Pull Your Ears and Squat

While Merinda is out having fun on the beach in New Zealand, it is now up to me and me alone to hold down the fort and tell the things that need to be told.

This morning our night guard knocked on the door. He held his earlobes with his fingers and squatted up and down three times while pleading in broken English, "Sorry sir, sorry. Very very sorry." He then put his hands flat together in a praying motion, bowed, looked at me right in the eyes and said, "Please sir, please...."

I fired him anyway.

So speaking about holding the fort, our house is kind of a little fort. There is a wall with spikes on the top that surrounds our small front yard, a driveway, the garage with the servant's quarters on the top and the main house. Sitting in a chair outside through the freezing cold and burning sun 24 hours a day is a day guard and a night guard.

The guard's duties are the following:

• Open the front gate when anybody leaves. Much of the time they will salute as the car goes by.

• Open the gate when anybody comes. The car will approach the gate and honk. We will hear the pitter-patter of footsteps running if he is far away, the bolt will slide open, and there he is. Since there are cars honking all the time, he has to know the particular honk of our car or he will wear himself out.
  

• Turn on and off the water pumps early in the morning when there is water to be extracted from the city water supply. Since the water only runs a few hours a day and there is no water pressure, it has to be pulled from the system into a big tank under the house in the early morning hours and then a second pump pulls it from there to a smaller tank on the top of the house. The tank used to be black, ensuring that there was nothing but steaming hot water in the summer until we finally paid Margaret the cook's husband to go up there and paint it white.
  

• Turn on and off the generator when the power goes out. He has had to do this manually ever since the automatic switch broke.

• Raise the alarm if there is ever an emergency. Since he has no radio or mobile or access to a telephone of any kind what this means is that he would blow his whistle. We don't know what would happen after that, but I bet it would be interesting. There's a whistle thing here I've never been able to quite figure out. What I do know is that all night long there is a guy riding around the neighborhood on a bike blowing a whistle loudly at regular intervals. My guess is that there is another guy listening and if he doesn't hear the whistle when expected then he would assume his buddy has been captured, and then, I don't know, maybe he blows his whistle, but in a different way that causes all the other guards join in blowing their whistles: louder and louder they would blow, more and more joining the fun, until the bad guys can't stand the noise anymore and run away.

• An unofficial duty is to play with the kids while they are outside. While Graham was learning to walk the guard would follow behind him squatting down with arms outstreached so he never would hit the ground. They kick the ball with them, go get it when it goes over the fence.

They can do other things too. We used to have them grind wheat back before the hand grinder broke. A friend of Merinda's taught her guards how to knit and they sit and knit sweaters for needy people. They won't sweep or clean, that's a caste notch or two down from where they are, but they do watch the sweeper do her thing.

4:30 yesterday morning, the phone rang. It was American Airlines delivering my lost suitcase. They were at the door, but couldn't get in. Somewhat annoyed at the timing, but happy to get it back, I came downstairs wondering why the guard hadn't let me know he was there. There was no guard to be found. I checked around the front, in the servant's bathroom, back where the water pump is, and he was nowhere.

Finally I opened the closed garage door and there on the ground the guard had made a bed. He was fully under the blankets. I stood there right above this, he blissfully unaware of my being there, while I thought about what to do. We've caught guards sleeping before in their chairs next to the gate, but making a bed was going a bit too far.

So I ripped off the blanket from him and shouted, "Hey, wake up and open the gate!!". He quickly stood up and then stared blankly into my eyes for a few seconds while his brain started up, and then sprung into action and ran for the front.

It turns out that pulling your ears while squating up and down is something that teachers make kids do if they've been bad in class. (They also make kids squat, hook their arms through their legs and hold their ears. Try it. It's not easy, I just had it a shot at it and fell over and hurt myself.) This is not something adults typically do, but I guess it's all that he could think of to punish himself for his mistake.

But since he had been caught in his garage bed several times before by Margaret the cook, I decided to fire him anyway.

The first person we ever fired was a little toothless old guy from Nepal who would put his hands together and bow low every time he saw us. He came with the house and didn't speak a word of English. When we moved in, we weren't sure what we were supposed to do with him, he was just staying up in the then-empty servant's quarters. We agonized over this for days and we finally asked the landlord's man what he was there for. We found out that he was just some random guy off the street that he brought in to watch over the house while it was empty and that if we could use him that would be great, but if not just to send him out.

"Just send him out?", we thought. What will he do? Where will he sleep? Will he starve?

But we didn't know what else to do and so we gave him some extra money and sent him out. He didn't seem angry. For a long time after that we saw him every day, brewing and selling tea on a little patch of ground just in front of the gate which was probably what he was doing before he stayed at our house. Seeing him somehow helped us feel a little better, like he was still alive and OK, until eventually we didn't see him anymore.

Since then, I've fired lots of people. I fired a driver for peeking at the maid while she was showering. I fired another one for selling fuel out of the gas tank.

I fired the guard in the picture on the right because he was too chummy with the people outside and let a really creepy one into the house once when the sewer backed up.

They say that you learn a lot about yourself from living in India, and you don't always like what you find out.

There are a things that really bother me about the firing of this latest one. One is how easy it was for me to do. Each time I send somebody out, I think less and less of it. But much, much worse is this:

He worked for us for months. Opening the gate, shutting the gate, turning on the water pump, off the water pump, on the generator, off the generator, playing kickball with the kids, fetching the balls from over the fence, day in and day out.

I didn't know what his name was.

I couldn't even tell him by his own name to leave my house.

When I think of why we are staying in India, one reason is that I want to conquer this cynicism, and learn to hurt for these folks again, even if firing them sometimes is the right thing to do. I look at the compassionate gaze in the eyes of our resident cousins, the Pulsiphers, and think about how I used to be like that. People take advantage of that look, but does that matter?

Because I just know that in the next life I will be standing in front of some of these good people. I'll pull my ears, squat, and have to say "Very sorry, very very sorry, please..."