India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (23 page)

Hari said again it was all because of his education; he pointed in the direction of his school and said it all started there. And yet, he knew it was also because of the times he lived in. “He was also educated,” he said, of the engineer, outside whose house we were standing. “But he just came back to Tindivanam and did nothing. There weren’t so many opportunities in those days. I know that if I had been educated in the sixties I would have probably just returned to Tindivanam and gotten old and lazy, playing with my grandchildren.

“Still, life is like that: we are lucky to get whatever opportunities we can. We should grab them when they come.”

Hari said he hadn’t waited around; he’d gone after life. He’d left home, moved to the city. He’d hunted for a job and worked hard when he found one. Yes, there had been times when he felt tired or scared, when he thought it would be easier for him just to move back to Tindivanam and have a safe life. But he had always been determined; he always knew he wanted to do something with himself.

He’d been thinking about some of his friends from Tindivanam recently. At school, he had been poorer than many of the boys in his class, and sometimes, that made him feel bad. There was one classmate in particular, a wealthy boy who used to bully him and mock him for always trying to speak English. He was one of the boys who used to make fun of Hari’s accent; he used to accuse him of putting on airs.

Hari didn’t know what had happened to that boy. The last he heard, he’d tried to get into college but flunked his exams. “Do you know what I would say to that boy if I saw him now?” Hari asked me. “I would tell him: ‘You are going nowhere, you stand nowhere. But I am going somewhere. I am going to London.’”

Selvi was also looking ahead, thinking of higher salaries and better
jobs. She, too, was planning for the future. But she wasn’t as ambitious as Hari. She wasn’t planning to quit her company or start a new job. She said she felt loyal to her company.

At her job interview, the recruiter had asked her where she saw herself five years down the road. Selvi replied that she hoped to be in the same position as the recruiter. I thought it was a good strategic answer. But Selvi meant it sincerely. She was kind of old-fashioned; she wanted to move up the rungs at a single company.

We’d been meeting, now, for over a year. I thought we knew each other pretty well. She seemed more comfortable with me. When we talked, she looked me in the eye. She sometimes asked about my personal life. She didn’t dress up for me anymore; in the mornings, she’d occasionally meet me in her nightgown.

Selvi still wouldn’t see me outside the apartment, though, and our meetings had a furtive, shady quality that made me feel vaguely guilty, like I was transgressing some boundary. The guard would sign me in, follow me through a courtyard that led to her building, and then wait outside, as if to make sure I really was taking the stairs to her apartment.

There was a woman in Selvi’s building, a neighbor I assumed, whom I met a couple times on the stairs. Her hair was pulled back in a tight bun, and she had a severe, unwelcoming face. She stared at me the first time she saw me. The second time we walked past each other, I smiled and she looked away. She seemed angry.

I met Selvi one Republic Day, January 26, a date that marks
the formal adoption of the Indian Constitution. The road from Auroville to Chennai was decorated with flags and portraits of freedom fighters. All over the countryside, children in blue and khaki uniforms were standing at attention in schoolyards as the national flag was raised and the anthem played.

Selvi had the day off; she seemed relaxed. She told me about eating at a restaurant the night before with her friends. She emphasized that they didn’t eat at any “fancy, hi-fi places,” but it was nonetheless an indulgence, something she did rarely, and that she wouldn’t have done at home. It was one of the privileges of living in a city; it made her feel special.

“Maybe one time I could come with you?” I asked.

To my surprise, she said she would be fine with that, if her roommates agreed. She went into the bathroom, where two of them were brushing their teeth. I heard a discussion, vague behind the sound of running water, and then one of Selvi’s roommates came out to meet me.

Her name was Sudha. She had a round face, and she was dressed in an orange
salwar kameez
. I introduced myself, I told her that I was writing a book and would love to know a little bit about her life. She seemed to know who I was and why I was there. She said she’d be happy to talk to me, but today she was rushing out because her father was in town.

Her father was a priest. He worked at a temple in the north of the state. He was often in Chennai to officiate at weddings and religious functions, and she was on her way to a
pooja
right now. She was running late; she seemed to be in a hurry.

She gave me her phone number; she told me to call. She stood around for a while, eager to get going, but too polite just to take
off. “Okay, I’ll be leaving now,” she said, finally, and she did something unusual: she stuck out her hand and shook mine.

Selvi started talking about life in Chennai again. She told me about how some of her roommates were going to clubs and bars. They were staying out late, especially on weekends. The city was doing something to them, she said. She leaned a little closer, conspiratorially, and, in a low voice, told me that some of her friends even had boyfriends.

She laughed, a little nervously I thought, and drew back. I asked if she had a boyfriend and she shook her head. “No, I will never go that way. Some people in the office flirt with boys during their break, or at dinnertime. But not me. I always mind my own business. I’m very focused on my work.”

“What about Sudha?” I asked. “Does she have a boyfriend?”

Selvi laughed again; it was a girlish giggle, coy, almost flirtatious. I had never heard her laugh like that before. She ran her hand down the side of her hair, feeling for knots. “You’ll have to ask her,” she said, and she arched her eyebrows. “That’s not a question to ask me.”

I was eager to get to know Sudha. The temple her father worked
at was one of the holiest in South India. It attracted hundreds of thousands of pilgrims a year. He would have been an important man. He would have been a pious man. She would have grown up in a religious household. I was curious to know how she was adapting to the city.

I called Sudha a few weeks after our first meeting. The phone
rang, but she didn’t pick up. I tried again a couple hours later; still no answer. I sent a text message. She hadn’t answered by late in the afternoon, so I called Selvi and said I was trying to get in touch with Sudha. Was she by any chance around the apartment?

There was a pause. “I’m very sorry to tell you,” Selvi said. “Sudha died.”

“What?”

Sudha had skipped work two days before and gone to the coastal town of Mahabalipuram with a friend. A lifeguard had seen them standing on the beach, not far from Mahabalipuram’s famous shore temples. He warned them not to go swimming; he said it was a bad season, the current was strong. Apparently, they didn’t listen. Their bodies were found washed up on the beach half an hour later.

“We’re not keeping very well,” Selvi said. “Sorry, I can’t talk now.”

I got more details about Sudha’s death later that day. Murugan
, their landlord, and the person who had introduced me to Selvi, told me that in fact, Sudha had been at the beach with a boyfriend. They had gone together the day before they drowned, a Sunday, and spent the night at a resort. They checked in under false names. The hotel should have asked if they were married, he said, but no one cared about those kinds of things anymore.

Murugan was upset. He was getting angry phone calls from Sudha’s parents, blaming him for not keeping a closer eye on their daughter. “What am I supposed to do about something like this?” he
asked. “I’m just their landlord. To me, this is a total problem of adjustment getting failed. They had too much freedom in the city, and the girls didn’t know what to do with it. Just running around—now look what has happened.”

Murugan said all the girls were in trouble. Everyone was sure they knew Sudha had a boyfriend; they were supposed to look after each other, prevent these types of things from happening. The girls denied that they knew anything, but Murugan didn’t believe them: he said they were just scared.

They were scared of what their families would say, and they were scared that Murugan was going to evict them (he had no intention of doing that). Most of all, they were scared for their reputations. Murugan said that if word leaked that they were associated with “something like this,” their names would be ruined.

“They don’t know what’s going on, they don’t know what to do,” Murugan said. “They’re just village girls in the city. They thought they could handle everything. They acted like they were on top of the world, without any problems, like they could just ride this wave. They thought they’d keep going, get bigger and bigger. But they totally lack street smarts and the wherewithal to survive in Chennai. City-bred girls are a different lot—they’re much smarter.”

Murugan said he should have seen this coming. He knew they weren’t adapting well. They didn’t know how to live on their own. Their financial situation was a mess; they didn’t know how to keep accounts, how to share costs. Their rent was often late.

Now everything was a mess, and everyone was in trouble. Selvi’s “uncle,” the distant relative who lived in Chennai, had visited
the flat and screamed at the girls. Their neighbors were talking about them. People blamed Murugan and his wife.

“Look how it is,” Murugan said. “Village girls move to the city and ruin their lives. I wish I hadn’t been caught up in this thing.”

Murugan advised me not to call Selvi for a while, and I agreed. She
needed a little space. I waited about a month. When I finally called her, from a car on the highway, the cell-phone connection fading in and out, she sounded composed. She said things had been hard, but that she was feeling a bit better now. She told me, unprompted, that she hadn’t known anything about Sudha’s affair. She said Sudha kept to herself; she was on another project at work. “She didn’t share these things with us,” she said. “We didn’t know her so well. Really, we didn’t.”