No God Is Infallible

• Work in pairs, especially when there is a single male guest
• Always keep the room doors open while cleaning
• Don’t give out personal contact details to a guest
• Shout for help when in trouble
• Keep a buzzer to alert colleagues if you find yourself in trouble
• If a guest misbehaves with you, always tell your supervisor

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What do you do when the man who just made a pass at you is ‘god’? It has been drummed into you—‘athithi devo bhava’ (the guest is like god)—and it’s this mantra that keeps the wheels of the hotel business turning and the cash registers ringing. So what happens when a god tries something inappropriate with a member of the hotel staff? “There is a certain culture of discreetness within the industry that is ingrained into the staff. The guest has to be appeased and you have to maintain your sense of decorum by not creating a scene,” says Mithu Basu, former general manager, corporate communications, The Leela Palaces, Hotels and Resorts. So if a guest acts “weird”, the staff is trained to politely defuse the situation.

The guest, apart from just that credential, is also always in a position of power—an industrialist, a politician, a celebrity—compared to the hotel maid. And as she has been trained to behave friendly and be obliging, male guests misinterpret her actions to be flirtatious come-ons. “Usually, it begins with questions about whether we are free in the evening or our family situation,” says Simran (name changed), an executive housekeeper at a five-star. “Over time, you learn to conduct yourself. You speak as little as possible to guests while being polite and confine yourself to your professional duties.” Meenu (name changed), who has worked in several five-star hotels, says: “All kinds of people stay in hotels, and they behave in different ways. There have been cases of foreign guests asking for ‘favours’ just as there have been high-profile Indian guests, including businessmen, who have propositioned even the male staff.” Sudipta Srivastava, who quit her job as a housekeeper to start her own housekeeping business is more forthcoming: “Many of the girls are fresh in the industry. They are vulnerable because they are so raw and they are scared to speak up. It’s not just girls. The male staff members also get propositioned, sometimes by women but mostly by men.”

And just how frequent are the Dominique Strauss-Kahn kind of incidents in India? Sexual assaults or molestations are still quite rare but lewd remarks and indecent proposals are commonplace, say insiders. According to Sudipta, in any hotel, the frequency of unwanted advances goes something like this. “Two incidents that involve the female staff every month and one incident involving the male staff once every two to three months.” The worst off, she contends, are the staff in spas who have to deal with inappropriate behaviour every day. “There is this sick mentality and you can’t do anything about it,” she says. The most common forms of indecent behaviour are of the borderline juvenile variety—from winking at room attendants, to asking for their phone numbers or telling them to come up to the room at a particular time, say late in the evening or at night. The most frequent offenders are the single travellers who are in the city on business and require a hotel room only for a night or two.

More than half the employees in the hospitality industry are women. But according to Gita Aravamudan, author of Unbound: Indian Women At Work, it has a long way to go in creating comfort zones for its women employees. While working on her book, she found that women who had to interact with guests in the room were the most vulnerable. “Most of the time, these women choose not to complain until the harassment has assumed dangerous proportions. They are worried about being told that they invited it, and since they are so low down the pecking order, they fear that they will be sacked. Going to a sexual harassment committee also means getting probed and having to prove that the incident actually occurred. Many prefer not to go through that process unless something really major has happened.” Samira (name changed), an operations manager at a five-star hotel in Delhi, confirms all that generally comes of an incident is a hushed chat with peers, avoiding a particular room or guest thereafter or sending someone else, usually the new girl, to do the cleaning. Clearly, voicing misconduct by a guest comes very hard to hotel maids—there wasn’t a single person employed in a hotel housekeeping staff who was willing to speak on record for this article.

But as the industry has expanded and gone global, and especially after incidents like the Kahn one, most reputed hotels in India have put in place several protocols to avoid unsavoury situations. “Prevention is always better than cure,” says D. Kavarna, general manager of the ITC Maratha. Some of these measures include cleaning the room when the guest is not in, always keeping the room door ajar when inside and asking the housekeeping staff to keep their superiors apprised about where they will be at all times. “But when it comes to our guests, we can’t act as judge and jury. At most, if we see that there is a pattern of bad behaviour in a guest who stays with us frequently, we report him to his company and ask them to take some action. We do not suppress such incidents, but we are definitely discreet about them,” says Kavarna. ITC also maintains a corporate guest history that keeps tabs on a guest’s preferences, his likes and dislikes, and also lists misdemeanours, if any, experienced by the staff. Says Vishwas Bhatnagar, vice-president, Indian Housekeepers Club: “If you compare the situation to that of 10-12 years ago, it is far better now. People are more aware about this problem and the guests, too, are now more cautious.” Sudipta suggests installing bells in rooms or giving buzzers to the housekeeping staff to summon help if things turn bad. This is a step that hotels in New York are taking now, by installing panic buttons, after the Strauss-Kahn episode.

Many long-serving staff members of hotels say they have learnt the ways of the industry, of always being there but staying just below the radar. Polite and invisible. Now is the time to change all that. Now is the time to scream out loud, just like the maid in New York’s Sofitel hotel suite did, if guests, even if they are gods, behave inappropriately.

By Smita Mitra with Arpita Basu