The Beautiful and the Damned (38 page)

I dropped her off in front of the mall, watching as she vanished inside that vast building. It was nearly dusk, and the lights were on everywhere, each luxury-brand logo carved out on the wall bathed in its own glow. When I went home, I decided to look up the Congress
MPs from Agra to find out more about the man who had held out the prospect of a job in the parliament for Esther. It would be nice if it came true, I thought – if a young woman from the border provinces who was smart, hard-working and good ended up working in the building that was the symbol of India’s democracy.

I looked for a long time on the Internet, sifting through the names, political parties and constituencies of the various MPs. There were no young Congress MPs from Agra.

No one at all with the name Esther had given me.

Because the names of a number of Indian cities have been changed in the past decade, I would like to clarify that the place referred to in the introduction as Gauhati is now known as Guwahati, just as Calcutta is known as Kolkata, Madras as Chennai and Bombay as Mumbai. I would also like to note that some of the material in this book has appeared, in a different form, in the
Guardian, n+1
, the Review section of
The National
in Abu Dhabi and in the anthology
AIDS Sutra
. The book itself was written in a superb programme called Scrivener, which I cannot recommend highly enough.

I am grateful to an extremely large number of people for making this book possible. I would like to thank everyone who spoke to me in the course of four years of interviews, especially the people who appear in the narrative and to whom I am grateful for their willingness to open up their lives to a stranger. I have interpreted those lives in my own subjective fashion, of course, and further straitjacketed them into the themes and movements of the narrative. I would therefore like to note that the minor role occupied by Vijay Gudavarthy in the book in no way does justice to the major role he played in my journey through Hyderabad and Andhra Pradesh. I am glad that I found a generous, knowledgeable and perceptive friend like him in a place so new to me.

Pankaj Mishra started me off and believed in this book well before I did. Sanjay Reddy shared his knowledge and humanism with me while Hartosh Singh Bal shared, among many other things, his whisky. Chitra Padmanabhan shared, among many other things, the antidotes required after too much whisky.

I met many people in India for contacts and suggestions in the course of researching this book. Some of them provided me with far more than that, often hosting me in an old subcontinental spirit of generosity. For that, I would like to thank Samrat Chaudhury, Mary
Therese Khurkalang, Anita Roy, Vivek Narayanan, Gautam Mody, Nilanjana Roy and Devangshu Datta, Alam Srinivas, Sanjoy Narayan, Jehangir Pocha, Umesh Anand and Jai Arjun Singh in Delhi; Sugata Raju, Anjum Hasan, Zac O’Yeah, U. Ananthamurthy, Arjun Jaydev, A. R. Vasavi, Roy Sinai, Aravind Adiga, Jeet Thayil and Achal Prabhala in Bangalore; Chinnaiah Jangam, Krishna Reddy, R. Limbadri, Ram Karan, N. Venugopal and Sridala Swami in Andhra Pradesh; and Jinendra Maibam and Kingson Shimray in Manipur.

For institutional support, I would like to thank the Society of Authors in the UK for a travel grant that came at a very early stage of research and helped get this book off the ground. I would also like to thank the Nation Institute in New York, especially Esther Kaplan, for a research grant that helped me finish some of the reporting. I am grateful to the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University, and in particular Judy Vichniac, for a year-long fellowship that allowed me to write this book. I am grateful to Barbara Grosz and Lindy Hess at the Radcliffe Institute, and to my superbly competent research assistant, Abigail Lind, for making my stay there such a productive experience. I am grateful to Eugene Lang College at the New School for providing me with an institutional base in New York, and to my colleagues and students there for providing a human superstructure to that base. I am especially grateful to Neil Gordon for bringing me to the New School and for believing that I had something special to contribute there.

Among editorial colleagues at magazines and newspapers, I would like to thank Katharine Viner and Helen Oldfield of the
Guardian
for starting me off with the call centre story. I am grateful to Sam Leith, Lindsay Duguid, Jennifer Szalai, John Palattella, Albert Mobilio, Jonathan Shainin, Peter Baker, Vinod Jose, and the team at
n+1
, especially Marco Roth, Benjamin Kunkel and Chad Harbach for editorial interventions — some of which, sometimes, took the form of cheques. I am grateful to David Miller at Rogers, Coleridge and White for doing the needful. I am in debt to Mary Mount for her early support for the book and for editing it with her usual clarity and confidence.

In the year that I spent in Cambridge writing this book, there were a select few who handled my obsessiveness with grace. I am grateful
to Marlon Cummings for beer and laughter, to Ananya Vajpeyi for vegetarian dinners, to Russ Rymer for shared confidences, to Suneeta Gill for confident cooking and to Balraj Gill for camaraderie. I am grateful to Basharat Peer for the energy and enthusiasm he provided in New York and in New Delhi. I am grateful to Adam Shatz for his unwavering loyalty. I am grateful to Amy Rosenberg for, among other things, her decade-long perseverance and for being a superb mother to my son. I am more grateful than I can say to my mother, to whom this book is dedicated.

But above all, I am grateful to Ranen Lal Deb, for being there and for being himself.

Siddhartha Deb is a novelist who was born in north-eastern India in 1970. His first novel,
The Point of Return
, was a Notable Book of the Year in
The New York Times
, while his second novel,
Surface
, was a finalist for the Hutch Crossword Award in India and a book of the year in the
Daily Telegraph
. His journalism, essays and reviews have appeared in
Harpers
, the
Guardian
, the
Observer, The New York Times Book Review, Columbia Journalism Review, Bookforum
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Nation, n+1, London Review of Books
and
The Times Literary Supplement
. He is the recipient of grants from the Society of Authors and the Nation Institute, and has recently been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University.