It’s hard to imagine what happens inside those  big, ugly McMansions that mar the once-tree lined street of Long Island’s North Shore.  The very existence of these pseudo-palaces reveals much about the mindset of their inhabitants.  Like a child screaming “look at me,” they emit the stink of pathetic neediness for self-importance.

With  the convictions of Mahender Murlidhar Sabhnani, 51, and his wife, Varsha Mahender Sabhnani, 45, we got a view into one such “mansion”, as the  always-reliable newspapers like to call it, in Muttontown, New York.  The litany of horrors that the Sabhanis inflicted on two Indonesian women are bad.  Not the sort of thing that people from Muttontown are supposed to do.  Or people from anywhere else, for that matter.  If you need the details, read the Newsday story.

The Sabhani’s ran a perfume company out of their home, where (if the reports are to be believed), they made many millions.  “You too can smell like the Sabhanis” must be an alluring marketing tool.  I have no idea what scent they sold or why anyone bought it, but apparently they did.

But that wasn’t enough for the Sabhanis  They had their showplace to let all their friends know how important they had become, but that wasn’t good enough.  They needed women to serve them, absolutely and without question.  A King and Queen must have obedient servants.  Not just people who do the dirty chores that important people would never do for themselves, but to do so with total obedience.

Varsha Sabhani came from Indonesia.  So did her slaves.  First one was brought in illegally in 2002, and then, when one was not enough to care for her every need, another in 2005.  It surprised me that Varsha would seek her own people to serve as her slaves, since people tend to always have some other nationality that they prefer to demean in order to elevate themselves.  Varsha certainly appears to be the type who needed to feel elevated above others, so one would have suspected that she would pick women from whoever Indonesians are prejudiced against.  Perhaps Indonesians have no such group to look down upon.  Perhaps using women of her own nationality elevated Varsha higher than some “lesser” people would. 

There was little about this case that made complete sense.  The prosecution’s position, that this was some throwback to the 1800s of slavery in America, certainly didn’t cover the Sabhani’s situation.  They would never have been here back then, or if so, would have been enslaved themselves.  We weren’t the most tolerant people of “lesser” cultures back then.

The defense made even less sense, attributing the thought processes, actions and mindsets of modern day Americans onto these enslaved women, as if they were slaves by personal choice since they could have chosen to be anything they wanted by merely escaping captivity.  Obviously, the “slaved by choice” defense didn’t fly.

But most curious is the sensibility of the sort of folks who inhabit these palaces.  They may have the money to buy or build them, but they have not yet raised their consciousness to the level necessary to handle the life they can afford for themselves.  While I have castigated them as monuments to bad taste, bad taste is the least of the problems with the Sabhanis.  They couldn’t handle their life with the ease and grace that is supposed to come with a life of wealth.  And so, they bought far more than they could handle, including two women who would be their slaves.  Their bad taste was a compliment to their bad souls. 

Is this a cautionary tale for people who one day find themselves unprepared to handle a life of wealth?  Perhaps, though I doubt that too many people, no matter how unprepared they are to deal with too much money, would do harm to other human beings.  But it does suggest that these massive houses are merely the outside indicators of people who cannot handle their success, and their inability to fill the shoes they can now afford to buy is something that we can all see as we pass by.