Two Lucknows (3): Food Made by Love

*First, apologies for disappearing for a little bit --- so many things have been happening that it has been hard finding time to keep all the updates coming in a timely fashion. Long story short: Allen is still plugging away at his Urdu, tabla-playing, and tabla-making classes ... Nikki is studying Hindi, is almost 90% sure she's moving to Bangalore for an internship in the spring, and last week visited several farming villages near Lucknow - and is full of stories (if you can imagine).... but enough about all that - hopefully I'll be able to put up posts with more details on each in the coming week, before we head to Hyderabad for Thanksgiving.

So, the point of this post is to continue with this series of posts I started to show some of the huge dichotomies that are everywhere visible when you're living in India ... I'm not trying to put too much judgment into these posts - but just point out differences that, I feel, in the States we take for granted.

It shouldn't be a big surprise to most of you that it is fairly typical to have hired-help when you live in this country.... I mean, there is a grammatical construction for the presence of servants built into the language for crying out loud (more on that later)! Given the available labor force (huge!) people will take work to pay bills - period. Just for some perspective - at my office we were hiring a gender specialist and a monitoring and evaluation specialist ... and we were getting applications from people with PhDs in management and sales (unrelated fields) because they need the work ... it doesn't matter what the job is...

I digress... it is not uncommon to have a maid and a cook. So we, and the other American students in our building chipped in to split the services of a maid and a cook. Every Sunday through Thursday we go to bed content with full bellies from Love's cooking - yes, our cook's name means Love. I've always said that food made with love is the best - but I didn't know how true that was until I started eating food made BY Love. Needless to say, we're all very very fond of him. He's always so respectful, earnest, helpful and generally pleasant to be around. We laugh because he calls us the bare bacche (the big children) because he has to correct us on what vegetables go best together and what spices to buy --- but always in a friendly, sort of fatherly way.

We found Love through our Landlords -- we had mentioned to them (back before our relationship with them had soured) that we were in need of a cook and they quickly mentioned Love, he was the best because he was their cook. Timing wasn't an issue because he was their Alfred (re: Batman reference) ... a 'butler', but that word doesn't seem right for India, but calling him a man-servant sounds derogatory ... Love is their go-to guy... he was with their family 24/7, but was "rented" out to another family in the mornings to cook their lunches (to bring to work), he was "rented" to us around 6-ish for our dinner, then he came back to the Landlord's around 9pm to make them dinner.*
*Side note: Most Indian's eat absurdly late, around 9pm to 11pm because many of them don't get off work until 8pm. Sounds nuts right! Then you consider that most offices don't open their doors until 10am and most business don't open until 11am and it all starts to make (crazy) sense.

Note, that I said Love was "rented," that's important and comes up later.

So the end of our first month came and we were happy to hand Love his agreed to wages (not much by US standards, but a solid month's work here) ... when we tried to hand him the money he said "no" that it had to go through the Landlords. We had been told that, but we didn't see the harm in giving him the money directly. I don't know who/how it was asked, but we subsequently found out that Love was only given 1/4 of the salary we had agreed to pay HIM, the other 3/4 went to the Landlords for the use of Love's time.

We were stunned. We're really angry at our Landlords for cheating Love out of money we intended to pay HIM and also at a class system that can justify this type of treatment of other humans. Love is not a self-employed man who happens to help out the Landlord's family: he is their man and they decide how he spends his time and who he works for. While we were all initially very angry about the reality of this situation we'd entered into there was a split amongst our group as to how to deal with this new knowledge. On one side, it was suggested that the best way to respond would be to openly acknowledge our disapproval of how Love was being treated and demand that the entirety of the money that was intended for him be given to him. Essentially, turn the culture clash into an actual clash. The other side (which was echoed by the advice given to us by the Director of the Institute) was of temperance: fighting for his right to the money might only get him in trouble with the Landlords - and while our time in India was less than a year, this was his life and his livelihood we were meddling in. My biggest fear was that they would just tell him not to come to us anymore and just tell us that "he left" ... while he was working for us and seeing us on a regular basis, we could always give him his proper wages through gifts for his five-year old son, through our respect for him as a person, and for our very voluble appreciation for his skills... if they told him not to come, there would be no way for us to find him again and help him (modestly) in these ways.

It has been a while since this first came up - but it is hard to know whether we're doing the right thing. We think we are, that our motives aren't too selfish, that maybe... just maybe we are making a positive impact on his life. But we don't really know: Love is too much of the consummate professional to gossip or share his complaints about his lot in life...
"His lot in life" ... that is such a trope in the US, but we really do take for granted how mobile our society is. Yes, too many people still feel the sting of racism and class is a large determining factor in terms of what types of opportunities you have available to you .... but living in India, a greater percentage of the population here (than in the States) doesn't have any choice about what strata of society they live in. There is no mobility.

Love, by every indication seems like a literate, neat, well-fed man --- not properly middle-class, but doing very well for himself, from what I can tell. But what about the street children? Or the rickshaw-wallahs? Or the road workers wearing only plastic sandals? Or people without proper shelter at night? How can they "make-it"? What chance at upward mobility do they have? What is preventing all the Landlords of India from taking 3/4 of their wages? What social pressure is stopping this from happening, from people being taken advantage of? When labor is a dime (literally) a dozen - why will anyone fight back, when the Landlords of India will just find someone to work for them for cheaper and with less complaints? What can one do when this is the norm?