so they were allowed to handle food.
'What can you do?' asked Bablu.
Seema listed her skills and some of her work experience.
'Wait there,' said the cook, snatching the letter out of her hand and shutting the door in her face.
Seema anticipated a long wait and it was nearly thirty minutes before the door opened again. This time it was Madam who appeared. Her hair was piled up on her head and covered in a thick, green mud; she was having it dyed with henna.
'You are married?' Mrs. Kasliwal asked Seema, looking her up and down.
'No, madam.'
'Why not?'
'My father doesn't have the dowry.'
'How old are you?'
'Twenty-six.'
Madam handed Seema's letter back to her.
'I made a call to Delhi,' said Mrs. Kasliwal, without elaborating on her conversation with Mrs. Kohli. 'I need one laundry-cum-cleaner maidservant. Can you start right away?'
Seema nodded.
'The pay is three hundred per month with meals. You must be live-in.'
The amount was below the market rate, especially for a live-in position, which meant a seven-day week.
'Madam, that is low,' stated Seema, eyeing the woman's diamond wedding ring and her matching earrings, which were worth several lakh rupees. 'I want five hundred.'
Mrs. Kasliwal tutted impatiently. 'Three hundred is fair.'
'Four hundred and fifty?'
'Three hundred and fifty. No advance.'
Seema considered the offer for a moment and then, with a reluctant wobble of her head, assented.
'Very good,' said Mrs. Kasliwal. 'Sunday will be your day off and you can leave the house, but otherwise you must be here. I don't want any sneaking out, and no visitors. Is this understood?'
Seema nodded again.
'Bablu will give you your duties. Any stealing and I will not hesitate to call the police. If, in three days, I am not satisfied, then you must leave.'
Mrs. Kasliwal led Seema into the kitchen, where she instructed Bablu to put her to work immediately.
It was a long, hard day. First Seema helped out in the kitchen chopping onions, kneading roti dough, picking out the grit from the moong daal and boiling milk to make paneer. Then she had to mop the hardwood floors in the corridors and the dining room. She was allowed thirty minutes for lunch, some subzi, which she ate on her own, crouched outside the kitchen. Afterward, she was sent to a nearby market to pick up three heavy bags of pulses, as well as a packet of cornflakes for Sahib's breakfast. The rest of the early afternoon was spent doing laundry.
As she worked, Seema was left with little opportunity to interact with her co-workers, let alone get to know them. Bablu said little and when he did speak, it was to curse. Mostly this was on account of Kamat, who was clumsy and forgetful and overcooked the chawal and poured fat down the drain. The driver, Sidhu, who had been working in the house for only a month, spent the morning in the driveway chatting on his mobile phone while wiping, waxing and polishing Mrs. Kasliwal's red Tata Indica, which he treated as if it was the Koh-i-Noor. Sahib's driver, Arjun, who had been hired to replace Munnalal, appeared at around twelve o'clock and, although there was no missing his reaction to the sight of Seema, he barely had enough time to eat his khana before returning to the office with his master's tiffin.
Seema found little opportunity to speak with any of the casual staff, either. The dishwasher girl who came for an hour to scrub all the pots and pans before continuing on to a number of other neighboring households was evidently intimidated by Bablu and kept her head down at the sink. The beautician who came to give Madam threading and maalish had airs and didn't deign to say so much as a please or thank-you for a cup of tea. And as for the dalit toilet cleaner, who came from a rag pickers' colony on the edge of Jaipur, she was a mute.
The only person Seema managed to talk to properly was Jaya, the other young maidservant, who had been working in the house since early August.
In the late afternoon, when Madam went out visiting friends, the two of them worked together sweeping and mopping the veranda. Given that Jaya was intensely shy and evidently unhappy, Seema broke the ice by telling her about some of her adventures. She talked about her days with a travelling theater troupe in Assam; the year she spent working as an ayah to a couple of Delhi socialites' children; and her experiences as a Mumbai bar girl and how a crorepati businessman had fallen in love with her and proposed.
These stories were all true, even though many of the mitigating circumstances surrounding them were adapted for the audience.
Jaya liked listening to them and quickly took to her new friend. On a couple of occasions, she even had cause to smile.
That evening, when all the day's chores were done, Jaya led Seema to the servant quarters at the back of the compound.
There were five rooms in all. The mali occupied the first (starting from the left); the next belonged to Kamat; the third was empty; the fourth, which had posters of the Virgin Mary and Hrithik Roshan on the wall, was vacant as well; and the last room belonged to Jaya.
Jaya warned against staying in the fourth room because the door was warped and did not close properly. But Seema said she liked the idea of the two of them being neighbors. Besides, the door could be fixed.
Together they cleaned the room, taking down the posters. And afterward, Seema took her idols from her bag. Having arranged them on the narrow windowsill of the front window, she lit an incense stick and said a prayer.
The two maidservants spent the rest of the evening chatting some more and sharing a few dates. Seema related more stories about her adventurous past and, now and again, asked Jaya about the other servants.
Soon, she had learned that the mali was stoned all the time and always passed out in the evening. Bablu was gay, but pretended to be straight even though there wasn't a Salman Khan movie he hadn't seen. Kamat often drank and turned extremely aggressive and there was a rumor going around that he had raped a girl working in another house.
At ten o'clock the two decided to turn in and Seema went back to her room.
She heard Jaya close her door and turn the key in the lock and it was with some effort that she managed to do the same.
An hour later, Seema was woken by the sound of a whistle. And then someone tried opening her door.
She called out, 'Who's there?' But there was no reply and she heard footsteps running away.
Cautiously, Seema got out of bed, went to the door, opened it and looked outside. It was pitch dark and there was no one in sight.
In her right hand, she held the four-inch Nepali Khukuri knife that she always kept under her pillow at night.
There were fifteen phone lines running into the Khan Market offices of Most Private Investigators Ltd., only six of which were used, officially, by the company. The rest were for undercover operations.
Each of these nine lines had its own dedicated handset, answering machine and a voice-activated tape recorder arranged on a long table in the 'communications room' across the hallway from Puri's office. In front of each phone lay a clipboard with notes detailing how the line was being used and precisely how it should be answered.
These notes were for the benefit of Mrs. Chadha, whose job it was to answer the nine phones in a variety of
