Last Saturday night, at 2am, I was really pissed off. Despite the frigid weather, my next-door neighbors (the ones in the enormous house with the surrounding wall too high to see over) were having a very big, very loud outdoor party around a fire-pit. They were blasting disco music, Bollywood hits, and 80s pop-songs and all sorts of synthesized music that a tired soul like myself has no desire to hear at bedtime. (And to add insult to injury, the partygoers were apparently passing around a mike so they could sing along in loud, drunken and very off-key melodies).
My room is at the front of my apartment, with nothing but a wall of windows to mute the cacophony. It was, in fact so loud that to talk to another person in my room I would have had to raise my voice. I considered getting dressed, marching over to my neighbors, persuading the security guard to let me in, and giving the owners a piece of my mind. But, as I've said, it was very cold outside and the idea of getting dressed to deal with the hassle was particularly unpalatable. So, instead I dragged my blankets to my roommate's room at the back of the house (she was gone on holiday) and eventually--with the help of both earplugs and my noise cancelling headphones--managed to get to sleep.
When I woke up in the morning there were emergency vehicles and reports outside of my neighbor's house. Three people had died there in the night, with a fourth in critical condition.
Who died? Well, as per usual, bad stuff always happens to the most vulnerable of a household and in this case it was four household servants who apparently, having drunk their fill, went to bed in the wee hours of the morning in a poorly ventilated room with no windows. To stave off the cold they used a coal heater and were slowly asphyxiated by carbon monoxide poisoning during the night. (The fourth man sleeping in the room was found still breathing, and rushed to the emergency room where he remains in intensive care).
The somewhat sensationalist article I read about the tragedy mentioned several times that the servants had been drinking alcohol--and perhaps that fact is relevant in that the men may have not been as sensitive to the danger as they usually would have been. To me, however, the real villain here is the living situation endured by servants--when you have 4 men sleeping in a small room with no windows on a cold night is it any surprise that when something goes wrong it goes really, really wrong?
Many servants in India have a really hard life, working 24/7/365 in poor conditions for minimal earnings. (We all remember the case of the domestic servant who accused her employer--an Indian diplomat to the USA--of trafficking, right? In my opinion the US responded appropriately by taking the servant's complaint seriously, but many Indians were totally appalled by the USA's lack of respect for their diplomat, never mind the trafficking complaint by the servant)
Another story--my friend lives in a building with one all-day, all-night security guard who sleeps outdoors on a cot by the gate. She noticed lately that he was always wrapped in a blanket and shivering and so offered to give him one of her extra electric heaters to keep by his cot. (Though, how much good that really can do for a person sleeping outdoors I do not know). In any case, the guard refused her offer, telling my friend that the landlady doesn't allow him to plug-in a heater since it uses too much electricity and runs up her bill. According to my friend, this landlady also constantly curses at and insults the poor man in the foulest language imaginable. For the record, this servant earns about Rs. 15,000 (US $240 a month) and works 24 hours a day with no holidays. He apparently also has 5 kids. (I have no idea how, if he works all the time, he's had time to even father 5 children--I'm chalking this up to one of the mysteries of the world that I do not understand).
I watched the Christmas Carol last night and was again struck by how similar the divide between haves and have-nots are in Dickensian England and current day India. (In fact, at one point I had to turn the movie off since it was striking a little too close to home.) I see reflections of those little emaciated figures of Want and Ignorance cowering beneath the robes of the Spirit of Christmas Present all over this city. (And certainly, thinking about these things puts my own grumpiness at the fact I needed to drag my bedding to another room due to the loud party outside into perspective.)
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