Habibi

Habibi! Enjoy your food and do rate us. Thank you 🙂

The first time one of these turned up tucked into a food delivery bag, handwritten, with a little smiley, it made me smile back. Someone had taken the trouble. Someone had sat in a hot kitchen at the end of a long day and written a small kind line to a stranger they would never meet.

I meant to rate them. I really did. The note had worked; I felt the small warmth of it and thought, yes, I will give them a good one, they deserve it.

I never did. I forgot, roughly the moment my hunger was dealt with. The man in the kitchen, the trouble he took, the line he wrote by hand, all of it lasted in me for exactly as long as it took to eat. He had asked me for one small thing, kindly, and I could not even manage that.

I have always been stingy with stars. I should admit that plainly.

Maybe it started in school. We were graded from the very beginning, marks, ranks, red ink, and no teacher I ever had would give full marks in English or Malayalam. Physics, mathematics, chemistry, sure, where an answer was either right or wrong. But never in a language. As if the written word could always have been a little better, and it was their job to remind you. Twenty-five out of twenty-five was a fantasy. You could write a flawless paper and still lose a mark somewhere, because perfection was not a thing that was given; it was a thing held just out of reach, to keep you reaching. Or maybe that has nothing to do with it and I am simply stingy. I genuinely don’t know. But somewhere I picked up the belief that five of anything is not a thing you hand to people. Three became my normal. Four felt generous. Five felt like a lie I was being asked to tell.

So I rated the world the way I had been rated. Carefully. Withholdingly. As though my approval were a limited resource I was responsible for protecting.

Not so long ago, a woman came to clean my flat. An hour of work, a fair rate, booked through an app. She did a good job. The place was genuinely better when she left than when she arrived. And when the app asked me to rate her, I gave her three stars, because of one small thing she had missed. One. I docked a working woman a third of her score, out of a habit I had not even chosen, for something I have now completely forgotten except for the fact of having punished it.

Those stars are her livelihood. They decide whether she gets the next booking. I knew that, in some distant way, and I did it anyway, because in my head five stars still belonged to no one, and three was simply what people got. Stingy me. I think about her more than she will ever know.

I used to think the begging was pathetic. The notes, the please rate us, the businesses pleading for stars as though their lives depended on it, which, it turns out, they often do. What a waste of dignity, I thought. What a waste of effort.

I run a place in the hills now. People come, they stay, they leave, and then they sit somewhere with a phone and decide what my place is worth out of five. Which, it turns out, feels exactly like being told what I am worth

I used to think I was above asking. Too proud to go around collecting stars from strangers. I rated the world; I did not perform for it.

Now I ask. Quietly, constantly, in the careful phrasing of the desperate. Do leave us a review, it really helps. The same small plea as the Habibi note, the one I meant to answer and never did. I refresh the page. I read each review like a verdict, because it is one. The same person who could not spare that woman a single extra star now waits, all ego gone, on the mood of someone who slept here one night and has thoughts about the towels.

We check the rating before we buy a handkerchief now. A handkerchief. As if there were a wrong one waiting to ruin us. And in hospitality the thing on the scale is not a handkerchief. It is your care. Your house. The actual effort you put in, the bed you made properly, the hours nobody sees. All of it hung up in public for anyone to take a star from on a bad morning, over something small.

I did exactly that, once, to a woman with a mop and a fair price and one small miss.

I did not know then what it costs. I know now. We have built a world that rates everything, the food, the driver, the maid, the house, the host.

Even your smile.