India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (18 page)

She was proud of what she was achieving. She liked being financially independent. She told me: “I used to try to play the role of the typical old housewife, holding Sathy’s hand and giving up my life. I thought that was how I had to be. But now I know that I can stand up for myself. I’m very bold. Sometimes, in the past, when I had no money, I used to depend on my family, and they had a hold over me. People would try to control me. But today I stand up and tell my family, ‘I don’t care what you say. It’s my life, and I run my life.’”

Banu attributed her independent streak to her father. He had always encouraged her to be her own woman. He had pushed her to get an education. She had gone to college in Bangalore, getting
first an engineering degree, and then an MBA. Now, she said, she could live life on her own terms. She enjoyed the freedom.

Still, as she showed me around the neighborhood, and then as she invited me back to her house and served me lunch under the green walls of her living room, I felt Banu was perhaps a little less clear about her freedom than she let on. She said a couple times that she was “bold,” and she said it proudly, unapologetically. But she told me, too, that she was worried about the long hours she spent away from her children. She said she was determined to seize her career, make something of herself. But she said, also, that for her, family came first.

“I prefer to be at home, a
pakka
wife,” she told me. “There’s so much I’d like to give the kids. I’d like to be with the family. If Sathy had a business he could travel around and I could stay at home with Darshan and Thaniya. Consulting is going well, but it’s tough for the kids. They need me.”

“But I thought you were worried you would lose your identity if you were just a housewife,” I said to her.

“So what?” she said. “If I want my identity, then why get married in the first place? If I want my own identity, then there’s no need to be married. A woman needs to give herself to her family and not be obsessed with her identity. We ape the West. People read the papers and they’re full of women’s equality. But what is equality? Is equality just about making the same amount of money as in the West?”

I told her she sounded unsure of what she wanted. She said she wasn’t. She knew exactly what she wanted. She was just forced to play the career woman because of Sathy’s shortcomings. She said Sathy poured everything he had into his land, into farming, and it
was a waste of time and money. He needed to get out of agriculture; he needed to get a job, a career.

“I believe in families. I was brought up that way. I believe kids should be with two parents,” she said. “I really do. But what can I do if I have a husband who can’t get it together, who runs around without settling down?

“Sathy’s so attached to his fields. I’ve told him a hundred times to forget his land. I’ve told him there’s no future in farming. He won’t listen. The truth is, I don’t need any of this city stuff—all the Mercedes, the ten cars, the big houses. I don’t need any of it. I could even move back to the village.”

“You’d walk away from your business?” I asked.

She said: “Maybe I could live in Molasur and travel to Bangalore for work. You know, I already gave up the embroidery business. Things are just starting to go well now; it’s really the right time to be building a business in Bangalore. I think I have a long way to go. I would regret it if I quit again.”

We were standing outside the shed from which she ran her business. Once, she and Sathy had talked about tearing down the shed and building a home there. That was when it seemed Sathy might move to Bangalore. That was before the family was divided.

“No, I’m not ready to walk away,” Banu said. “But I believe there has to be a way to combine the two. Why do I have to choose—can’t I have my family and still build a career?”

Speaking about his marriage one time, Sathy said to me: “Banu
and I care about each other, we try so hard to make it work, but at
the end of the day maybe I’m too old-fashioned for her. I’m a farmer. She’s modern. Career will always matter to her. I don’t know if she could ever live in the village.”

I asked Banu if she agreed with Sathy’s assessment of her. She hesitated, she demurred. She said she was committed to her family. She said maybe Sathy was correct. But then she said she wasn’t sure.

I thought things were a little bit more complicated than Sathy made them out to be. He was right that Banu cared about her career. But it was clear, too, that she cared deeply about her family, and that she was determined to be a mother to her children. Banu was indeed a modern woman—but her modernity lay precisely in her confusion, in the tug she felt between career and family, between the city and the village.

It wasn’t easy being a woman in the new India. Banu’s generation was the first to be told it was all right, desirable even, to work outside the home. They were the first to have the option of a career. That option was a form of liberation; it came as emancipation. But it was also a burden, or at any rate a challenge. Banu—and millions of women like her—were following an untrodden path. They didn’t always know where they wanted to go.

When Banu talked about her clients and her business and the way it was growing, I sensed pride. I saw ambition. But when she talked about her family, when she complained about the long hours she worked and the way the kids needed her, I sensed ambivalence and even anxiety. Sometimes I could see the anxiety on her face. Her eyes—she had big, round eyes—would narrow; her brow would fold up into a little ridge.

I felt that cities like Bangalore exacerbated the ambivalence. They nurtured the ambition, but they also fed the anxiety. A city—a nation, a moment—so full of possibility could not be denied. India was alight with opportunity. No matter how much a woman wanted to stay home and raise her children, no matter how attached she felt to her family, it was hard to turn away from all the excitement outside the home.

So many women I talked to—successful, accomplished women, women who loved their jobs and felt proud of their achievements—told me that in a way, things had been simpler for their mothers and aunts and grandmothers. They never had to choose. They never had the option of a career. And although this lack of choice was a kind of imprisonment—“slavery,” as one woman put it—it was also enviable, like a balm for the anxiety felt by so many women today.

I spoke to Banu once in Molasur. She was taking a break from Bangalore and her business, bringing the family together for a few weeks. When we met, I thought at first she seemed a little bored, maybe restless. She talked about jobs in the cities, about flights she would normally be catching to Hyderabad and Chennai. But when I asked her how she felt being so far away from it all, her answer surprised me.

She said she felt calm. In Bangalore, she said, she was always tense, perpetually trying to balance her personal and professional lives. Now, although she knew that she was missing out on business, losing clients and money while she sat in a sleepy village, she felt at ease.

“I feel peaceful,” she told me. “It’s strange, but I feel settled.”

India was booming; its options and possibilities were seductive
, almost irresistible. I felt this myself whenever I visited Bangalore, when I considered the life I might lead if I lived somewhere like there. Amid the plenitude and dynamism of India’s metropolises, it was easy to wonder if living in the countryside (or, indeed, staying at home with the family) was a mistake. Sometimes I felt like I was sitting outside history, missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to participate in the remaking of a nation.

It was hard to believe now, but I could remember a time when Bangalore was little more than a sleepy town. It had always been a cosmopolitan place, but when I was a boy, it felt like an overgrown hill station, a holiday destination where the air was cool, the girls wore jeans, and the draft beer ran plentiful. My friends and I would take a bus from Auroville for the weekend. We’d visit the city’s ubiquitous pubs, we’d sit around one of the many parks. Bangalore was a green town. It was known as the Garden City.

Already back then, though, in the seventies and the eighties, Bangalore was emerging as a hub of India’s technology industry. It was home to the government’s aerospace company, and to the country’s main space research lab. In the 1970s, the state set up one of India’s leading technology parks, in Bangalore. All of this laid the foundations for the stunning growth of the city’s software and technology businesses after India’s economic reforms.

By the time I returned to India, shortly after the turn of the millennium, Bangalore was known as India’s Silicon Valley. It was one of the fastest growing cities in the world. But it was also so
much more than a city. It was a verb (to be “Bangalored” was to lose your Western job to outsourcing), and it was a metaphor—an emblem of the new, shining India, a totem to global capitalism.

It was, too, a magnet: for the millions of young Indians who migrated to the city, who were drawn by the abundance of jobs and careers, Bangalore was an opportunity to reinvent themselves. Between the early nineties and the mid-2000s, Bangalore’s population grew 150 percent, from around four to six million. More than a third of the city’s population were first-generation migrants.

These migrants came from across India, and from around the world. Bangalore had one of India’s largest expatriate populations. Every time I saw these men and women, crowding into the city’s pubs and restaurants, filling the air with their chatter of dialects and languages and accents, the thought came to me that Bangalore was India’s America: a chance at a new life, a beacon on a hill that attracted the young and the ambitious and the talented from across the globe.

In Bangalore, I got to know one migrant to the city, a young
woman named Veena Sharma. She was in her mid-thirties, a marketing professional with wavy black hair and a small mouth that puckered up, like a bird’s, when she smiled. She had grown up in Jaipur, in the northern state of Rajasthan. She moved to Bangalore in the winter of 2006.

Before moving to Bangalore, Veena had lived for a time in a small town near Chennai. She had lived with her boyfriend, a man named Arvind, in a two-bedroom apartment by the ocean. They
had good jobs; they had comfortable lives. But after a while, they decided they wanted more than comfortable lives.

I knew Veena a little bit before she moved to Bangalore. We hadn’t spent much time together. We’d see each other at a restaurant or a shop sometimes, nod in mutual recognition, maybe say hi. But we had a lot of friends in common, and after she moved I kept hearing from them about how well she and Arvind were doing—how they’d gotten jobs right away, how they’d already been promoted, how they were earning so much money.

I looked Veena up on one of my trips to the city. We met, on a smoggy April evening, in a coffee shop near the center of town.

The coffee shop was in an old Victorian building with stone walls. It was a noisy, smoky place, and when Veena showed up, late, dressed in blue jeans and white sneakers, I could hardly hear her over the din of college students and radio music. I suggested we go to a quieter place. But where, in a city like Bangalore, do you find a corner of silence? Outside, the roar of traffic was overpowering, and every restaurant or coffee shop we looked into was equally smoky, loud, and crowded.