India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (22 page)

She said she wondered sometimes why she and Arvind worked so hard. She tried not to, but she couldn’t help thinking about the sacrifices they were making in their personal lives. Kids, family, just a sense of personal peace and well-being: all these were on hold while they pursued their careers. Was it worth it? She figured time would tell.

I asked her how married life was going, and her face lit up. She said it was great. She said that given her history, she had been a little worried. She’d felt tense at the wedding, and a little sad; the memory of her last marriage had been like a scar. But since then, she’d felt calm, secure, and happy. She was really enjoying being married again.

“Were you worried that your relationship with Arvind would change after getting married?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said. “This time felt completely different. It just felt like a natural extension of our relationship. Last time, I felt like marriage would change everything for me. I was sort of resigned to giving up my identity and becoming a housewife. I can’t say I felt great about it, but I felt accepting; if it happened, it happened.”

“And this time you don’t feel like you’ll have to give up a part of your life for marriage?” I asked.

“Hell no,” she said, laughing. “I mean, I might be slightly more obliged to attend family functions or something, but nothing’s going to stop in the way I dress, or the way I socialize, or anything like that.”

“What about work?” I asked.

“No way,” she said. “Nothing messes with the work. Working is so the first thing I do in my life. That’s just the bottom line. There’s no way that marriage, or anything really, can change that.”

Banu had a new plan. She’d stopped working, and moved with
the kids to Pondicherry. She said she’d put her business on hold. She needed to give the family priority.

Sathy rented the first floor of a house on the outskirts of town. It was part of an effort to reunite the family on middle ground, between the village where Banu couldn’t live and the busy metropolis that Sathy couldn’t abide. He missed the village; he kept a room there, and he sneaked away to his fields as often as he could. But he was also happy: for the first time in years, the family was together.

I visited Banu in that house one afternoon. She was home alone. I sat with her in her new living room, under stained-glass windows, on wooden furniture she’d shipped from Bangalore. The room was dominated by a large dining table; the rented house felt homely.

I asked Banu how she felt about giving up her consulting business, and she said she hadn’t given it up; she was just taking a break. She said she kept thinking she’d go back to it. But she acknowledged that starting again could be tough: once you were out of the game, it was hard to get back in.

“Obviously, if I want one thing, I have to give up another thing,” she said. “There’s always an opportunity cost. My kids are happy here, my family is happy. It’s so nice to see the kids getting closer to their father. It gives me a very different kind of satisfaction than what I had when I was working in Bangalore.”

She said there were aspects of her old life she missed—interacting with interesting people, for example, or the financial independence she had when she was earning her own money. She found herself holding back on certain purchases, spending less on jewelry, clothes, and household decorations. It wasn’t that Sathy restricted her purchases; it was just instinctual, a feeling that it wasn’t her money.

“Do you get bored sitting at home?” I asked her.

She said she managed to keep busy. She was thinking of taking a job as a teacher at Darshan and Thaniya’s new school in Pondicherry. It was a bit of a step down for her; from making 10,000 rupees a day, she would be making the same amount in a month. Sathy had laughed at her for considering the job, but she didn’t
mind. She was just happy that things were more relaxed on the home front.

“But what about your ambition?” I asked. She had seemed so determined to grow her consulting business. She had worked so hard to get it off the ground.

“You have to trade with your ambition,” she said. “Of course it’s always there. If I wasn’t married, if I didn’t have kids, I would have gone behind my ambition and made something of myself. Who knows what I would have done by now? But you have to accept trade-offs.”

She offered me a cup of tea. She talked about the challenges of maintaining a large home. As I was leaving, she instructed the maidservant about the night’s dinner.

Later, she would dust the living room, clean the house, and make the evening beds. She would cook dinner for Sathy. He would come home late. She’d wait for him. They’d eat together at ten-thirty. He would tell her about his day at work.

“I’m still learning,” she told me that afternoon, sitting in her living room. “Every day is an adjustment to my new role.”

Meanwhile, back in Chennai, Selvi was still resisting the temptations
of city life, and Hari was getting ready to go to England.

He’d been chosen by his company for a three-month posting in London. It hadn’t been easy getting selected. Twenty-one people had applied. As part of the application process, they were asked to research the top ten companies in the Atlanta, Georgia, area. A short-listed group of candidates was interviewed by videoconference from London.

A few days after the interview, Hari and his colleagues were sitting around their computers. Some of them started getting rejection e-mails in their inboxes. Hari didn’t get an e-mail, so everyone crowded around him in anticipation. People cheered and clapped when he got his acceptance message. They sang “I’m a London Boy” to the tune of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl.” They danced around the office.

Things were hectic for Hari in the weeks leading up to his departure. He had to buy warm clothes, he had to apply for a passport and a visa. I didn’t see him much. I called him once and he was standing outside the British consulate in Chennai, waiting in line. He said he was exhausted; his mother had been dragging him around to temples, offering
pooja
s and praying for his safety.

A couple weeks before he left, he invited me to his hometown of Tindivanam. He was going to see his parents for the weekend. He suggested I join him. It was a long way from Tindivanam to London; I think he wanted me to see just how long.

We met, on a hot Sunday afternoon, at a crossroads near a
crowded marketplace in the center of Tindivanam. Hari was, as ever, fashionably dressed. He wore a tight-fitting white T-shirt and torn blue jeans. He looked fresh, colorful, and clean. He stood out against the drab, small-town landscape of his former home.

Tindivanam wasn’t a very charming place. The sidewalks were piled with heaps of garbage, and the roads lined with discarded plastic bags and rotting vegetables and fruit. There were stray cats and dogs everywhere, and a few pigs, blackened from sewage.

Still, I was struck by the town’s transformation. Streets that had once been filled with pedestrians and cyclists were now jammed with cars. There wasn’t a thatch hut to be seen. Many of the new houses and shops were decked out in glass panels and elaborate masonry.

Hari was eager to show me these changes; he wanted me to know how Tindivanam had developed. As we walked around, he
talked about colleges that had come up at the outskirts of town, and about the restaurants, many serving modern dishes like pizza and veggie burgers, that had taken the place of tea shacks he used to frequent as a boy. He pointed to a new department store, a pink three-story building that he said represented a “revolution in shopping.” Before, he and his mother used to shop at the provisions store, where you wrote what you wanted on a piece of paper, and the clerk selected your purchases at the back. Now, Hari said, you could choose your own brands.

He took me to his house. It was behind the new bus station. When Hari was a boy, the bus station had been marshland; during the rainy season, he would go fishing and hunting for frogs in it. Now it was the biggest station in the region, and farmers from surrounding villages congregated there, balancing gunnysacks of produce on their shoulders, arguing with conductors who refused to seat their cows and goats.

Hari’s house was painted white and pink. It had wooden nameplates on the ground floor, bearing the names and work positions of his parents. Upstairs, in a narrow living room with a television at one end and a kitchen at the other, Hari introduced me to his parents. All they wanted to talk about was his trip to London. His father pointed to an announcement on television: a British Airways flight from Delhi to London had been delayed for fourteen hours. Hari told him not to worry; he didn’t know what airline he would be flying. He had never been in a plane.

Hari’s father showed me the computer that the family had recently bought. It was silver, and it was in a room that had been outfitted, also recently, with an air conditioner. The computer had a webcam; Hari’s mother said she would use it to communicate
with her son when he went to London. She would check that he was eating properly; she would make sure he dressed warmly, and that he didn’t spend too much.

Hari wanted me to see his old school. He asked his mother for directions. “What, have you forgotten?” I asked, and he said, “No, it’s just that when I was a kid there were no roads or paths here. I get confused sometimes. There were hardly any buildings.”

We walked around, looking for Hari’s school, and he talked about some of the houses we passed. He showed me one place, a gaudy imitation of a Mediterranean villa, with sculpted columns and archways, a car in the driveway. He said it was the house of a local electronics merchant; it hadn’t been there when he was a boy.

Few of the houses had. Hari pointed to another new building that was painted in a shocking neon green. “Look at all these colors,” he said. “Before, you used to get these kinds of colors only in Chennai. But now everything has come to Tindivanam!”

He showed me a tall house with red concrete beams running along its exterior façade. It was the house of an engineer who worked in the government telecoms department. It was an imposing structure, and one of the few houses that had been there when Hari was a boy. He remembered when it was built. Everyone talked about it; he used to walk past it on his way to school.

He remembered that the engineer’s children had been show-offs. They would play loud music from their bedrooms, and stand outside their house with their toys and gadgets. They had remote-controlled cars and dart guns. Hari said he would think about them, wonder why they had so much more than he did. Now he realized it was because their father was educated: he had a postgraduate degree in engineering.

We got to Hari’s school, but the guard wouldn’t let us in. From what I could see, the grounds were impressive, the garbage and smell of urine by the entrance less so. Hari said: “Everything I am today is because of this place. It is because my parents sacrificed for me and pushed me. I owe them so much.”

On our way back, we stopped outside the engineer’s house again. We stood in its shade and I drank from a bottle of mineral water. A pig ran across the road.

In a way, Hari said, he would be happier if he were going to America. When he thought of a “cool place,” he didn’t think of England. England was the past; it was common. “When I was a kid I dreamed about America,” he said. “The U.S. is number one. It’s the most powerful ever. Who doesn’t want to go there?”

He worried that his sense of fashion wouldn’t fit well in England; he thought that he dressed more like an American. “I like to mix and match,” he said. “I’m very casual.” In the United States, he had heard, even a CEO could go to work in a polo shirt. But someone told him that the English were more conservative, and not just when it came to fashion. “They have more dos and don’ts. In America, they have only dos,” he said.

“You don’t sound very excited,” I said.

He said I was wrong; he knew his time in London was a big break. It would enhance his résumé. It would make him more desirable on the job market. When he got back, he planned to start looking for a new job right away.

“To tell the truth, you feel like you’ve achieved something,” he said. “You feel you’re moving somewhere. When I think of some of my friends, I know that I overtook them. I won the competition.”