India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (36 page)

“Where do you get your hope from? Where do you get your conviction?” I asked him. I told him about my sense of hopelessness, about feeling like I was up against an unstoppable force.

“I believe that people have a strong survival instinct,” Vinod said. “I’ve seen how they throw off tyrants throughout history, how
they fight for their lives and freedom. My reading of history is that whenever repression gets out of hand, people rise up. I think we’re in such a moment now. We’re involved in a huge struggle with nature. We’re fighting for our lives. Everything going on now will somehow come to a head. How can this city or this country sustain this kind of growth? I mean, how many more people can you fit into a single room?”

“So you think we’re heading toward major upheaval?” I asked him. I wasn’t sure, really, if the tyrant he was talking about was nature, or the economic system that was destroying nature. I wasn’t sure if he was expressing hope that India would somehow learn to control the environment, or that it would reverse the economic path it was on.

“Who can say for certain what will happen?” Vinod asked. “But one thing I know for sure: There’s going to be a huge amount of destruction. We have to accept that we’re destroying ourselves. We’re engaged in a dark fight with nature, and of course nature will react. This ocean is going to rise, water will take away parts of this city. There will be destruction on a huge scale.”

“That’s not very hopeful,” I said. Vinod said his work was just to push the moment of destruction further and further away. He drew conviction from small things. When he looked around now, for example, he saw a few mangroves and coconut trees, and crows in the trees. They had persevered, they were living despite all the damage. That gave him hope.

“Look,” he said, as we walked back to his apartment, pointing into the garbage. “A flower. A flower has also survived—against all odds.” He was right; it was a red flower, half buried in the plastic. But then I looked closer, and I realized the flower wasn’t real. It was
made from cloth. No real flower could have survived the devastation on that beach.

On a hot Sunday in May, I went for a jog. I went through a forest
in the north of Auroville. It was a beautiful forest, one of the biggest in the area. It was filled with silver eucalyptus, slender acacia, and ancient palmyra trees that stood like sentinels over the land. It was marked by winding dirt tracks and rows of channels that became muddy ponds during the monsoons.

I went in the evening, when the sun was low, when the harsh light of afternoon was turning yellow. I ran past houses, municipal buildings, a few schools, and then, as the development and traffic thinned, into the green. I could always tell where city ended and forest began. The air was cooler, somehow clearer. I felt a sense of upliftment, of stillness and well-being.

There is a clearing in the middle of the forest. It wasn’t always there. It was created a few years after I returned to India, when a landlord from a neighboring village cut down the palmyra trees and cashew groves growing there and built a women’s college.

The college was big and bulky. It had been open for while, but the building was still incomplete, a concrete block with unplastered walls, and steel rods pointing from its roof. The grounds were piled with rubble and overrun with stray dogs. I thought of the college like a gash in the forest.

As I approached the college on that Sunday in May, I felt something in my throat: the garbage reached all the way into the forest. Even there, miles from the landfill, protected (or so I had assumed)
by acres and acres of green, of carbon dioxide–absorbing trees, the smell of burning plastic was strong. It was harsh, repellent, and deeply distressing.

I had to stop running. I leaned against a tree. I crouched on the ground, took a few deep breaths. My heart slowed, but my breathing was labored.

Across from the college, a village entrepreneur had set up a chicken farm. I could hear the cackle of chickens now, cooped up in their cages, and I could smell their shit. Someone was playing a radio; it was loud, Tamil disco music.

A white SUV drove past, its horn honking and its own loud music playing. A man and a woman, tourists by the look of them, sat in the back. I knew that a businessman had bought land in the forest, set up a spa hotel. I assumed the SUV’s passengers were guests.

Forty years ago, there had been no forest. A group of ecologists, the first people to settle in Auroville, had planted and irrigated a barren soil. Then they’d moved out, left the earth to its own devices. It was a gift of sorts, an act of homage to nature, and over the years, a desert had turned into a lush and often wild green land.

Now humans were reclaiming the gift. The country was pushing back in, its lust to build and grow and prosper encroaching upon the territory from which it had once withdrawn. It was a form of colonization. Sitting there that afternoon, with the smell of burning plastic and chicken shit in the air, with disco music and car horns drowning out the birds and crickets, all the development struck me as violence—violence against the forest, of course, but also violence against ourselves.

A woman I knew from a local village was sending her daughter
to the college. She was an illiterate mother, and her daughter was studying engineering. The mother was justifiably proud. She was convinced that her daughter would have a better future. But would she, really? I wasn’t entirely convinced.

I wasn’t convinced, anymore, that any amount of money, any increase in salaries or GDP or the number of cars of billionaires, was worth the damage we were causing to the country and ourselves. I wasn’t convinced that the path the nation had chosen—a path I had so eagerly joined just a few years earlier—was leading to better things. More things, maybe. But not necessarily better.

Maybe I was wrong. Who was I, after all, to speak for impoverished village women? Let them make their own trade-offs, I guess. Let them decide if an engineering degree or a forest—or breathable air—was more valuable. I knew that I was in a privileged position. But I knew, also, that I felt increasingly resentful about the price we (the country, my family, myself) were being asked to pay for development.

A watchman came over from the college and gave me a dirty look. He seemed drunk; he carried a stick. He asked what I was doing there. It seemed like a good question. What
was
I doing there?

I didn’t say anything. The watchman was angry, a little aggressive. I thought I might as well be on my way. So I stood up, I ran away, I ran back home, to my children and my wife, and that night, when the smell of garbage wafted into my bedroom, when my kids started coughing and my eyes were stinging, I shut the windows and turned on the air conditioner, and I did everything to shut out my doubts, I held on to all that was good, all the reasons I had moved to India—and all the reasons I had for staying.

Later that summer, I took a trip to America with my family. We
went to New York. We were escaping the smoke and dioxins of our new home, and my wife and I were revisiting our old life—the bars and restaurants we used to frequent, the bookstores we had browsed, the park to which we had once retreated, sought solace from the city, and in which my children now chased pigeons and marveled at the horse carriages.

Things had changed for us since we’d left the city. We had two sons. We’d built a new life at the edge of a forest. We’d made new friends, and I’d rediscovered the country I had known as a boy.

India felt different, too. It was tougher, in many ways harder to endure. Of course India had always been tough, a little wild; that was part of its charm. But now it was harder to keep the wildness at bay.

I felt tired. I was worn out by the grind, the turmoil and
instability of a nation perpetually in reinvention. It’s hard to believe, but New York, with its eight million people and frantic pace, its grasping scramble to the top, felt soothing. The streets were cleaner, the air was easier to breathe. In Central Park, I met two friends from India. It was their first time in America. They were impressed. “Everything works here,” they said. A few years earlier, I would have dismissed their reaction as a cliché. Now I identified; I agreed in a way that was painful, longing. I wanted to live in a country where things worked.

My wife and I took a trip outside the city, to a summer house on an island in Connecticut. We drove across the Triborough Bridge, and we made a side trip through the back roads of Connecticut, along the well-manicured lawns, the order and security I would have once ridiculed in suburbia. “Everything feels so clean,” my wife said. I knew that the ecological damage was just better hidden, but what she said was true: there wasn’t a plastic bag in sight, no stray dogs or pigs, no rotting vegetables emitting methane gas or deadly dioxins.

One night in the West Village, at a restaurant where we had once been regulars, a few glasses of wine in us and the glitter of the city exhilarating, seductive, my wife asked: “Couldn’t we move back? At least for a little while? Just to recharge our batteries.”

I thought about it over the next days, and, back in India, over the following weeks and months. We talked about it some more. It was tempting. India was certainly exhausting. It was exasperating, and often dispiriting. But our time in America had also soothed us, calmed the nerves left raw by a summer of breathing garbage. There was so much we still loved in India. There was so much to keep us going—just enough uncertainty, just enough movement, just enough
of a sense of things still being played out, a story still unfolding, so that we wanted to be around to see where it was all going.

I had left America because I felt that the country was in many ways at a standstill. I moved to India in search of action. I wanted to feel alive, and I suppose I got a little bit more than I had bargained for. India was undeniably—sometimes terrifyingly—alive. The country was an adventure. On good days, the dust and chaos and danger could seem part of the adventure; they were invigorating. On bad days, I now decided, I would remember the good days.

On my way back from America, I had a stopover in London. I
looked up Hari. I had e-mailed him a few weeks earlier, and now, from the taxi coming in from the airport, I called. He seemed happy to hear from me. In Chennai, I sometimes felt I was imposing on his busy social and work schedule; now he sounded a little lonely. We made a plan for the next day.

He told me he worked near the London Eye. He said I should take the Northern or Jubilee line to Waterloo Station, and meet him outside his office. “Ask for Elizabeth House,” he said. “Everybody knows it—it’s famous.” But when I got out of Waterloo Station, into the thick air of a rainy summer evening, no one could help me. One man I asked for directions pulled at his maroon fedora and said, in accented English: “Young man, I don’t even speak English, how can I help you find this place?”

So Hari came out to the street to get me, and together we made our way to a park bench under the London Eye. We sat just off the Thames. It started raining a little, thick drops that splattered the
footpaths in intervals, with dry gaps between the wet, and I put my umbrella up. Hari, well adapted to the weather, seemed impervious. He kept talking.

He had a lot to say. He told me about the places he’d been visiting, the people he’d met, everything he was learning at work. He loved London. He visited its sights on the weekends. He had seen Big Ben, he’d been to the National Gallery, to the parks, and recently, he’d visited Madame Tussauds, where he posed with Justin Timberlake and J.Lo, but not with Britney, because she was too ugly (“Even Kylie looked better”).

He’d made some friends. He talked about a Taiwanese man he had met online, and a Czech woman he had met at work. She had expressed admiration for how well Hari was adjusting to London. She said it had been much harder for her when she moved to the city. She asked what his secret was, and he told her, “It’s easy, you just have to know how to mix and match,” by which I think he meant you had to remain flexible.

He complained about his roommates, the two colleagues who had come with him from Chennai. He said they were immature, always fighting with each other. They gave long lectures at work about Indian tradition, and about the country’s superior moral values. They praised arranged marriages, they talked about the modesty of Indian women. Hari called them hypocrites. He couldn’t stand people who talked so much about tradition. “What does tradition mean?” he asked. “It’s just a game, a word people use.”