‘There is no water in our flat this morning, Mrs Puri.’
‘No, Mr William, and I am telling you why.’
‘Why, Mrs Puri?’
‘You are having guests, Mr William. And always they are going to the lavatory.’
‘But why should that affect the water supply?’
‘Last night I counted seven flushes,’ said Mrs Puri, rapping her stick on the floor. ‘So I have cut off the water as protest.’
She paused to let the enormity of our crime sink in.
‘Is there any wonder that there is water shortage in our India when you people are making seven flushes in one night?’
Old Mr Puri, her husband, was a magnificent-looking Sikh gentleman with a long white beard and a tin zimmer frame with wheels on the bottom. He always seemed friendly enough—as we passed he would nod politely from his armchair. But when we first took the flat Mrs Puri drew us aside and warned us that her husband had never been, well, quite the same since the riots that followed Mrs Gandhi’s death in 1984.
It was a rather heroic story. When some hooligans began to break down the front door, Mr Puri got Ladoo (the name means Sweety), his bearer, to place him directly behind the splintering wood. Uttering a blood-curdling cry, he whipped out his old service revolver and fired the entire magazine through the door. The marauders ran off to attack the taxi rank around the corner and the Puris were saved.
From that day on, however, the old man had become a fervent Sikh nationalist. ‘Everyone should have their own home,’ he would snort. ‘The Muslims have Pakistan. The Hindus have Hindustan. The Punjab is our home. If I was a young man I would join Bhindranwale and fight these Hindu dogs.’
‘It is talk only,’ Mrs Puri would reply.
‘Before I die I will see a free Khalistan.’
‘You are daydreaming only. How many years are left?’
‘The Punjab is my home.’
‘He may have been born in the Punjab,’ Mrs Puri would say, turning to me, ‘but now he could not go back to village life. He likes flush toilet and Star TV. Everybody likes flush toilet and Star TV. How can you leave these things once you have tasted such luxury?’
Since the riots, Mr Puri had also become intermittently senile. One day he could be perfectly lucid; the next he might suffer from the strangest hallucinations. On these occasions conversations with him took on a somewhat surreal quality:
MR PURI (up the stairs to my flat) Mr William! Get your bloody mules out of my room this minute!
WD But Mr Puri, I don’t have any mules.
MR PURI Nonsense! How else could you get your trunks up the stairs?
During our first month in the flat, however, Mr Puri was on his best behaviour. Apart from twice proposing marriage to my wife, he behaved with perfect decorum.
It had been a bad monsoon. Normally in Delhi, September is a month of almost equatorial fertility and the land seems refreshed and newly-washed. But in the year of our arrival, after a parching summer, the rains had lasted for only three weeks. As a result dust was everywhere and the city’s trees and flowers all looked as if they had been lightly sprinkled with talcum powder.
Nevertheless the air was still sticky with damp-heat, and it was in a cloud of perspiration that we began to unpack and to take in the eccentricities of our flat: the chiming doorbell that played both the Indian national anthem and ‘Land of Hope and Glory’; the geyser, which if left on too long, would shoot a fountain of boiling water from an outlet on the roof and bathe the terrace in a scalding shower; the pretty round building just below the garden which we at first took to be a temple, and only later discovered to be the local sewage works.
But perhaps the strangest novelty of coming to live in India—stranger even than Mrs Puri—was getting used to life with a sudden glut of domestic help. Before coming out to Delhi we had lived impecuniously in a tiny student dive in Oxford. Now we had to make the transition to a life where we still had only two rooms, but suddenly found ourselves with more than twice that number of servants. It wasn’t that we particularly wanted or needed servants; but, as Mrs Puri soon made quite clear, employing staff was a painful necessity on which the prestige of her household depended.
The night we moved in, we spent our first hours dusting and cleaning before sinking, exhausted, into bed at around 2 a.m. The following morning we were woken at 7.30 sharp by ‘Land of Hope and Glory’. Half asleep, I shuffled to the door to find Ladoo, Mr Puri’s bearer, waiting outside. He was holding a tray. On the tray were two glasses of milky Indian chai.
‘Chota hazari, sahib,’ said Ladoo. Bed tea.
‘What a nice gesture,’ I said returning to Olivia. ‘Mrs Puri has sent us up some tea.’
‘I wish she had sent it up two hours later,’ said Olivia from beneath her sheets.
I finished the tea and sank down beneath the covers. Ten seconds later the Indian national anthem chimed out. I scrambled out of bed and again opened the door. Outside was a thin man with purple, betel-stained lips. He had a muffler wrapped around his head and, despite the heat, a thick donkey-jacket was buttoned tightly over his torso. I had never seen him before.
‘Mali,’ he said. The gardener.
He bowed, walked past me and made for the kitchen. From the bedroom I could hear him fiddling around, filling a bucket with water then splashing it over the plants on the roof terrace. He knocked discreetly on the bedroom door to indicate he had finished, then disappeared down the stairs. The mali was followed first by Murti, the sweeper, then by Prasad, the dhobi, and finally by Bahadur, Mrs Puri’s Nepali cook. I gave up trying to sleep and went downstairs.
‘Mrs Puri,’ I said. ‘There has been a stream of strange people pouring in and out of my flat since seven-thirty.’
‘I know, Mr William,’ replied Mrs Puri. ‘These people are your servants.’
‘But I don’t want any servants.’
‘Everyone has servants,’ said Mrs Puri. ‘You must have servants too. This is what these people are for.’
I frowned. ‘But must we have so many?’
‘Well, you must have a cook and a bearer.’
‘We don’t need a bearer. And both of us enjoy cooking.’
‘In that case you could have one cook-bearer. One man, two jobs. Very modern. Then there is the mali, the sweeper, and a dhobi for your washing. Also you must be having one driver.’ Mrs Puri furrowed her brow. ‘It is very important to have good chauffeur,’ she said gravely. ‘Some pukka fellow with a smart uniform.’
‘I haven’t got a car. So it’s pointless having a driver.’
‘But if you have no car and no driver,’ said Mrs Puri, ‘how will you be getting from place to place?’
Balvinder Singh, son of Punjab Singh, Prince of Taxi Drivers, may your moustache never grow grey! Nor your liver cave in with cirrhosis. Nor your precious Hindustan Ambassador ever again crumple in a collision—like the one we had with the van carrying Mango Frooty Drink.
Although during my first year in Delhi I remember thinking that the traffic had seemed both anarchic and alarming, by my second visit I had come to realize that it was in fact governed by very strict rules. Right of way belongs to the driver of the largest vehicle. Buses give way to heavy trucks, Ambassadors give way to buses, and bicyclists