India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (29 page)

“See, not everything about the new India is depressing,” I said to Naresh, and he laughed and said that it was good we could afford to come to places like this so we knew what to criticize. Naresh wasn’t above a little self-deprecation.

The talk turned to the financial crash that had swept through the West and lapped up on the shores of India. Around the world, capitalism was in crisis. There was no doubt that the economic system Vinod and Naresh so reviled was reeling. But it was hard to figure out just how this crisis was playing out in India.

In the papers, there were reports of pink slips and hiring freezes. The stock market was down dramatically—more than 50 percent, at one point. But corporate earnings seemed relatively healthy, Indian banks didn’t face the existential crises of their counterparts in the West, and, most of all, the country’s spirit seemed unabated. I saw little sign that India’s exuberance was in any way shaken.

“Is the recession for real?” asked a headline in one of India’s leading newspapers, over an article about the persistence of conspicuous consumption in the country.

A number of papers reported on a business confidence survey that found—in the somewhat impenetrable language of the reports—that India was the “third best country that will tide over the global economic crisis.”

Naresh and Vinod had a slightly different take on things. For them, the crisis validated their skepticism about capitalism. Vinod talked about watching America bail out its banks and car companies. He said these were “socialist measures.” It was exactly what people like him had been saying India should do for decades. So why was the country so eager to sell off and shut down its ailing
public sector industries? Why did so many thousands of workers have to lose their jobs in the name of efficiency?

Vinod said: “India’s greatest strength was its public sector—its banks, its railways. But when the public sector was going down, we were always told we had to dump the whole system. Does the West do that when it has problems in capitalism? They don’t dump the whole system.

“What we always suspected about those financial firms was shown to be true. Before, we were always criticized as doomsday people. People would mock me. They’d say I didn’t get that India was going places. They would call me a commie. They would bash us just because we said that the country should take it a little easy. Now that this whole thing has gone down, they have nowhere to hide.”

The irony was delightful; it was hard to avoid the feeling that people got what they had coming. Vinod said that watching the system implode was a bit like watching a glutton who eats himself to death. He spoke of “poetic justice.”

Still, Vinod and Naresh both agreed, they couldn’t take too much satisfaction from the situation. Naresh pointed to the nation’s resilient cheeriness. In fact, people were saying that India’s relatively controlled brand of capitalism—its more tightly regulated capital markets, its remaining controls on foreign capital and investment—would allow the nation to ride things out and even position it to emerge at the top of an Asian Century. In some ways, Naresh said, India’s comparative economic health had strengthened its faith in a model that he continued to believe was unjust and inegalitarian.

“India’s the one place in the world where there hasn’t been a real debate over capitalism,” Naresh said. “The country’s growing at
six percent instead of eight percent, so everyone thinks everything is okay.”

“They still don’t admit that it’s a failure of the system,” Vinod said. “Corporate greed in this country has reached a point of no return. Its appetite is insatiable. But if we keep following these kinds of policies, I believe they will blow up in our faces one day.”

We finished our beers, we ate the last french fries. The bartender turned the music up, and it became hard to hold a conversation. The evening was just beginning in that bar; it promised to be a fun night. For us, it was time to leave.

Vinod got into a car, went home. I was staying at Naresh’s. On our
way back to his place, walking through the buzz of Bandra’s busy nightlife, stumbling a little on the cracked pavement, we came across a family living on the street. There was a father, a mother, and three children. They had set up a tent of sorts, fabric strung over a pole. A couple cardboard boxes, containing what I assumed were their worldly possessions, were piled under the tent.

One of the children sat with his father by the boxes; two were sleeping on the sidewalk with their mother. The children slept on tattered fabrics; the mother slept on concrete. A stray dog hung around. I wasn’t sure if he was domesticated, waiting for a scrap of food, or maybe just searching for solace in the shared company of the dispossessed.

“Look at that,” I said to Naresh, as we walked past the homeless family. “That’s quite a contrast with the place we were just at. I should write about that.”

“It would be a bit of a cliché, wouldn’t it?” Naresh asked, and he laughed. “I think there’s been plenty written about Indian misery.”

Naresh was right. It was a cliché to write about poverty in India, a cliché to point out the contrasts and inequalities within the nation. These stories have been told for decades. India is tired of hearing them, as is much of the world. And so, over the last decade or two, the narrative has changed: now people write stories about Indian upliftment, about a nation on the move, emerging from the shadows of poverty into the glitter of twenty-first-century prosperity.

This more cheerful India is real. But as Naresh and I continued on our way that night, it struck me that its reality didn’t in any way negate the existence of another, far less cheerful, India. I could understand why people were tired of hearing about misery. I could understand why they wanted happy stories. Still, I couldn’t help feeling that we were replacing the old cliché with a new one—that the new, happy narrative was just as simplistic as the old, depressing one.

In that simplification lay the blindness of the nation. I felt a kind of turning away, a refusal (or inability) to stare in the face of all that remained undone. And I couldn’t help feeling, too, that the blindness was a form of complicity—that it was a way of consigning the poor to an immutable state of poverty, and that it was, ultimately, part of the oppression and injustice of modern India.

It was a Friday afternoon, the start of a weekend, and I was in a
car coming back home from Bangalore. It had been a long week. I was tired; I was looking forward to seeing my children.

My driver might have been in a hurry. Earlier that morning in Bangalore, we had been held up by roadwork. We were diverted onto side streets. They were too narrow for the traffic. Buses couldn’t take the turns; cars, vans, and autorickshaws were stuck behind the buses. Everyone used horns liberally. It was pointless, it was maddening, and it lasted for two hours.

It was good to get out of the city, into the open country and onto the uncrowded highways. I suppose we were driving too fast.

At around two-thirty, just about fifteen kilometers from home, we hit two boys on a moped. It happened in slow motion. I saw the moped pull away from under a tamarind tree. It cut across the road at an angle, heading into our path. I saw it, I wanted to
scream at the driver to stop, but it was too late. I was blocked, as in a dream, and I couldn’t say anything.

We hit the moped from behind. The boys were lifted onto our hood, and then dropped to the road. They were carrying lunch in a tiffin. The tiffin flew open; the cover was stuck behind one of our wipers. The windshield was covered in yellow
sambar
and rice. It looked like vomit.

I had rehearsed this moment in my mind a hundred times. Traffic on the roads around Auroville was chaotic. Accidents were common, and they were often followed by an enraged mob. I had heard about drivers—and passengers—who were dragged from their vehicles, beaten and even murdered by the mobs. The driver of my car looked at me, terrified. We escaped to the nearest police station. We left to report the accident before the mob.

As we drove away, I looked behind. I wanted to know that everything was all right. One of the boys, in a blue shirt, was standing. But his friend was on the ground. He was lying in a pool of blood. His right arm was twitching. The boy in blue dragged his friend off the road, back to the shade of the tamarind tree from which they had come.

The police station was in a red brick building, with the wrecks of
vehicles—a crushed car, a burned-out van—scattered in its courtyard. It was a rural outpost on a hot afternoon. Four or five policemen were sitting around, their shirts off, their bellies protruding through white undershirts. The inspector was in his office, slouched
over his desk. His shirt was off, too. His pistol was on his desk; it was out of its holster.

The policemen got up, slowly, and led us into the station. They sat me on a bench. Two of them took the driver into a space at the back. They asked him what happened. They started to hit him. He said: “It wasn’t my fault, they came in front of me.” One of the policemen said: “Why did you turn to the right, you fool?” I heard the crack of his hand against my driver’s face.

A man ran to the station, called from outside. The inspector stood up, put his shirt on, tightened his belt, and walked out. The man said something to him, and the inspector came back in and told his men to get dressed. “Is it all right?” I asked, and the inspector didn’t say anything.

There was a moment of silence, a stillness. The police had stopped hitting the driver. We were waiting for whatever would happen next.

I watched through a window as a boy ran to a house outside the station. He called a name, a woman came out, he told her something, she screamed and fell to the ground, howling, rolling in the sand.

A man pulled her to her feet. A crowd of mostly men gathered in front of the house. They made their way in a procession, about thirty of them, to the station.

The policemen shut the windows. They double-bolted the front door. One of them told me to move farther back, away from the windows and the door. “Family, riot,” he said. He shoved me behind a wall. We crouched together. He was very young; he looked scared.

The men from the village gathered outside the station. They
started pushing my car, rocking it, as if they were trying to topple it. Some of them came up to the station. They were carrying sticks.

A policeman opened the door, told them to leave. They pushed back, started surging toward the station; the policeman closed the door and retreated inside. The men were now banging on the shuttered windows. A few were throwing stones. They were shouting; they were saying a name; they were demanding to be let in.

The policemen seemed confused, unsure how to handle the situation. One of them started hitting the driver again. He needed to show the mob he was doing something.

The inspector was back in his office, at his desk. He put his pistol in a drawer. He played with his cell phone. I didn’t get the feeling he would help me.

I thought of Sathy. I was in his neighborhood. I called him; his phone was busy. I sent him a message: “Call. Urgent.” He called and I told him what had happened. “Don’t do anything,” he said. “I’m on my way. This is my area.”