The poor traditionally live in the basti. Basti is an Urdu word, meaning “neighbourhood”; in Bengali, however, it means “slum.” I remember the shock I felt when I was seventeen, when I first began to listen to Urdu ghazals, where the poet or singer might be pining for a woman living in a different basti from his own, because the word, with its connotations of squalor and anarchy, familiar to me from my visits to Calcutta, sounded incongruous in the ghazal’s fragrant world. These days, the person who comes in the morning as your domestic help doesn’t necessarily live in a basti, but often in developments for working-class folk, such as Subhasgram, clusters of houses with poor facilities and inadequate drainage and roadworks, but with shops and a local railway station. The trains are dangerously full in the mornings with commuters making their way to work in South Calcutta — so full that cooks and maids have sometimes reached us in the tranquillity of our flat in Ballygunge — a posh residential area — with a leg or arm bruised, having fallen off or been pushed off by another commuter on to the platform. These signs — of the wear and tear and abrasions of commuting, of the cook limping dramatically into the apartment and receiving only moderate sympathy from her colleagues and her employer — aren’t that unusual.
When a domestic begins to shout in an unseemly way at another domestic, or even at her employer, the word “basti” invariably makes a reappearance. “Don’t behave as if this is a basti,” the employer will instruct the domestic. “This is a bhadra person’s house.” In fact, the word might come up when two middle-class people are shouting unrestrainedly at each other. “Remember,” one might interrupt the other, “this is not a basti.” It doesn’t matter if neither person has ever seen a basti; it’s meant to bring back to them, indirectly, the presence, or the trappings, of that elusive thing, a bhadra existence.
Disasters occur in Calcutta, mainly from a stupendous disregard for norms and regulations, and from a mixture of greed and apathy — but not frequently enough for the domestics to arrive late at our doors in the morning. The women come wearing saris meant for the journeys workward and then homeward later in the evening — sometimes saris with atrociously colourful prints — which they discard and change for a drab work-sari after they’ve entered their small room by the kitchen. All this in six or seven minutes.
The city’s not at war with itself, and trains generally run on time, so there’s really no excuse for coming late. Despite this, a domestic might walk in an hour after she was due and claim the train was late, a story that may be contradicted by another domestic. Only on bandh or strike days do kaajer lok have an absolute, unarguable reason not to come. In comparison to many other cities, and despite occasional political conflagrations in the outskirts and neighbouring villages, despite “jungle mahal” further afield (the sovereign mini-states within states where Maoists reign), Calcutta is fairly safe to walk and travel through, and you won’t as a rule be robbed or shot or lacerated or raped (though you may be run over by a bus). This is not so much because the police are vigilant, but because the working and homeless people who populate the pavements at any given point of time are, despite their conditions, intrinsically bhadra. On the whole, there’s no good reason for domestics to delay reaching, or abscond from, their place of employment — except the obscure compulsions of their personal lives, compulsions which are almost always considered to be fictitious by their employers, and sometimes probably are. The two days of monthly paid leave are given to them reluctantly, and other swathes of time when they disappear without explanation, switching off the mobile phones that all of them have, or simply allowing them to ring endlessly, are viewed with helpless bafflement and outrage. (I’ve used the word “they” or “them” frequently, because it’s the other term—ora—besides kaajer lok most used to describe domestics.) When they return from their inexplicable absence — citing illness, or a relative’s illness or death, or a wedding, or a puja or festival — they’re usually accepted once more into the fold, not with open arms as the prodigal son or even one’s own son might be, but fairly meekly, with some moral remonstrances that are, on the whole, pretty unintimidating.
I say the city isn’t at war with itself, but it is in a state of chafing conflict; the oppositional mode, where kaajer lok are concerned, is passive resistance. Strategy, subtle preparedness, and passive resistance are most in use during festivals. New festivals, paying homage to some unheard-of deity, are invented almost annually by the kaajer lok, in order to fob off the interminable and unrewarding cycle of work in a way that, at least in their own eyes, requires no rationale. Certain dubious middle-class festivals, such as jamai sasthi, when the demi-god and star and bane of Bengali society — the son-in-law — is fed and appeased by his wife’s parents, have grown in strength and consumerist fervour amongst some sections of the middle class after being appropriated by the free market and advertising; all this is being undone by the fact that jamai sasthi has now been smuggled out of its domain by the kaajer lok, and amplified for their own purposes. For days exceeding the single day of jamai sasthi, domestics fail to reappear, as they’re busy celebrating their own jamai sasthi — in an intricate, slow-paced way. Jamai sasthi, as a result, is more or less ruined for the middle class, because you can’t flatter and feed the son-in-law without the infrastructure and detail afforded by the hired help. Jamai sasthi, for the middle class now, is a week of dearth and abandonment.
Working people not only lack time for recreation and holidays, they also lack a proper notion of these things, and, at times, they’re indistinguishable to them from torture. For days they’ll go back to their home or desh or gram or village or family, the very place whose devastation drove them to Calcutta in the first place, be impeded during their return by a flood or a hurricane or a local election — anything from a natural calamity to a man-made disruption — and return to their employer’s apartment looking barely alive. No middle-class person would have undertaken this excursion — they’d simply have severed ties with their home town. Sometimes they insist on embarking on a self-flagellatory pilgrimage — my parents’ driver, Mahinder, did this: he went off to the famous Tarakeshwar temple, took a train from Howrah and got off at Sheoraphuli, collected water from the Ganga in two earthen pots which he hung from both ends of a pole resting sideways on his shoulders, then walked forty kilometres barefoot, as is customary, to the temple. He resumed work gaunt as a ghost; not only had he demolished the soles of his feet, he’d contracted gastroenteritis. Despite the awfulness of domestic work, most middle-class people would prefer domestic work to this kind of holiday. For the kaajer lok, kaaj or work is often terrible, but the escape from work sometimes seems more destructive. “Why did you do it?” I asked Mahinder, thinking divine reward might be the attraction. He suspected he was being mocked. “Oi — for some bhakti-wakti”—“devotion and stuff.” “Any other reason?” Surely some good fortune? “No, just bhakti,” he said, sheepish. Should I believe him? To make that trek, but receive no windfall?
The Durga Pujas, the principal festivities of the year, is a period of abeyance and false stability, when passive resistance is applied cautiously, or in stealth. It’s akin to a card game; especially to playing poker. The kaajer lok, like everyone else, will receive notun bastra, or new clothes, from their employers, as part of the season’s distribution of goodwill. Even if they’ve come to hate their employers, poker-faced, the kaajer lok will play the game till the end of the Pujas, in the interests of the notun bastra, upon receiving which, and the moment they have a better offer from a potential employer, they will show their hand, rise, and leave. Today, notun bastra is passé, and domestics forgo it in favour of a palpable monetary incentive, a Puja bonus, which could be half their salary and thus worth substantially more than a new sari. The drivers, the crème de la crème of the hired help, of course receive a full month’s salary as Puja bonus. If, for some reason, you need to hire a driver or a domestic a month and a half leading up to the Pujas, you’ll be unsuccessful and have to do without, because the game has begun to be played, and no disaffected staff will reveal their cards and peremptorily move jobs before the bonus has exchanged hands.