India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (40 page)

As far as Hari could tell, his company hadn’t signed up a single new client since he’d started working. “Things are very difficult out there,” he told me. “The world economy is in a terrible situation. We’re lucky that we escaped it.”

“Did we?” I asked him. I pointed out that he’d gone months without a job. I reminded him that he wasn’t getting paid anywhere near what he had wanted or expected when he came back from London.

I asked if he wasn’t worried about the fact that he hadn’t found any new business for his company. What if they decided they couldn’t afford to keep him around?

“No, why should I worry?” Hari asked, smiling. He took a bite of his apple pie. “This is how I understand it. Times were bad, I went through hard times. But now they’re good again. I’m back in the good times. I know my company won’t fire me. I don’t see why I should worry about anything.”

Veena was back at work. It had taken her a little while to find a
new job. Opportunities weren’t as plentiful, and, she said, she was a little more fussy. She wasn’t the same woman (“girl,” she called herself) who had moved to the city all those years ago. She knew her worth now. She had higher expectations.

The position she finally found paid a little less than her previous one. But she had learned that money wasn’t the only—or even the best—measure of a job. She said she had a lot more responsibility at her new company. She was the head of a department at a large export business. She had more than forty people working under her. She’d grown revenues by more than 200 percent.

I talked to Veena on the phone once about her new job. She sounded enthusiastic. She said her company treated her well, and it offered a lot of scope for what she called “career development.”
This time, she told me, she wasn’t going to look for other opportunities. She felt like she was on a good track. She was going to keep her focus, see where that track led.

Veena was committed to her company. She talked, uncomplainingly, about the long hours she worked. But then, when I visited her in Bangalore one rainy Monday, just before five in the evening, she was already at home. These days, she told me, she left the office early. She’d just come back from six weeks off the job. She was trying to take it a little easy; she needed to slow down.

A couple months earlier, I’d woken up one morning to find the
following text message from Veena on my phone:

I stayed in touch with her and Arvind over the following weeks. I didn’t want to intrude—just a text message or short phone call here and there. I heard about them from friends. I heard that the results of the CT scan were positive, and that Veena had gone into the hospital for surgery. I heard that the surgery was tough, long, but that it went well.

By the time I visited Veena in Bangalore, she had pretty much recovered from the surgery. She’d spent ten days in the hospital,
and another twenty or so at home, mostly in bed. She told me the pain had been intense—more intense than anything she could have imagined. She said she’d been weak, and that she’d lost a lot of weight. I told her she looked the same to me. “Yes,” she said, and she laughed. “Unfortunately, I’ve put it all back on.”

She led me up the stairs to the third floor of the house she and Arvind were renting. It was a large house, with four bedrooms and a small garden in the front. It was an impressive building. I knew it was testament to the progress they’d both made in their careers.

At the top of the house, under a tile roof, we sat side by side on a wooden sofa. The room was dominated by a large pool table covered with a blue plastic sheet. A string of colorful Chinese lanterns hung over the table. Veena said the lights had been set up for a New Year’s party, but they’d been forced to cancel the party.

She spoke a lot that evening; I felt she was unburdening herself. She talked about what she’d been through—her diagnosis, the surgery, conversations with various doctors, the emotional roller coaster she and Arvind had been subjected to. She was remarkably upbeat. She said that initially, she had felt great fear—“terror,” she called it—but that now she was learning to control her mind. It was one of the best things to have come out of the experience. In the past, her mind had always been whirring; now, with the aid of yoga, with some meditation, and through sheer willpower, she was learning to focus on the present.

“Arvind and I decided early on that we wouldn’t break down,” she told me. “Just by pretending to be brave, we found some kind of courage. It gives me an incredible amount of peace to know that the only thing I have to deal with is just this moment.”

She focused on the positives; she told me about another good
thing that had come out of her diagnosis. The confusion she’d felt for so long—about her career, about the choices she’d made, and most of all about the balance between her professional and private lives—had dissipated. She said she had a new clarity.

In the past, work had always consumed her. She thought it was the only thing that mattered. Now she had a different view. It was a very new Veena who told me: “If you just go from one job to the other, your career is going well, but you’re not progressing as an individual. You’re pursuing your ambitions, not your dreams. I’ve understood now that I could be writing short stories instead of nasty e-mails at the office. An individual is capable of doing a lot of things, but we let work define us. We don’t think anything else is important.”

She had so many plans: she wanted to write a book, she wanted to travel. Most of all, the clarity she’d found had convinced her, finally, that she did want children. She told me that her mother had come down to Bangalore from Jaipur when she’d first been diagnosed. She’d stayed with Veena in the hospital for ten days; she hadn’t gone home for even one hour during that time. Veena told me this with awe. It had made her realize what it meant to be a parent. Nothing was as important as one’s children. That was a feeling—a sense of commitment, a certain purpose—that Veena wanted to know in her own life.

There was another way, too, in which her illness had convinced her she wanted kids. She said she’d been thinking more about Arvind, and what it meant to be married to him. He’d been a rock; he’d supported her so much. But she had no illusions: she knew that if she died, he’d carry on. She wondered, though, what would happen to “us”—to the joint entity they’d created by getting married and living together. That “us” meant so much to Veena. She realized
she wanted it to survive her. “And that,” she said, “is when I really thought we should have kids. That’s the ‘us’ that would survive.”

As Veena spoke—spoke in a torrent, as if reaching deep within herself, to the bottom of her recent ordeal—dark clouds rolled across the sky. It rained gently at first, a few patters against the tile roof, and then the clouds broke into an unseasonable downpour, a crash so loud that I had to move closer to Veena to hear what she was saying. A cool breeze blew in. I found myself hugging my knees, holding them closer to keep my body warm.

“What I’m not able to tell you, and what I’ve not been able to tell anyone, is how big this is,” Veena said, looking outside, through the rain. I wasn’t sure, but I thought she was welling up with tears. “Now you see me, and I look normal. But I can’t explain the terror to you—the uncontrollable terror, the reigning terror. It was like drowning twenty-four hours a day. I think my biggest achievement in all of this is the control of the terror. I have to focus on the moment. If I project into the future, then the terror will take over.”

She was quiet for a while. When she spoke again, she returned to the positives. “Maybe I’m allowed to say stupid things in front of you, maybe you have to listen,” she said. “But the fact is that every time I’ve had a serious issue or illness in my life, it has taken me to a better thing. Every time I’ve had a tough period, it has been followed by a better period. It is my belief that I can come out of this thing better and stronger. It’s like a rebirth.”

It felt strange to be back in Bangalore. Driving to my hotel from
Veena’s place that evening, past the multitude of construction
sites, the lit-up towers of scaffolding that were crawling with laborers even at that late hour, I could see that the city was picking up again, awakening from the slumber imposed on it by the economic slowdown. I noticed that restaurants and bars were livelier, shopping malls full of eager customers once more.

I had a couple nice meals in the city. One night, I went to a bar by myself. I sat in a corner, basked in the anonymity, the comforting privacy of urban crowds, that I sometimes longed for in Auroville.

The truth, though, was that I wasn’t spending as much time in the cities. I was less attracted to them. Something in me had changed, or maybe settled. I wasn’t so drawn to the confidence and optimism of urban India. That was a story I didn’t fully believe in anymore. After more than seven years in the country, I knew that India’s future—like its present—was a lot more complicated than the postcard version offered by the cities. I found the countryside more real, and more honest.

In Pondicherry, Sathy, who was still living in a rented house with Banu, told me that he, too, was tired of urban life. He was tired of hearing horns and his neighbors’ televisions all day, tired of the washed-out, starless skies. He longed for his village; he missed the slow pace of life and sense of community, of belonging, that he remembered from Molasur.

He still kept a room in his family house, but he said Banu tried to keep him away from the village as much as possible. She wanted him to show commitment to their life in Pondicherry. She wanted him to place family first.

I had noticed a few changes in Sathy since he moved to Pondicherry. He dressed up more, in long-sleeved shirts and pants. I rarely saw him in sandals anymore; he wore closed leather shoes.
He was working part-time at a business in town. (I was one of the founders of the business, so Sathy was, improbably, working with me as a consultant.)

I noticed, also, that Sathy’s stomach had grown; he no longer walked his fields. Sometimes, when I asked him about village life, when I wanted to know about how certain crops were doing or whether farmers were satisfied with the monsoon, he fumbled his responses. It was clear to me that he was a little out of touch.

Sathy’s citification reached its height one January, when he missed the annual Pongal festival in Molasur. Banu wanted him to spend Pongal with her. His mother implored him to come home. Sathy hesitated. He spent one morning of the three-day festival in the village. But that year, for the first time in his life, Sathy wasn’t in Molasur when the offering to the gods took place at his house.

Sathy said his mother didn’t say much; he could see she was disappointed, but she didn’t want to put pressure on him. The pressure, he told me, was in his own head: he worried that he was losing his roots. “When I visit Molasur, I feel like I’m a stranger, as if I’m a guest in my own house,” he told me one afternoon, after we had lunch in Auroville. “I’m being pushed into that category now—pushed by other people, but mostly by my own mind. It’s a psychological feeling.”

Recently, he said, he’d woken up at two in the morning to take his son’s dog for a bathroom walk. He looked out the window, and he saw the moon. It struck him as beautiful, something special. But then he remembered that he used to see the moon every night—that it was in fact something normal, that all his life he’d taken the night sky for granted. He said he felt just like a city dweller then, staring in astonishment at a “natural phenomenon.”

City life was cut off from nature. It felt synthetic. People never went for walks. They just drove everywhere, and they never came into contact with their surroundings.

“I’ve seen the worst of life,” Sathy told me. “I’ve seen the suffering of village people, their poverty, the murders, the suicides. I’ve been to the mortuaries, seen how they die. Once I took two bodies, a father and his daughter who had been struck by lightning in the fields. They were black, burned all over. I saw the rats tearing at bodies, I had to buy country liquor so that the people working in the mortuaries could build up the courage to cut the corpses. I’ve seen all of this, Akash. This is the reality of life. City people don’t understand any of it. They don’t understand life.”