(Written January 2)
I was sitting in Dadi and Dadaji’s front lawn, drinking tea and reading the Atlantic under the coconut palms, when I wondered what made this place, Saumya’s grandparents’ house, so incredibly relaxing. It felt like an all-inclusive resort. Our daily pattern was: get up – early morning chai – breakfast – do whatever – noon chai – 2 pm lunch – nap – do whatever – 4 pm chai – do whatever – 6 pm snack/dinner – 8 pm chai (?) – 10 pm dinner. A pretty packed schedule. And soon enough a pretty packed waistline as well, with sugary, milky chai four times a day that came with “biscuits” (cookies).
And If I Don’t See You – Good Afternoon, Good Evening and Good night! – Chai is a 24 hour affair. Dadaji: “If there is nothing to do – have tea.”
Dadaji chillin’ in the front yard – where we’d spend most of our time in Patna.
And it was clear enough: servants. There were probably half a dozen people gainfully employed under Dadi’s (grandmother’s) roof: a cook, a driver, a go-to-guy for anything, a handyman, an old man who raised Saumya and her father who had basically retired from doing much but stayed on the payroll, and an additional cook hired to feed the fat raging hordes of Americans that had descended, locus-like upon this place.
DadI: “Eat something!” (continual exhortation, even when eating)
I was sitting at the table once, doing something, and felt like I could really use some chai (it must have been around 8am, noon, 4pm or 8pm). And literally the next thing that happened was Ramu, one of the servants, walked in with a tray of tea. Is he telepathic?
There are a lot of people in India. About a billion, give or take a couple tens of millions. A lot of those people live in big cities, and more come each year. The rural population is experiencing a drain on their youth, as they give up farming and move to the cities to find jobs. And a lot of those people end up working as servants in middle-class and upper-class homes, doing odd jobs or trying to sell things. (On a side-note, the door-to-door market here is huge: door-to-door cotton candy salesman, door-to-door carpet salesman, door-to-door kitchen pot salesman, door-to-door masseuse, door-to-door purchaser of old newspaper for recycling, door-to-door guy who irons your clothes for you). Labor is so cheap here because of the tremendous population looking for work, that even middle class families can afford a couple servants to help out around the house.
It’s a really complicated thing, this system. The initial reaction by most Americans is one of resistance to being served. As a nation we have a strong independent streak, so we are afraid of dependency. Someone clearing your plate from the table instead of taking it to the sink yourself seems awkward. Having someone walking behind you carrying your shopping bags seems shameful. Waiting for a servant to bring a spoon from the next room instead of just getting it yourself seems silly. But it’s how things are done here. Americans would probably bristle at this idea of someone serving you like that; they’d probably make quick and thoughtless comparisons to slavery, that shameful scar on our collective past. To those who had not really experienced the relationship between servants and their employers here, that may seem like what’s going on, but there is much more to it.
The important thing to think about is the alternative for these people. If they lived in these rural villages they’d have little (or no) electricity or water. We drove by some of these small towns and their grinding poverty. Rickety shelters made of torn-open rice sacks, or palms, or dried bamboo, with of a roof of a tarp or plastic sheeting. The measly fire in the dirt in front of the house and the steaming pot with hopefully something for breakfast. Barefoot children in the road chasing goats with sticks. Men idly talking in small circles, smoking cigarettes. Defecating in the creek. Malnutrition. Limited schooling. Spending afternoons plastering wet cow dung onto sunny walls to dry it for fuel to cook dinner. And I’m making no attempt here to tug at the heart strings – this is much the reality, as I have seen it and as I’ve been told.
Working as servants they get out of rural poverty and have a chance to make a better life for their children, who can often get to school more easily in towns than in the countryside. Better access to medical care, employment, etc.
And the servants become a quasi-extension of the family. The old man who shuffled around the house, doing no appreciable work still had a “job” that paid him something in a country with a limited safety net for retirees. While not entirely charity, his continued employment speaks to that fact that there is real gratitude for the work he did over fifty years ago to raise Saumya’s dad and later Saumya herself. Saumya’s family is also helping to pay for the education of some of their servants’ children. Members of her family are pitching in to make sure the next generation would have more opportunity to improve themselves. Her family may be a huge anomaly, but I would not be surprised if it indicates a larger trend.
This positive feedback loop is literally transforming the world. The story of the last forty years (and the next forty, at least), will be the dramatic alleviation of poverty for hundreds of millions of people. This is happening most dramatically in India and China, but in other parts of the developing world as well. The hungry and destitute are becoming poor but not hungry, the poor are becoming working class, the working class are becoming middle class, etc. And this huge sucking sound, that inexorable demand for Earth’s resources, is attributable to this increasing living standard as well. Steel, coal, rubber, water: pump it, smelt it, ship it, burn it. The resources and energy required to lift a third of the planet’s population out of poverty. And meet their new demands for more consumer goods.
Going from under a dollar a day to a dollar a day, or going from a dollar a day to two dollars a day may not seem like much to us. But that increase doubles their income. And counts for something. A long way to go, of course, but it is a major advancement.
I’m still thinking a lot about this system and the people here, about the economy and about the population and labor and what it all means. I haven’t come to any grand conclusions yet. I think it’s complicated. I think the general trend is positive, in the alleviation of poverty, despite the intimidating urban, environmental and social challenges it brings. I think this dynamic, the alleviation of extreme poverty and the slow expansion of a global middle class, will be the driving force in the world for this century. Let’s hope we have the collective courage to meet the new challenges that it brings.
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