Subclinical: The Invisible Service Worker

That’s it. The last plate out the kitchen. Now all of them could go out for a smoke. And a bitch and moan session about the worst guests of the shift. She hated it. Calling these weirdoes guests, ‘Atithi Devo Bhavah’, her father always began the Sanskrit lessons of her childhood with this phrase. ‘My guest is my…’, he would stop mid-sentence and wait for her to complete it. ‘God’ she would chime. Happy to make her father happy. ‘Atithi’, he would begin the explanation. From the root tithi – technically date, but colloquially time. ‘A tithi’ he would break it down for her young mind’s benefit. ‘The one without time, the one outside time, the one whom time can’t control’. She knew, reading the two Hindu epics Ramayana and Mahabharat, that atithis were not the best of dudes. Gods would literally come down from the heavens, dressed as urchins or poor mendicants to test mortal humans on their adherence to this maxim. Ask for entire kingdoms and the hands of nubile young maidens. A sort of cosmic Punk’d with one or the other from the holy pantheon playing Ashton Kutcher.

Even those scheming pseudo-gods were better than this a lot. Leering, salivating, mentally undressing any half-good-looking ambassador. That’s what the hotel bigwigs decided they will call the lowest rung. No more military metaphors, thank you very much. No more frontline workers, or guest-facing jobs or waiters or stewards. They were all Ambassadors. Sounded grand enough. And god knows that it helped with the relatives who constantly asked her designation. If her visiting card would have said Steward or Waitstaff, that would have been it. A constant stream of disingenuous pity would have found its way to her crammed 1-bedroom house. Now she had a visiting card, which said ‘Shruti Dahiya, Ambassador, The Grand Hotel, Mumbai’. And a gleaming bronze name tag to show to her parents every night. It simply said ‘Shruti’ but it was engraved and looked expensive. When you are a 22-year-old in your first job, every little bit helps. She guessed the name tag had given her an extra 6 months before her parents started to pressure her to see boys from good, decent families and get married. If she could somehow get any variation of the word Manager in her designation, that would add a solid couple of years to that time bank. Her father, working in the postal services, had tried for 33 years to upgrade from lower division clerk to manager. The best he could hope to reach now was senior supervisor. He would retire before he could get to a manager’s position. Her elder sister, a nurse, had married a South-African non-resident Indian and left the overflowing by lanes of Mumbai suburbs behind. But Shruti, she had a chance.

She had gone to a management school. Not the fancy ones with two Is. But the emerging ones with an I and an H, The Institute of Hotel Management (IHM). It was like being born again. The teachers taught her how to walk, how to talk, how to look graceful and feminine while balancing four dirty plates with enough waste food to feed a small family. Verbiage, they called it. ‘Can I take your order, Sir’, ‘Most certainly, Sir’, ‘I am extremely sorry for your inconvenience, Sir’, ‘Can I do anything else for you, Sir’. Comportment too. Walk with a book on your head and a pencil between your teeth. She knew how much makeup to apply (subtle but visible), how much to smile so the guest was not encouraged to flirt, what kind of interaction to have with guests (professionally friendly). And she was thankful for all of it. The school had been nice. They played dress-up almost every day – one day an angry client, one day a timid waiter, another day a chatty hostess. Her parents were overjoyed to see her in a business suit when they once came to visit. What the father had not done, the daughter would do. She would command people. Be more than a Senior Supervisor.

God knows she tried. The Grand Hotel was a prestigious recruiter. A luxury hotel in the heart of Mumbai, an International brand, European, whatever that meant. She had never been to Europe, England, France or Italy. One day she would take a Europe trip for sure. That is what a lot of her friends kept talking about. And then a few years later, who knows, maybe even France, Italy or Switzerland. She had joined the hotel as a management trainee, full of beans. It was paying well. She would make as much money as her father in her first job. She would try her best to make sure that the men who hired her would be proud of her. One was from HR. The other from Food and Beverage (F&B). Both were very nice at IHM. Said good things about her attitude. They had given the entire college a multiple-choice test. She and a handful of others had come up trumps. Apparently, she possessed a ‘service attitude’ and had scored high on ‘guest orientation’ and ‘agreeableness’. Good girls were supposed to have that. The Grand Hotel was in the market for such girls and boys, those who did not mind bending the rules for a demanding guest, those who still believed in ‘Atithi Devo Bhavah’ and those who uncomplainingly adjusted to changing environments. She could feel the bile in her throat every time she said the word out loud. ‘Guest’ – she almost spat out the word. Saliva and everything. This is lot.

The scales fell off, as they usually do, on the very first day of the job. RD, the General Manager, thundered in the small training room that served as the corralling pen for all the new hires. ‘Give the guest what he wants. If he wants to eat a steak in the North-Indian restaurant, you will bloody damn well give him a steak’. RD was old and short – short-statured, short-tempered. He had come back from an international stint and brooked no opposition. His favourite line was ‘I am your headmaster because I know all of you will behave like little children’. He was always on guest mode – always dissatisfied, never acknowledging anyone and always ready to pick up a fight. All he cared about was TripAdvisor mentions and revenue maximization. ‘How many reviews this week?’ he would ask anyone who was caught in his path. If the answer was less than three, you’d had it. Listen to the full lecture on the importance of customer service and building relationships with guests, which would help you zilch when it came to moving from two reviews to four reviews a week. But the worst part was that the guests, the entitled sons-of-bitches, had caught on to this game. They knew TripAdvisor was a big deal. They had double the power now. FML.

The first day also sucked because her bubble of positive acknowledgement had a full-blown meltdown. There were 14 other management trainees from other IHMs, 12 other women, 2 men and 13 women with minor differences. All more than 5 feet and 7 inches. All are fair-skinned, good looking and with the same centralized hairstyle. Once in the Grand Hotel’s uniform, they were practically indistinguishable from each other. The HR guy came in and gave identical grooming kits to all 13 women, slightly different ones to the two men. The kit had shampoo, conditioner, soap, cosmetics, hair clips, nail polish and perfume. HR would give a new kit every month. They called this the Grand Hotel Way. Thirteen women, similar sounding and looking, trained to walk and talk the same way. Because reliability and familiarity were core values of the Grand Hotel brand. Now, they would even smell the same way, indistinguishable from each other, modular service deployment, one down, another up in her place.

But those first few days were a honeymoon compared to the day when she began her first rotation stint at F&B, acting senior supervisor of the 24-hour restaurant. Good start Shruti, she told herself. Next stop, Manager-town. She had practiced serving make-believe guests at IHM. But all the guests were her friends. And it was for an hour or so everyday. Here, the shift began at 6 in the morning and ended when your boss said it ended. ‘Watch out for the sofas’, one of her colleagues had warned. She didn’t know what that meant. The sofas were not going to bite. They were super plush and comfy. By the time evening tea had been served at the restaurant, her body was a hot mess. She had discovered new muscles in her calves and the pain radiated all the way to her head. The sofas beckoned now. Whispering sweet nothings in her ears, ‘Come to me darling. Come and put your feet up for a minute’. Or at least that’s what she heard. Hypnotized, she crumpled in a heap on one at the far end. Girish, the restaurant manager came running, or not so much running as a fast, purposeful walk. ‘Get up get up before someone sees you. If RD sees you, you’re fired. This is the guest area’. WTF. What about all the spiel about being ‘employee first’ and the ambassadors owning the hotel. The orientation PowerPoint had lulled her into a false sense of safety. This was no more her hotel than this was her city. Shruti Dahiya, Management Trainee, was the one who did not belong. She was an outsider who everyone tolerated because…well, let’s not open that can of worms now. Now, Girish is literally pulling her from the sofa and pushing her towards the hostess podium. Back to Attention. No more Relax. You were in the army now. She felt it.

But the army dudes had only one boss, the CO. Here, there were many. The CO would know every new recruit’s name. Here, she had a name tag and yet half the people didn’t know who she was or didn’t care. The army dudes had bonhomie and all-for-one kind of feelings. Here, everyone was watching everyone else. The Security Manager had told them that there were 108 cameras in the hotel, keeping track of things, mostly keeping track of workers. Guests didn’t like being watched. But everyone else, all the Ambassadors, the Supervisors, the Assistant Managers, Managers and Senior Manager and Head of Departments were watching each other. There went that cute little boy who had only last month come up close and whispered in her ear the three magic words, ‘Your breath stinks’ and pushed a bottle of Listerine in her palm. Man, she wanted the ground to split then and there and swallow her whole. She wanted to shout back at him, ‘Yes it stinks you asshole because I haven’t had a morsel of food in the 6 hours since I woke up. Get me a sandwich and take this Listerine and shove it up your ass’. But she had taken the bottle and made the right horrified face at breaking a brand standard. ‘Employees should always look fresh and energetic. There should be no body odour or bad-breath’. It was right there on that piece of cardboard that every ambassador had to carry the Ten Service Commandments of The Grand Hotel. A few weeks later, a female supervisor told her how her make-up was too much. ‘You can’t look like all those women that hang around the bar. You’re an Ambassador, not an escort’. Ooh that hurt. She wanted to slap her. Tell that woman that she, Shruti Dahiya, came from a decent family. She had izzat, Honour. And that she was looking the way she was looking like an escort, because the train had been delayed that day and she had only 45 minutes to get ready before the shift. Normally, she reached at least an hour in advance. Carefully draping her uniform and spending 20 odd minutes fixing the eyeliner, foundation, lipstick, and so on. Ooh boy…in those long make-up sessions in the employee bathroom, she wished she was a boy. They just came in, changed into their suits and sprayed The Grand Hotel’s official deodorant and that was it. An extra half an hour of sleep every day. Ah, heaven.

Even worse than the snooty Ambassadors and Supervisors were the entitled bunch who came in the hotel to stay, eat and drink. Or was it to drink, eat and stay!! Man, the affluent Mumbaikar was a nasty piece of business. They didn’t know jack. But they had money to spend and the hotel tolerated all sorts. ‘Keep them happy’, RD would exhort to whoever he would catch on his walkabouts. ‘Or else…’ But the customers…oops, guests, were hell-bent on being dissatisfied and unhappy. All the punchlines about customers being kings and queens had gone to their heads. She was no one’s servant. Especially someone who did not know the difference between a shiraz and rosé. Gods…even she, Shruti Dahiya, 22 years of age with no bank balance, knew that. The problem was, no one had told this to the guests, ‘Sir, this complementary meal voucher was only valid till June 2018, now its April 2019. I am extremely sorry but I cannot accept it’. Cue outrage. She had borne the wrath, seen the various phases of customer misbehaviour, from anger and thinly-veiled sarcasm all the way to threats of public shaming and revenge. Thanks, TripAdvisor, for making all our lives that little bit worse. Everyone was a level-5 contributor now and small armies of angry customers were always at the digital gates.

The goras, foreigners, were no better. Sorry, scratch that. The goras as an average were better. But the worst of them could mix it with the worst of the Mumbaikars. There was the American woman, Alice, who literally hurled the key on Shruti’s face. All she had done was tell Alice that there was the small matter of clearing up the bill before Alice checked out. And boom. Key meets face. The front office manager apologized to Alice on Shruti’s behalf. The way he saw it, it was a simple case of ‘face meets key’. Shruti should have ducked out of the way better. What use all those years of physical training if a piece of metal can defeat you. Now, Shruti was guilty of making Alice feel guilty about her key-chuck. Alice was a regular. And she had dollars. Shruti only had a rented uniform. Round 1 to Alice.

But on other days, it was the goras who got her through her shift. They would look into her eyes and talk back. As if she was a real person and not an animatronic installation that brought the brand to life. Shruti knew who the best goras for bad days were. It was the old couple who had come to India on holiday. They had time to stop and smile. They made her feel good about herself and the job. At least for the next 15 minutes before some ugly Indian sucked all the will to live from her body. She had seen that happen to others as well. Only the other day, Vikas, the new concierge, had to escape to the back-office on the verge of tears. She was there, in the lobby chatting up the cute front desk Ambassador when it all went down. ‘Nice hairstyle dude. Keeps the heat out’ said the South-Mumbai teen, running his hand over Vikas’s smooth, newly bald pate. The dude was waiting for the valet to give him a parking receipt for the Range Rover. ‘Thank you, Sir’, Vikas mumbled in something approaching a whisper, gaze fixed on the marble floor. ‘Ummmm, it’s because my mother passed away last week’. ‘Too much information man. Don’t spoil our mood with all this talk of dying’, one of the teen’s friends, wearing torn shorts and sandals without socks piped up. The whole rat-pack laughed in sync. She saw Vikas struggle. Vikas should have laughed with the guests. That was the brand standard. He wanted to cry. That was the human standard. But the dudes had ceased to be human as soon as they stepped inside the hotel’s large glass doors. She wanted to shout at the dudes, put them in their place, question their parentage or at least question what their parents had taught them. Nothing doing. The cute front office Ambassador spied RD in the lobby. There was to be no confrontation today. Vikas was left to fend for himself, managing a weak smile from the corner of his mouth, before muttering a whiny ‘Excuse me, Sir’ and running off for a good cry in the back office.

The back office was where the action was. It was also where the golden oldies of hospitality spent their remaining pre-retirement years. Their stories were all Queen this and King that, and starred High Commissioners and Prime Ministers, stars and starlets, underworld dons and big builders. Oh, the nostalgia for a past they never really had. When the whole world and its uncle came to India to ride the elephants and experience the famed Indian hospitality. She would burst a vein if she heard ‘Service is in our blood’ one more time. It was in the oldies’ blood. Not hers. She was not the carrier of the deadly ‘atithi devo bhavah’ virus. No Sir. Not the high-falutin disease for her. What she was carrying was far more mundane. But she wasn’t ready just yet.

The Grand Hotel prided itself on cleanliness. The GM ran in intellectual circles of Mumbai. On one such day, he had heard someone say ‘Mary Douglas’, ‘Dirt’ and ‘matter out of place’ in the same conversation. Something had clicked. Not that he ever did something as dangerous as reading a real book. He had one rule. Never read anything that is not on the airport bookshop. Airport bookstores were the best. They knew who their customers were. High-earning adults who had the attention span of a squirrel and the self-preservation instinct of…of frequent fliers! All dangers had been purged from the airport bookstore. No reflection, only emulation. A steady diet of habits, timetables, life-lessons, inspirational bootstrapping and of course, the cult of the individual-entrepreneur. Learn from the best. In this nursery of how-to’s, the line about matter out of place had stuck. RD had become a stickler for cleanliness for reports on the number of Escherichia coli found on the hands of cooking staff and for random inspections of uniforms and their wearers. His favourite joke was to compare someone’s inelegant tie to a pakoda, an Indian fritter made out of bread and cottage cheese. That was his original contribution to the misery-pool of Ambassadors.

RD, all five feet nothing of him, had something of the drill-sergeant about him. Or at least so he thought. He had the same rapacious demeanour that vertically challenged males display all over the world. ‘I’ll fight you’ seems to be the general point, without it ever coming to that. But he ran the hotel like a bad Hollywood army sequence. A public shaming here. A humiliating interaction there. ‘You’re not good enough, son’. If you saw one, you had seen ‘em all. Oh, and he had left the boundary of appropriate behaviour with women so far behind that it wasn’t even a speck in his rear-view mirror. A distasteful joke about the lack of physical beauty in his hostesses. Another one about buying someone a gym subscription. Par for the RD course. Shruti had seen, heard, felt, smelt it all. How the young trainees were slacking, especially the women, whose first job was to titillate. The pressure to flirt back, to smile and nod gently to sexualized comments. Apparently, the whole hotel was now a giant locker room, and RD would give the keys to whichever guest wanted it. But she had promised herself that she would not break just yet.

She had seen first-hand what it could do. That thing in her blood. It had left graveyards in its wake. God knows how she was still alive. ‘What was the plan here, big guy’. A few hints would be nice. No miracle of modern science. Just good old fashioned cosmic mysteries. She could not tell how she got it. From someone who was just like her, who had it running in his blood but was immune to it. Was it that cute South-African on exchange at the college? Or another guy who had been on a trip to Masaimaara. That’s where this thing began. Africa. It was her sister, practicing drawing blood and analysing it in her off-duty time. ‘Will help with the promotion’, she said. I can be a lab-tech in no time if I learn how to do this. There were no symptoms. The sister had put it down to a faulty test kit and they had forgotten all about it. Not Shruti though. She tested and tested and tested again. Positive every time. No symptoms every time. It was her destiny, her secret. Asymptomatic? Subclinical? Winner of the genetic lottery? Who knew.

That’s why she loved working at the hotel. It was the place where the worst of humanity came to become even worse for a few hours, days, weeks. Kings and queens and gods. Well, someone had to teach them that there were consequences to their actions. They didn’t get a free pass in the name of consumer sovereignty, whatever that meant. Today’s lucky guests were at table number 36. A local politician’s son and his friends. She could always tell. By the way they would size her up without shame or a worry in the world. Have that odd slack-jawed smile. This group was no different. Her shift had ended half an hour ago. But they called Rajeev, her immediate line manager, and asked for her. ‘She is taking such good care of us. We won’t feel the same with someone else’. And as always, the customer was right, at least in this five-star hotel. That’s how Shruti Dahiya found herself staying for a full 3 hours after her shift had ended and her mother had called her three times on her phone that was on silent mode. The mother had nothing to worry about anymore though. The table had asked for the check. And Shruti’s phone number and address. And the name and details of her imaginary boyfriend. And for Shruti to sit and have a few drinks with them. If not here then somewhere else. They knew lots of places. They had a nice car as well. The punchline, of course, was that they were four and the car had four seats. No room for Shruti. Until someone suggested that she could take turns sitting on their laps in the ride. Ha ha. Funny, right. She listened in silence. Laughed at the right places. Behaved coyly at the right notes. Followed the hotel’s script. Even thanked them for the pleasant and friendly interactions and offered a complementary round of dessert. Ice cream, one of them said. Paan, Betel Leaf with sweetmeats, she offered. ‘Alright, bring it on. Maybe she can even put it in our mouths’. More guffaws. More coy behaviour from Shruti. She goes in to the kitchen. Rattles out the order, four Sweet Pans. As the dessert chef prepares them, she takes four toothpicks, gives a long lick and suck to each of them, and pierces each Paan with one of these. The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention website said 25,000 cells of the Ebola virus are secreted in each drop of human spit from an infected person. Enough for symptoms to manifest within the next 3–4 days. One good lick. That’s it. The last plate out the kitchen. Now all of them could go out for a smoke. And a bitch and moan session about the worst guests of the shift.