"...Of course, you are more than welcome in my bed, although you also have the option of sleeping in yours," the landlady had written.
My friend who sent me the listing had added a note: "Hey, doesn't this sound like your old landlady?"
It did.
About eight months ago, I decided to complicate my otherwise joyous and carefree live by moving out of a relative's house into my own apartment. I'm impulsive to the point of mental illness, a trait that never served me worse than in my brief and terrible search for a house in Delhi.
I was determined not to use a housing agent, since I was convinced that all real estate brokers are jackals. So I started browsing listings online. Eventually, I found a listing on Sulekha.com, placed by a woman who was looking for an occupant for one of three rooms in a fully-furnished flat in Lajpat Nagar 4.
It seemed too good to be true. I went over to the house on an otherwise uneventful Sunday. The three-bedroom apartment was nice. The landlady was a tall Panjabi woman in the midst of a divorce. She had a seven-year-old son, as well as the longest mane of black hair I'd ever seen. The apartment had belonged to her and her husband, and in an effort to pay the divorce costs, she and her son were moving in with her parents next door.
"You can rent my room," she said. I was shown to the room. It was large and commodious, well-decorated, with a beautiful balcony and a flat-screen TV. I was in heaven. There were already three other girls occupying the other rooms. I thought the situation was ideal, and I agreed to give her a deposit on the obscenely high rent she charged me. The fact that she never seemed to lock the stairwell did not bother me, nor did the hordes of rickshaw drivers whose main amusement seemed to be to linger in the driveway and watch girls going up and down.
But it was in South Delhi, and I'd be living with other "working girls" (The landlady had already told me that she only accepted "working girl" tenants, since students were "always hanging around." At the time, the idea that a landlord would resent tenants spending time in a space that they had legitimately rented didn't strike me as odd.)
My first clue that my new landlady was not who I thought she was came the weekend before I moved in. I received a call around 9:30 pm on Friday night.
Her: Hey, why don't you come over? Some friends and I are going out tonight. We're going to hit four or five clubs, then call it a night around 3 am.
Me: I, uh, don't have a ride. (Subtext: aren't you in your mid-thirties with a small son?)
Her: Come on, it'll be fun. Tell you what. I'll send my brother to pick you up on his way. Just get in with him and he'll bring you here.
Me: It's all right. I don't want to come back to my relatives' place at 3 am. (Subtext: is she serious?)
Her: Don't worry about that, silly! You can share my bed!
Me: ...??! (Subtext: ....??!)
Her: I mean, if you really don't want to I guess it's ok...
Me: Uh, I'm really sorry to say this, but I really don't think tonight is the night. Some other time, though!
Despite this alarming portent, I went ahead with moving in. After my cousins had dropped off the last of my bags on Monday morning, I caught her on my way out to work and mentioned that the hot water heater was leaking all over my bathroom floor. She said she'd have someone come in and look at it.
That night, the heater was still leaking, and water had collected on the floor. Also, someone had used the toilet in my bathroom and forgotten to flush. I called her. It was about 11.
She arrived looking like the Ghost of Clubbing Past, in streaking eyeliner, tottering on high heels, and trailing a bawdy floral perfume. It was Monday night.
"Um, it's still leaking," I said. She passed her hand under the heater a couple of times, as if the puddle in the middle of the floor was not proof enough.
"I did call someone and he said he fixed it," she said. We stared at each other across the obvious silence, neither of us saying anything. "I guess I'll call a plumber tomorrow. In the meantime, just use one of the other showers."
I followed her out into our living room, where one of my other "working girl" roommates had just come in. She and the landlady got to chatting. I kept waiting for the landlady to leave, but she showed no sign. Eventually, around 12:30, she stretched her arms over her head and said,
"I think I'll just sleep here tonight. Erika is out." Erika was one of the tenants. I blinked. Did the landlady really plan to sleep in one of the tenant's beds without telling her? My surprise must have shown on my face, because she said, "It's musical beds around here. We just knock on whichever door and sleep wherever there's space. Sometimes I have friends over and they do the same thing."
I had trouble peeling my jaw off the floor, which she mistook for approval.
"In fact, I've been thinking of having a party here at some point soon," she said.
"Sounds nice," I choked out, heading for my room.
Things intensified the next morning when I asked for the key to my room.
"You can't lock your door," she said. "I told you that before you moved in."
"What?"
"I have my stuff in your room."
"I thought you already moved your stuff out of my room."
"Well, I also do my laundry there twice a week. My machine is in your bathroom."
I didn't know what to say to this. Also, I was beginning to realize that the unflushed toilet was the result of her hanging out in the apartment during the day with her young son. The young son also liked to play with other people's laptop computers, a fact the landlady shared proudly with me and that immediately gave me hives.
During the workday, I solicited the advice of my co-workers. They all eyed me funny.
"That is highly irregular," they said.
"Tell me about it," I said, but I was willing to give it one last shot.
That night, when I got home around midnight, the landlady was still there. She was wearing her regular heavy eye makeup and fancy dress. Her son was noticeably absent, and I couldn't quite divine what exactly she was doing in our apartment. I had a sneaking suspicion that she had been there all day, and in fact that she would be there all day the next day, and the day after that.
Nonetheless, I proposed the compromise that my co-workers had suggested: I told the landlady that I would lock my room but that she could do her laundry twice a week in the morning before I left for work. Thunderclouds descended over her already none-too-pleasant face.
"I can't organize my life according to your convenience," she said. At that point, I was finally aware that I was paying an obscenely high rent (enough for an entire two-bedroom apartment in other parts of town) for a room that my landlady intended to continue to occupy.
"This isn't what I had in mind," I said.
"If you don't like it, then get out," she said.
"I guess I will," I said.
"Tonight," she continued. "Or pay me for the month." Her expression had reached a diabolical stage; I could only imagine the fierce pleasure with which she punished her child's lapses in discipline.
"I..." I was about to leave for a business trip to Bombay, and I had no intention of leaving my belongings in her un-tender care. "Hold on," I said. I spent five minutes trying to decide whom to call. Eventually I settled on a colleague whom I felt comfortable calling because she'd once told me was an insomniac. It was 1 am.
"I need to move out tomorrow morning by nine," I sobbed into the phone, while the landlady and her painted face and straightened hair looked on.
"I had a feeling this would happen," sighed my co-worker. The next morning, two of my co-workers arrived with a car. We packed all my things into the vehicle and headed out. The whole operation took an hour, punctuated only by one of my co-workers' brief interactions with the landlady (who had again spent the night, it seems, although this time on the couch) After asking the landlady for a glass of water, the co-worker came running back and stage-whispered, "This woman is bad news. I've known her kind. Don't talk to her, don't make eye contact, just get out."
We proceeded to do just that. In the car on the way back, my co-worker (who has lived alone in Delhi for decades now) finally enlightened me.
"I think she's one of those women who takes in young working girls and then convinces them to have sex with her friends in exchange for money," she said.
"You mean, like, prostitution?" I scoffed. "Please."
"It happened to a friend of mine when she had just started working as a nurse. She moved in, the landlady was super-nice. Then one evening the landlady invited her out to a club where my friend met some of the landlady's friends. Soon enough one of the guys was propositioning her, and the landlady made it clear that if my friend slept with him, she'd get paid."
"I think this is a fantasy," I replied.
"Oh no, it's quite real," my other co-worker concurred. "Once she saw you weren't that type, she threw you out."
I eventually found another house that I liked much better. Three months later, I got a frantic midnight call from one of my former roommates.
"You gotta help me," she said. "I have to move. This woman is crazy! She keeps making up rules that I can't follow! Now she told me I have to stay in the house and can't come back after 8 or she'll lock me out!"
With the calm of someone who knows exactly what the problem is, I directed her to my agent. Because agents might be jackals, but at least they aren't pimps.
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