Monthly Archives: June 2009

hot sweaty bribery

Posted on June 24, 2009 by | 9 Comments

Delhi is peppered with small parks — 18,000 of them, if The Hindu’s dubious figures are to be believed. Most of them are small community parks, where any open space is claimed by boys playing cricket and any secluded bench is occupied by young couples trying to escape Delhi’s incessantly prying eyes. But a few are big enough to appear as bright green splotches on the maps of Delhi that hang obligatorily in every expat’s living room. One of those is the Jahanpanah City Forest, adjacent to GK II.

In our time in Delhi, Jenny and I yearned for fresh air and open spaces. But despite the fact that Jahanpanah City Forest had both, we never returned to its 800 acres of scrub forest and meandering paths — not after the experience we had there on Jenny’s very first day in India, when I’d been in the country all of a week.

Only rookies like us would have entered the forest at all, seeing as it was a scorching August Saturday with the sun almost directly overhead, ensuring the trees alongside the path were unable to shade us. We each felt the sweat drip down our backs and refused to admit that this had been a mistake, that maybe we should have waited until the evening to go  hike. It didn’t improve things that we had no water, and it further didn’t improve things when we got a little lost, and any hope for the improvement of things became a forgone impossibility when the policeman appeared on his motorcycle and began to blackmail us.

“Park closed! Park closed!” he repeated menacingly, miming to us that he didn’t speak English but somehow finding words to explain that we had to get on his bike so he could take in to pay a 30,000 rupee fine for being in the park during closing time. Or, you know, we could pay him 5,000 rupees right then and there.

Panicking and terrified (I read Shantaram; there’s no way I’m going to Indian jail!), I called my landlord and asked him to speak to the cop. After a discussion, the phone was returned and my landlord apologized on behalf of his country. “This man is only trying to extort a bribe. I suggest you give him nothing.”

As our understanding of the situation finally clarified, and we started shuffling our feet and edging away, the policeman’s demeanor changed. His glowering was replaced by pleading. “Gift for policeman!” he begged, blocking our way, his eyes tearing up.

I was unsure about the consequences of ignoring him. I worried that not bribing a policeman might be an arrestable offense. And I was totally ignorant of the going rate for a bribe. So I opened my wallet and tentatively handed him 400 rupees.

Suddenly his English seemed to get better. “Please, ma’am,” he asked Jenny as the money disappeared into his pocket. “I beg of you. Double that!” She shook her head warily.

And then his demeanor changed again. He grinned broadly, gave first Jenny and then I a tremendous handshake, and pointed us down the proper path to return to GK II. He watched us to make sure we took the correct fork in the road, and waved happily as we walked down the path towards home.  I deeply regret not taking his picture; I’m sure he would have eagerly posed with us.

→ 9 Comments

Posted in living in Delhi

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

a zoning violation

Posted on June 16, 2009 by | 1 Comment

The smell would appear suddenly every two to three weeks, billowing up the stairway from the basement of Jenny’s office building, each time making her think that something had gone terribly wrong and that evacuation of the office was imminent.

“Stench” is a better word than “smell”, Jenny tells me: these were terrible stenches for which Jenny had no frame of reference within an office environment. It wasn’t stagnant urine from improperly-plumbed urinals, as plagued my Gurgaon office’s stairwell; and it wasn’t rot from a refrigerator opened after weeks of forgotten festering lunches. It saturated all four floors of this nondescript four-story building; it crawled underneath her office door and stabbed at her nose while she worked.

But only Jenny seemed bothered. While she coughed and choked, everyone else went about their business.

One day, fed up from mouth breathing, Jenny made some enquiries. While the top four floors of her building were home to one of India’s best-known advertising agencies, the basement housed a distributor of raw and processed meat products. Among their clients, it was rumored, were many of the Subway franchises that had sprung up all around Delhi.

Which meant that the smell was meat-related. Whether it was meat being cooked, strips of flesh curing in the basement heat, or blood being burned off a killing floor, nobody knew; all anybody knew was that it was meat. Which made it all the more surprising that an office of vegetarian Hindus were so complacent about the awful airborne particles polluting their bodies by way of their nasal passages.

One day, on a day I happened to be with her, Jenny investigated. There was no smell this day, but she marched smartly down the stairs anyway, with me following mutely along. We entered into a small office area with a single desk, a solitary phone, and a man in a button-down shirt bent over some papers. Through a door on the right we saw a large room, a half-dozen workers sorting meat into plastic packages, a few red-stained rags on the ground, and a few cardboard boxes that were open to reveal more meat. One man was wiping at some red liquid pooled on the packages.

No refrigerators were in sight.

Jenny walked up to the man sitting at a desk: the one employee in the establishment not wearing meat-stained clothes. Behind us, the workers had noticed us, and had crowded around the doorway to watch.

“Hi!” Jenny said. “How are you! I work upstairs. I heard you sell meat. Do you sell meat?”

The man, who hadn’t seen her come in, looked up sharply. His mouth dropped open. This was a distribution point, obviously; customers were neither expected nor prepared for.

“I heard you sell meat to Subway,” Jenny continued. “Is that true?”

“Yes,” said the man. “No! I mean, can I help you?”

“Do you sell meat?” she paused. “Uh, I’m having a party.”

Behind us, somebody said something in Hindi, and a few guys laughed.

“Yes, chicken and pork products, ma’am. Salami. Pork chops. Sausages.”

“You sell to Subway?”

“I’m afraid I can’t discuss that.”

“Uh… do you deliver?”

“Yes.”

“OK! Thank you! I’ll let you know what we decide.”

“But – ” But Jenny was already leaving. I looked at her walking away, looked at the man staring after her, shrugged, and followed her upstairs into her company’s lobby—the owners of which, incidentally, were the one bribing the local authorities not to notice their four-story, fifty-employee violation of the local zoning laws.

→ 1 Comment

Posted in living in Delhi

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

the loneliest walla III: the night watchman

Posted on June 5, 2009 by | 4 Comments

Here is my third essay in this series for The India Tube.

====

The Loneliest Wallah (III): The Night Watchman
by Dave Prager
Originally published on The India Tube


“Up here!” I shout down to the street, waving my phone to get the attention of my party guests. I also get the attention of the neighborhood guard, who looks up from his post across from our flat. He sits next to our street’s iron gate, which is closed because it’s after eleven—the dangers of the Delhi night, you see, can be kept at bay by an unarmed seventeen-year-old guard with a whistle. Which is why this guy is hired by the neighborhood association to sit all night, every night, no matter how cold it may get.

My guests see me and wave back. They file out of their auto and past the guard and into my building. The guard watches the girls pass while I disappear back into the warm yellow light. Then he settles back in his seat, a cracked blue piece of weather-beaten plastic that once stood proudly in a hospital waiting room. He wraps his grey blanket tight against the cold wind, sits under the dim naked light bulb hanging from the tree, and waits for the opportunity to do his job.

His job consists of two tasks: closing the gate at eleven PM, and opening it when cars come by.

I come back to the balcony to guide more friends to the party. The guard has started a fire using scrap newspaper and plastic chai cups as fuel. I watch him stamp his feet and smell the toxic fumes and wonder if he knows they’re toxic. But it probably doesn’t matter to him, because it’s cold in Delhi in the winter, except for in my apartment, where the wine is flowing and the glasses are clinking and the sound of our laughter drifts over the guard’s head and into the night.

Some time later, I return to the balcony once more. The guard is sleeping, his head slumped left and his body cocooned tightly in the blanket, but not for long: my friend pulls his car to the gate and honks twice to rouse him. It’s well after two AM. A stray dog, sleeping nearby, doesn’t even look up.

The guard trudges to the gate. He opens it. He watches the shiny car glide past. He closes the gate. He wraps the blanket around his body. He trudges back to his seat.

Upstairs in my apartment, somebody turns the music louder.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in thinking about delhi

Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

the loneliest walla II: the bank guard

Posted on June 1, 2009 by | 5 Comments

Here’s my second article for the brand new blog/magazine/community called The India Tube.

====

The Loneliest Wallah (II): The Bank Guard
by Dave Prager
Originally published on The India Tube

Last September and October, Delhi became darker and more disgusting. It was an invasion of leafhoppers: fly-esque creatures that feed on the paddy crop in the rural areas around Delhi. They’d been eating good, and heavy rains meant they were drinking good as well; and one day they took to the skies and headed towards Delhi by the billions with the singular goal of smashing themselves against bright lights until they died.

In Delhi’s glass-enclosed ATMs, garishly lit with white florescent to attract light-walleted passers-by, they became the only real company for the stoic and sleepless bank guards.

These guards’ posts became snow globes that someone had shaken (after replacing the snowflakes with squirming black insects). The poor guards stared without expression as bank customers franticly waved their arms to warn the pests off; but the guards didn’t sympathize for entomological discomfort lasting the duration of a single transaction when they were the ones sitting there all night in their florescent cages, the insects crawling on their heads, landing on their mustaches, mating and dying in the air they breathed while thousands more on the outside slammed themselves against the glass walls and fell into piles on the ground, little snowdrifts of black life now lifeless, waiting for the morning sweeper.

It could be worse than being an ATM guard. There is AC in these vestibules, which is nice. There is protection from the sun and the rain and the cold, which is nice. There are people to watch, which is nice.

Every so often a real sight to see comes through the door: like when our friend Trevor, a six-foot-tall black man with long black dreadlocks, wearing a skin-tight tank top, sashayed into our local Citibank ATM lobby on the first day of his visit with us. The guard stood and stared and walked forward for a closer look, as if in a trance, and stood next to Trevor and scrutinized his face for the duration of the transaction. But the sights are fleeting. And any company a guard may have lasts only as long as it takes the machine to validate a PIN.

The ATM guard: he exists because the sum total of the his labor and his cognitive capacity as a human being is valued to be slightly less than the cost of acquiring and installing a security camera. His job is to sit and watch men and women withdraw more money in one go than he might earn in a month.

And, while there are plenty of low-income workers in this city, but few are forced to earn their pay by watching other people count and pocket theirs.

→ 5 Comments

Posted in thinking about delhi

Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,