Years later, I am having coffee with some very well to do people in the 1900s, a swanky bar at the Taj Hotel in Bombay on one of my trips back home.
These are people who are richer than the usual multi-millionaires. People who have cultivated dining to an art form where the serving is segregated and courses are announced.
The people I see around who are seeking position or money in India often use this one hotel, this one citadel of Empire, as a mark or measure of their progress upward through the strata of society.
The Taj was born out of a slight; because a man was turned away from a fancy hotel. When the prominent Parsi industrialist Jamshedji Tata was refused entrance into Watson’s Hotel in the nineteenth century because he was a native, he swore revenge and built the massive Taj in 1903, which outshone Watson’s in every department.
It is less a hotel than a proving ground for the ego.
The Taj lobby and its adjoining toilets are where you test your self-worth.
The road outside the hotel just adjacent to it is teeming with warm semi-naked bodies. Laborers, vendors selling vegetables, clerks from adjacent government offices, or newly minted software engineers like myself, looking for a job — Any job.
Then there is the inside. Cross a couple of hundred feet from that hell and you are suddenly in a large semi-circled hall, wafting in the cool scented air standing in a lobby filled with fresh flowers everywhere. Discreetly placed lightning that makes everyone look slightly better and a quiet sense of dignified silence, as if those heavy Persian carpets absorb all the noise surrounding you.
Theoretically, anyone can come in, out of that heat and sit in the plush lobby, on the ornate sofas, amid the billionaire Arabs and the society ladies, or even walk down on the right to relieve themselves in the gleaming toilets.
But you need that inner confidence to project to the numerous gatekeepers, to the toilet attendants that you are eligible to be there.
You need to first convince yourself that you belong there, in order to convince others that you do.
And then you realize that the most forbidding gatekeeper is not the one outside.
…. It’s the one within you.
