One damp morning about a month ago I awoke to the usual cacophony of crows and staggered from my marble-floored Kolkata flat to my office job, just one flight down. That particular morning was one of the few upon which I thanked God (if there was one) that the office was just one flight down instead of one flight up; or, worse, in a different building altogether; or, unthinkably, on the other side of town.
The previous night had seen copious drinking. My friend Debashish had been over, and we’d managed to dispose of all of his whiskey as well as several bottles of my beer. Fortunately all I really had to do was pry myself from the monsoon-sodden sheets, dump a little cold water over my head, and let gravity drag me down to work. And yet even this presented certain challenges to a man in my condition. On that particular morning I was glad of the close proximity of the office.
At other times I was prone to do a lot of complaining – to myself, of course – that the people at the office knew my every movement. I am a fairly social person by nature; but in India I found that I had fight to maintain any sense of privacy, at least in the Western sense. The average Indian grows up in a house full of relatives – some close, some more distant – so the concept of privacy is never a part of the picture. Everybody feels it is their right to know what you are up to at all times of day. Anyone who doesn’t willingly provide said information is considered secretive and strange.
Admittedly as an English-speaking American in Calcutta I’d had it pretty damned easy. I had been at the job for 2 or 3 months re-writing (read ‘plagiarizing’) British and American textbooks for the Indian market. I was paid $500 a month and given a snazzy three-room apartment with kitchen, private bathroom, and cable TV -- pretty luxurious for India. Though the $500 salary may not sound much by western standards, it was more than double what any Indian employee at the company was paid. My apartment was more spacious than my boss’s house, and I mostly had my place to myself; whereas he shared his place with an extended family that included various in-laws and grandparents.
Unfortunately plagiarism wasn’t exactly the kind of work that set my creative spirit on fire. And in light of the weird and peculiarly Indian flavor of English evidenced in advertising, on television, and the English newspapers, I began to see my job as largely irrelevant. When one billion people had been conditioned to understand that a newspaper headline reading ”Pass-outs Uptake Going On “ referred to admissions for postgraduate study, and not to a failing de-tox program -- who was I to tell them any different? Indian English had a bizarre poetry that I quite enjoyed. National newspapers with millons of readers would regularly provide gems like this one from an art review in a Bangalore paper: “Since centuries, the different facets of nature have been the tried and tested means, where one usually doesn’t go wrong.”
Clearly something had gone wrong; but why should I spoil everyone’s fun by telling them? Besides, I was badly outnumbered. I was the lone lunatic on the beach struggling to turn back the tide; and no, not just the tide of hopeless grammar. I became well known in my neighborhood as the unstable crank that insisted people wait in line at the liquor store instead of plowing into the crowd like it was a rugby scrum. I was the uppity foreigner who picked fights with motorists when they drove straight at me with horns blaring, expecting me to leap subserviently out of the way like every other poor sucker in the country who was to poor to pilot a dangerous weapon with a license to kill.
I began to fall victim to the sense of futility that every foreigner inevitably experiences on having spent any stretch of time in India. It wasn’t the poverty that bothered me. It wasn’t the garbage or the open sewers or the cockroaches or the starving dogs or the human shit in the gutters or the smell or the flies. It wasn’t or the millions whose bedroom was a patch of cement, whose shower was a hand pump, and whose toilet was the gutter at the side of the road. The thing that really began to depress me was the way that middle- and upper-class Indians dealt with it. For the most part they dealt with it by doing nothing. And like them, I started to grow cynical. So I began to take liberties.
I knew that the company needed me more than I needed it. This was obvious. I was working for a school of English and I was the only fluent ‘native speaker’ they had. I was part teacher, part editor, but mostly mascot: I was the token whitey, the obligatory gringo. I knew if I was ever fired I could find work just about anywhere on the subcontinent – or anywhere in South East Asia, for that matter – inside a week. People in that part of the world desperately wanted to speak English. And by the pure luck of my birthplace, I had what they wanted. So, feeling slightly guilty about it, I took liberties. For the sake of my own sanity I had to.
My appearances at headquarters became fewer and further between. Instead of working in the crowded and noisy office where honestly I found it difficult to concentrate due the general level of chaos that accompanies any Indian endeavor, I worked upstairs alone in my air-conditioned flat. And instead of wearing the company-prescribed uniform of business slacks, polished shoes, shirt and tie, I strolled about in Army surplus shorts, a T-shirt and sandals. But hell, it was 100 degrees and near 100 percent humidity every day. I may have been willing to work for the publishing black market, but I was not willing to die for it.
Although I kept to myself and played by my own rules, I got my work done. And let’s face it, I was the only one on the company roster who could do my job. So I took liberties, and my aberrant behavior was reluctantly tolerated. Indians are conformists as a rule. Individuality is not so much frowned upon as regarded with a face that registers both confusion and pity. Anyone who goes against the grain must be either dangerous or crazy or both. In my neighborhood I was regarded as a loose canon; at the office, an object of envy and mild scorn. Indian society, as you may know, is highly stratified. Even today, nearly fifty years after the official abolition of caste discrimination, the Indian social system operates much has it has for the last three to five millennia, though this would only become clear to me on the morning I spotted the dead rat. As much as I did my best to avoid the office, it was made clear to me that I needed to show my face at least once a week. And it was on one of these occasions that the dead rat incident occurred.
****
As I made my way down the stairs, struggling under the weight of the aforementioned heavy hangover, I paused for a last-minute cigarette on the landing. Whilst flicking my ash out the window I happened to spy a couple of rotund ladies avoiding some small gray item on the sidewalk, immediately in front of the street entrance to the office. Leaning over the windowsill, I identified an injured rat in its final death throes, following some apparently tragic accident.
Perhaps it had fallen from the roof of the building or had been hit by a car. Maybe it had been captured by one of Calcutta’s many crows and then accidentally dropped. At any rate, at the moment I spotted it, it was clearly dying, its spine hopelessly twisted, as it writhed in pain on the sidewalk. Employees, business partners, and students arriving at the school, were forced to either squeeze around or leap over it on their way into the building.
I finished my cigarette and entered the office. “Hey, there’s a dying rat blocking the front door,” I said to the receptionist by way of salutation. “You want me to move it?”
“A dead what?” she asked, joining her eyebrows.
“Rat. Not dead yet, still dying.”
“Oh!” she said, screwing her not unattractive face up in disgust, and didn’t give it a second thought.
I made my way through the cramped and brightly painted reception area and into the academic offices, where I was supposed to do my work. The portly Malabika was on her way out as I was coming in.
“Mr. Tod,” she said, flashing her familiar unconvincing smile.
There was no love lost between Malabika and me. After three months I still had no idea what her job description might be. She acted as a sort of receptacle for odd jobs. But no matter what she turned her hand to it invariably yielded disaster. As her unceasing blunders had resulted in many additional hours of work for me, I felt I owed her no contrived pleasantries. I was convinced that she was either somebody’s unwanted cousin or the daughter of an investor in the company. She for her part was convinced, I am certain, that I was an utter charlatan engaged in bilking the company of large sums by needlessly changing letters of the alphabet from upper to lower case, and by moving irrelevant commas and periods around.
“Malabika,” I said, my expression fairly dripping concern, “there’s a rat in dire need of medical attention lying in front of the entrance to the building. Is there anything we can do?”
Malabika’s English was none too good, and my saying things I knew she wouldn’t understand was my little way of torturing her. Of course it wasn’t Malabika’s fault that she was simple and short on talent, but her existence annoyed me. Plus, she was fat and spoilt.
“Ah?” she said, perplexed as usual.
“There’s a rat dying at the front door. What should we do?”
“Uh!” she said, her saccharine façade crumbling. “Tell Indro.” And she waddled off in disgust.
Indrojit, or Indro for short, was my favorite person at the office. His English was not great, but he was genuine and friendly and was always picking up new phrases. In return, he taught me a little Bengali (or Bangla), the language of Bengal. Indro had a sincere and winning smile, the kind you instantly know you can trust. He did all the accounting and also managed the office -- and was only 22. Indro was sharp and worked hard; he was obviously going places, though how far he could go at this shambles of a company was anyone’s guess.
“Indro,” I said, as we went enacted the ritual of the five-part New York hipster handshake I had taught him, “I’m sorry to bother you with this, but there’s a rat in front of the office, and, well, considering we’re just launching the business here, maybe, is there somebody who could get rid of it?” (The company had just moved the office to the relatively swanky neighborhood of Bollygunge.)
“A rat?” he said. “A dead rat?”
“I’m not sure if it’s dead yet. But it’s not looking too healthy either. And it seems to be, well, not exactly attracting new customers.”
“Oh, Mr. Tod. You are never serious. Is there really a rat, really?”
“Yes, really. Should I go down and move it? I would have done it already, but to be honest, I’m feeling a bit queasy this morning,” I said.
“Kweeshy. What is it meaning?” He asked.
“Not entirely tip-top. Not sick, but not exactly…” I began.
“Oh, Mr. Tod. You are drinking completely too much beer, isn’t it? Of this I am convinced.”
“Well, you know…editing is thirsty work.” I mumbled lamely. “But about the rat…it’s probably not good for business.”
“I will inform The Peon immediately. Don’t worry. Rat is taken care of.”
“Are you sure? Because I don’t mind doing it, if nobody else is going to.”
“Mr. Tod. I will see to it. Avit will take care.”
“Are you sure?”
“Definitely.”
****
Avit was an unassuming, gracious and graceful guy (introduced to me by my coworkers as “The Peon”) whose job it was to make the tea, open doors, run errands, and generally be bossed around by people with half his IQ, like Malabika for example. He was employed by the school, and it was his duty to do these things for all the employees. I eventually discovered that his name was Avit.
Living in Calcutta I had had servants thrust upon me. Lots of them. I use the word servants because that is how upper and middle class Indians refer to them, and that is how they are treated. While India’s privileged classes were prospering hand over fist largely due to the I T and “outsourcing” boom, there was still a significant underclass kept in a position of financial dependency and servitude. Middle and upper class people (my friend Debashish included) had no qualms about shouting orders at someone who, by accident of birth, bore the misfortune of serving them.
Maybe it’s my American middle class upbringing; or maybe it’s my Yankee blood; but I have never been comfortable being served. For those unfamiliar with the term Yankee, we are Americans who hail from the Eastern Seaboard, usually of distant British extraction, who pride themselves on their independence and self-sufficiency. Like most Yankees, I prefer doing things for myself; being served always makes me feel slightly guilty. Even maids and waiters make me vaguely uncomfortable. I insisted on saluting Avit as I opened doors for him, and thanked him when he served me tea. This amused and confused him no end. He was used to being barked at. I think he thought I was crazy, but harmless.
Avit was a Brahmin. The office had been forced to hire a Brahmin servant because the boss and some of the employees were also Brahmins, and Brahmins can only have their food prepared by fellow Brahmins. Most modern, educated Indians would of course never admit this, but it is true. While it may seem strange to a Westerner that a member of the highest caste could still be a servant, it is only because of lingering contamination issues.
India’s caste system is so vast, so intricate, and so indelibly printed on the national psyche, that for foreigners comprehension of it proves elusive. There are four major caste groups. They are, in descending order: Brahmins (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants), and Shudras (menials). In addition to these there is one group considered so abhorrent by the other four that they are not even included in the system. These are the Untouchables, outcastes, or Scheduled Castes.
But within these five major groups there are an almost infinite number of sub-castes. For example, as one of my coworkers explained, even within the warrior caste a distinction is made between the descendents of former cavalry officers and former foot soldiers. He, from the infantry caste, had fallen in love with a woman from the cavalry caste, and there had been considerable inter-family upheaval before the marriage had been allowed to proceed. This was considered quite progressive thinking for the time.
Everyone within a given caste can identify by surname a person’s subcaste, as well as the relative position of that subcaste within the greater hierarchy. Multiply this by 30,000 and you’ll begin to get some idea just how vast and intricate is the subject. For most modern educated Indians caste no longer officially exists. Everyone knows about it but nobody wants to discuss it. Caste is the elephant in India’s sitting room: the thing that’s too big to ignore, but too embarrassing to bring up; caste is the dead rat that nobody will touch, malingering there in plain view, ever so slowly rotting from within.
*****
The day wore on. I was waiting to meet with my immediate superior, a woman named Smita, who despite her utter lack of proficiency in English, oversaw the academic department. Smita may have been no academic, but she was a crack businesswoman. She kept the leaking ship that was the company afloat through sheer force of will and lack of sleep, guiding it erratically yet determinedly through murky entrepreneurial waters.
However, due to her inability to ever decline a phone call, Smita was only ever available to her employees in blocks of time not to exceed two minutes. A fifteen-minute meeting with Smita took at least an hour and a half, due to the ceaseless interruptions. I sat down outside her office door to wait my turn.
The job of designing the layout of the new office had of course been assigned by default to Malabika, the person least qualified for the job. She had proven herself to have as little natural talent in this endeavor as in anything else. The office was claustrophobic to say the least. Somehow Malbika had managed to transform a beautiful, airy space with eleven-foot ceilings into a claustrophobia-inducing rabbit warren of people, desks, chairs and inefficiency.
The reception area door was blocked by the chairs in front of the receptionist’s desk. Office doors opened into the corners of rooms or onto the backs of cubicles. Everything was in the way of everything else. Nobody could ever find what they were looking for, especially the person they needed to talk to. Workspaces had seemingly been assigned at random. Doors were spring-loaded to slam shut. As you could rarely get all the way into a room without asking someone to move their chair, logjams of people developed in doorways.
The office was in possession of one stapler, one tape dispenser, and three pencils. This was not because pencils and staplers were prohibitively expensive in India, it was only due to bad management. Malbika’s ultimate dream was to install a costly intercom system in the office. This was not so that employees could communicate with each other, but so that she could boss the servants around without having to get up off of her fat ass.
As I sat in Smita’s office waiting for her to end yet another interminable phone call, it struck me that all this incredible inefficiency was simply a way to turn one person’s job into three. India, being a country with no shortage of people, had to find a way to keep them all busy. On construction sites workers carried rocks by hand, one by one. In Indian supermarkets there was one person to advise you on your purchase, one person to remove items from the shelves and place them in your basket, one to take the items from your basket and put them in front of the cashier, one cashier to ring up the sales, one person to bag the groceries, and one to check your receipt at the door.
Even the two-minute blocks of Smita’s time uninterrupted by phone calls were punctuated by people poking their heads into the office to ask her endless questions: Have you taken your lunch? Where is Sangita? Mr. Chowdhury is waiting to see you. Have you taken your tea? Do you have the stapler?
True to form Indro stuck his head into the room to ask Smita an urgent financial question. As she was already on the phone, I took the opportunity to ask him for an update on the rat situation.
“Rat? Yes, sweeper should take care of it.”
“Wait, so Avit hasn’t moved it yet?” At least two hours had passed since I had first reported the existence of the rat.
“Mr. Tod, no!” He laughed heartily at my cultural naïvite. “Avit is Brahmin. He cannot touch. Avit will tell sweeper.”
“Oh. Well, what’s he waiting for?”
Before Indro could answer me, Smita got off the phone and they immediately launched into a highly animated ten-minute discussion in Bengali. The English phrases ”cash”, ”check clear” and “payment” popped up frequently, so I assumed it was yet another cash-flow emergency. Resigned again to waiting I recalled my first encounter with the sweeper, my introduction to the Indian servant class; it had taken place without warning and probably had scarred us both for life.
He had arrived unexpected early one morning: a surly gent with a straw broom. I was new to Calcutta, new to the job, and new to India’s lingering caste system. I had only just moved into my new digs. It was 8:00 am and the air temperature was already topping 90 degrees. While showering I had been hit with the melodic inspiration for a new song. Thinking myself in the privacy of my own flat, I had rushed from the shower and picked up my recently purchased Indian guitar (“A genuine Givson,” the salesman had boasted), and was in the process of strumming and crooning away stark naked in the center of the bedroom, when an aggressive mustachioed man burst through the door.
Only the distant cawing of crows broke the pregnant silence in the room. He stared at me; I stared at him. He looked at the guitar -- which thankfully covered my genitalia -- shook his head in disgust, turned abruptly, and left the room.
“Hey! Have you ever heard of knocking?” I called feebly after him.
After our initial encounter we never spoke. But he came every Saturday at 8:00 am without fail, and always entered without knocking. Instead, his arrival was always preceded by lots of banging and coughing in the hallway, after which he would come in and pretend to sweep out my room, leaving as soon as possible. As I peered from underneath the soggy sheets feigning sleep, I could tell by his sour expression that he was convinced all foreigners were inherently perverse and devoid of musical taste, which of course we mostly are.
The impending financial catastrophe seemingly averted for one more day, Indro shut the door behind him and I finally got my allocated two minutes of Smita’s attention. Apparently I was to leave the next morning on the 6 am Doon Express for Dera Doon, clear on the other side of the country and 36 hours away by train.
I took the news in stride. I often found myself being packed off at a moment’s notice to someplace on the map I‘d never heard of where on arrival I would be informed that as honored guest I was expected to give a one hour lecture I hadn’t been asked to prepare on a subject I knew next to nothing about. 150 Indians would listen politely as Mr. Tod From America waxed polemic on The Future of English in a Global Economy. This was actually one of the more entertaining aspects of the job.
I gleaned what few scraps of information I could from Smita between phone calls, and headed upstairs to get down to my editing work. I had a book to finish before I left the next day: Business Conversation Skills, or something equally riveting. I ran into Avit and Indro in the stairwell.
“So did Avit tell the sweeper about the rat?” I asked Indro. I referred to Avit in the third person only because addressing him directly would have called for a lot of hand gestures and pantomime.
“Yes, definitely.”
“And so the sweeper is going to remove it?”
“Actually, sweeper is having family difficulty,” he said apologetically.
“Difficulties?”
“Actually he must attend cremation service for mother.”
“His mother died?”
“Yes.”
“That’s terrible,” I said. Then, remembering another imminent death, and after probably too indiscreet a pause I said, “So the sweeper probably won’t be in today?”
“No, sweeper not sweeping today.”
“So, about the rat…”
“Someone will take care.”
“Yes, but if he isn’t in….?” I asked hopefully. “Today? Tomorrow?”
“Actually he will not be in office for next three days.”
“But the rat. We can’t just let it lie there. Why don’t I just go and move it?”
“Mr. Tod, no!” he said, truly shocked at the suggestion. “Someone will take care!”
“Who?”
“Definitely.”
*****
I had to infer that the job of removing the rat would fall to Toilet Man. He was the third servant with whom I had regular contact. We enjoyed an amicable though utterly silent relationship. I never discovered his name; nobody at the office knew what it was, and he spoke no English.
Toilet Man was probably of the Untouchable or scheduled castes. I assumed this because only the scheduled castes will perform this type of labor; dirt and detritus are their exclusive domain: they are the latrine cleaners, the rag-pickers, the garbage men.
Toilet Man would show up bright and early every morning to slosh water around in my bathroom. Every attempt I made at trying to convince my boss that I really didn’t require servants, let alone a person whose sole purpose seemed to be to make my bathroom damp before I had a chance to do so myself, was met with hysterical laughter.
“But Tod, it is their job!”
Although not all Indians are lucky enough to have jobs, caste ensures that everyone has a place. While it is the concern of the upper castes to handle matters of governance, high finance and the all important concerns of Bollywood gossip, it falls to the lower castes to deal with the ugly reality of refuse.
Upper caste people simply cannot be sullied with so base a question as what happens to their garbage after they toss it nonchalantly to the ground; some lesser person will surely deal with it. If they don’t, and if the negligence of these baser humans means the upper caste person has to step through piles of stinking garbage and human excrement on their way into the mall to buy a new sari or cellphone, then so be it. It is beneath their dignity to appear to notice such things.
Don’t get me wrong. There are many elements of the Indian system of waste disposal that, despite their more unpleasant aspects (primarily sight and smell) make an awful lot of sense. While westerners shove their trash into black plastic bags with the unconscious mantra “out of sight, out of mind”, Indians throw their garbage on a heap for all to see. Very few Westerners give much thought to what happens to their garbage after they dispose of it; in India the system is all too transparent.
At morning’s first light the ad-hoc recycling process begins. The first to arrive are the Untouchables. They pick through the rubbish, gleaning those items that can be re-sold or re-used: cardboard for slum housing; newspapers to be refashioned into paper bags; plastic bottles for water vessels. Everything deemed valuable or viable is thrown onto their wooden carts and wheeled away.
Next come the carnivorous scavengers: the dogs, the cats, the rats, and the crows; these devour all they consider edible from the waste pile. Much audible commotion between species usually accompanies this process, but since all creatures have their place in the great order of beings, somehow it all works out. Later in the morning arrive the lackadaisical cows, who lazily chew up whatever vegetable scraps remain.
By this method, most human waste in India is recycled. All that endures is the ugliness and the stench. That, and the plastic bags. No creature, bipedal, quadripedal, or avian, has yet found a secondary use for these things, so they lie in the dust until they are either blown away upon the pre-monsoon breeze or washed away by the ensuing rains through the open sewers, until they are caught on branches and find a final resting place festooning the trees along the canals.
*****
Around 7 pm I finished my editing for the day and ventured out to grab a few beers before returning to pack for the next morning’s trip. I had already decided to quit the job on my return from Dera Dun. I was sick of Kolkata, sick of working in an office.
I made my way back from the liquor store along the “footpaths”: the granite slabs, patches of brick, and jumbled blocks of concrete that passed for sidewalks in Kolkata. Bats darted after mosquitoes in the fading light. Lower class women in saris pulled water from the corner hand-pumps. Rickshaw-wallahs dozed in their vehicles. And the crows kept up their ceaseless din.
As I approached my building Toilet Man was on his way out with a plastic bag brimming with last night’s bottles (the deposit he received returning my bottles was my way of tipping him). Something small and gray was swinging from his other hand. He flung the rat (now certainly dead) across the road into the pile of garbage. When I left for Dera Dun the next morning at dawn, all that was left of the rat’s body was a pale skeleton wrapped inside a thin pink envelope of skin and fur, picked clean by the crows.
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