My next post will be about Loreto Sealdah, the Village Program, and St. John’s second schools—all amazing programs to help the very poor. It has been a real privilege to see these places, and the people who have created them, run them, and work in them. More about that later. Today: the hotel.

Each day, we walk away from this juxtaposition of selflessness and poverty and return to The Grand Hotel. The Oberoi Grand, a relic of the Raj era, of British grandeur and colonialism, is mentioned in Jeffrey Eugenides’ short story in the summer fiction issue of the New Yorker: “A few blocks away, up Jawaharlal Nehru Road, was the Oberoi Grand, with its turbaned doormen.” The story is set in 1983; the turbaned doormen are still here.

The opulence is still here. It is one of a chain of luxury resort/spa/hotels. (Check out the one in the Himalayas: http://www.oberoihotels.com/oberoi_wildflowerhall/index.asp.)

In the lobby (notice the HUGE flower arrangement behind us. It gets changed every couple of days. different each time):

We come home to classical music, flowers, service unlike anything we have ever experienced (every employee smiles and greets you every time they cross paths with you! Imagine their in-service training.) There is a complimentary cappuccino delivered to my room each morning shortly after my wake-up call. The young man brings the paper in with it (saving me the trouble of opening the door and removing it from the door handle myself.) My room is cleaned every day; usually by Gourav whose parents are teachers, but he studied hospitality. He carefully arranges every single toiletry item I own every morning. I found myself complaining to Bree that I was aggravated that they keep setting everything up to the left of the sink, so that every morning I have to move everything back to the right, where I like it. (In my defense, I am right-handed.) Today I wondered why there was not the usual flower blossom floating in the finger bowl that comes with the two fresh mangoes. (Just sayin’!)

Every day we have two large bottles of bottled water delivered to the room, along with two fresh mangoes. A turn-down service every night straightens the bed, (brings two more mangoes if you’ve finished yours) closes the curtains, and places the room service breakfast menu and the next day’s weather predictions on your pillow. I have a fuzzy white bathrobe and slippers every day (I was horrified when they forgot my bathrobe several times. Gourav was very apologetic.)

I’ve been reminded on more than one occasion of David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again” (thank you Jon Wanders!) in which DFW documents a cruise he took because “a certain swanky East-Coast magazine [Harper’s] approved of the results of sending me to a plain old simple State Fair last year to do a directionless essayish thing. So now I get offered this tropical plum assignment w/ the exact same paucity of instruction or angle” (256). They send him on a Caribbean luxury cruise on Celebrity Cruise Lines. They want, he says, “a sort of really big, experiential postcard.”

His experience came to mind for me while I packed. When he was preparing to leave for his cruise, he did not follow their suggestion to pack formal wear, including a tuxedo. He regretted his decision when every man on the cruise showed up for an event in a tuxedo and he showed up in a T-shirt with a tuxedo design on the front (I remember those!). Just because you really don’t care doesn’t mean you won’t feel awkward. I packed a dress and shoes for the more formal dinners they said we’d be invited to. I didn’t need them (everyone tends to wear the lovely, all-purpose Indian salwars), but I have found myself in situations too many times in which I wished I’d followed advice (as in, I don’t think we’ll really need an umbrella…) At any rate, because of DFW, I did pack dressy clothes.

And my fussiness about my toiletries, and notice of the missing blossom, is cannily realized when he says:

The Infantile part of me is insatiable—in fact its whole essence or dasein or whatever lies in its a priori insatiability. In response to any environment of extraordinary gratification and pampering, the Insatiable Infant part of me will simply adjust its desires upward until it once again levels out at its homoeostasis of terrible dissatisfaction. And sure enough, on the Nadir itself, after a few days of delight and then adjustment, the Pamper-swaddled part of me that WANTS is now back, and with a vengeance. By Ides Wednesday, I’m acutely conscious of the fact that the AC vent in my cabin hisses (loudly) …By now I notice that when Table 64’s towering busboy uses his crumb-scoop to clear crumbs off the tablecloth between courses, he never seems to get quite all the crumbs. (317)

The afternoon that I took a nap, then went to a short program meeting and returned to find my bed made, this passage came to mind:

After a couple of days of this fabulous, invisible room-cleaning, I started to wonder exactly how Petra [Gourav!] knows when I’m in 1009 and when I’m not. …For a while I try experiments like all of a sudden darting out into the 10-Port hallway to see if I can see Petra hunched somewhere keeping track of who is decabining, and I scour the whole hallway and ceiling area for evidence of some kind of camera or monitor tracking movements outside the cabin doors—zilch on both fronts. But then I realize that the mystery’s even more complex and unsettling than I’d first thought, because my cabin gets cleaned always and only during intervals where I’m gone more than half an hour. [Here, too! I have never walked in on Gourav or anyone else cleaning my room.] When I go out, how can Petra or her supervisors know exactly how long I’m going to be gone? I try leaving 1009 a couple times then dashing back after 10 or 15 minutes to see whether I can catch Petra in delicto, but she’s never there. I try making a truly unholy mess in 1009 and then leaving and hiding somewhere on a lower deck then dashing back after exactly 29 minutes—and again when I come bursting through the door there’s no Petra and no cleaning. Then I leave the cabin with exactly the same expression and appurtenances as before and this time stay hidden for 31 minutes and then haul ass back—and this time again no sighting of Petra, but now 1009 is sterilized and gleaming and there’s a mint on the pillow’s fresh new case. (297-298)

I haven’t reached DFW’s level of paranoia, probably because I’m out most of the day, and because it’s not as much of a mystery here. If you walk down the hallway, you will see a staff member, or 6. This place is an anthill of activity. And they communicate! If they are cleaning the room and something is missing or awry, they quietly get on their cell and get someone up here. And they come—immediately.

Apparently the staff likes us—we are nice and friendly. Much of that is probably due to the fact that we are not the uber-wealthy they are likely accustomed to. We are, as anyone knows (and if you didn’t, the message has certainly been driven home recently, especially in Ohio and Wisconsin) solidly working class. So when the hotel invited us to a cocktail party with hotel personnel, we thought they were giving us the opportunity to socialize with the service staff. Oh silly Americans. It was a monthly event with gorgeous women and handsome men from their corporate offices. They mingle with the guests among drinks and hors d’oeuvres and hand out business cards and ask how their stay is. The service staff here, on the other hand, will not get on the elevator with you—even if you are the only one on the elevator. Even if you hold the door and invite them in. They wait for the next one. I imagine that sometimes that is a long wait. Like I said, can you even imagine the in-service training?