India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (26 page)

The villages around me were parochial. For all their superficial modernity, they were in many ways stuck in the past. I was surrounded by the same social and cultural conservatism that had made me feel so uncomfortable, so frustrated and angry, after my last meeting with Selvi.

Sathy told me a story about his driver. He was by all accounts a modern man. He drove a car, he was studying for a law degree. But when his sister—an adult woman, in her twenties—insisted on marrying a man from a different caste, Sathy’s driver and his parents threw her out of the house. They refused to have anything to do with her. She now had two children; they would grow up not knowing their grandparents.

In a village not far from Rajiv Gandhi Salai, outside Chennai, I heard about a man who killed himself. He swallowed fertilizer and drowned in his vomit. He was a shopkeeper; he’d lost everything to his debts. He left his wife and children behind.

In Kuilapalayam, outside Auroville, I knew a woman whose husband had been run over by a bus. She had a daughter, and a younger son. The daughter was approaching puberty, and the woman told me of her plans to pull her out of school. The son would stay in.

“Why?” I asked the mother. “What’s the use of keeping her in?”
she asked me. She said school was expensive; she’d have to pay a big dowry when her daughter got married. She couldn’t afford her daughter.

I lived in a place where girls were liabilities, where impoverished fathers took their lives in the shadow of glossy software complexes, and where, for all the talk of Dalit upliftment, the ancient manacles of caste were still fastened tight. Sometimes it felt positively medieval. It was stifling. It was like living at the edge of the world, and there were days when I just felt I had to get out.

Mumbai was where I went when it all became too much for me
. Mumbai was my escape. An hour and a half by plane from Chennai, Mumbai, with its millions of dreamers and strivers from around the country and the world, was cosmopolitan, modern, and bathed in the neon signs and billboards of a city that never stopped. Mumbai was far, far removed from the countryside.

Mumbai was a global city; and it was a triumphal city, the capital of Indian finance, the engine of the country’s surging economy. It was home to the nation’s two leading stock exchanges. A third of the country’s taxes were collected there; the city’s per capita income was almost three times the national average. In sparkly car dealerships, in photo galleries filled with men and women in deceptively simple designer
kurta
s and saris, in jewelry stores with fist-size pendants that could feed a village for months, Indian capitalism, its exaltation and veneration, reached new heights.

All the prosperity could be seductive. I loved visiting Mumbai’s bars and restaurants, sitting on a sofa drinking imported wine,
watching the city’s bankers and lawyers and actors flirt with each other after a day’s work. I frequented art auctions where the cocktail snacks were plentiful and the businessmen spent millions on paintings that looked like scribbles to me. It’s true it was a little vacuous, but something about that vacuousness felt soothing. I felt as if I could be anywhere in the world—and that sense of normalcy, of being immersed once more in the frivolity of global capitalism, was comforting, reassurance that India was progressing beyond the poverty and austerity that had so long set it apart.

All these feelings were particularly true when I first moved back to India—when I still missed my life in New York, and when, I suppose, I was looking for validation of my decision to return. After a few years, my feelings changed. It became harder to overlook the vacuousness. The consumerism and prosperity started feeling false, even a little offensive.

I attended an art show in Mumbai one evening. It was held in the ballroom of a five-star hotel, under chandeliers and an ornate ceiling. It was a high-class event, with women in low-cut dresses and men in expensive tailored suits. Waiters in white gloves served Moët & Chandon champagne.

I skirted the edges of the show, getting a little tipsy, marveling—almost choking—over some of the price tags on the paintings. I listened in on some of the conversations. I heard financiers express awe (and satisfaction) at the way demand for Indian art had risen, I heard collectors talk about auctions they’d attended in New York and Hong Kong and London. It was a wealthy crowd. One woman, dressed in a green silk sari, a shimmering wonder that reflected the glow of the chandeliers, walked around with a man who I guessed was some kind of financial adviser.

They discussed the merits of art as an investment. The man thought art represented a good “asset class.” The woman was skeptical. She curled her lips and said she preferred to put her money in equities.

Once, I might have taken satisfaction from that scene. I might have seen it as evidence of India’s globalization and new, prosperous modernity. But I left the show feeling a little depressed, increasingly disillusioned by the ostentation and commercialism on display. I felt a kind of blindness in the room, a willful and self-indulgent denial of all that lay outside.

That blindness, I had increasingly come to believe, lay at the heart of large segments of modern India. The nation was enthralled—and, in the process, had become entranced—by its recent economic success. Politicians promised that India would soon ascend to global economic leadership; pundits peddled visions of Mumbai (and other metropolises) as global centers of business and finance. These promises were attractive. I felt their allure myself. But they also seemed out of touch with reality.

I had to wonder: Was the India of millionaire art collectors the same nation in which almost one half of rural children were underweight? Was the India of aspiring global financial centers the same India in which more people had cell phones than access to a toilet? Did the bankers I saw in Mumbai, so confident and smooth, live in the same country as the more than 300 million who, after almost two decades of economic reforms, still lived on less than one dollar a day?

India had shed the straitjacket of state-led socialism and embraced capitalism. The new economy had delivered a lot. Sometimes, though, when I left the thatch huts and country roads
around my home for the glitter of Mumbai, I felt as if I was traversing worlds. Even within Mumbai, where millions of people lived in dismal slums, and a tiny slice of the population towered over those slums in luxury apartments with swimming pools and roof gardens, India could often feel like two nations.

I didn’t know which one to believe in. I didn’t know which India was the real one.

When in Mumbai, I often stayed with my friend Naresh Fernandes
. Naresh was a journalist and editor. He was in his late thirties. He’d grown up in Mumbai, in the northern suburb of Bandra, a neighborhood of winding streets and whitewashed churches. He’d attended a Catholic parish school there, and then a Jesuit college in the south of the city.

In 1996, Naresh moved to New York, where he graduated from Columbia Journalism School and later got a job at
The Wall Street Journal
. He was in the
Journal
’s offices, looking out onto the Twin Towers, when the two planes hit on September 11. He returned to Mumbai shortly after that and worked as an editor, first at one of India’s leading newspapers, and then at a lifestyle magazine.

Naresh enjoyed his time in New York. We shared a common nostalgia for the city. He talked about going to jazz clubs, sampling ethnic food in the outer boroughs, and riding his bicycle through the parks. For all his love of the city, though, Naresh had never doubted that he would return to India. His roots were in Mumbai, and, he felt, something tremendous was happening in the country, that it was changing in new and exciting ways. Like so many
Indians living abroad—like me—he wanted to return and see where the nation was going.

Naresh returned to India full of idealism and enthusiasm. He launched himself into his work as a journalist, he attended documentary screenings, and he started a book on Mumbai’s jazz musicians. He was excited about what he felt was an impending cultural and intellectual revival in the nation. By the time I met him, though, about two years after he’d come back, some of that idealism had curdled. India’s cultural life hadn’t quite developed in the way Naresh had envisioned. From his vantage point as a journalist, he saw instead a commodification of public discourse, and the general commercialism of daily life. He saw a city—and a country—that he believed was increasingly under the spell of money.

This trend, Naresh felt, was part of a general movement that had started with the economic reforms of the early nineties. Naresh wasn’t a big fan of India’s recent model of development. Although he recognized the new wealth that was being generated, he felt that the fruits of India’s economic growth were being distributed unequally. He railed against the inequities of the nation. He complained about a “neoliberal” economy that condemned millions to poverty even while it created a tiny class of billionaires.

Naresh seemed especially dismayed—angry, even—at the way the city of his youth had developed (if indeed that was the right word). Mumbai was an urban nightmare. Almost 20 million people were crammed into some of the most densely packed real estate in the world. More than 60 percent of that population lived in slums. Various studies had concluded that Mumbai was one of the loudest cities in the world. Of course, Mumbai had always been an intense place, but Naresh felt that it had really started deteriorating with
the unchecked growth and development that followed India’s economic reforms.

Naresh’s frustration with Mumbai could manifest in odd—sometimes comical—ways. Walking around the city, he would gesticulate animatedly, and complain in a loud voice about buildings he said had come up illegally. Mumbai’s anarchic traffic was a particular source of consternation. Naresh would stand in front of vehicles driving too fast, or the wrong way up one-way roads, and block their paths. Often, too, he would tap taxi and autorickshaw drivers on the shoulder and ask them not to use their horns. The drivers would turn and look at Naresh in bewilderment, incredulous that anyone expected them to navigate the chaos—and cacophony—of Mumbai’s roads in silence.

Naresh told me once about a recent (and typical) confrontation he’d had with a man driving the wrong way up the street that ran below his apartment. The man, as Naresh described him, was an exemplar of the newly wealthy and privileged class that had emerged in recent decades. He was driving an air-conditioned SUV. Naresh stood in the middle of the road and stopped him. The man rolled down his window, leaned out, and stared at Naresh in astonishment.

“What goes of yours?” the driver asked, in a piece of Mumbai idiom whose syntax was borrowed from Hindi.

“Any sense of respect I have for you, motherfucker,” Naresh responded.

“You don’t know how to talk, or what?” the infuriated driver asked.

“You don’t know how to drive?” Naresh asked.

Naresh broke into something like a laugh when he told me that story. He had an oval face, with a prominent, jutting mouth; he
could open that mouth in an expression that simultaneously conveyed amusement and horror. Now I saw more horror than amusement. He told me about all the people he knew who had been hit, many fatally, on Mumbai’s roads. Often, the drivers just took off; they were never brought to justice.

Naresh felt that his city, and indeed the whole country, had been infected by a kind of “social Darwinism”—a me-centered capitalist culture that was replacing the more collective-minded socialism of another generation. Mumbai, he liked to say, had become “the physical manifestation of neoliberalism”: an uncontrolled, unequal, and unpleasant cityscape where private greed encroached on the commons.

“Everyone’s out for themselves in India now days,” he told me once. “It’s the worst manifestation of Reaganism and Thatcherism. There’s no value given to the larger public good. There’s an ideological climate in this country that encourages a kind of selfish attitude.”