The chipped cup, the service lift and other things I had forgotten about India

Every time you return from a vacation, things feel slightly different. The roads are annoyingly crowded, your bathroom is smaller and the people in your city are impatient. In a few days, you slip into a routine, those things blur.

But if you spend a few years away from home, a lot that seemed mostly normal begins to feel jarring.

After nearly a decade in the US, I returned to India with my family almost on this day last year. It was a well-planned move, with a lot of thought given to everything that matters: picking the city closest to family, finding friends to reconnect with, getting the children acquainted with the language and grammar of India, and making carefully calibrated financial decisions.

Readjusting means getting used to the kind of things you’ll hear on return-to-India subreddits and social media groups. The discourse, generally intelligent, focuses on the predictable upsides and downsides, with shocking levels of consensus.

The main complaints centre around quality of life, which means gripes about air and noise pollution, driving and navigating traffic, the state of bureaucracy and public infrastructure, the complexities of the school system, the lack of personal space, the quality of customer service, familial interference in everyday matters, the work culture, and the general trust deficit in everyone and everything.

There’s a term to describe this phase: reverse culture shock.

These start off as mild irritants, but turn into severe pain points after the first few weeks of peak NRI romanticisation. The initial months are about telling your old friends how nice it is to have access to family. It then shifts to extolling the virtues of five-minute grocery deliveries, and your plans to hire a chief of staff to manage your army of domestic workers – all of this without making a dent on your wallet.

Over the last year I’ve found a lot of my own thoughts neatly align with what the prodigals discuss. But there’s one aspect that I felt least prepared for both individually, and as a parent: the Indian caste system.

If you grow up in India, casteism is omnipresent, but only if you choose to look closely.

My observations are not unique – they’re just mundane things that feel painful after returning, and harder to explain to my children.

For example when Sushila, our cook, asks for a different cup to drink tea. Her expectation is to have a low-grade, old, chipped mug, not too different from the world where they still have separate taps and wells.

Or every domestic worker who visits finds it appropriate to sit on the floor. To them the couch feels intimidating, imposing and too equal. It’s not surprising, because some of them have told us the air conditioning is always turned off in the room they’re working in.

A few months back, while dusting our bookshelf, she came up to my wife holding our copy of Annihilation of Caste. “Didi, yeh hamare bhagwaan hain,” she said, pointing to the picture of BR Ambedkar. Sister, he is our god.

Sushila was recently docked a third of her salary by a neighbour because she missed work while tending to her daughter who went from pillar to post in a government hospital before undergoing heart surgery. Without asking, we were offered pictures as evidence.

Last Diwali, we were invited to a nightclub for a party organised by parents of an international school. The children were put through tacky games organised by a local emcee; the adults enjoyed cocktails while taking turns to meet a tarot card reader. When it was dinner time, the emcee announced: “Parents, the buffet is served. Please note, for your nannies, we have separate food boxes.”

Of course, it goes without saying the nannies had to first shovel food down the children’s mouths before getting to their own meals.

Then, there’s a building in South Mumbai we visit often. Every time we return late in the night, we walk down the stairs to show our children a sight that’s both sickening and eye-opening: men, employed as full-time live-in domestic workers, sleeping on the floor near the lift because it’s convenient to have someone clean up after you, but too inconvenient to have them actually live in the same apartment.

Thankfully it’s an old, post-Partition era building, and unlike the modern towers with “service lifts”, a clever name for a lift allocated for blue-collar workers so they’re invisible to wealthy residents. For most of the day it’s crowded with delivery workers scrambling to make it on time after braving the elements.

To be fair, not every example is reducible to caste alone. Class, money and occupation matter too. But in India, these categories have overlapped for so long that separating them is often impossible. Returning to India does not allow me to stand outside the hierarchy. But the discomfort – and it’s only a discomfort – comes from seeing this hierarchy play out so clearly.

Amidst all this, here’s my favourite anecdote from last year. On my daughter’s birthday, as I was running an errand in my neighbourhood, the plumber walked up and shook my hand. Over the previous few months, every time he stopped by our home to fix a broken tap or check the drain pipes, he did not come anywhere close to a handshake.

This happened because he noticed what I was wearing: a very worn-out Ambedkar T-shirt that I bought on Amazon for $18 while living in the US.

I didn’t ask him, but he evidently assumed something. And for a fleeting moment, the invisible line that divided us, felt a little lighter, almost as if it didn’t exist.

Rahul Fernandes divides his time between consulting and writing. He has spent more than two decades in media and technology, including at Google, Meta and TikTok.

Also read: How separate lifts in Mumbai highrises sustain caste prejudice in the city