On the Grand Trunk Road (27 page)
Read On the Grand Trunk Road Online
Authors: Steve Coll
For twenty years Shroff made a living buying and selling junk in Hyderabad, Rao’s city of statues. A brother had moved to Illinois and wrote that America was a land of splendor and opportunity, a place swirling with business deals and millionaires. He invited Shroff to visit. During two stays at his brother’s apartment between 1989 and 1991, Shroff found himself dazzled by the ethos of American capitalism. What amazed him most was the mail: the business offers, magazine offers, lottery games, astrological forecasts, and franchise advice brought to his door each day by the letter carrier. Eager to become a millionaire, Shroff dutifully wrote back to the solicitors. By his count, he sent out and received three thousand letters while in the United States. “I just got the idea of how your people live in your country and grab the business,” he explained. “I wanted to be a millionaire. I wanted to associate with the big people, no doubt.”
And the replies poured in. “Will Amir Shroff win a share of $250 million?” a letter from a magazine clearinghouse began. “Very likely!”
“Now you can add $50 million to your personal Nest Egg,” said another.
“Great news!” reported a self-described property researcher in Florida. “My investigative report indicates that there could be many—MANY SHROFFS—that are currently owed unclaimed money from government offices nationwide and YOU, AMIR SHROFF, could be one of them.” Shroff could not figure out how his ancestors might have left unclaimed property in the United States, but he assumed it must be true. “To be frank with you, I don’t know,” he told me. “My forefathers must have some interest in your country. A person living in your country for nine months has been given so much opportunity.” Indeed, letters seemed to come from every corner of the continent and beyond: the Winners Club, the American Constitution Coalition Foundation, American Family Publishers, Global Lottery Agency, Lucky Lottery Service, the Jupiter Pioneer stamp club, the Trade Leaders’ Club, and on and on. “I have joined so many clubs over there,” Shroff said. “These all came to my residence—I never went anywhere. This was the miracle, I’m telling you.”
Moreover, the letters were personal. They called Shroff “my dear.” He explained: “All the mail contained the appreciation of Mr. Shroff. Why, I don’t know—maybe the destiny and confidence behind me.” Inspired, Shroff even wrote to President George Bush at the White House, telling him what a great job he was doing. And the president—or one of his franking machines—wrote back. “Thank you for your warm and thoughtful message,” said the signed letter on White House stationery. “I appreciate your comments and am encouraged and strengthened by your kind words as I face the many challenges and opportunities before our country. I am grateful for your support.” Shroff, recognizing regal patronage when he saw it, now figured that he had hit the big time. “The postman said to me, ‘Mr. Shroff, are you a politician? Why do you get a letter from George Bush?’ ”
Shroff stumbled into another corner of America’s get-rich-quick subculture, the lotteries. He played—and won. “To be frank with you, Lady Luck is with me,” he said. “I played twenty dollars and won five hundred dollars instantly. Even sitting in India, I am still playing with the Canadian people. This pays me money the easy way.”
Finally it came time for Shroff to return to India. He brought with him all of the correspondence and information about business opportunities he had received through the mail, carefully encased in plastic sheaths and folders. He brought the club membership cards he had been sent—his Discover America at a 50 Percent Discount card, his
Faith Magazine
Life Study Membership Card, his Hertz United States Golf Association card, his Authorized Mason Shoe Dealer Card—and the letters promising he would win millions of dollars soon. Back in Bombay, he gathered up all of his family members and his voluminous files of correspondence and went to the U.S. Consulate to apply for a visa to go back to America. But the consulate turned him down. Its visa department felt, in the circumstances, that Shroff did not intend to return to India, which meant he was ineligible to receive a nonimmigrant visa. The only way he could ever get an immigrant visa would be to win in the lottery held annually by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Devastated, Shroff began calling, writing, faxing, and sending telegrams to Washington daily, looking for help. He said he was disappointed that his friend Bush would not return his calls, but he rings the White House four times daily just in case. He said he was wasting away in his Bombay apartment, waiting for results.
Faith Magazine
Life Study Membership Card, his Hertz United States Golf Association card, his Authorized Mason Shoe Dealer Card—and the letters promising he would win millions of dollars soon. Back in Bombay, he gathered up all of his family members and his voluminous files of correspondence and went to the U.S. Consulate to apply for a visa to go back to America. But the consulate turned him down. Its visa department felt, in the circumstances, that Shroff did not intend to return to India, which meant he was ineligible to receive a nonimmigrant visa. The only way he could ever get an immigrant visa would be to win in the lottery held annually by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. Devastated, Shroff began calling, writing, faxing, and sending telegrams to Washington daily, looking for help. He said he was disappointed that his friend Bush would not return his calls, but he rings the White House four times daily just in case. He said he was wasting away in his Bombay apartment, waiting for results.
“I want to disclose something very, very important,” he said, leaning forward in his stark living room as if about to divulge a secret. “Something is wrong with the government machinery in the United States.”
Since the end of the British Empire, the West has occasionally perceived that it has interests in South Asia, as the United States did during its proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But even the most serious of these interests can hardly be described as vital. Any Western newspaper correspondent filing stories from New Delhi and then looking for them on the front page comes to understand the point quickly. Some South Asians chalk this relative dearth of attention up to racism. But that does not explain very much. The West produces mountains of academic writing, think-tank reports, and journalism about the Middle East and Japan. The point of much of this material is to promote mutual understanding. This is not because of any ebbing of racist attitudes toward Arabs and Japanese. It is because the West perceives material interests in the Middle East and Japan. It sees no comparable interests in South Asia.
The West’s indifference matters in South Asia for several reasons. It reinforces the self-interested arguments of the local elites, which use the specter of Western malevolence to resist full integration in the international economy and to protect their own positions of domestic privilege and control. It feeds, too, the subcontinent’s traditional fear of things foreign, a state of mind developed during centuries of coping with foreign invaders. Most important, it means that South Asia must struggle—against very great odds—to implement resurgent Western ideas such as democracy and capitalism at a time when the West itself does not seem to care very much about how it all turns out.
The West is indifferent to South Asia but it is not absent. Imperial and cold war history cannot be erased, so they are there to be manipulated by those who benefited most from the postimperial and cold war arrangements. Fragments of ascendant Western culture and material prosperity flow through on the satellites and crossed lines, but without explanatory footnotes or warning labels. This again leaves those in power, or in pursuit of it, free to supply their own explanations while seeking some version of national liberation or self-aggrandizement. South Asian nationalism and religious revival are two of the obvious, if complex, responses. Blend this landscape of modern, even futuristic, confusion with the rubble of history—the enduring inequities of the old orders, the decomposition of the Nehruvian state, the surging numbers in self-conscious search of opportunity—and there is fertile ground for conflict. The future and the past are simultaneously up for grabs, and there are accounts to be settled before either is won.
STATES
OF
CONFLICT
OF
CONFLICT
9
Among the Death Squads
If you have a government that promotes people because they are
mass murderers, you have a problem.
—
Mangala Samarweera
Mangala Samarweera
O
f all the bonehead mistakes I ever made, arguably the most bone-headed was the decision to drive away at sunset from the Madhu bishop’s compound. War was on again in Sri Lanka and we had been driving around in it all day. For reasons I no longer retain it seemed important to record what we had seen in a brief news story. The difficulty was that we were stuck in the jungle and the light was going. The bishop of Madhu had offered to put us up for the night at his cool, whitewashed compound, a sanctuary in the battlefield where thousands of civilian refugees were arriving daily to take shelter from the soldiers, guerrillas, and paramilitary hit squads roaming around their villages. To get back to the land of international telephone lines from the bishop’s place, we would have to drive along narrow dirt roads through checkpoints manned by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese security forces. Of course, I was not planning to do any actual driving; I would leave that to Ron, the cherubic Sri Lankan madman who had developed a highly lucrative, monopoly-by-default business of driving journalists around his island’s several wars. Ron’s advantage, aside from nerve, was his divided ethnic lineage—half Sinhalese, half Tamil—which conveniently allowed him to claim that he was a partisan of whatever side of the ethnic conflict he happened to be on at any given moment. This kept him alive and kept his passengers moving through the checkpoints. Ron once drove for the Colombo Hilton but was discharged after returning his polished Toyota with fifty-caliber machine gun bullet holes in the roof and sides. One of these bullets, fired from a helicopter tracking him from overhead, had passed between his parted legs and through the driver’s seat. The car company seemed indifferent about the near-miss but was terribly upset about the Swiss-cheese ventilation. So now Ron worked out of his home near the airport and drove scavenged cars on which he erected great white banners proclaiming neutrality in several languages. He was unfailingly cheerful and game for anything, even bonehead ideas like the drive from Madhu.
f all the bonehead mistakes I ever made, arguably the most bone-headed was the decision to drive away at sunset from the Madhu bishop’s compound. War was on again in Sri Lanka and we had been driving around in it all day. For reasons I no longer retain it seemed important to record what we had seen in a brief news story. The difficulty was that we were stuck in the jungle and the light was going. The bishop of Madhu had offered to put us up for the night at his cool, whitewashed compound, a sanctuary in the battlefield where thousands of civilian refugees were arriving daily to take shelter from the soldiers, guerrillas, and paramilitary hit squads roaming around their villages. To get back to the land of international telephone lines from the bishop’s place, we would have to drive along narrow dirt roads through checkpoints manned by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese security forces. Of course, I was not planning to do any actual driving; I would leave that to Ron, the cherubic Sri Lankan madman who had developed a highly lucrative, monopoly-by-default business of driving journalists around his island’s several wars. Ron’s advantage, aside from nerve, was his divided ethnic lineage—half Sinhalese, half Tamil—which conveniently allowed him to claim that he was a partisan of whatever side of the ethnic conflict he happened to be on at any given moment. This kept him alive and kept his passengers moving through the checkpoints. Ron once drove for the Colombo Hilton but was discharged after returning his polished Toyota with fifty-caliber machine gun bullet holes in the roof and sides. One of these bullets, fired from a helicopter tracking him from overhead, had passed between his parted legs and through the driver’s seat. The car company seemed indifferent about the near-miss but was terribly upset about the Swiss-cheese ventilation. So now Ron worked out of his home near the airport and drove scavenged cars on which he erected great white banners proclaiming neutrality in several languages. He was unfailingly cheerful and game for anything, even bonehead ideas like the drive from Madhu.
For thirty minutes we raced along abandoned narrow tracks through elephant grass and groves of palm. We had the windows down and the tape deck on and we mouthed falsetto accompaniment to Michael Jackson. We passed a couple of checkpoints with ease and thought we were nearing the edge of the fighting zone. Darkness fell quickly and the passing palms faded to black.
Suddenly Ron slammed on the brakes. He killed the headlights and the tape deck and the motor.
Somebody was shouting at us in Sinhalese from a distance. Ron interpreted under his breath. Put your hands up. Open the car doors slowly. Step with your hands in the air to the front of the car. Get down on your knees. Move forward down the road on your knees with your hands still up.
Flashlights glanced across us as we followed these instructions. Gun bolts clicked. We couldn’t see a thing. Ron began a dialogue in Sinhalese with somebody in the shadows. I could not understand a word but it did not sound as if it was going very well. We moved twenty yards down the road, shuffling humbly in the dirt. Ron, still talking like a Gatling gun, finally rose to his feet and walked forward, telling me under his breath to stay where I was. I knelt like this, reaching to the sky, physically and emotionally frozen, until I heard Ron begin to chuckle. Then he began to laugh. Now three or four people were laughing.
“It’s all right,” Ron said. “Come ahead.” An army captain in fatigues and a T-shirt stood near a barbed-wire bunker. He had a pistol in his hand. Soldiers with assault rifles and shoulder-fired grenade launchers joined the group. They were chattering in rapid Sinhalese and still laughing. Ron, now in full salesman’s mode, had his arm on the captain’s shoulder to express collegial intimacy. I asked Ron what the hell was so funny.
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