On perhaps February 12 Sou and I went to some mall to exchange a broken suitcase of his.
Sou has, and Indian people in general can have, attitudes about service workers that I rarely see in Western culture. Sou pushes my limits for detecting how suave a person could be, and if he had any more finesse, I am sure that he is so smooth that I would not be able to perceive him becoming any more of a gentleman. I mean when he wants to be, of course, but even when he bites or missteps he does so with a lot of style.
I would have trouble describing his attitude or how it is different than anyone else’s, but I suppose that I could say that he expects to be surrounded by service and in fact in his society he often is. In the United States, when one wants service one typically has to have some social transaction with the employee who would give the service. I am just now reconsidering why this is, but I think it has to do with the US attempting to be a more classless society, and because the US industrializes a lot of processes to give a consistent and uniform experience to consumers, and because there is not a large economic divide between the poorest half of society and (perhaps) the 51-90% of society above them, or wherever the divide becomes sharp. Also there is a history of hierarchy in India strengthened by the caste system and by a history of governance by kings.
Sou expects service in the same way that I expect to walk into a business and find that it is temperature controlled. I never would expect to ask a place to please adjust the air conditioning, because they can manage that themselves and when I walk in I should expect comfortable conditions and escape from harsh weather outside. I am making this analogy but I hardly even know how to talk about something which is so fundamentally natural to me in the service industry that I never notice it.
Sou and I went to an underwear shop. India has fewer department stores than the United States, and frequently there are store complexes in which many small stores all sell one thing. I have never seen a male underwear shop in the United States that did not target a gay clientele, but in India, there would not necessarily be any such targeting because there really would not be any other place to get underwear except an underwear store so all people would go there.
At this store there was staff who was managing it. This person seemed to me like the typical Indian shopkeeper who had been living in his business for a lifetime, and he was only taking money and giving receipts. All other work was done by his employee, who was some boy who got the job somehow. We were in a mall so the place was a little upscale.
Sou and I were talking to each other about underwear and I asked him about his size. He told me that he did not immediately know, so the sales boy pulled Sou’s pants down to examine the tag on his underwear. Following that the boy got on one knee in front of him to measure Sou’s waist with tape, and then he started producing large amounts of underwear and putting them in front of Sou for his perusal. Sou never acknowledged the boy except when he had a question for him, and I would say that he treated the boy with the utmost respect and politeness, but the forwardness of the sales staff in entering what I would call personal space and for going to a lot of work to layout everything in the store which Sou could have without getting any information from Sou about what he would like is typically of Indian service, and this especially so for someone likes Sou who projects the attitude of one for whom receiving service is as natural as breathing in conditioned air.
The boy helped me with my purchase decision as well but it was Sou that he felt the need to measure twice. I asked Sou later what he thought of the underwear boy; I would not say that his behavior was unusual for India but the differences in it still stand out to me. Sou was completely unconscious of it. By my perception, the boy was of a lower social class than Sou, and indeed of likely all his customers, and that he really wants to do his job well. At the same time, a job selling men’s underwear is best suited to someone who likes the idea of putting underwear on men, and that idea was probably not why the manager at the cash register got into the business, but it probably was related to why the sales boy thought to apply to work at this store.
If I were to buy underwear at a gay boutique in America, then I would not be surprised to find flirty sales staff. There are also plenty of people in the United States who simply do not have time to acknowledge sales staff. But what I perceived in this situation was something fundamental in Sou that he gauged the interaction as a class–based transaction, and the boy was doing what he needed to do for his job, and if the boy liked his job then he should but it was not Sou’s place in society to personally acknowledge him. It also might not have been appropriate for the boy to be acknowledged; he was just doing his job, and if he might have enjoyed selling Sou underwear, he should also feel safe in being able to go into his personal space and even touch his body a bit without worrying if his actions could be construed as a come-on to be acknowledged.
I found the entire exchange to be fascinating as an example of how people could interact with each other in a personal experience like choosing underwear and not have any chance of having the interaction being perceived personally by either party. Sou was buying and the boy was selling a store-product, and nothing more.