India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (15 page)

I followed Ramadas around the shandy that morning. I watched
him strike a few deals. He wasn’t easy to keep up with; Sathy joked that I should hook him up with a GPS device.

Ramadas prowled the northwest corner of the market, which he later told me was his territory. It was a tough area, dominated by businessmen from the slaughterhouses, people with little respect for brokers. But it was where the big money was made, and
Ramadas had been going to cow markets for forty-five years. He’d started as a boy with his father; he said he felt confident in any situation.

He had stubby, energetic legs, and a loud, screeching voice that he used to shout down rival brokers or hesitant buyers. He had a way of being smooth and aggressive, nonchalant and pushy, at the same time. He would keep an eye out for prospective sellers, farmers standing protectively by their cows, wary of being cheated, and when he spotted one, he’d swoop in and grab the cow and begin leading her toward a buyer. If the seller displayed any reluctance, Ramadas would take his hand, look him in the eye, and tell him: “You should trust me. I know what I’m doing. People buy cows just on my word. I’m known around here. You can trust me.”

The first time I saw Ramadas in operation, he was trying to ingratiate himself with a tall man who had two bulls to sell. The man was a farmer; his face was lined, weather-beaten. Ramadas had almost closed a deal for him earlier that morning, but the farmer had backed out at the last minute, and now he was explaining to Ramadas that it wasn’t about the money. He said he didn’t like the buyer; he had something against him personally.

“Don’t worry about all of that,” Ramadas said, and he took the yellow rope that tied the man’s two bulls together, pulled them toward another buyer. The new buyer was willing to pay 12,000 rupees for a bull, but the farmer wanted 12,500. Ramadas yelled at the buyer. “You’ll get sixty kilos of meat off these bulls,” he said. “Why don’t you pay the right price?”

The buyer waved some money in front of Ramadas. “If you give up your commission, then the price will be all right,” he said, and he looked at the seller meaningfully. The seller nodded in agreement.
Ramadas looked disgusted. “Why the hell should I do that?” he said, and he stomped away.

When I caught up with Ramadas, he was surrounded by a small crowd, his hand on another cow. He felt the cow’s vagina and shook his head at the owner. “If she were pregnant, it would be wet,” he said. “There’s no liquid.” The man, insisting his cow was pregnant, wanted more money, but Ramadas negotiated a lower price. The seller paid him a commission of fifty rupees, but the buyer gave him only twenty, and Ramadas shouted at him: “Why should I do all the work and not get paid for it?” He grabbed thirty rupees out of the buyer’s hand and walked away. The buyer stared after him.

A man ran up to Ramadas and said that the weather-beaten farmer’s two bulls were still available; the deal was open. Ramadas went back to the farmer, but he refused to look at Ramadas. “You had your chance, but you were too greedy for your commission,” the farmer said.

“Why are you speaking to me like that?” Ramadas asked him. “Am I your enemy? Do I speak to you like that? Don’t I speak to you like a friend?”

Ramadas hit one of the bulls on its haunches in a proprietorial manner, but it was too late: the sale went through with another broker. When the farmer paid the new broker less than he wanted, Ramadas took the part of his competitor. “What’s your problem? Why won’t you pay a proper commission?” he asked the farmer.

He raced into the crowd again, and when I found him, he had just sold three cows to a man in a flowing silk
kurta
. The man gave him a thirty-rupee commission. Ramadas complained, and the man, smiling, said: “You’ve made plenty of money off me. Why should I give you more?”

There was a moment of silence; Ramadas seemed tense. Then he smiled and slapped the man on the shoulder. “It’s okay,” Ramadas said to me. “We’ve done a lot of business together. If he wants, he gives me something. If he doesn’t, that’s also all right. It’s as he wants.”

“Hey,” Ramadas called out to another man, leading five cows down a slope. “Where have you been? I’ve been trying to call you all morning. I thought we were friends.”

“What nonsense,” the man shouted back. “I tried to call you but you were too busy chasing other cows. Now I’ve sold mine without you.” Ramadas laughed and patted one of the cows he’d just sold. He retreated to the side of the market, bought a cup of buttermilk from a woman working out of a thatch stall, and took a break.

I had a chance to catch up with Ramadas later, a little after
noon. There were a few other people with us. Krishnan and Sathy were there, and also another cow broker, a big man with a pockmarked, bulbous nose. A couple farmers joined us; they were from Sathy’s village.

We sat on the veranda of a government school, at the edge of the shandy. The veranda overlooked a playground. Kids in uniforms, the girls in blue-and-white
salwar kameez
, the boys in shorts and inexplicably pointed ties that aimed like daggers at their chests, ran around.

Ramadas had closed a few deals that morning; he was in a good mood. Krishnan praised his friend. He said again that Ramadas was a legend. One time, Krishnan said, Ramadas sold 1,500
cows in a single week. Ramadas corrected him: it was 1,500 in a month. Still, it was an accomplishment. He had sold the cows to a trader who shipped them to Kuwait, where they were slaughtered and eaten.

Now, Ramadas said, there was no need to ship cows to slaughterhouses in the Gulf; plenty of people in India ate beef. “Really?” I asked, and he held up his hands and said, “Of course, everyone eats beef now.” He said that young people did, and so did people in the cities; even people in the villages had started eating beef.

Ramadas said that he ate beef himself. A lot of his friends did, too, but he wouldn’t name them because they would be ashamed. “I eat beef,” the big man with the bulbous nose said, in a surprisingly high-pitched voice. “I started eating it because my doctor told me to. I complained that I was always weak and sick, and he told me that if I ate more beef I would get fewer colds.”

“Yes, lots of people eat beef now, and so the prices have gone up,” Ramadas said. It started in the early nineties. Around that time, Ramadas began noticing a few changes in the shandies. He noticed, first, that more businessmen were showing up. They had lots of money; they bid up the price of cows, beyond what most farmers could pay. Then, inevitably, fewer farmers began attending the cow market. When a farmer did show up, it was almost always to sell a cow rather than to buy one.

The farmers sitting with us nodded. They talked about how hard it was to keep their farms running. “We have so many problems,” one of them said, “and now we can’t even afford cows.” Sathy said that even a wealthy farmer like him had problems. He had been forced to sell the family’s ten water buffaloes, because
he couldn’t afford to feed them anymore. “There’s nothing like buffalo milk,” Sathy said. “And buffalo manure is the best.”

When he was a young man, Ramadas told me, the shandies had primarily been agricultural affairs. Every Wednesday, farmers from the area would pile into their bullock carts and gather in the clearing. Business was slow, low-key. On a good day, about twenty cows would trade in the market.

Over the last couple of decades, the shandies had become less about agriculture, and more about business. There were fewer bullock carts now, and more vans and trucks. Before, the shandies had also functioned as markets for local produce. Farmers would set up stalls at one end of the clearing and sell their tomatoes, onions, and spinach. Now few farmers in the area grew such produce. You couldn’t buy vegetables or fruit at the shandies anymore.

The mood of the shandies had also changed. Ramadas said that striking a deal with a farmer was easy; the relationship between brokers and farmers was cordial, even social. People knew each other from around the village. But businessmen were impersonal, and hard-nosed. They weren’t interested in socializing; they didn’t ask about your family. They just pushed for the best deal they could get, and then they left.

Still, Ramadas said, he shouldn’t complain too much. He did sometimes feel nostalgic for the old ways, but he made a lot more money these days. He emphasized to me that he was by no means a wealthy man; he struggled to make ends meet. But the influx of businessmen had made life a little easier. Now, he said, more than fifty cows traded in the market on a typical day. His take from commissions was much higher.

“A farmer could afford at most to pay eight thousand rupees for
a cow,” he said. “They would buy just a few cows, and keep them for years. They would only buy during the season. There was hardly any money in it for me. But when a businessman would show up, he’d buy ten, twenty, maybe even thirty cows. He’d offer ten thousand or fifteen thousand rupees a cow. Businessmen have a lot more money. They are shrewd, but they can spend more.”

Ramadas told me about one businessman in particular, a slaughterhouse owner he called Kottakuppam Kannan. (Kottakuppam was the name of a town in the area; Ramadas didn’t know his customer by another name.) Throughout the nineties, Kottakuppam Kannan was a regular customer. He’d call Ramadas, tell him to keep a hundred cows ready, and then show up with trucks or load carriers to ship them away.

Ramadas worked with Kottakuppam Kannan for more than fifteen years. The money he earned during that time allowed him to put his kids through school, and then college. He had three children, two sons and a daughter. Each of them had, or was earning, an engineering degree.

I told Ramadas it was impressive that he’d managed to put his three kids through college. He smiled widely. His pride was evident. He said his younger son was finishing college that year; he wanted to work abroad. His daughter worked in an outsourcing company in Chennai. And his other son? Ramadas pulled a picture out of a notebook he carried in his shirt pocket. His elder son had died in a traffic accident a few years before. He’d been on a motorcycle, he was hit by a bus early in the morning. Ramadas said his son was a bright boy; he’d been offered a job in Canada.

Ramadas was particularly proud of his daughter. He said that many of his acquaintances pulled their daughters out of school;
everyone expected him to do the same. But his daughter had always done so well, she had marks of 85 percent and above, how could he do that to her? He insisted that she focus on her studies.

“Congratulations,” Sathy said. “That’s really amazing. That’s really something.”

“Write about it in your book,” Ramadas said to me. “I wanted to set a different example. I wanted people to see what a girl could do if she was educated.”

Sathy turned to Krishnan. “You see, you dog,” he said. “Why didn’t you do the same with your own kids? They’re useless, good for nothing.”

“But sir, I tried,” Krishnan protested. “I even tied them to a post and beat them, but they refused. I could never get them to study hard enough.”

Ramadas laughed. He said: “What were you thinking, tying them up and beating them? Did you think they were cows?”

I met Ramadas several times after that first day at Brahmadesan
. We met at the cow market, where he was friendly but often too busy to spend much time with me, and we met at a lodge in the nearby town of Tindivanam, where he stayed when he was visiting the shandy. In 2001, when Ramadas’s son had died, his wife suffered a nervous breakdown. The family moved to Chennai, where she’d grown up, thinking it might help her recover. They’d stayed there, and now Ramadas commuted to work.

The lodge was a cheap, basic place, looking down on a flyover with noisy traffic. Rooms with a shared bathroom cost seventy
rupees a night, about $1.50. Sometimes, Ramadas saved money by sleeping on the floor in a storeroom at the top of the lodge. The storeroom was like a cave—it had one dim light hanging from the ceiling, and a mosquito coil on the floor. The floor was hard, cold in the winter and hot in the summer, but Ramadas said he didn’t mind. He didn’t want to waste his money.

Ramadas told me that his children didn’t like it when he came to Tindivanam. They said he was getting old; he should take it easy. They said he shouldn’t waste the family’s money on bus fares and hotel rooms. Actually, Ramadas said, the real reason they didn’t want him in Tindivanam was that they didn’t approve of his line of work. His children were deeply religious; they thought what their father did was against the gods.