India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (13 page)

At the back of the house, in the kitchen, three men were grating coconuts and stirring a pot of
sambar
. One of the men was Sathy’s cook; he’d been with the family for forty years. The second was the cook’s helper, and the third was Sathy’s masseur. Every self-respecting zamindar had to employ a masseur.

The men were cooking for more than two hundred people. Traditionally, Sathy told me, his family opened their house to the village on Pongal. It was a way to acknowledge the bounty from their fields, and to signal their wealth. Sathy conceded that the tradition had become a little expensive. There wasn’t as much bounty, or wealth. Still, he said, citing a Tamil proverb: “No one has ever gone hungry by feeding too many people.”

Sathy introduced me to his family. I met his brother, visiting from
New Zealand, and I met Sathy’s children. I met Banu, Sathy’s wife. She was a short woman with a frank, inquisitive face. Her green silk sari caught the light, shone in the windowless living
room. She wore red lipstick. She shook my hand and said she’d heard a lot about me. She laughed when she said this.

Darshan, Sathy’s son, was shy; he had doe eyes. Sathy said he was going to be a scientist, and Darshan told me in a soft voice about atoms, about how they were the smallest elements. He told me, too, about reading
Who Moved My Cheese?
He said: “I learned from it that you should always look forward and don’t stay in place and don’t wait for things to happen. Make them happen.”

Sathy stepped away, to help with preparations for the feast. I asked Banu if it was true that she wanted him to leave Molasur. She shook her head, furrowed her brow. She said: “It’s too late for that. I keep trying, but I really don’t think it’s possible anymore. Sathy can’t adapt to life in Bangalore. He’d be like a fish out of water there. He’s still stuck in his zamindar mentality, stuck on the past and what his family means.

“I don’t know how well you know Sathy, but when he sees someone in Bangalore that earns a lakh a month or more, he can’t accept that they’re above him socially. He can’t face the fact that things have changed and that now it matters how much people earn. In the cities, people only care about money. They don’t care about what his family used to be.”

“Was it different when you first met him?” I asked her.

“Very different,” she said. “That was before the outsourcing and IT companies and all of that had come to Bangalore. A person’s background still mattered then. Now it only matters what you do, not who you are. There are so many people much younger than him, people who don’t come from his type of family. Could he ever accept them being equal to him? I don’t think so. I don’t think he’ll ever leave here.”

I asked her: “What about you? Could you live here?”

“What would I do? Here, I just sit around reading books all day. It’s nice for a holiday, but that’s all. I’m not the kind of woman who sits in the kitchen all day. I need to do something. I can’t even work in the fields because of his zamindar status. It would be looked down upon, it would be considered beneath me.”

Banu told me about the period of time when she had tried to live in Molasur. It was after she and Sathy got married. They had lived in Chennai at first, but Sathy was unhappy, directionless, and she felt he wouldn’t be satisfied unless he was living on his land. So she had given Molasur a try. She was a city girl; she’d never lived in the countryside. Nonetheless, she moved into the family home in Molasur and tried to bend herself to village life.

It wasn’t easy. Sathy’s family was very traditional, and they expected her to conform. The household was strictly vegetarian; Banu wasn’t allowed to eat meat. She wasn’t allowed to enter the kitchen when she was having her period. The family wanted her to place her jewelry and valuables in a cupboard to which they all had a key.

To keep occupied, Banu had started a small embroidery business. She employed women from the village; they would come to the house to stitch garments—shirts, dresses, aprons—that Banu would then sell to export companies. She discovered an entrepreneurial streak in herself. The business had done well; at one point, Banu said, she was making at least 50,000 rupees a month.

Soon, though, her business started causing tension in the family. Some of the women she employed were Dalits. Some members of the family weren’t happy about that. They weren’t comfortable with Dalits in the house.

Much of the tension was unspoken. Occasionally it would flare up. One time, a member of the family called Banu to the back of the house and asked her not to bring Dalits into the home anymore. Banu was astonished. “I wouldn’t take it,” she told me, years later. “For me, it was totally un-modern. I mean, I lived in the city, where caste is totally out—it’s over. I said I couldn’t accept that. It was really difficult for me.”

Banu started talking about leaving the village, moving to Bangalore. Sathy resisted; he said maybe they could build a separate home, somewhere in the fields or outside the village, away from the family. Things were calm for a while, but then they blew up again over a dinner that Banu hosted for her workers.

Sathy’s family was away for a few days, and Banu invited her employees into the house for a party. One of the women caught some fish in a well and cooked it for dinner. When they returned, Sathy’s family was shocked: Dalits had been in the house, non-vegetarian food had been cooked. These were grave offenses. It was made clear to Banu that she had to shut the business down.

“How could I keep living here after that?” Banu asked me. “They think so differently from the way I do. I felt like I was losing myself to the family. All these rules and restrictions. I couldn’t live like that anymore.”

She took the kids with her to Bangalore. She told Sathy to come, but he asked what he would do there. She told him they’d figure it out. She said: “If you want to do something, if you have the willpower, you can do it anywhere.” Sathy couldn’t let go; maybe he didn’t want to let go. Maybe, Banu told me at that Pongal feast, he didn’t dare let go.

Now Banu lived in Bangalore, Sathy in Molasur, and the kids
saw their father only on holidays and weekends. It was difficult. Banu worried about her kids. At least, she said, the schools in Bangalore were better; the children would get a city education.

“I don’t belong here,” she told me that Pongal afternoon. “It’s beautiful, no doubt. It’s peaceful. But I can’t have my own life here. In Bangalore, I feel like I am a person.”

Pongal lunch was served on the floor, on banana leaves placed
over a line of cane mats. Sathy’s cook, shirtless, his chest glistening with sweat, served at least ten dishes from metal buckets carried by his assistants. It was, as Sathy had promised, a feast, and a delicious one. He beamed when I asked for seconds, and then for thirds.

“This is the way we have always eaten in this house,” Sathy said. “As far back as I can remember, this is exactly the food we ate every Pongal.” He told me that his grandfather’s grandfather probably ate the same food. The only difference was that in the past, the food would have been made almost entirely out of produce from the family’s farms. Now the farms weren’t quite what they had been; only the rice was from their land. Who knew where everything else was from? Sathy muttered about industrial farming.

After the meal, Banu served me a cup of coffee, with milk from a cow at the back of the house. She asked about my family. She seemed curious to know how my wife was adjusting to life in India. “Why don’t you all visit us sometime in Bangalore?” she asked, and I said I’d love to. I asked Sathy if he’d take me. They exchanged looks; they both laughed.

Sathy walked me to the front of the house, to my car. It was pouring now. The rain came down straight, at a right angle to the ground. I decided to wait it out on Sathy’s veranda. The smell of the earth, of Molasur’s fields and dusty streets, lifted to my nose.

I told Sathy about my conversation with Banu, about how she’d said he would never move to Bangalore. “It’s true,” he said. “I feel lost there. Here, I’m known. There, I have no power.”

“Bangalore’s really a useless place,” he said. “You can’t use anyone’s name. You can’t use any influence. Even with the traffic police—if he stops you and you tell him who you are, or who you know, he just doesn’t care. He won’t care at all. I have so many connections here. In the city, I feel useless.”

He told me a story about going for a drive along the East Coast Road with his family recently. They had turned off the road at one point, to get closer to the ocean. The car got stuck in the sand. It was evening, getting dark, and the kids were worried. But Sathy wasn’t worried; he was sure that everyone in the area knew who he was. If his car was seriously stuck, he could just summon a tractor to pull it out. Everyone would be eager to help; they wouldn’t dare refuse him.

“They know me, they know my influence, Akash. They know that if they treat me badly I can easily come back with men from my village and teach them a lesson. I’m not saying I would do that, I’m not that type. But what would I do if that happened in Bangalore? I would feel so lost. No one would respond to me.”

The rain came down harder; it was a real downpour. Sathy said rain on Pongal was auspicious. The coming year promised to be fertile. “Maybe it will be a lucky year for agriculture,” he said,
cupping a hand into the rain, as if trying to catch it. “We need a little luck around here. The farmers could use a little luck.”

He talked about wells that had run dry, reservoirs that were silted up through years of neglect. A few decades ago, he said, you barely had to dig to reach water. You could scoop water out of wells with handheld buckets. Now you had to dig deeper and deeper, and in the summers, even the deepest wells ran dry.

He returned to his personal situation. He told me that Banu had been talking about moving to Dubai. She’d been offered a job there. It was a great opportunity. I could see he was proud, but he was also scared. “I could use a little luck, Akash,” he said. “Tell me: What will I do if Banu leaves us and goes to Dubai? Who will take care of my family?”

Sathy and I were walking across his fields one day, not too long
after that feast at his house. Pongal is a three-day festival. The feast marked the first day of the festival. Sathy was telling me, now, about the second day, known as Mattu Pongal, or Cow Pongal. The second day was dedicated to cows; it was an occasion to venerate them, to honor them for the service they’d provided in homes and on farms.

At the end of the second day, cows and their owners traditionally gathered in a clearing opposite Molasur’s main temple. The village priests performed a
pooja
. They chanted over loudspeakers, they lit a fire, and they oversaw a ceremonial plowing with one of the biggest bulls in the village.

Sathy told me about the
pooja
that had taken place that year. It happened right by his house; he stood on his veranda and watched. He had been disappointed. He said that in the old days, Mattu Pongal had really been something. Sathy and his siblings would get dressed up; they’d cover their faces with powder. The village drummers would stop in at his house and lead his family in a procession to the temple. The whole village would be gathered; thousands of cows and bulls would be assembled. There was an air of solemnity, of seriousness.