'd rather be a whore to convenience than a slave to ritual. So well, I am looking to see what I want to do with life, and as I see it, I stand at an extremely pivotal moment and I must take my time before I want to decide which way I want to go from this crossroads, unlike the night I spent drunk on a motorbike with my friend Peter on the backseat, somewhere around CP, trying to find our way home (to Vasant Kunj), and all we remember the next day is driving for hours, and crossing the same 'Gandhi's Dandi March' statue several times and wondering how many of them there were in Delhi! That is a funny story for a night, but if I live my life like that, I don't think I'd be laughing about it when I waake up on the other side (well, that's another philiosophical debate I have no answer to, but I'd like to believe that I will wake up somewhere, somehow).

Today, I will write about my current neighbours. My friend Martin used to stay there earlier, but he left last year, post which a Punjabi dude moved in. He stayed for about 8 months, and was very intrigued by the fact that I had 4 Indian dogs, and wanted to know if I wanted a breed, as someone in his family was a breeder. I succeeded in convincing him that I had quite a tough time handling just the four mutts I had, and that I wasn't willing to 'let go' of them if I got some 'fancy breeds' instead. Anyway, he was very intrigued by the whole set-up, so he called his breeder brother who brought home a ppuggg, a gurrmunn shaefud, and two roatwheelerrz, and they used to mess up our courtyard by bathing them everyday. Once they even locked all four of them in the house and disappeared for three days. You can imagine the mess their place was in when they got back. Well, they had give a key to my maid, who used to feed them everyday. When I complained to the landlord about this, he asked them to leave, as he is very afraid of attaining bad karma by being part of any kind of cruelty towards animals. My landlord has a couple of property related court cases pending, and tries to accumulate as much good karma as he can, so that he wins those cases (partly why he wants me to stay here with my dogs). Strange beliefs I say, noble as they may be.

I'm not writing about the Punjabi neighour this time, though, but about the ones that moved in after him. My landlord (who is an old, rather entertaining Sardar) sat me down one day, and as usual, started talking bout his days in Japan, where he ate all kinds of meat, drank all kinds of alcohol and slept with all kinds of women. He spoke about his Japanese girlfriend and how well-mannered she was and how well she took care of him. Then stories of the ship he was in on his way from Japan to India, and the halts in various countries, especially Vietnam (since he had heard that I spent 6 months there). He stopped to get up and take a leak, returning with the left side of his trousers all wet from top to bottom. He had obviously not been very successful at that venture. Anywway, so he sits on the chair in the courtyard again, and asks me, "Have you heard about Geisha Girls?" I replied in the affirmative, as I had seen parts of 'Memoirs of a Geisha'. After a brief conversation about Geishas, during all of which he was observing my take on their lifestlye and profession, he told me, "Well there are two girls moving in as your negihbours. They are Indian Geishas"

Well, I was quite thrilled at the idea of living next to hookers, as it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience, as was the time when I used to stay in a house where my neighbours were carpenters, truck-drivers and watchmen, but that is another story). Anyway, so here I was expecting some really hot-looking, sexy girls to walk in next door, but what actually happened took quite a lot of fizz out of the episode. The girls weren't bad, except they didn't have much education, and they were fine till they opened their mouths, which is the worst kinda fine you can find. There are three of them who stay next door, and they often have 'visitors', some of whom are constant, in the sense that they have been visiting for over 4 months or so now. So, I don't know what the technical term for this is, but I think these girls are basically 'keeps' for married men. Every now and then they get drunk, and then there are loud noises from the room,of abuses, wails, slaps, punches, kicks, pots and pans flying around, hitting the other side of one of my bedroom walls. The next morning is often intersting too. I wake up to broken bottles of beer, a girl who has cut her hand, finger, etc. Then the 'family' rushes in to take her back home to ensure that she doesn't kill herself, post 3-4 days of which, she returns smiling, and the entire routine resumes. Maybe I'll write more about them later.

I went on a road trip in my first month of unemployment. A Vietnamese girl I had met through a French friend I had in Vietnam was coming to India, and I hadn't seen most of the places here that she planned to visit, and I thought it might not be a bad time to do this while I can. It also coincided with the time when I got fed up with what I was doing at my new job, and I quit after 6 months, which was rather short considering that I had spent nearly 7 years in the organisation before that. I had saved up enough for a few months, bought a car, worked on my thesis, etc. while I had this job, but it was just too laid back and meaningless for my liking, something a lot of people would consider a dream job of sorts. I guess I just couldn't bear the fact that what I did there was not important to anyone, and what I did was merely a 'tick mark' activity for a lot of people who attended training sessions coz their managers forced them to, or because they had to take a break from work, and even the organisation had them only because they wanted to look good with a 'robust training team and a packed training calendar'!

I left all of that and went on a trip. I visited Jaipur, Ajmer, Pushkar, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Vrindavan, Mathura, Agra, Srinagar, Gulmarg, Mcleodganj in that order. Rajasthan was okay.I understand why it charms the west, with its colourful clothes and ethnic dance forms, camels, the desert landscape, the forts, etc. but that is not the kind of thing that fascinates me much. I took Stuart along for this stretch, and we had a good time bonding over various streets in the cities of Rajasthan. People were really surprised at the fact that I had gotten a dog with me woh bhi Desi! (and that too Indian!), but well, we were oblivious to the gazes, stares, remarks, etc. At least the Vietnamese girl was happy that we were taking some of the attention away from her.

After Rajasthan, we did Vrindavan, Mathura and Agra, this time without the dog, but by now I realised that she nd I had very different travelling styles, and I wasn't willing to spoil my vacation just trying to be nice to the visitor. So I took her to the places she wanted to visit, left her there and went and did my own thing n these places. She was not very happy about it and felt that she could have been kidnapped, raped or molested, which I had a tough time explaining to her that though common in India, does not happen inside monuments like the Taj Mahal, or the ISKCON temple, etc. Then she wanted to go to Kashmir!. So we booked flights to Srinagar and went there, and she was taken aback by the fact that there were men with guns everywhere. She thought she was goinna die. It was then that I realised that she had come to India, planned an itinerary, witout reading about the places she was visiting.

So when I mentioned Leh to her and said it would be too cold in March, she wanted to go to some part of Kashmir that wasn't too col, assuming that all of Kashmir was Buddhist and Tibetan. To top this, there was a militant attack a few hours after we landed there and we spent the next two days in a curfewed Srinagar, which meant that all we could do was stay in the house boat or go for a Shikara ride. I loved just chilling on Dal Lake for two days, post which the curfew was lifted and we got to see the Mughal Gardens and Gulmarg before we left. At this point we realised that we were better off travelling separately, and she went off to Rishikesh and I went to Mcleodganj with a college friend from Ludhiana. Mcleodganj is indeed beautiful and quite spiritual. I wish I had take a week off to go there, but as plans had it, I had just 2 days there, so we did as much as we could in those two days, but I am probably going back there quite soon.

Well, that was the road trip in a nutshell. I might write more about it elsewhere, about the details and some of the awesome places we visited, but enough has been said about it for now. The lights have just gone, and without the sound of the ceiling fan, I can hear the girls next door talking aloud and laughing about something. I don't have an opinion yet about the life they lead, and sometimes wonder if I'd like to be a hooker if I could be one. Well, thankfully, I don't have to answer that question... at least not yet. :P

The Gold Rush!

Dulbhul Singh was found dead in the bathroom one fine morning. The cause of death had been determined to be excessive intake of calorie rich food. Dulbhul Singh was just like every other hardworking, competitive, corporate man. Right since childhood, he had been told that the key to success was hard work and dedication, and that true happiness can be found only by means of wealth. Despite his greatest efforts, he had never managed to top his class as a kid, right throughout school and through college. He never did badly, but there were, somehow, always a handful of people who always did better than him. In this futile race of life, he spent so much time trying to beat the competition, that by the time he was 28, he could barely remember the last time he had stopped to take a breath and smile, breathe, relax and actually enjoy life.

"To hell with it!", he thought to himself... there is always time to enjoy life once you retire, that is what all the ads these days are about. Dulbhul was still struggling with his life. Although he had a good job in hand, everything that most people his age were still trying to achieve, he, like everyone else around him, wanted 'more' - of what? he never knew, but he wanted more for sure. So one day, he took a break from the usual meetings, project reports, updates, training sessions, MRMs, WRMs, MBRs, and all the other acronyms that had woven themselves into his psyche. He took a pit stop in the perpetual race he was running up the corporate ladder. He had been running after promotions, incentives, perks, revenue, growth, benefits, etc. for the last 5 years, but had still not found what he was looking for. No matter how much money he earned, he always seemed to want more. "I am still young, and still have enough ambition left in me to not want to stop", he said.

So, upon that fine day - a warm day in February right at the onset of spring, while the birds chirped in the trees and the children played in the gullies, Dulbhul sat in his 11 by 11 one room apartment, busy chalking out new ways to earn that elusive satisfaction. He had alays planned several investments - the stock market, real estate, mutual funds, insurance - everything under the sun, but today,as if that were not scope enough, he 'went the extra mile' - beyond the sun, to the stars and astrologers. Of course he lit his usual candles and broke his usual coconuts in front of his usual deities, nailed carefully upon the wall, surrounded by incense sticks and garlands of jasmine and marigold, but he also particularly appealed to each one of them individually to give him more money in this world.

While he did that, several light years away, the Gods decided to grant him his wish. They decided to give him gold coins everyday - several of them, and the quantity would actually depend on him. What they did was that they blessed him with the ability to convert food into gold, just that it had to come out the way food usually comes out once digested... yes, he started shitting Gold. Despite the excruciating pain of metal coins sliding down your anus, that is needless to mention, and the prospect of earning your bread from what used to be a waste disposal utility, Dulbhul was elated! He jumped for joy when he first felt painful yellow substance slide out his arse. "I am rich!", he yelled out. He soon started getting all the things he wanted - clothes, accessories, women, cars, land, houses, hotels - his riches knew no bounds - and if he wanted more money, all he needed to do was eat more calorie-rich food.

This kept going on till, one day, Dulbhul decided that he would be truly content only when he had produced enough money to buy the whole world. He started eating day in and day out, he spent all his money in purchasing hig calorie food, fat burners, laxatives and anti-septic cream for internal organs. As he started churning more and more gold, he realised that at this rate, he may actually be able to buy the world in just a few years. He accelerated his efforts by using all the theories of motivation he had learnt about in the dev. training sessions early in his career. He began taking anaesthetic pills and injections, so he could not feel his intestines about to explode, and had all his food brought to his custom-made toilet outlined with gold, so that he could produce the maximum amount of gold with a minimum investment of time, effort and resources He even hired six sigma experts from all around the world to do the calculations for him. The day had come when there was just one day left, according to the calculations, for him to have enough oney to buy the whole world - what he would do with it once he bought it, he had no clue. It was a day before his 42nd birthday.

As he lay in wait for the final few pieces of gold, he could wait no lnger for one more day He decided to take an extra dose of anaesthetics, laxatives and anti septic cream for inner organs, and gobbled up the food that was stocked up for the final day. As he sat on his cutom designed 24 carat gold pot seat, waiting for the final 42 coins of gold that would enable him to buy th world, his entire life flashed in front of him - the early days of carefree chldhood, the first inquisitive days at school, the numerous innocent crushes and the careless masti that used to be an integral part of life, the high school certification, the college campus fun, graduation, the joy of his first paycheck, the first girlfriend, the first kiss, the skipped heartbeats, those dazed, dreamy eyes - 22 more coins to go - the first betrayal, the first lesson learnt the hard way, the first promotion, the first car, the first house, the first step taken in the race for gold - 11 pieces left - the time he couldn't handle 'mediocrity' any more, the time he discovered his 'true need for wealth', the time he 'found his blessings' - 5 pieces left - the high-calorie diet, hi endless cellar full of defecated gold coins, empty cans of laxative, tubes of anti septic cream for internal organs - one coin left - the unbearable pain, the unparalleled anxiety, the purposelessness of purpose, the needlessnes of need, the uselessnes of use, the blood spurting out from all orifices, the knees too weak to carry his weight, the heart too weak to make the next beat, the mind unable to distinguish relaity - the last coin - stuck exactly halfway out, he would have yanked it out if he could have, but that is how thay found his body... 42 year old Dulbhul Singh; cause of death - excessive intake of calorie rich food...