Having Staff - A life of luxury? Who's working for who?

So what's it like having staff? Let me tell you who we have here and what they do (actually I'm not entirely sure what they all do!). The staff (they insist here on calling everyone servants but I just can use that term) that we have at the house and what they are employed to do are as follows:

The Cook - Samuel: He is our cook and he also does some household duties. He works from 7:15 am to 7:30pm or 8:00pm (depending on how quickly we eat our evening meal) and has an hour (sometimes 2) off during the day. He does all the food shopping, preparation, cooking, laying of the table, serving and clearing it all away. He was previously a cook for Indian diplomats in places like Qatar and Belgrade. He and Poody live in the servants quarters attached to the house (basically 2 rooms) with their 17 year old son. He (and Poody) work Monday to Saturday but on Saturday night they put out Sunday morning breakfast (lay the table and put out cereals) and they will not let us do any washing up on Sunday, insisting that we leave all the day's washing up for them to do on Monday. After all we don't want to get our hands dirty do we?

The Housekeeper - Poody: She is married to Samuel and is responsible for house work and child care duties. She is also a very good english speaker and as Samuel is not so good with the language, she tends to do most of the organising. She makes sure the house is clean, the beds are made and changed (weekly), the laundry is done (daily), the bathrooms are cleaned (daily) and she looks after the 2 boys who live here, doing things like bathing them everyday, combing their hair in the morning and clearing up after them. She will also do babysitting in the evenings. She works about the same number of hours as Samuel.

Assistant Housekeeper - Rhoona: This lady was taken on a few months ago, as it was decided that with all the visitors (my Mum and Paul stayed for 4 weeks before we got here and we will have been here for 8 weeks) to the house there would be a significant amount of extra washing, ironing and house work. She probably does about 20 hours per week and mainly concentrates on the washing of clothes and ironing. Everything gets ironed. I now have ironed underpants and I'm getting very used to the idea (don't be ridiculous!!). In the UK (absolutely no reflection on Julie but a joint decision) we don't iron anything unless we need to get rid of a few wrinkles before we go out somewhere and then we do it on the spot.

The Gardener: He does about 10 hours per week. He comes just about every day, as you do need to water anything that is alive in the garden every day just to keep it alive. He sweeps the drive, smiles sweetly, sweeps the sand patch (lawn) of leaves and smiles some more.

The Guards: We have 2 guards who guard the house over 2 shifts of 12 hours per day. They are on duty outside of the house compound and are actually in the road in a little sentry hut which they are not usually in unless it's raining. They are not armed, as Suzanne and Rob's guards where when they lived in Pakistan, but they open the driveway gate anytime that the driver pulls up. They also have the job of monitoring our water tanks. The water in New Delhi is only on for 2 hours per day, so you have to store it in big tanks in the ground. The guards ensure that we don't run out of water (usually they do - as we have run out of water 3 or 4 times in the last month). I am not quite sure how much "guarding" they actually do, as in protecting us from any threats. I don't really know if there are any threats. It's more of a question of; everyone has a guard so you have to have a guard and after all it's nice when someone opens the drive way gates for you and salutes you as you come into the house.

The Driver - Shashi: Shashi is prehaps the most indispensible of all the staff. Not only is he the best driver in New Delhi, he knows where everything is, how everything works and he is a great "fixer". If you need anything done, mended, fetched, organised or sorted, he is your man. He knows his way around India by road and rail too. He took us all on holdiay to the foothills, he met Julie and I and the boys in Agra and took us all around the Taj Mahal. You really couldn't do without him. Especially as there is no possibility that you could ever manage driving in this city. For the British it would be near impossible. My sister, who is an accomplished driver and used to ride around London on a motorbike, has only driven once in 3 years and never again. Rob will on occassion take the car out to the tennis club or the British High Commission on a Sunday but only because there is so little traffic. You generally feel that when Shashi is around nothing can go wrong and if it does we are definitely going to come out of it OK.

The Tutor - Mr. Gotam: We employ Mr. Gotam to do stuff with the boys for 3 hours per day, 3 or 4 days per week. His fee is 300 rupees an hour, or about £3.75 per hour. Actually he only gets £2.25 per hour as the agency takes it's cut. In typical Indian fashion he tries to do too many jobs at once and is often not here at the time we want him to be, as he is double booked. But it hasn't been too bad and the boys have kept their finger in with some mental stimulation. He also takes the boys out on cultural visits to places in New Delhi. They are going to the science museum on Friday.

Julie and I reckon that with all the staff we have here, it saves about 2 and half days of labour in UK. You would have an extra 2 and half days to yourself if you had this lot working for you at home. So what are the good and bad things about it?

Firstly, in the house you never have any privacy. It seems that my bowels operate on exactly the same timetable as the housekeepers. Just when you need a quiet toilet all to yourself, you find there is some massive cleaning operation going on it and often in 2 toilets simultaneously. I also find it tedious having to lock the door all the time just to make sure someone doesn't come in and start cleaning at just the wrong moment.

You can never walk around unless you are decent. It's like living in a hotel. You can't walk in the common parts unless you are dressed appropriately. The staff all come from different backgrounds and religious beliefs (Sammy and Poody are christians), so we never know where we stand with what is acceptable or what might be considered rude or offensive. So when you have staff you always have to consider another lot of rules, another lot of traditions or values. You could just say (as I am sure the British did in the past) well they work for us so they will have to accept our ways. I just can't allow myself to do that.

Then you have the management side of things. There is absolutely no doubt that one of the laws of this country is that any specified job will always expand to fill the maximum time allotted to it. If your job is cleaning bathrooms, you do it everyday in the time you are engaged to work. This flies completely in the face of the more acceptable work theory that we should do what is required and what is needed and when that job is done go and ask for another job. So that bathrooms get cleaned every day regardless of wether or not they have been used or wether or not there is even anyone living in the house (I'm sure they were done on a daily basis whilst we were away). There is no question a member of staff might think, well the baths are clean perhaps I should clean under the beds. (I am actually being very hard on the staff here to make a point. They are all very good but the tendancy is to go in the direction that I have indicated).

This way of thinking is part of the national culture; I've not been told to do that, my job is to do this, so I will do it until someone tells me to stop. I have read that this "not thinking for yourself" idea is generated initially from inside the family unit. There the children and the women are simply told what to do and they never learn to make decisions for themselves. They cannot operate without an instruction.

I recently heard from an ex-pat who has been in India for 35 years (poor man had turned completely native) that until very recently all government letters, orders and communications started with the line:

"I have been instructed to inform you ......."

The implication of this is that the writer is not the person who makes the decison. In fact you can't really find the person that makes the decision, no one is willing to carry the can. Absolutely no culture of personal responsibility.

So the same applies to our staff. You need to constantly monitor that they are doing something useful. The trouble is that because in our terms the cost is virtually nothing, you tend not to be too vigorous in getting value for money. So they carry on day after day doing what they always do. That is of course, if you don't spend time organising them. Then you get to the stage of wondering; who's working for who. Running the house becomes not quite a full time job but it certainly takes up time.

It's not so bad when it's all running according to plan but if anything goes slightly adrift, it can all fall apart like a pack of cards. Take the water shortages for example. It's the guard's duty to make sure we don't run out of water. He's been doing the checking of the tanks for years. Then for some reason then don't fill up at the same rate as before. He doesn't come to us and tell us; we just run out of water. It take Rob and I days to investigate how the water arrives, which tanks it goes into and how we can solve the situation. The plumber is called and we have meetings in the garden with Samuel, Poody (translating) the guard, the plumber, his assistant, me, my sister and Shashi the driver. You stand back and look at the scene and it's a scene being played out all over India. Everyone has something to say, they all think they know how it works, the plumber is trying to sell us extra pumps, Shashi thinks he's right, Samuel just wants some water, Suzanne is trying to understand something so she can make a decision. No one really knows anything. It's the blind leading the blind.

I spent an hour crawling around in a water tank that was only 30 inches high but covered an area of 2 double beds, with a flashlight in my mouth, looking at the entry and exit pipes to determine how the system functioned. Then Rob and I spent an hour on the roof of the house, where there are four seperate water tanks, working out which water tank on the ground fed which water tank on the roof through which pump. We (Rob is an oil engineer and knows something about pipes and pumps) had a pretty good idea of how it all worked, so I took charge of the garden meeting and decided for them that the system works OK as it is but it just needs to be managed properly.

It is said by the locals and the ex-pats that this kind of management intervention is what is required in this country and was perhaps why so much was achieved when the Brits were here. The Indians are not afraid of hard work but they need channelling.

To get back to the staff, you can leave them to get on with their regular jobs but don't expect any crisis management or any initiatives to be taken.

The food thing is quite interesting. Samuel is a good cook. He doesn't eat any of our type of food as he is a vegetarian. He makes all the dishes by following the recipe. He never tastes our food at all. How then does he know that it tastes OK? Well of course he doesn't, as he has no idea what it should taste like in the first place. So you get some interesting results.

He made an apple pie soon after we first got here and he obviously put about 2 soup spoons of salt too much in the pastry. It was really, well, you can imagine. So what do you do? Rob and Suzanne seem to eat it OK without making any comment. Perhaps he hadn't dropped the salt box in there and this is how he always makes it? We didn't say anything about it but we just don't order Apple Pie anymore.

Other times he comes out with a pudding and plonks it down in front of you and you really feel obliged to eat it. Never before have I had so many jam rolly pollies, steamed treacle puddings and apple crumbles thrust before me during weekday evening meals. The thing is you feel like you have to have some. He has been working all day (remember the job fills the amount of time available) on preparing our evening meal and you feel like a real rat turning it down. His face crumples and he shrugs his shoulders. So you get stuck in this sort of rut. You eat more than you really need or want. You also put on lots of weight.

The meals themselves have to be so much more structured too. Samuel will ask you what time you want to eat supper in the morning. Well in the morning you don't know what time you want to eat but since he has to work to a time line you have to come up with a time. What this means is you are now committed to eat at that time. If you are out and you want to hang around somewhere you can't; you have to get back for supper. If you're at home and you want to put supper off for an hour because you just had too many crisps and beers; you can't. You are tied to the meal times. There is really no flexibility as you know that Samuel and Poody have been at work all day and they want to go off duty. I find all that constricting. Julie likes the routine of it but she also understands you can't factor in any changes of plans which can be quite difficult.

I think we'll do without.