The Beautiful and the Damned (26 page)

The pyramids were not very large, perhaps thirty feet high, and were made of granite. They had names – Khafres and Khufus [sic] – but like all the other proper nouns echoing through the resort (‘Lawn of Isis’, ‘Lawn of Osiris’, ‘Prometeus [sic] Unbound Health Club’),
the names suggested not Egyptian or Greek but an Indian sort of Disneyland. Yet although money had been spent in putting up the resort and effort expended in creating a clean and comfortable complex, Papyrus Port was still more an idea than a place, with the offerings in the brochure far more generous than what was available in the actual resort.

The pictures showed a large swimming pool, a huge conference hall, a zoo, ‘multicuisine’ restaurants and a list of ‘adventurous sports’ running from ‘Water Zorb’ – whatever that might be – to ‘Commando Net’. In reality, the swimming pool was small, the ‘Prometeus Unbound Health Club’ a tiny room with two lonely treadmills, the zoo a cage with some sick-looking rabbits whose fur was falling off, and the multicuisine restaurants of Khafres and Khufus capable at that moment of serving only local food.

But there was something other than the gap between vision and reality that added to the dissonance of Papyrus Port. Apart from a dating couple in the restaurant and a family group enjoying kebabs on the lawn, the place was empty. It had been crowded when Vijay visited it a couple of years earlier, but now, in the summer of 2009, there was suddenly less money in India. The global downturn had come home, and even the middle classes and the elites accustomed to the high-consumption side of globalization were beginning to find things difficult. The campus recruitment conducted by IT companies in engineering colleges was down or, in some cases, had stopped entirely. There were lay-offs happening in many organizations. The building boom that had thrown up condos everywhere had slowed down, and the billboards in Hyderabad offered free rent and discounts to entice customers into buying the half-built units. In my mother’s lower-middle-class neighbourhood in Calcutta, the posters offering jobs in call centres had been displaced by signs that said: ‘Sick of credit card debt? Tired of phone calls demanding money? Call this number to find a solution.’ The downturn was one reason why Papyrus Port was emptier than it should have been.

When an attendant showed us around the ‘Live Like a Pharaoh’ suites, they too turned out to be empty. Vijay had thought that I might want to stay at the resort, but I decided that I would be better
off at his house in the village. The resort was comfortable, but it was hard to picture being there in the evening, all by myself apart from the staff, a middle-class pharaoh protected by security guards and an electric fence from the land and its people.

The land was part of the district of Mahabubnagar, and it was teeming with people. Many of them were outsiders, itinerant figures coming from as far north as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, or from the eastern segment of India that includes West Bengal, Orissa and Assam, travelling on a long chain of trains and buses to find work in the factories of Kothur. Within that seemingly sparse agricultural landscape, so remote from the highway, there were nearly a hundred factories churning out chemicals, pharmaceutical products, steel bars and metal pipes, places that were discernible only when one got off the highway. The factories weren’t clustered together but appeared at random, across a patchwork of fields, near the village market, or next to the old road that had been superseded by the modern highway, and one didn’t see the factories as much as the marks they created on the landscape: smoke being belched out from a distant chimney; black heaps of slag that had been deposited on the fields and were being turned over with infinitesimal patience by women and children for a few scraps of iron; the infernal metallic squeaking of machinery from behind walled complexes; and the sickly sweet smell of chemicals that appeared suddenly on the wings of an occasional breeze.

The area around Kothur had been developed as an industrial zone in the eighties, and the name Kothur, which means ‘new village’, reflected that transformation, replacing the earlier name of Patur, or ‘old village’. The industrialization had been initiated, accompanied by subsidies and tax breaks from the government, because Mahabubnagar was considered to be one of the poor, ‘backward’ districts of the Telangana region. It is home to lower castes trying to eke a living out of agriculture as well as to the Lambada gypsies, a community so
impoverished that it often sells its children to shady adoption agencies and sex traffickers.

Two decades after the industrialization of the area, about a million people, or two-thirds of the adult population of Mahabubnagar district, have to travel to distant parts of India to find employment. They end up in Bangalore or as far away as Bombay, often working as construction labourers. In a recent report on migrant labour in India published by the United Nations Development Project, its authors Priya Deshingkar and Shaheen Akhter interviewed Mahabubnagar workers and discovered that even though the middlemen who take them to the construction sites are often paid 4,500 rupees for each worker, the workers themselves get paid as little as 1,200 rupees a month in cash and in food. The workers – most of whom belong to the lower castes, the authors write – are often trapped in debt because of the advances they take to fund the initial expenses of their migration. Their children are regularly coerced into work, the women are often sexually abused, and all of the workers are prone to injuries since India has the highest accident rate in the world for construction workers, with 165 out of every 1,000 labourers getting injured on the job.

While the local people of Mahabubnagar go elsewhere for work, the factories in the area attract tens of thousands of men from other parts of India. It is an arrangement that suits employers everywhere well, ensuring that the workers will be too insecure and uprooted to ever mount organized protests against their conditions and wages. They are from distant regions, of no interest to local politicians seeking votes, and they are alienated from the local people by differences in language and culture.

A few miles from Papyrus Port, diagonally across from it on the other side of the highway, was the Vinayak steel factory. It stood near an intersection, surrounded by high walls and facing a muddy yard where canvas-covered trucks idled through the day. Although unlike Papyrus Port in every other way, the steel factory too had an excellent brochure that I had received when I first went to meet the managing director, Venkatesh Rao. The cover displayed a bouquet of steel rods, and when I rubbed my hand on the rods, I could feel
their rough textured surface, contrasting sharply with the smooth paper. A skyscraper of concrete and glass rose towards a cloud-covered sky from the bouquet. It was an advertising agency’s rendition of how the rods built at the factory went into the making of condominiums and office towers. The picture eliminated all signs of the human labour that went into creating the rods, but it was nevertheless a reminder of the connection between this nondescript, almost invisible steel factory and the globalized cities. The steel factory was one of the countless invisible nodes of modernization in India, pulling in workers from distant rural areas to create the material that would be used for construction far away, perhaps by men and women who travelled from Mahabubnagar. It was to get a sense of the labour involved in producing the steel rods that I entered the factory echoing with metallic clangs and screeches, the yards smelling of smoke and grease, the sky above cut into thin quadrants by angled delivery chutes that groaned into life without warning and stopped just as suddenly.

The factory seemed a rather bewildering place at first, strangely empty in spite of the noise coming from everywhere. There had been some activity at the entrance, with the security guards patting down workers going out and recording the licence numbers of trucks entering the factory. But once I had walked away from the gate, I saw few people. The administrative building, a two-storey, whitewashed concrete structure, seemed deserted, its small windows revealing nothing of the clerical staff sitting inside. There was a temple as well, equally empty, although it appeared clean and well maintained. There were workshops scattered all around the grounds, each surrounded by black coal dust, places where raw iron ore was worked through various stages into the finished product of the TMT bars, the abbreviation standing for ‘thermomechanical treatment’. When I occasionally glimpsed workers inside these workshops, they seemed diminished by the scale of the operations, barely visible through the fire and smoke roaring in the furnaces.

It was when I arrived at the rolling mill, the place where steel ingots were turned into the finished product of TMT bars, that I finally received some sense of what went on in the factory. Here,
finally, was the heart of the place, a vast, open-sided shed filled with deafening noise and the blast of heat from furnaces operating at 1,200 degrees Celsius. The men visible through the smoke and noise were infernal creatures, rags wrapped around their faces to protect themselves from the heat, inevitably dwarfed by the extremity of the place, with everything so large, so fast and so hot. It was as if they were being worked by the machines and materials rather than the other way around. There was a man feeding ingots into the furnace at the very beginning of the mill, using long metal tongs. At the other end of the vast shed there were two men who were his doubles, faces similarly wrapped in rags and wielding tongs like his with which they grabbed the rods that shot out at great speed from the belt. The rods blazed red as they came out, and the men moved in unison like drugged dancers, each picking up an end of the rod and then moving it to the side with a concentrated effort that was broken only by the expulsion of their breaths.

In between the men with tongs was the steel, turned by the alchemy of modern engineering and a proprietory process licensed from a German company into a hot, red liquid. I watched the liquid twisting and turning through the belts, sizzling as it ran through the water-filled pipes that cooled down the external surface of the liquid and gave the material the strength and suppleness that would make it so valuable as construction material. It was a long tongue of fire, infernal and alive, claiming the men with the tongs as its servants. If the rolling mill was the heart of the steel factory, the red, pulsating liquid was its soul.

The changes that have been wrought in India in the past two decades have not been kind to the poor. Even as the number of millionaires and billionaires has increased, followed by the aspirers from the middle classes, the poor have seen either little or no improvement at all, depending on which economists and policy makers one chooses to believe. The data collected by the Indian government, which has
been subject to some controversy for its tendency to downplay the number of poor people and the extent of their destitution, is nevertheless stark. In 2004–5, the last year for which data was available, the total number of people in India consuming less than 20 rupees (or 50 cents) a day was 836 million – or 77 per cent of the population.

The people in this group belong overwhelmingly to what policy makers refer to as the ‘unorganized’ or ‘informal’ sector of the economy, which means that the work they do is irregular, carried out in harsh conditions and offers no security or upward mobility. Many of the people in this category are farmers, but a large number are also migrant workers, people who oscillate between the rural areas where they have grown up and the cities or semi-urban areas like Mahabubnagar where they work. An Indian government report in April 2009 that looked at the ‘informal’ economy characterized migrant workers, along with child labourers and bonded labourers, as being at the very bottom of all those working in the informal economy. Almost all migrant workers, the report noted, face ‘longer working hours, social isolation, lower wages and inadequate access to basic amenities’. They live in slums, are expected to be available to work around the clock and are denied access to the ration cards that would allow them to buy subsidized food from what remains of the country’s public distribution system. And although they are everywhere – huddled in tents erected on pavements and under flyovers in Delhi; at marketplaces in Calcutta, where they sit with cloth bags of tools ready for a contractor to hire them for the day; gathered around fires made from rags and newspapers in the town of Imphal, near Burma; and at train stations everywhere as they struggle to make their way into the ‘unreserved’ compartments offering human beings as much room as cattle trucks taking their passengers to the slaughterhouse – they are invisible in the sense that they seem to count for nothing at all.

It is difficult even to get an estimate of the number of migrant workers in India. The government census of 2001 considered 307 million people, or 30 per cent of the total population, as migrants. In this assessment, however, the census was merely counting people who had moved away from their places of residence, and not the
reasons for their migration. The authors of the UNDP report on migrant workers, in contrast, have figured that there are around 100 million ‘circular’ migrant workers in India. Of these, the report notes, the largest number, some forty million people, is engaged in construction, followed by twenty million workers, mostly women and girls, who are employed as domestic servants. From various case studies around the country, the UNDP researchers found that migrant work was often a way of maintaining the minimal standard of living of rural families rather than improving such standards. They also discovered that middlemen contractors often locked workers into high-interest debts, low pay and abysmal working conditions, including the practice of bonded labour for entire families that is especially prevalent among the ten million workers employed by small factories that make mud bricks.

A few years earlier, in Delhi, I met a man who worked for a trade union attempting to organize migrant workers. Among the things he said was that there was an underclass even in relation to the destitute migrant workers, a group so desperate that factory owners often use them as scabs during a strike. These were the people he called ‘Malda labour’ after a town of that name in West Bengal. ‘If you ask any of these men where they’re from, they all say “Malda”. Is it possible for a small town like Malda to have so many people?’ The organizer explained that the men were from Bangladesh, just across the border from Malda. They were Muslims, crossing into India illegally, without any rights at all and often willing to work for a pittance. He told me about an instance when he had visited some Malda labourers in their shanties because he knew that they had been hired to work the next day at a factory where his union had called a strike. ‘We took some food, some cheap liquor and drank them into the ground so that they wouldn’t be able to get to work the next day. It was more food and drink than they’d seen for a long time,’ the organizer said. It wasn’t a terribly ethical thing to do, he admitted, but he didn’t have much of a choice in trying to unionize migrant workers.