Shifty Business

Moving house in Mumbai.

In Mumbai, people don’t talk about ‘moving house’, they talk about ‘shifting’. I don’t think anyone realises quite how apt a term this is because when it comes to moving house in this city, just about everything associated with the process is shifty. At every stage from packing up to settling in, in every interaction with the people involved, there is something or someone that feels shifty.

This was not our first move in Mumbai and the previous experience was a masterclass in how to ruin someone’s day: there was incompetence, poor communication, lying, laziness and overcharging for the privilege of running this gauntlet. And so, on the Monday morning that marked the start of a three-day mover-packer ordeal, I was ready for battle: swords drawn and a facial expression that oscillated between ‘what on earth are you doing?’ and ‘just try me, shiftie’. 

My first port of call, however, was a hotel into which we were booked to spend two nights as a far more appealing alternative to a mattress on the floor of a packed up apartment, surrounded by musty cardboard boxes. There is something about the casually opulent lobby of an Indian luxury hotel that dulls the defence systems and so I sheathed my swords and allowed myself to be lulled into a false sense of optimism for how my next few days would play out. I handed over my luggage to the bellhop and the vouchers with which I intended to pay for the stay to the duty manager. I thanked them both for their well-wishes, declined their offer for any transport assistance, and looked forward to returning in the early evening for some dinner and a peruse of the pillow menu. For a fleeting moment, I felt like a holidaymaker, not like a woman about to spend 72 hours being pushed around by Mumbai’s shiftiest shifties.

My complacency was short lived; ten minutes after leaving the hotel a call came, from the same man who had taken my vouchers, telling me that the vouchers couldn’t be used in this hotel. Other hotels under the same brand would accept them, but not this one. Holidaymaker me would have been disappointed, maybe even a little irritated, but would have accepted this fate and provided some card details. But one-woman anti-shiftie defence me wasn’t about to give up that easily. Taking this man at his word might have kept my blood below boiling point, but would also have more than doubled the cost of our move by adding an extortionate city-centre hotel rate into the outgoings. So I chose to fight back — with email chains where I had double and triple checked the eligibility of the vouchers ahead of time, and screenshots of the list of participating hotels, clearly showing that I wasn’t the one who had made a mistake here. I ranted and raged on the phone, as much as any polite, British person really can rant and rage at a well-trained hotel manager, and, finally, just as I was about to stop the packers from wrapping up our mattress, the hotel came through for me. Yes, they could reactivate the voucher systems under these special circumstances; yes, they could understand why I wasn’t okay to switch my booking to a hotel more than two hours away from where I needed to be; yes, they would take it up with the voucher issuers instead of with a vulnerable, half-homeless lady who just needed a place to stay with her five-year-old son (sob); and yes, they were very sorry for the inconvenience this misunderstanding had caused. 

For them it was an inconvenience. For me, it had been five hours of unbudgeted stress, 50% of my phone battery and a struggle to stay calm enough not to trigger a migraine. Not to mention the challenge of trying to oversee box-packing, TV removal and the never-ending fight for access to the service elevators while on the phone. I think if I have to move again, I will clone myself first. Or hire an assistant. Someone with a phone who can speak to bots, send emails, make calls and approve gate entries while I focus on the chaos unfolding in front of me physically. 

To the shifties, it probably looked like I was playing on my phone instead of answering their questions about the correct labelling system for the stacks of boxes. But in reality, I was booking services from the various companies who handle water filter relocation, TV installation and IKEA furniture disassembly and reassembly, all of which had to be carefully scheduled around the access to the elevators and loading bays so as to ensure a man didn’t show up to install a TV in the new apartment, only to find it was still on the wall at the old apartment. Even though we were moving within the same apartment complex, from one tower to another, this coordination was almost above my pay grade. Because the rules just kept on changing - especially where the elevators were involved. 

Moving in or out of these new tower blocks requires new and departing residents to pay move-in or move-out fees of around 17K rupees or about $200 USD. For this money you are granted access to the service elevators which can be locked to your floor to ensure the smooth movement of all your belongings. The fee also includes access to a loading bay for your Tempo (small van) and permissions for your vehicle and manpower to come and go as needed. We had paid two of these sets of fees, one to each tower, and I had done my utmost to make sure the towers knew my plans and my estimated timings. So, when on day two of the move, the towers sent me emails one after another, informing me that I had exceeded my two-hour exclusive elevator access period for the day, a timing restriction about which I knew nothing at all, I blew a fuse. Some of my belongings were at the lift shaft in one tower, a few more were sat at the loading bay, some were packed in a Tempo and some were being unloaded into puddles at the other tower. And suddenly my movers were waiting over an hour for an elevator. 

As with so many things in India, the problem lay in the communication, or lack thereof. If these timing restrictions had been communicated to me up front, I could have worked with them. If someone had communicated to me during the day as the timing restrictions started to cause problems, I could have worked with that. If someone was able to communicate a solution to me once I was down at the lobby, smoke coming out of my ears, demanding answers, I could have fallen in line. But within the shiftie community, there seems to be an unwritten adherence to the ‘never complain, never explain’ mantra. And it gets nobody anywhere. Literally. 

Having not anticipated the delays we were now facing, my carefully choreographed dance of workmen coming to build and install things was now all out of sync. Some people I was able to reschedule, others were more stubborn. A few days before the move, we had brought in a man to dismantle some of the larger items that were not going to fit through door frames, round corners, or in lifts. The man I chose had been recommended by someone in the building and on first impression he appeared to be very bish, bash, bosh — which suited me. The items on his task list included some very tall wardrobes, Jasper’s bunk beds and our hydraulic bed. It’s not as fun as it sounds. The hydraulics are simply to allow access to the storage space underneath and are also, we now know, very easy to damage if someone is arrogant enough to think disassembly is a one-man job. I was certainly right in my bish, bash, bosh assessment, but apparently there was some disparity between what I thought that meant and what he did. 

This man was now sitting in my new apartment, with me, waiting for the arrival of the wardrobes. The bed had been in an earlier shiftment, before the elevator issues had kicked in, and he had dutifully reassembled this — as best he could given the damage he’d caused while taking it apart. He complained loudly about how the movers must have caused the damage, and not him, when he had dropped the mattress base onto the hydraulic mechanism with an almighty crash on his previous visit. And now, he was insisting on waiting until the bed pieces to arrived, rather than leaving and returning once they were in place. Besides the freshly built bed, there was very little by way of usable furniture in the new apartment — one IKEA footstool and a single dining chair. I sat on the floor in one room, glued to my phone trying to rearrange the various workmen, while the man sat on the IKEA stool in the living room. After a while, I sensed a stillness in the apartment, where earlier there had been a restless, impatient energy emanating from the living room in theatrical huffs and puffs, and so I got up to see where he was. He was not, as he had been, in the living room, nor in the kitchen, nor in what would soon be Jasper’s room. In our not-very-big apartment there was only one room left to look in: the master bedroom, where the bed was. 

I am not proud of the language I deployed to express my extreme anger at finding him lounging on our bed, but I do think its usage was justified. I simply could not believe what I was seeing. And I think he could not quite believe that I could turn my face so red so quickly. I’m not sure if he understood every word, but he seemed to get the gist as I threw him out of the apartment. After listening to him verbally lying about his role in breaking the inside of the bed, my tether wasn’t long enough to handle him physically lying on the top of very same bed. I should have fired him on the spot, but I still had four cupboards that weren’t going to build themselves and anyway, I figured I could give myself a discount in return for the board and lodging he’d enjoyed. I also insisted that he bring an assistant the next day, to minimise any further damage to the remaining items, at his own expense. He did not appreciate my instructions nor my sense of humour and I am pretty sure he must have launched his own colourful tirade after he got paid. 

Surprisingly, the mover-packers who were largest in number and workload, caused me the least amount of grief. Right up until the very end, that is. Sure, they had failed to alert me to the issues with the elevators, they temporarily lost my crockery (it was still in the cupboard in the old apartment) and they didn’t follow my coloured-sticker labelling system, but all in all, they were quite competent. So competent, in fact, that they bullied a $100 USD tip out of me — for a $300 dollar job. At the end of the first day, I had been happy to tip. They had arrived on time, they hadn’t broken anything and they had worked efficiently. My mistake was that I was generous and nothing opens the door to intimidation quite like generosity. On the second day, after all the boxes and furniture had been moved, I found myself standing in the new apartment with eight men blocking the doorway, staring at me as one of the managers counted out my proposed tip, note by 500 rupee note. With big, exaggerated gestures, he counted the money to show everyone that I hadn’t given a note per person and then he looked at me as if to say ‘Well, where is the rest?’. Shattered after two full days of what felt like a high stakes games of ‘spot the lie’, and knowing that they were well aware of exactly where my bag and wallet were in the apartment, I didn’t feel I had a choice by to hand over the amount they requested. But as soon as they had left the apartment, I called the company to complain. 

I wasn’t complaining about having to give a tip - I am happy to reward hard work. I took issue with the way they trapped me in the apartment and forced the tip out of me. And more than that, I wanted to try and prevent anyone else from being made to feel the way I felt: targeted and victimised for being a woman, and a foreign one at that. From this perspective, moving house seems to showcase the very worst of Mumbai. Had Dylan been present in the apartment, much of what rattled me the most over the three days — the carpenter on the bed, the packers demanding tips, other smaller issues with lengthy lunch breaks, ignoring instructions, disappearing security guards — simply wouldn’t have happened. The shifties saw me and saw an opportunity to take advantage. 

I hate the feeling of being exploited. Not because it makes me feel vulnerable, but because it turns me into an ogre and life as an ogre is exhausting. Now, two weeks after the move, I am still suspicious of everyone. Our new AC units make strange noises, and I assume I’ve been lied to about how old they are. The water filter stops working, and I presume the technician has cut a corner somewhere when he serviced it (he didn’t — the housekeeper switched the socket off). The cleaners I booked in the old apartment start asking for more money paid directly to their accounts, bypassing the company, for ‘extra rooms’, and I think they are trying to trick me into paying more than I need to. Actually, on this last one I was right and avoided the trap by grassing them up to their company and watching them slink out of the apartment with their tails between their legs. At least this time I was a vindicated ogre. 

If I am being honest, it wasn’t the move that triggered my ogremorphosis: it started a week earlier, when the washing machine broke. It had been making some strange noises for a while and a sensible person might have brought someone in to look at it then, but I decided to wait until the move. My logic was that we’d be in a hotel and wouldn’t miss doing laundry for a few days but I didn’t factor in the possibility that the machine needed major, invasive surgery. For reasons which are not 100% clear but which I am blaming on the several different house helpers we have had over the years, our machine needed a full drum-and-membrane-transplant. And this required organs. I listened attentively as the technician explained that I had two choices: wait about a week for The Company (by which he meant Samsung) to order and deliver the parts and send him back to fit them, or let him go to the market the next day and have it fixed for half the price and in a 7th of the time. Immediately, I smelled a jugaad. Defined on the internet as ‘a Hindi term for an innovative, frugal, and often unconventional fix or work-around’, another way to say jugaad is ‘short term gain leading to long term pain’. I am not a fan of jugaads. Just give me the official process and authentic parts and I’ll pay whatever is needed. As soon as someone proposes a jugaad as a way to skirt an official process, I can no longer trust them, because there always seems to be something in it for them — in this case, the full fee going to the technician rather than Samsung taking their cut. Once I can no longer trust someone, I become paranoid, and so began two weeks of me dementedly checking up on whether or not his assessment was correct, whether the parts had been ordered, whether my ticket was properly lodged in the Samsung system, why the parts were taking twice as long to arrive, whether the parts had indeed arrived damaged and had to be re-ordered, whether the man now whatsapping me to arrange a visit was the right technician assigned by Samsung, how much the repair was going to cost me and why nobody seemed able to provide a quotation and, finally, whether the repair was going to happen before Dylan ran out of work shirts and trousers.

The surgery finally took place on our fifth night in the new apartment, by which point laundry mountains had sprung up in every room. Two huge boxes were delivered during the day and then in the evening, two technicians arrived — one who I knew, the other whose uniform carried the reassurance that this visit was on the books. The washing machine was broken open to reveal severe and irreparable damage to its bowels, as diagnosed, but the transplant was successful. In went the plug to the socket, down went the pipe into the drain and on turned the tap to test the water flow. This should have been it. But it wasn’t it, was it? Because some days, Mumbai decides to test us. Out came the water from the drain pipe, flooding the floor. The pipe was completely blocked. And not by something that could be dissolved by a drain cleaner, or poked out with a long stick. No, this pipe was blocked with concrete. 

My laundry mountains mocked me cruelly, growing in size and number as I navigated a further three days of no machine — calling plumbers and carpenters, negotiating access to the apartment below so we could hack into their ceiling and switch out the clogged section of pipe, questioning the landlord on how on earth they didn’t know about this when they had supposedly had a tenant before us, popping next door to the use the neighbours’ machine to ensure Dylan, at least, had clean clothes to wear to work. And all the while, Jasper was on school holidays, reminding me daily of all the promises I had made to him and that were now being broken in favour of hanging around waiting for plumbers. An auspicious start to life in our new apartment, this was not.   

But, time is the greatest healer of all wounds and, now two weeks into life here, I have conquered the laundry and we are starting to understand how the apartment works. The sharp pain of moving has dulled to an ache and most of our belongings have found their place. Moving house anywhere in the world is painful, whether you are moving down the road or across the country. As coincidence would have it, my sister moved house the same week as us. Hers was a far greater upheaval of 170 miles from the north to the south of England, compared to our 100 metres across and a few levels up. But the biggest difference in our experiences was not the distance travelled, nor the fact that she was sizing up while we were sizing down, it was the fact that not once in her move did she feel as though someone was trying to exploit her. Perhaps next time we move, I will be that lucky.