India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (38 page)

Hari said he needed a new job, one that paid a lot more than his current position. He was willing to go anywhere, do anything. He said: “All I need is money, money, money. I’m broke.”

He’d sent out his résumé to dozens of places. He had high hopes; after his posting in London, he expected to get good offers. But times weren’t as positive as they had been. The Indian economy was feeling tremors from the American subprime earthquake, and the software and back-office companies that relied on American business were particularly hard-hit. For all the talk that India had escaped the worst of the global crisis, Indian companies were nonetheless having to cut costs and slow down on hiring. Hari hadn’t been called to a single interview; only one company had even bothered to acknowledge receiving his résumé.

He told me about layoffs at software firms, and salary cuts that were hitting his friends. One of India’s largest software companies, he said, had raised salaries by a mere 500 rupees. Hari was
scandalized, and, I felt, a little disoriented. This wasn’t the world in which he and his friends had come of age; for the first time in his working life, the future seemed uncertain.

“Sometimes I wonder why this is happening to me,” he said. “All my debts, all my financial problems, and now the world economy—it feels like everything is coming in a flood. But I guess somehow I’ll manage. There are always ways to manage.”

One thing, at least, was going well in his life. He’d met someone, a young man, and they’d been spending a lot of time together. Hari was crazy about him. “With everything else happening to me, it’s good to have this one bright spot,” he said. It was his first relationship. He said he was in love.

Hari wasn’t the only one having a hard time. Across the country
, I heard stories like his—stories about frustrated job hunts, about layoffs and slowdowns, and projects that had to be shelved or put on hold. India’s trademark optimism—its enthusiasm for capitalism, its faith in the future—was still evident. There was none of the panic or despondency I sensed in e-mails and phone calls from friends in America. People seemed confident that the troubles were just a blip. But accompanying the unabated (perhaps willful) cheeriness, I did sense a new wariness, and maybe even sobriety.

The new sobriety was most evident in the cities. In Bangalore, the fount of modern Indian business, the crucible of its new economy, there was a palpable change in mood. Nightclubs were less crowded, shopping malls less noisy, and the airport less busy. Hotel rooms, for a while among the most expensive in Asia, were affordable again.

One day Banu took me to meet her uncle, a Bangalore real estate developer. He had done well for himself in the boom years. He’d built a three-story mansion with granite floors and carved teakwood doors. Now, he said, times were tough. He took me to see one of his projects; it was a hole in the ground, with unfinished concrete columns and rusting steel rods. It was supposed to be a commercial center, but financing had dried up. He couldn’t get a loan; his partners were out of cash.

Standing over that hole, the wind blowing cement powder and dust into our eyes, Banu’s uncle said: “We are all just sitting around at home, nothing to do. It was so good for so long, but now it feels like it was just gambling, a dream. We all wonder: When will it end? How much longer can it take? When it will be like it was again?”

At the shopping mall where he worked in Bangalore, Arvind, Veena’s husband, told me that business was definitely slower. He said only the jewelry stores were still doing well. Business was especially brisk on weekends, when middle-aged men bought earrings and necklaces for younger women. Arvind’s theory was that they were buying for their mistresses; infidelity didn’t slow down with the economy.

But things weren’t as good for Veena, Arvind told me, and he said she was having a tough time. When I asked him what was happening, he said I’d better just speak to her myself.

Veena was, as ever, looking for a new job, but this time the conditions were different. She had quit her last job, at the software company, after getting entangled in an episode of sexual harassment. Now she was worried; given current economic conditions, she said, she wasn’t sure what kind of a job she could find. “It’s the
worst time to have to quit a job,” she said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.” I had never seen Veena’s confidence so shaken.

The sexual harassment at work had been difficult to recover from. Veena’s company had defended her, punished the alleged offender. But then, Veena said, she started feeling uncomfortable at work. She decided she didn’t want to stay on.

“It’s an incredible situation,” she told me when I met her in Bangalore. “I’ve only read about situations like this. I was very surprised that this is actually true. I was surprised that men actually behave like this. I’ve always been a male advocate. I always defended men when they were accused of such things. You know, generally, my history is that I always go after men and get them. In the past, if someone has come on to me and I tell them to back off, they always did. If I said, ‘Forget it, take the hint,’ they did.

“It’s hard for me to believe that a man can be so persistent. After all that I’ve been through, I can’t believe I’m without a job. I can’t believe I’m the one in trouble.”

I reminded Veena of the time she told me she never believed a woman who claimed she’d been sexually harassed. She had said that women who had sexual problems at work invited them.

“Well, I’ve changed my mind on that,” Veena said. “I’ve learned that women can’t always be as strong as I thought. I thought we could always push back when someone tried to pressure us. Now I know: sometimes, no matter what, we end up victims.”

Mostly, what I felt in India those days, for much of 2009 and parts
of 2010, was a kind of stunned silence. As the global economy
stumbled from crisis to crisis, stuttered in and out of recessions, the nation held its breath. There was a kind of watchfulness, a certain muted apprehension. Could the party already be over? Could the celebrations of the last decade have been premature? Or would—as the press and politicians kept assuring us, perhaps a little too stridently—the contagion soon pass us by?

There was silence in the media, where the cheerleading evident for so long was replaced by a new self-restraint. There was silence in the cities, where shops and restaurants were emptier; and silence in the tech parks and recruitment centers, where business was down and young men clutching engineering degrees, raised on the assumption of an ever ascendant job market, were shocked to find their skills no longer in demand.

There was silence, too, from Hari, who had stopped replying to my e-mails and phone calls. His phone would ring and ring without an answer. Often, I would get a recorded message saying his phone was switched off. I got this message for weeks on end. I started to worry.

Then Leo, the friend who had introduced us, told me that Hari had bought a new number. He was giving it out only to close friends. Leo said Hari’s financial situation had worsened. He was trying to avoid the banks and credit card companies that kept calling him about his debt. I called Hari on his new number, and he told me that yes, things had deteriorated; he was trying to keep a low profile.

He was getting harassed by collection agencies now. They would call him at work, they would call him at home. For a while, he’d been able to roll over some of his debt by taking new loans. But as the economy got worse, banks started cracking down; no
one would lend to him anymore. Hari said he was barely able to make his monthly payments.

We met a short while later, in our old haunt, the coffee shop in Chennai with cool air-conditioning and synthetic leather chairs. Hari was waiting for me when I got there, sitting at a table eating a piece of chocolate cake. He had circles under his eyes; his hair was uncharacteristically unkempt. “Are you still a regular here?” I asked, and he shook his head and said he’d barely left his apartment in a month. “I just sit at home these days,” he said. “All I do is stare at the wall and wonder what happened to my life.”

Hari had lost his job. It wasn’t entirely clear what had happened, although I thought I could read between the lines of the story he told me. He said his manager had submitted a negative performance report. She said he wasn’t living up to his potential. According to Hari, the real reason she’d given him a negative report was because they had personal differences.

Hari was angered by the report; he said he quit his job. An old friend offered him another job; he had a business that handled outsourcing projects, and he promised Hari a good salary. But the friend started having trouble getting contracts, and he couldn’t pay Hari what he’d promised. Hari felt deceived. He thought the friend was being dishonest.

Hari confronted his friend, and his friend accused him of lacking loyalty. He said business was tough; Hari didn’t understand his situation. He said Hari cared only about money; he called him greedy. Hari told him: “I was very clear with you when I joined you. You knew about my debt problems. You knew that I needed
money and that’s why I quit my old job.” They had an argument; Hari told his friend to “fuck off.” He quit that job, too.

Now Hari was unemployed, heavily in debt, and scared. The last two checks he’d written to his credit card company had bounced; if a third one bounced, they’d file a court case against him. He said he really had no idea what to do. He’d applied for jobs everywhere he could think of; he’d even sent his résumé in to an airline. He hadn’t heard anything back.

He just sat at home staring at a wall. He wondered where he would go, he wondered what he would become. He was disappointed and shocked. He was having trouble sleeping.

I asked Hari if he’d told his parents about his situation. He clenched his jaw; there was no way he was going to turn to them. “I don’t want support from them,” he said. “I’m finished with them. Let them pretend we’re a happy family all the time—we’re just a pretend family.”

I told Hari he seemed angry. He said: “I’m angry because in my street every single mother wanted a son like me. I was so perfect, I seemed so good to everyone. And now, if people come to know the things I’ve done in my life, if they come to know me, who I really am, they won’t ever want a son like me—never, ever. Everything is blank for me. I have no future.”

I brought up the topic of coming out to his parents. He laughed; he sounded bitter. He said he wasn’t scared anymore. He was going to do it, as soon as his sister was married. He was going to look his parents in the eye and say: “I know what I am, and I’m not going to change. Accept it or not—I won’t change.”

His phone rang; he looked nervous. But it was his private number.
He picked it up, made a plan with a friend for that evening. “If I switch on my other mobile I’ll be dead,” he said. “They chase me all the time. ‘What’s happening with your payment? Why is it late? Why did your checks bounce?’”

He looked out the window, where the traffic was, unusually, moving smoothly. He said: “Even the one thing that was going well for me is gone now.” He’d broken up with his boyfriend. The boyfriend had been too jealous, so Hari called it off. The boyfriend called him one night, around midnight, and threatened to jump off the roof of his hotel. Hari talked him out of it, and in the morning his boyfriend sent him a text message: “You are one A-class, third-rated bitch.”

Hari replied: “Thanks for the compliment.”

The story seemed to cheer him up a bit. He started telling me about all the great sales that were happening in the city. It was just his bad luck that the biggest discounts were available now, when he had no money. Benetton had a huge sale under way. It was a good thing he’d been locked away at home, depressed; if he had gone to the store, he said, he wouldn’t have been able to resist.

I reminded Hari of the time we had gone shopping together in Spencer Plaza. I reminded him of the way he and Nikhil had been so sure of themselves, so certain they’d have their pick of jobs. He laughed at the way he’d flashed his credit cards around, at the memory of his easy confidence. Back then, he never imagined that things would turn out this way.