Book Extract: The inequality inside our homes

It’s not uncommon for five-year-olds in India to bully their parents. Generally, though, the little tyrants tend to be boys. Many girls learn at an early age to talk less, run less, eat less. Not Santosh Srivastava’s little girl. She is one tough little cookie, issuing a series of commands and complaints as I attempt to interview her father. ‘Papa, this phone isn’t playing the cartoons,’ she shouts at one point. ‘Okay, just hurl it on the ground,’ he suggests amiably. At another point, the little girl begins punching her father in his stomach, shouting, ‘Fatso! You’ve become a real fatty, eating and eating.’

Will this elicit a spanking or a scolding? Not at all. At these remarks, Srivastava, a chubby-faced young man in his twenties clad in shorts and a yellow T-shirt, just beams fondly.

Our interview is punctuated with shrieks of ‘Papa!’ at ever increasing decibel levels.

Srivastava is solo parenting at the moment; his wife is visiting her family in Jharkhand. She calls on his mobile phone repeatedly, likely missing her little girl, prompting Srivastava to ask his daughter rather tentatively, ‘Don’t you want to speak to your mother, she’s called so many times?’ But the little girl hangs up on her mother, calls loudly for Maggi (‘Papa! Papa!’), and enquires when the lady will stop with her tedious questions.

Then she returns to her cartoons, casting a baleful glance in my direction. I am cowed and rush through my remaining queries as she tucks into two steaming platefuls of instant noodles. (‘Papa, salt!’) …

Srivastava and his wife, proprietors of the S. K. Group Placement Service, located opposite a slum in southeast Delhi, are among them. These middlemen (and often women) are usually former cooks and drivers and nannies who’ve cottoned on to a bizarre fact about India’s domestic service market: you can earn more for finding someone a maid than you can by working every day as a maid for three months. Or six months. Or, if the employers are particularly kanjoos, for a year.

Realizing this, Srivastava retired as a cook at the age of twenty-one, seven years ago. He had been in domestic work for about a third of his life when he quit it. He started when he was thirteen, after a truck heading out from the local sugar mill near their Uttar Pradesh village knocked his father off his motorcycle. Srivastava, who was riding pillion, spent two months in the hospital. His father died on the spot.

He had been a good student, he says about his younger self. But when he was better he didn’t go back to school. Instead, he went to Delhi to work for a doctor, a friend of his father’s. He was the oldest of six siblings and with their father gone, the responsibility for all of them was his. His earnings of 1,000 rupees a month paid for extras like cooking oil, spices, notebooks and pencils for his youngest siblings; their food came from the fields. The sister born after him dropped out of school too and waited for her brother to save enough for her to get married.

Over the next eight years, he worked his way up to a salary of 10,000 rupees, cooking for a family in Jangpura. He began ‘living out’ in a nearby neighbourhood called Kotla, a warren of one-room tenements in a locality known for its suppliers of marble and teak by the square foot, German-made faucets, sculptural light fixtures and domestic help to the wealthy neighbourhood of Defence Colony just across the road. There, in his friends’ circle of cooks and maids, he fell in love with a Christian woman from a village in Jharkhand. In their home, a 100-square-foot room on the third floor of a tenement with a bathroom and kitchenette in the corner, there is room enough for two faiths. On one wall hangs a picture of the holy family while a little Hindu altar is on another wall. Even though Mr Srivastava did not convert, his family was against the marriage. He told them to mind their own business. ‘Forget about me,’ he told them. ‘But I’ll still send you money,’ he quickly added. ‘Don’t worry about anything else.’

‘I have married according to my own thinking; I have planned according to my own thinking of what I’m going to do next,’ says Mr Srivastava. ‘If I lived according to their thinking, maybe I wouldn’t be able to do everything that I’m doing.’

In 2008, after hearing all their friends complain about either the employers or the agents they had worked with—the ratio is two complaints about employers for every eight complaints about recruiting agents, he says—the couple decided to give the business a try themselves. His wife already had some experience: she had done some recruiting on trips home for a man running a placement service out of their neighbourhood.

They left Kotla, crowded with such maid recruiters, for Taimoor Nagar in Southeast Delhi, where they live on the better side of the drain that bisects this area. They live on the third floor in a building whose walls are grimy and splashed with crusty, rust-coloured paan stains. An enormous truck tyre rests on one landing, perhaps stored by its owner. Outside, wild black-bristled pigs nuzzle the garbage spread like a bedcover over the black waters of the drain. It is from this place that Mr Srivastava runs the business that quadrupled his income. He is just back from his village, where he was overseeing the completion of a two-storey brick home for his mother and siblings to live in. If the numbers he’s giving me are correct, he’s earning more than a lakh a month, putting his little family in India’s top one per cent…

And, he emphasizes, he’s doing ek number ka kaam—honest work—not do numbar ka kaam, as most agents do. When young women turn up in the city asking for a job, he calls their families in villages to make sure they are in the know and also to check the ages of the job seekers. He distributes salaries the way his workers ask for them. If they want monthly payments, that’s what they get. If not, he keeps meticulous records for workers who have asked him to hold their monthly payments for them until they go home, rather than trying to fob them off with 10,000 rupees when the eleven-month contract is over and it’s time to settle accounts. He lobbies with employers for better food and for working hours not to greatly exceed ten hours a day. He has worked with local police and a child rights group to help find children brought to the city to work, and consulted with the city government on possible regulations for brokers.

Mr Srivastava’s area of operations stretches from Delhi’s suburbs to Kashmir, he says. But there are two areas from where he now generally declines to entertain enquiries. In South Delhi, they don’t stint on money, but the homes are too big and the expectations too high: ‘Too much overtime,’ he says. In Punjabi Bagh, they want to pay as little as 2,000 rupees a month, and although they no longer say it as boldly as in the past, they want children. They always claim it’s because the girls won’t have any real work, they’ll just be companions for an elderly mother or a toddler. But Mr Srivastava believes it’s because children put up with a lot before they run away. They don’t know any better.

Mr Srivastava offers three categories of workers: housekeepers, specialists, and health attendants. In the housekeeper category, he has three sub-categories. For a woman fresh from the village, he sets the salary at 5,000 rupees a month for sweeping and mopping, doing the dishes and washing clothes, for a day that likely starts at 7 a.m. and ends at 10 p.m., with a two or three-hour rest gap in the afternoon…

Someone with a bit more experience, who knows how to make a bed and use glass-cleaner and polish silver and brass statues, gets between 6,000 and 8,000 rupees. An experienced person, whose skills range from laying a table with an assortment of cutlery and glasses, to using a microwave and a washing machine, gets 10,000 rupees. His specialists include cooks and nannies. A cook who can only do North Indian food can start at 12,000 rupees for a full day, while those who know Chinese, South Indian and pasta as well, can ask for 15,000 rupees and up. The Srivastavas charge a commission of 25,000 to 30,000 rupees for every person they place in an eleven-month contract, and they place perhaps four or five people a month.

It’s not all profit, of course. He and his wife have travel expenses a couple of times a year, escorting workers back to their villages or from them, both for their safety, and, I suspect, to prevent poaching by other recruiters. His wife is in Jharkhand right now because she took some workers back in December, and then decided to stay on and spend Christmas and New Year’s with her own family in Latehar district.

Apart from the room they live in with their daughter, the Srivastavas rent two other rooms in their tenement, which provide room and board to workers who are in between jobs. One of the workers in transit, a petite girl from Jalpaiguri in West Bengal who is headed home, makes a cup of tea for each of us, and I wonder whether one perk of being a domestic work recruiter is never having to do your own housework. But Mr Srivastava says he doesn’t have a problem with housework. ‘I sweep and mop this place. I cook my own food, I wash my own clothes,’ he says. ‘I like doing my own work.’

This, fortunately for him, is far from the norm, otherwise Mr Srivastava would not be in the business he’s in. I ask him how long he expects to be able to live off supplying maids, and cooks and drivers to India’s affluent. ‘Lifetime,’ he responds, without missing a beat.

Extracts have been taken with permission from Aleph

Pages 314; ₹599