On the Grand Trunk Road (26 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
We said we wanted to see the main palace out in Mahmudabad proper, fifty miles from Lucknow, and he gave us directions. He mentioned the somewhat confusing fact that his wife, a Hindu Brahmin, was at present staying in the Mahmudabad palace in purdah, the Islamic system of strict segregation of women. Thus she could not receive me, but she would probably be glad to talk to Rama. In New Delhi and London, Suleiman’s wife enjoyed a modern, liberated life. But when in the kingdom, she did as the kingdom does, covering herself from head to toe and living in isolation with women from the palace grounds and the surrounding village.
We rattled out to Mahmudabad in our hired Ambassador, antique pride of the centralized Indian automobile industry, a chugging bubble replicating Britain’s 1953 Morris Oxford. We passed through the green fields of Uttar Pradesh farm country—paddies, cane, groves of fruit trees. At the palace a corniced yellow archway rose before a shaded lawn. An old man with a white beard and a Nehru cap guarded the entrance with a stick. He ushered us through the decaying grounds and into the musty palace. The drawing rooms and ballrooms and dining room were virtually empty, the furniture having been carted off and sold for cash years before. Lizards darted across the throne-room floor. Goats brayed in the yard. Ten-foot oil portraits of Queen Victoria and the bejeweled rajas loomed from the walls. There was no electricity. We wandered into the rear grounds to take some pictures, past an empty ritual pool. A shower rolled up and doused us with rain. Crows and vultures fluttered to the palace eaves.
When we started back to Lucknow, the Ambassador broke down, so we hiked back to the palace to wait for help in the form of Suleiman, who had said he was coming to Mahmudabad in the evening. We sat with the guards among the yapping stray dogs. Rama went in to visit with the raja’s wife, who sat on a carpet in a mildewed, darkened room, instructing local women about their marriages and their problems. When Rama returned, we talked through the sunset about Mahmudabad, and the way history fades and the future rises on the same decayed ground, and everybody—Suleiman, his London-bred wife, Abedi, the Mahmudabad villagers—is understandably confused. As we talked, monsoon clouds raced across the sky. The bell tower struck five times at six o’clock. A bearded mullah sang the call to evening prayer. “Allah O Akbar...”
When Suleiman showed up, he agreed to send us back to Lucknow in his own Ambassador, but he said there was a problem. His wife’s cousin, a public relations executive from Dubai, was visiting, and he had promised her, too, a ride to Lucknow. In Dubai, she went to work in a skirt and heels, but here she was in purdah and thus could not sit in the backseat with me without offending the sensibilities of Mahmudabad’s former subjects and present citizens. Suleiman’s scientific mind devised a solution. A black curtain would be erected between the front seat and the back seat of the Ambassador. The car would then back up to the section of the palace reserved for purdah. Servants would draw enormous black drapes around the car. In this privacy, the cousin and Rama would enter the backseat and secure the curtains. Then the drapes would be withdrawn and I could enter the front seat. I watched this solution unfold in a state of disbelief. Finally climbing into the car, I thanked Suleiman for his hospitality and apologized for the problem caused by our failed Ambassador. He replied that it was no bother. “Uttar Pradesh is a mess,” he said. “Nothing works.”
In this way we made the two-hour drive to Lucknow, segregated in seventeenth-century Islamic tradition, but chattering all the while in English about shopping and business in Dubai.
South Asia cannot escape the West, however much some sections of its leadership may wish to do so. The most important commerce in ideas is carried on by people like Suleiman, the millions of South Asians who move freely between the two worlds. The large subcontinental cities mark the intersection. There great tribes of native professionals and businessmen and minor royalty, whose families have partially emigrated over the last few decades to countries such as Britain, the United States, and Australia, return to “find” themselves and to cook up a few political and business deals along the way. These émigrés, half in and half out, exude a heightened energy, uncertain about which world to conquer and which set of values to build upon. Often they seem determined to do everything at once. Benazir and Abedi and Suleiman are hardly the only ones. Their stories are replicated hundreds of thousands of times these days in more obscure but no less vivid dramas involving college-age students searching for identity, trading families searching for opportunity, writers searching for language. Strike up a conversation in the jumbled economy-class cabins of the overbooked 747s jetting between South Asia and the West and you will hear yet another tale: the young Indian engineer coming back from America to an arranged marriage about which he feels ambivalent ; the expatriate Keralite Muslim construction worker shuttling between his jungle village and Dubai, ferrying bags of electronics and fistfuls of gold; the carpetbagging businessman with a different visiting card for each of his two dozen offshore companies; the daughter of disenfranchised South Asian royalty who observes that for all the privileges of living in the West, what she finds most liberating is that everybody has to clean their own toilet. South Asia and the West talk to each other in a babel of jumbled, misunderstood conversations. The cultural collision resembles the South Asian telephone network, with its “crossed lines” on which you hold a conversation simultaneously with three or four other parties. You can try to talk through the chatter, or you can sit there and yell “Crossed line hai!” until everybody else gets off. Either way, the conversation is fragmentary.
Although South Asia’s history raises obstacles to its future, the future’s call remains insistent. For one thing, the truth of the cliché about a rapidly shrinking world is nowhere more visible than on the subcontinent. Satellites now beam American and British twenty-four-hour news and sex-pop videos into vast blocks of cable-wired middle-class apartments in New Delhi, Bombay, Madras, Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad. So large is the appetite for this programming that even the present governing Islamic conservatives in Pakistan have decided to permit domestic CNN broadcasts, though they employ a censor to turn the picture fuzzy whenever a woman appears in a short skirt.
In my New Delhi neighborhood rival underground cable operators literally battled to win the profitable right to sell Western programming. The founder of our particular local franchise spent six years in American prisons on heroin-trafficking charges; presumably he knew the value of a captive audience. He strung his cables on trees and through bushes, and when the system failed, as it did frequently, he sent around circulars blaming his troubles on his enemies and promising victory. One that turned up on our doorstep went like this, the English as found:
THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. Don’t Panic. After Receipt of this Circular, immediately DIS-CONNECT our CABLE input Socket from your T.V. Set. Our system has been Sabotaged once again. As promised in our earlier circular, regarding the Re-Vamping of the Cabling, we had somehow accomplished the task to a certain extent, and taken the cables from Rooftop to RoftTop. The same culprits who had earlier indulged in massive sabotage of the cables, after finding that they could no longer reach our cables physically, have in a maddenning Frenzy, adopted the worst method possible. They have run a 220 Volts of Electrical current in our cables; This ugly trick surpasses all moral and Ethical behaviour. It is no more Business!! This Criminal Act has been committed with the slightest regard for human life.... Two of our Technicians were badly wounded. We shall have no objection in case you prefer not to wait, by making Alternate Arrangements, from the same people, who have thus far, shown no Mercy, for our members. They could’nt careless whether human lives are lost, in a Tragic Manner, so long as their coffens are being filled in.... We genuinely feel SAD, for this disruption caused by anti-social Elements trying to do hegitimate business, but again in an Illegitimate manner. WITH PROFOUND SORROW ...
Even totalitarian governments have trouble managing the Information Age; in wide-open South Asia, controlling the spread of new technologies and ideas is a lost cause. In obscure Indian market-town bazaars, entrepreneurs in dilapidated stalls hawk videotapes of Swedish erotica and maudlin American made-for-TV dramas about surrogate motherhood and euthanasia. In all but the very poorest villages television antennae protrude from mud-brick homes that lack piped water. Once, covering an election in Punjab, I drove for hours from timeless village to timeless village with Dinesh Kumar, a young reporter at the
Times
of India. There were few paved roads in the villages but plenty of antennae. In Ludhiana, we weaved through hordes of bicycle rickshaws and stray cows and found a hotel, where we planned to eat lunch. Sikh separatist guerrillas had forced the hotel to close its restuarant, so in order to eat we had to check in and order room service. Our room overlooked a rancid mud garbage dump, but it did have a TV, and we turned it on while waiting for our
samosas.
Up came talk-show host Phil Donahue, speaking earnestly to a New York audience about mother-daughter prostitute teams. Dinesh stared in silence for a while, then turned to ask, “Do people in America really watch this?”
Times
of India. There were few paved roads in the villages but plenty of antennae. In Ludhiana, we weaved through hordes of bicycle rickshaws and stray cows and found a hotel, where we planned to eat lunch. Sikh separatist guerrillas had forced the hotel to close its restuarant, so in order to eat we had to check in and order room service. Our room overlooked a rancid mud garbage dump, but it did have a TV, and we turned it on while waiting for our
samosas.
Up came talk-show host Phil Donahue, speaking earnestly to a New York audience about mother-daughter prostitute teams. Dinesh stared in silence for a while, then turned to ask, “Do people in America really watch this?”
The degree of confusion that arises at the cultural intersection is difficult to overstate. South Asians tend to see their roles as tragic, as was the case with Benazir and Abedi, and it is hard to blame them. But the clash of cultures is also sometimes comic. N. T. Rama Rao, a wildly popular, self-aggrandizing movie-star-turned-politician in south-central India, a man who routinely cast himself as God on the big screen, had a fondness for grandiose symbols. He was especially enamored of statues, and when he got elected as chief minister of Andhra Pradesh state he began erecting them all over Hyderabad, the state capital. A significant percentage of the bankrupt state budget was allocated to commission statues of mythical and historical figures from the region’s past. Then Rao fell ill, and like nearly everybody in South Asia who can afford it, he flew off to the West for diagnosis and surgery. In New York, he saw the Statue of Liberty and was awestruck. He pledged to outdo the statue on behalf of the huddled masses of Andhra Pradesh. On his return to Hyderabad, Rao earmarked more than $5 million in public funds to commission an enormous statue of the Buddha, which he planned to install on a platform in the middle of Hyderabad’s central city lake. It would be the largest monolith ever erected. For several years, hundreds of shirtless stone masons chipped away at a granite hillside outside Hyderabad, painstakingly carving the Buddha’s figure. But when it was finished, state engineers pointed out to Rao that he had misunderstood something about the Statue of Liberty—it was hollow, and thus not so heavy, whereas the Hyderabad Buddha was solid rock and extremely difficult to move. Unfazed, Rao allocated more money to construct a widened road between the granite mountain and the city center, and he hired transport engineers from Calcutta to build special trucks and barges to move his statue. It took days to roll the Buddha into town, but it was done. At an auspicious dawn selected by astrologers, Rao gathered with city fathers at the shore of the Hyderabad lake to watch the statue be loaded onto a barge and ferried to the platform at the lake’s center. But as the barge pulled away from shore, it began to list under the weight of the huge Buddha. The boat tipped this way and that. The statue plunged toward the water, broke free from its straps, and splashed into the depths.
“I worked so hard, found the rock, brought it from such a long way,” Rao told me afterward at his house in Hyderabad, where he summoned up what I took to be stage tears during our conversation. “I am sorry. The great saint is lost in the waters of the Hussain Sagar.... You [Americans] have the appreciation of the liberty of the nation. I wanted something like that.... That would have been my contribution to society.”
After several years resting at the bottom of the lake, the statue finally was hauled out of the depths by an engineering company and set on its pedestal. Rao, not coincidentally, did not fare so well. He is at present out of office, trying to decide whether to cast himself as God again in the movies.
You figure that a politician like Rao gets what he deserves. But then there are the ones like Amir Shroff, the Hyderabad junk dealer who once spent an afternoon with me talking about how the West had ruined his life. Shroff caught my attention with one of those unsolicited letters Western correspondents in South Asia frequently receive, the ones describing massive conspiracies afoot to ruin innocent citizens. I read all of these carefully, out of my growing fondness for expressions of political paranoia. One persistent correspondent in Kanpur wrote every few months to express his outrage that the world was not paying attention to his astrological earthquake forecasts. As for Amir Shroff, it was difficult to tell from the documents he sent—astrological sketches of concentric circles and lotus flowers describing his spiritual and financial predicament—what, exactly, had gone wrong. At first I thought that he might have gotten fleeced by American businesses, and that it might be a good thing to help him. But when Rama and I arranged to see him at his splotched, fetid apartment in Bombay, the problem turned out to be nothing quite so straightforward as that. Shroff had fallen into the great sea of American junk mail and had been unable to climb out. His was a tale of confusion and crossed signals in the postmodern global village.
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