THIS IS THE STORY OF THE CLOSEST PERSON IN MY LIFE. Not the person I trust the most. Not someone I live with, sleep with, or love. Not my mother, not my brother, not a girlfriend, not a boyfriend, not a best friend. I mean the person who is physically closest to me most days, which I spend working as a chef in a restaurant in Paris.

There are a few different job titles that describe the role this person plays in a kitchen, and none of them are lovely. Scullion, lavapiatti, plongeur, sguattero; depending on your level of political correctness, you might decide to call him a “multi-purpose agent.” But usually, most people call him—or rarely her—a dishwasher.

Blaise Pascal once said that the hardest thing for a human being is to be left alone in a closed space with no one to talk to and nothing to do. I bet he never worked in a professional kitchen. Chefs, cooks and dishwashers crave solitude and silence. Unfortunately for everyone else in a kitchen, a chef’s supreme authority allows him to be nervous, peevish, and sometimes irascible at will. Sometimes I am guilty of this, but there is a constraining force: I know that if I’m too cruel with other cooks, they’ll leave. And so it falls, all too often, upon the dishwasher to bear the brunt of my fire and fury.

Here’s the problem if you’re a dishwasher: I know you need to move to a different spot, I know that you need to open this drawer, because you need that potato peeler, and you need it right now; I know you need to go over there, even if every time you open the drawer you hit my shin, and when you hit my shin I curse against both the gods you believe in and the one I grew up with.

You move those messy columns of dirty plates knotted with strange forks and lobster carcasses and lamb bones. I know that they are very likely to fall, crash and make lots of noise, I know that. It’s not your fault if they fall, but it bothers my sacred chef’s concentration and I need to blame someone. I’m pretty sure that heaven is a place where plates never fall, and where glasses break in silence.

There is nothing more annoying than someone who does everything to avoid annoying you. Why are they so often sloppy and irritating? Because they are scared. Because year after year, chef after chef has blamed them for the very fact that they exist.

***

Subroto, from Northern Bangladesh, has a finance degree and dreams of being a concierge in luxury hotels. He applied twice, but failed because his English wasn’t good enough. His English and French vocabularies are in fact quite rich, but both languages come out completely messy when it comes to putting their words into sentences with proper syntax. But at least we can make small talk in the kitchen.

He’s delicate, sensitive, and often wears lip gloss and some mascara. With his huge and old white shirts and aprons he is doubtless the most elegant of the team, the waiters and the chef included. And he considers dishwashing to be torture.