An urban thriller with socio-political and racial overtones, “HOUSE BOY” is a fact-based tale that inhabits a shadowland where ancient traditions take root and prosper in our so-called modern world. In the polite suburb of Hendon, North London, in an undistinguished house at 321 Finchley Lane, the lives of a young man and an older woman intersect as if decreed by history.
Patu Patel is a twenty-four year old Dalit from Chettipattu, a remote village in southern India where untouchables like him live and die unnoticed. Binda Tagorstani, forty-six, is a wealthy widow from the upper castes, long assimilated into British life. Binda’s son, Rafi Tagorstani, is twenty-seven, a real estate property manager with low self-esteem and a nasty mean streak. Rafi and his mother have kept Patu for nearly a year as an indentured house boy, after paying the Better Life Employment Agency in Chennai hard cash for his unlimited services. Patu has become, from the moment of his arrival, their property, and Binda has the signed contract to prove it.
Patu’s journey here began with a trip by transit bus from his village to Chennai, capital city of Tamil Nadu state. He is seeking work of any kind. All he will earn he pledges towards the dowries of his sisters, Sakthi and Amala. The twins are twenty-one, thus already past the ideal marrying age for girls of their caste. As the only son and eldest offspring, Patu has made himself responsible for their well-being and that of his aging parents, Surendar and Hamsa, whose lives in Chettipattu as a night soil collector and a washerwoman he has pledged to make less unendurable.
In Chennai, Patu meets Santhana Gopalan, a recruiter for Better Life. Seduced by gilded promises of good wages and pleasant working conditions with “upper-caste Indian families” in the UK, Patu is faced with an offer no starving Third World person could possibly refuse. Prey to the hard sell of these professional flesh merchants, Patu is given no time to read an employment contract rooted in the ancient scheme of debt bondage. He is bathed, medically tested, decently dressed in the western manner, then supplied with an authentic Indian passport, a doctored work visa, and a modest cash advance for him and his family.
Arriving at London’s Heathrow airport, Patu meets Sammi Appan, a middle-man who delivers him and other fresh arrivals to their new places of enslavement. Before he knows it Patu has become ensnared in schemes beyond his understanding. He experiences up close and personal a caste-based savagery with its roots in the ancient world. Binda and Rafi Tagorstani will make this house on Finchley Lane the kind of hell Patu thought existed only after death and not before. His promised wages have gone unpaid from the beginning. Now, after nearly a year, all of the promises of leisure time advertised in the brightly printed Better Life brochure, to take in the sights of merry olde England, have gone unfulfilled. Patu is allowed no access to the outside world. He is locked beneath the stairs at night in a space no bigger than a cupboard. He is shackled to the kitchen sink while preparing meals and forced to serve his masters at parties dressed in humiliating garments.
Binda’s business associates are witness to this treatment. Only one of them, Sheela Atwal, shows any signs of empathy for the mistreated young man. She keeps her feelings cautiously to herself, offending Binda being the last thing she can afford to do. Sheela cannot do anything to risk her position as heir apparent to Binda’s affinity fraud empire, known as the Pandit Advisory Group, which has made millions over the years by playing on the hopes and dreams of South Asian emigres.
A virgin on his arrival in the UK, Patu is that no longer. Each step he takes towards Binda’s elaborately decorated bedroom feels as if he’s travelling down the latest of several dark, converging paths that have led him here. The Missus reclines yet again on an oak four-poster, splays herself Salome-like across the silken pillows. She unpins the graying swirl atop her head, the tendrils spilling like kelp over her shoulders and onto her surgically augmented breasts. Binda’s eyes, thick with mascara, are bleak, demanding. She lifts the edge of her nightdress, slowly and for obvious effect. Extending her legs like dumplinged compass rods, she curls her meticulously pedicured toes around the griffin-headed footboard.
“Taste me now.”
With all of the privations Patu has lived through in Chettipattu, nothing in his previously impoverished life has prepared him for the fate that has befallen him. He has become a sexual plaything, a beast of burden, a beating post with little value and no hopes of achieving his modest goals for self-determination. “If you ever try to leave me,” Binda warns, “I will chop you up into twelve little pieces, not including your head, which will be found floating in a nearby stream by a man walking his dog.”
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