Spies in the Family by eva dillon

Author:eva dillon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-19T16:00:00+00:00

a higher-caste Hindu who had worked for other Americans and wanted to show off his American cooking skills to my (uninterested) mom.

In the back of the driveway, across from our garden lawn, was a small separate building, servants’ quarters, with two rooms, one bath, and a tiny kitchen. Ram, the Dalit, lived there with his wife and three children. But they were soon joined by his brother and an uncle and their families. Then we noticed that another family of relatives had moved in. Then another one. Within a few weeks of our arrival, there were at least twenty-five people living there. They did their cooking in the driveway, played with and fed their babies in the garden, drank chai and laid their laundry out to dry across the bushes that formed the garden hedge. Mom loved watching these activities in our impromptu village, the women in their saris, with their dark eyes, the men in their white shirts, or dhotis, walking down the driveway past our house to get to their quarters, deferential and unassuming in their greetings to Mom, “Namaste, memsahib.”

Still, eventually the situation became insupportable. Our higher-caste servants, appalled at Mom and Dad’s egalitarian permissiveness, complained of the noise and clutter, and there were probably a few raised eyebrows among our well-to-do neighbors. Mom had to tell Ram that only his immediate family could live there, and the others melted away as quickly as they’d arrived.

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