India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (34 page)

I welcomed the progress. But all the destruction seemed a heavy price to pay.

The landfill outside Pondicherry occupied my mind. It was in my
dreams, in my conversations, in the half hour of meditation I did every day. Every morning, I tried to clear my thoughts, find a quiet space. Visions of smoking garbage, of a country in flames, would rush in.

I found myself looking at the world in a different way. I noticed heaps of ash, impromptu burning sites, all over the place. I began
to see plastic bags and discarded mineral water bottles as enemies. Their sight tightened my stomach; I thought of them as hazards, bombs waiting to explode on my children.

In the weeks and months after the smoke started entering my house, I visited the landfill over and over. I wanted to get to know my nemesis. I wrestled with him. I sent out press releases. I met activists and politicians, tried to convince them that something had to be done. Everyone was enthusiastic, everyone had ideas. People made promises. But the scale of the problem was overwhelming.

Solving India’s garbage crisis, I came to see, would require whole-scale social transformation—changing the way government worked, reforming education, instilling a sense of civic consciousness in a population capable of maintaining ritualistic levels of hygiene at home, yet that dumped its garbage on the streets without compunction.

Most important, it would require altering the trajectory of India’s development, nudging the country from the path of more more more it had so gleefully adopted from the West. After all, the landfill had existed for over a decade. It was only now, as Pondicherry and the surrounding villages succumbed to the consumerist culture infecting the nation, that the dump had swollen into a major ecological peril.

I took Sathy with me to the landfill one day. I thought maybe he could help. He was always talking about his connections, about all the politicians and government officials he could introduce me to. He knew how to work the system; I wanted him to work the garbage system.

We took his car. We drove with the windows rolled up, the
air-conditioning on high. We drove through bare, flat land, with goats grazing on dried-out fields and farmers taking shelter from the sun under solitary trees. We stopped and asked two farmers for directions. They were sitting under a neem tree; they were surrounded by plastic bags, paper plates and cups, the detritus of their lunch.

The fields gave way to a forest of acacia and eucalyptus. There were mansions in the forest, large country homes with high stone walls and carved wood doors. Expensive cars were parked in the driveways. The houses belonged to the rich. They were enveloped in smoke, and I couldn’t help thinking they were mansions in a slum.

We parked at the edge of the landfill, by a gypsy encampment, a row of boxy concrete rooms. A yellow sign attached to one of the rooms announced the name of what I assumed was a donor organization. It was a dubious gift. The garbage came right up to and in some cases beyond the camp. As Sathy and I stepped out of the car, we were hit by the smoke. The stench was overwhelming.

A group of four or five gypsies sat on the ground in front of their homes. A woman was delousing her daughter. A newborn baby was lying in the sand, flies swarming on her blood-encrusted belly button. Pigs and chickens and stray dogs ran around. A few children chased the pigs over piles of garbage.

A woman came up to us. She was fiery, with red lipstick, and wild eyes. “What do you want?” she asked, in a gypsy dialect, a version of Tamil that both Sathy and I struggled to follow. “You people always come and promise to help, but you never do anything.” When we told her we weren’t from the government, that we, too, were affected by the dump, she softened. She complained
about the smoke. She said the garbage attracted mosquitoes and flies. She said her children were always sick. They had sore throats, coughs, fevers. They missed a lot of school; they were often in the hospital.

“We used to live in town,” she said, talking about Pondicherry. “Our people lived where the white people lived, right by the big houses and parks. But then we were brought here, promised houses, and we were dumped like we were just a piece of garbage. Look at our lives now. This is the way we live.”

“Don’t worry,” Sathy said, in a fit of zamindar munificence. “We’re working to move the dump. We’re talking to people, and we’ll have all this taken away.”

A young man standing next to the woman shook his head and raised his hand in a supplicant’s gesture. “No, no, sir,” he said. He was shirtless; his
lungi
was old and dirty. “Please don’t move it. It’s our livelihood. What will happen to us if you move this?”

The gypsies were ragpickers. Like the people Vinod worked with in Dharavi, they earned a living extracting recyclable pieces of waste—metals, plastics, glass—from the dump. They got much of their food from the dump, too. The gypsies told me about scavenging for tomatoes, onions, and the occasional chicken bone they used to make soup. It was a hazardous life. But it was the only way they could survive.

Sathy, flustered, suggested we go to the top of one of the houses to get a better view. We climbed up a narrow flight of stairs, to a terrace blackened by smoke. There was a tattered mattress and a blanket on the terrace; they, too, were black.

We were standing, now, above the Karuvadikuppam waste dump. It was an apocalyptic sight, a sea of brown, muddy sludge,
interspersed with flakes of blue and pink and white and red—plastic bags, the occasional computer monitor or keyboard, tubes of toothpaste, and CDs that glinted in the sun. Municipal tractors drove through the garbage, pulling carriages of waste like industrious ants, dumping them indiscriminately, piling the garbage higher and higher.

The landfill was bordered by denuded cotton trees and headless palmyras. They looked sickly; they were draped in torn pieces of fabric. Hanging over it all was a gray pall, a dense accumulation of smoke that lifted with every gust of wind and blew through the gypsy settlement and the neighboring cashew plantations.

As Sathy and I stood on that terrace, we heard a series of pops; the methane gas emitted by the tons of organic waste in the landfill was exploding. Each pop was followed by a burst of crimson and yellow flames.

I cursed the flames. I swore at each pop, denouncing the garbage and the clouds of smoke. I grabbed Sathy by the shoulder. “That’s the shit that comes into my house every night,” I said to him, my voice raised, agitated. “People throw away all that stuff and it ends up in my living room. People in the cities don’t know where their garbage ends up. They don’t know, and they don’t care. It’s a culture of ‘out of sight, out of mind.’ It’s a culture of not caring.

“Everyone’s too busy buying these days; no one thinks about what happens to all that stuff they buy. They don’t give a damn about their garbage, and they don’t give a damn about these gypsies. They certainly don’t give a damn about me or my family.

“Tell me something, Sathy,” I said. “I have two kids. Why should I subject them to this poison? What am I doing to them by living in this country?”

Sathy didn’t say anything. He was uncharacteristically quiet. He just stared at the dump, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders slumped, his eyes behind a kind of glaze. I continued with my diatribe for a while, and then, finally, I asked him: “Sathy, say something. What are you feeling?”

“I feel,” he said. He stopped. He turned to me. He looked at me as if from a distance. “I feel like shit,” he said.

Back on the ground, at the gypsy camp, I found myself talking
again to the young man who had begged us not to move the landfill. His name was Raghu. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he was about twenty-eight years old. He was short and broad-chested; he had rotting teeth, and matted hair pulled back in a ponytail.

Raghu was distressed. I could see he was worried that I really would manage to shut down the dump. He wanted me to understand just what the landfill meant to him and his people. He cornered me under a wilting tree. With a carpet of garbage at our feet, kids and pigs running around, sometimes bumping into each other, he told me about scavenging with his children.

He talked about collecting plastic bottles and cardboard boxes and milk cartons. He said he used magnets to fish out pieces of metal from the piles of composting waste. Life was hard, he acknowledged, but at least he and his children were alive. He said that on a good day, they made around thirty rupees. It wasn’t much, a little over sixty cents, but it was enough—just enough—to eat.

Raghu told me that in the past, the gypsies had been hunters. They had guns; they were able to supplement their incomes by
hunting for birds, rodents, and rabbits in the surrounding fields. But now the government had banned them from using their weapons. Everything they got, they got from that landfill. “If you remove this garbage, we will starve,” Raghu said. “Our stomachs will be empty. We’ll die.”

I told Raghu not to worry. I said I didn’t have the ability to move the landfill. But I asked him, also, about the wild-eyed woman Sathy and I had met when we first arrived, who had complained to us about all the health problems people in the camp suffered. She had talked about sore throats, coughs, and fevers. Another man I’d spoken to, a doctor who had done some work near the dump, had told me that the mosquitoes and flies drawn to the garbage carried diseases like typhoid, dengue, and filariasis.

“What about your health?” I asked Raghu.

“What use is health if your stomach is empty?” he asked me. “Health is secondary for us—living is the most important. This is how we eat.

“It’s not a big problem,” he went on. “If the children get sick we can always take them to the hospital and give them injections and medicine. They take pills, they get better. We’ve been here for twelve years and we’re still alive. I’m strong. I don’t have any big health problems, they come and go.”

As Raghu spoke, a skinny man came over. He was one of the few men in the camp with a shirt on. He listened to us, he waited a bit, and then he interrupted Raghu. “My mother has heart disease, my uncle has blood cancer,” he said, in a low, controlled voice. “This place is killing them. My uncle has seven children. One of them is in the hospital with jaundice right now. Who will
take care of them when he dies? Of course we should move this garbage. It’s certain death.”

Raghu turned to the skinny man with an angry look. He made a loud, aggressive noise, almost a bark. “You shut up,” he shouted, and he told me not to write what the man just said. “He doesn’t know anything. He’s not from here originally, he’s from another village. He doesn’t understand our condition. He’s not one of us—he doesn’t even know how to shoot a gun.”

“I understand everything,” the skinny man said. “Just because I can’t shoot doesn’t mean I don’t know about this poison. I understand that the tsunami came and killed so many people, but it came only once. This comes all the time, it’s like a tsunami every day. When it rains, the garbage comes into our houses. It floods us.”

The skinny man said he was a “decent type.” He didn’t scavenge for a living; he didn’t send his children to the landfill. He sold balloons in a market in Pondicherry. Raghu scoffed. He said selling balloons was an even worse way to make a living than scavenging. Sometimes, Raghu said, the balloons popped and the man lost everything he’d invested.

“He’s an idiot,” Raghu said, talking to me, ignoring the balloon seller. “Even if he lost his balloon business he’d probably refuse to come out here with us. He’d rather be a beggar. He would rather see his family starve. We do what we have to do to feed our family. I have four children—do you think balloons will feed them?

“Don’t write anything he says,” Raghu said again. “He’s just a fool.”

The skinny man repeated that the garbage was killing everyone in the camp. He walked away. Raghu kept talking. He was
trying to convince me now; I could see he was still worried that I would move the landfill.

Scavenging was tough, Raghu said, but it had its rewards. He pointed to a freshly painted house. It was pink and green, a lively contrast to the plain concrete and drab yellow of the other houses in the camp. He said the house belonged to his brother. His brother had saved money from scavenging; he’d bought twenty pigs. He was a rich man now; he could afford to paint his house. He didn’t need to scavenge anymore.