I am Raghavi Kushwaha. I worked in Spicy Baatein. The name sounds funny, right? But it is true. I first came to Delhi when I was like five. My father, Vimlendu, had found a job as an office boy in a showroom in Karol Bagh. We were originally from Bhagona, a remote village in Uttar Pradesh.
We shifted to Delhi to escape the court case my father had due to an altercation and a fight with his neighbour, who died in the subsequent event. My mother, Sushma, had died during the birth of her second child. We had neither any possessions nor any money, so the shift to Delhi wasn’t really big for us. We were living a hand-to-mouth existence in our village; we thought we could live the same way here, too.
“I am going to enroll you in a school tomorrow,” Baba had said the day before he died. We had been in Delhi for the past three months, and after being helped by a distant relative, we had rented an accommodation near Kashmiri Gate, and Baba had just found a job. I was 15 back then. Now it’s been three years since Baba’s death. A speeding truck ran over him. The errant driver was never located. He was returning from his night job as an auto driver. At daytime, he worked as an office boy, while at night, as an auto driver for six hours: between ten and four. Then he was back to work by 9 am. The accident happened near Anand Vihar when he had been waiting for some passengers. I lived at the rented accommodation for over a month before the landlord threatened to kick me out.
“Pay or leave, that’s our policy, and I just charge nine hundred rupees. Can’t you even pay that?” he had roared. I tried to locate my distant relative, but since I had never met him, I had no clue where he lived. He never appeared again. Maybe he was just my father’s friend. I don’t know.
“Uncle, I don’t have any money. Baba just died, and I have nowhere else to go. If I return to my village, they will kill me to seek revenge,” I cried. The landlord, Raju Singh, a burly man in his fifties, sat on the only chair in the room. The room in which I lived was very small. One corner of the room was turned as a kitchen and consisted of a stove and some cooking utensils. The middle part of the room was converted as a bedroom and consisted of a mattress, which I rolled up every morning. The other corner of the room was treated as a guestroom and occupied a second-hand chair and a small table. The bath and toilet were common and shared between the other tenants. There must be around 15 tenants living in our building. Raju Singh owned ten of the living quarters while another local MLA owned the remaining five.
“Bitiya, this chair is very uncomfortable. You should get it repaired,” he said. I handed him a cup of sugary tea. I wondered whether he was joking or was serious. Here, I was struggling to get my next morsel of food and he was talking of repairing the chair. Anyways, I sat down on the floor directly facing him on a newspaper sheet.
“Are you literate?” he asked me.
“Till class eight. I failed in class eight and then never went to school again.”
“So you are just a seventh pass? You can’t find a job with that qualification . . . Can you wash utensils?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said, nodding my head. Raju Singh helped me to get a job as a maidservant in a couple of houses. He used to pay me ₹ 3,000 as salary. Later I learnt that I was lowly paid, and that I should be getting ₹ 8,000 as salary for the four houses where I worked, but Raju Singh was charging a hell lot of brokerage.
I was satisfied with my job because I still had a roof to live in and was not out on the streets, as I had feared after Baba’s death. Mrs. Sharma, one of the four employers, was evil, but the rest were good.
“Why have you switched on the geyser? Hot water is for us, not for you,” Mrs. Sharma had screamed the very first day.
“But it’s cold, Bibiji,” I had pleaded.
“Chal bhag, if you feel so cold, then drink some tea before you come. What is the use of having a maid who enjoys the same privilege that of an owner? From now on, never switch on the geyser, okay?” she had warned me.
“Yes, but all others allow me,” I had murmured.
“What was it that you said? All others allow you, eh? They must have haram ki income. We don’t. I won’t allow my husband’s honest salary for some maid’s benefit. You hear me?” she had screamed, losing her temper.
“Yes, Bibiji.” I had nodded. And so life went on with few hiccups.
Then one day, while I was purchasing groceries from Safal, the grocer, Karishma, my next-door neighbour, suggested that I try for a job in Spicy Baatein since I had basic educational qualification and could speak in halting English.
“What is that?” I had asked.
“It’s where I work. The job is simple. You know what a call centre is?” she asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Okay, the job in Spicy Baatein requires you to talk to men, and you get paid for it. That’s it. How cool is that?” I was a bit apprehensive because I couldn’t understand why someone would be paid just to talk. In my village, if you wanted to talk to someone, all you had to do was to sit under the banyan tree, where people chatted all day, and another popular spot was Chotu chaiwalah, where people discussed everything from politics to Bollywood.
“Yes, I will do it,” I screamed happily. Only, city of Delhi could create such jobs. I loved chatting. In fact, my baba used to call me a chatterbox because I talked a lot.
“There is one downside to the job. The manager is a sexual pervert, loves touching and fondling. You need to bear up with that. Otherwise, he won’t hire you,” she said.
The next day, I went with Karishma to the office, located in the blind alley in central Chandni Chowk amid a mesh of shops. It was very hard to locate the place at once. We took the metro. I was travelling in the metro for the first time, and had it not been for Karishma, I wouldn’t have managed. All the gates were automatic and coin-operated. Was I still in India? I asked myself.
Munna was the manager of Spicy Baatein.
“How does a woman moan when she is having sex?” asked Munna. I was stumped. Karishma smiled and intervened.
“Be nice to her, Munna. She really needs this job,” she said.
“And I need a call girl,” he said and leaned back to reach for something in his desk. He was sitting in a small reception area cordoned off from the rest of the room by a plywood partition. Inside were small cabins. I counted as many as ten girls who were speaking in hushed tones on some black thing attached to their heads.
“It’s called a headset. You can see a microphone attached to it to talk to the other person.”
“I pay seven thousand per month. You need to work at least six hours a day, and two hundred and fifty per hour extra for every one hour of overtime, take it or leave it. We work from Monday to Saturday,” he said.
“Am I hired? Doesn’t he want to interview me?” I whispered to Karishma.
“Arrey, what interview? If I do an interview, you will fail, darling. As long as you can talk, that’s all I care about. It’s not a sarkari naukri that you need qualifications. If you are ready, you can join tomorrow, and first, I will train you for a week.” I nodded a yes.
The next day, I informed Raju Singh that I won’t be working as a maid anymore. He was a bit disappointed but didn’t voice his worry.
“As long as I get my rent in time, I don’t care what you do,” was all he said.
I reached the office on my own since Karishma had night shift. Munna was there and so were other three girls. Apparently, everybody worked at different timings. The office was in a two-storey building. On the ground floor was Prithipal doctor’s clinic. He was notorious for reusing the disposable syringes. He must have been responsible for half of Delhi’s HIV cases. Even our local anganwadi bai used a disposable syringe only once. On the upper floor was our office. Munna had painted the name in full bold in English, just above the doorway of the reception area, with some pictures of semi-nude models.
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