The Ground Beneath Her Feet (37 page)

We have been privileged, in India, to observe at close quarters some of the very best—the best of the best—members of the trickster hall of fame. As a result, we are not easily impressed, we demand the highest levels of performance from our public crooks. We have seen too much, yet we still want to be made to laugh and shake our heads in disbelief; we rely upon the scamster to rekindle a sense of wonder dulled by the excess of our daily lives.

Since Piloo’s pioneering work, we have marvelled at the People’s Car scam of the later 1970s (huge sums of public money disappeared from a project headed by Sanjay G.), the Swedish Cannons scam of the 1980s (huge sums of public money went astray from an international arms deal that besmirched the reputation of Rajiv G.), and the Stock Exchange scam of the 1990s (strenuous efforts were made to fix the movements of certain key stocks, using, naturally, huge sums of public money). Yet when students of the topic gather together—that is to say, whenever and wherever two or more Indians meet for coffee and a chat—they will generally agree that the Great Goat Scam gets their vote for the all-comers gold-medal position. Just as
Citizen Kane
is always chosen in movie polls as the best film of all time, and VTO’s
Quakershaker (How the Earth Learned to Rock & Roll
) invariably beats
Sgt. Pepper
into second place in the voting for best ever album; just as
Hamlet
is Best Play and Pelé is Best Football Player and Michael Jordan is the Hoop Dreamboat and Joe DiMaggio is forever Best American, even if he needed the famous line in the famous song explained to him, he thought he was being sent up, didn’t understand the reverence in which he was held, so also Piloo Doodhwala is unshakeably ensconced as India’s Scambaba Deluxe.

And the fellow who put him up there was me.

Fodder fraud does not, at first glance, look as romantic a diddle as gun-running commissions or manipulating the investment market. Goats, after all, famously eat anything, so the subventions to farmers are necessarily small: on the order of one hundred rupees per goat per annum, or around three dollars a head. Goat feed = chicken feed, you may scornfully conclude. Not much scope there for one of the great confidence tricks of all time. Doubter, be reassured. Mistake not flamboyance for genius, or glistering garbage for gold. It was the very smallness
of the sums involved that enabled Piloo to set up his glorious scheme, the sheer banality of the project that protected it from public scrutiny for so many years. For while one hundred chips is a mere bagatelle, it is, nevertheless, one hundred chips in your pocket, as long as your goat is of the Non-Existent type. And because the Non-Existent Goat breeds faster, and requires less attention, or indeed space, than any other variety, what is to stop the energetic goat farmer from increasing the quantity of his livestock at high speed, almost ad infinitum? For the Non-Existent Goat never falls ill, never lets you down, never dies unless it is required to do so, and—uniquely—multiplies at the precise rate stipulated by its owner. Truly, the most obliging and likeable of goats, it makes no noise, nor is there any shit to shovel.

The scale of the Great Goat Scam was almost beyond comprehension. Piloo Doodhwala was the proud owner of one hundred million wholly fictitious goats, goats of the highest quality, the softness of whose wool had passed into legend, whose flesh was a byword for tenderness. The flexibility of the Non-Existent Goat allowed him to defy the received wisdom of centuries of goat husbandry. Deep in the heart of central India he achieved the incredible feat of rearing top-quality cashmere goats—who were conventionally thought to need high mountain pastures—in the heat of the plains. Nor had communal issues restricted him. His meat goats could be raised by vegetarians, whose work with these magical creatures involved no loss of caste. It was an operation of immense beauty, requiring no work at all, except for the effort of maintaining the fiction of the goats’ Existence. The financial outlay required to ensure the silence of thousands upon thousands of villagers and government inspectors and other officials, and to pay off the border bandits, was very considerable, but entirely within tolerable limits if considered as a percentage of the enterprise’s turnover, and it was, after all (see above), cushioned by tax breaks and capital subsidies to boot.

One hundred times one hundred million is ten billion rupees, one hundred thousand crores. Two hundred million pounds sterling. Three hundred million dollars per annum, free of taxes. Hush money and protection money payments, annual salaries to the villagers employed to tend the Non-Existents, and miscellaneous expenses added up to less than five percent of this exquisite sum and represented nothing
worse than a tiny mole, a sort of financial beauty spot, upon the immortally lovely face of this magnificent scam, which Piloo operated without hindrance—indeed, with the enthusiastic support of many of Maharashtra’s greatest figures—for almost fifteen years.

Three hundred million times fifteen is four and a half billion dollars. One and a half million crores of rupees. Less expenses, certainly. Let’s not exaggerate. Call it four billion dollars, net.

I went in to the office to discuss the brief. Anita Dharkar had a satirical spread in mind. On the left, Piloo’s deserted “ranches”; on the right, a more typical goat farming operation. “Presenting Piloo’s Invisible Goats,” she extemporised, enjoying herself. “Here you see them, not being seen. Unlike these Ordinary Goats, which, as you can see, you can see.”

I, who had boasted about my talent for invisibility, was commissioned to photograph these phantoms, Doodhwala’s “ghoasts.” Anita wanted Piloo’s magic herds on film. “Piloo is not only protected by corruption,” she said, becoming serious. “Also, there is the infinite indifference of India.
Chalta-hai
, isn’t it? So it goes. We expect our Piloos to get up to tricks, and we shrug and turn away. Only if you get the pictures proving the case beyond all doubt will we be able to make anything happen.”

She had acquired a full list of all Piloo’s registered goat-rearing facilities. “How’d you do that?” I asked, impressed. But she was too savvy to betray a source, even to me. “Truth will out,” she said. “In the end, there’s always an honest Injun somewhere, if you can find him. Even in Inja.”

“Or maybe,” I said, less idealistically, “there’s someone Piloo forgot to buy.”

“Or maybe,” Anita took up the thread, “it’s just in the nature of secrets to come out, because the only way to keep a secret is not to tell anybody, which is why I’m not answering your disgraceful question about my informant. And Piloo’s secret was shared by too many people. The wonder is it didn’t leak years ago. Piloo must’ve been paying damn, damn well.”

“Or maybe,” I responded, “your source is a kind of patriot. People
are always complaining, right?, that India is too busy aping the West. But here is our very own special talent; we should celebrate it. About scams we don’t need to learn a thing. We can teach. Listen, I’m sort of proud of Piloo. I hate the bastard, but he has done a beautiful thing.”

“Sure,” said Anita. “So let’s try to give him what he deserves. The Padmashri, even the Bharat Ratna. No; these honours are not big enough. How about a pair of official portraits, front view, side view, wearing stripey outfit, and holding a card with name and serial number also, if poss?”

It sounded good to me. “Just get the photos, Rai, okay?” she said, and walked out of the room.

She didn’t tell me about the other photographer, the one she’d sent before me, the one who hadn’t returned: not because she was anxious to avoid alarming me, but because she knew I would be offended at being her second choice. She wanted to come with me, too; she had it all planned out. We would fly to Aurangabad, acting like newlyweds on honeymoon, not a camera in sight. For verisimilitude and other reasons, we would check in at the Rambagh Palace Hotel and make love all night. To keep up the honeymoon cover story—for we were going into Piloo country, where any doorman, any
chaprassi
, could be a stool pigeon—we would go to Ajanta and stand in the darkness of the caves while a guide switched a light on and off and the Buddhist masterpieces appeared and vanished. The bodhisattvas, the pink elephants, the half-clad women with their hourglass figures and perfect globes of breasts. Anita’s body was the equal of any fresco and the offer was an attractive one, but I left Bombay without telling her and plunged into the hard heart of India, intent upon doing what I had laughed at Vina for wanting to do, what city dwellers almost never do in India. I would enter rural India. Not to learn about rhythm or withdrawal, but to get old Piloo’s goat.

After that strange, jangling single night with Vina, it did me good to get away.
Of course I never set any fire. You think I burned your house down? Did your mother think so? Gee, thanks. I may have been a thief, but I wasn’t crazy
. She had wanted to meet my mother, to offer restitution. New jewellery for old. But it was too late for things like that. The rifts in our
world could not be mended. What was burned could not be unburned, what was broken could not be fixed. A dead mother, a father rotating slowly and reeking of bitter perfume as his bedroom fan turned. Strange fruit. I tried to imagine how Ameer Merchant might have reacted to Vina’s return. I think she would simply have opened her arms and taken Vina right back into her heart.

To think about those days again—Ameer, V.V., the fire, the lost love, the wasted chances—was upsetting. The size of the countryside, its stark unsentimental lines, its obduracy: these things did me good. To be moving within its great dusty sweep, its lack of interest, helped restore a sense of proportion; it put one in one’s place. I drove my Jeep—laden with supplies of dry and tinned food, jerry cans of petrol and of water, spare tyres, my favourite hiking boots (the ones with the secrets in their heels) and even a small tent—into the far east of Maharashtra. I was in Piloo’s empire, looking for the back door.

Always the back-door man.

A journey to the centre of the earth. The air grew hotter with every mile, the wind seemed to blaze more fiercely on my cheeks. The local bugs seemed larger and hungrier than their city cousins, and I was, as usual, lunch. The road never emptied: bikes, horse-drawn carts, burst pipes, the blare of buses and trucks. People, people. Roadside saints in plaster. Men in a circle at dawn pissing on an ancient monument, some dead king’s tomb. Running dogs, lounging cattle, exploded rubber tyres prominent among the piles of detritus that were everywhere, like the future. Groups of youths with orange headbands and flags. Politics painted on passing walls. Tea stalls. Monkeys, camels, performing bears on a leash. A man who pressed your trousers while you waited. Ochre smoke from factory chimneys. Accidents.
Bed On Roof Rs 2/=
. Prostitutes. The omnipresence of gods. Boys in cheap rayon bush shirts. Everywhere around me, life was striving, pullulating. The roaches, the beasts of burden, the enervated parrots, fought for food, shelter, the right to see another day of life. The young men with their oiled hair strutted and preened like skinny gladiators, while the old watched their children suspiciously, waiting to be abandoned, to be shouldered aside, tossed into some ditch. This was life in its pure form, life seeking no more than to remain alive. In the universe of the road, the survival instinct was the only law, the hustle the only game in town, the game
you played until you dropped. To be here was to understand why Piloo Doodhwala was popular. The Great Goat Scam was the life of the road writ large. It was a mega-hustle which freed his people from the daily hustles that drove them into early graves. He was a miracle man, a prophet. It would not be easy to bring him down.

My plan—more a notion than a strategy, really—was to get as far off the beaten track as possible. I had seen from Anita’s list that many of Piloo’s ghost farms were located in the most remote parts of the state, in highly inhospitable territory, with a communications infrastructure that was poor to non-existent. Any farmer of Actually Existing Goats would have had the greatest difficulty, and would also have incurred inordinate and crippling expenses, in simply bringing his herds to the slaughterhouse or shearing shed. Non-Existent Goats caused no such problems, naturally, and the inaccessibility of the “ranches” made the true nature of Piloo’s operation easier to conceal. I was gambling on the over-confidence of his minions in these far-flung places. A photographer from the
Illustrated Weekly
would be the last person on earth they’d expect to see.

At that time, a much ballyhooed Trans-India Auto Rally was taking place, and it was my intention to pose as a lost driver in need of food, water, rest and guidance. This would, I hoped, buy me a few hours of time in the company of Piloo’s phantoms. Then it would be up to my powers of photographic invisibility to seize the opportunity. Dusty, exhausted, I turned my Jeep off the main highway on to ever smaller and more broken roads, and headed for the hills.

After travelling for two days I came to a river, a trickle down the centre of a dry, rocky bed. There was a peasant passing, as there always is, with a stick over one shoulder and a water pot hanging from each end of the stick. I asked him the river’s name, and when he answered “Wainganga,” I had the odd feeling of having taken a wrong turning out of the real world, of having slipped somehow into fiction. As if I had accidentally crossed the border of Maharashtra not into Madhya Pradesh but into a parallel, magic land. In contemporary India those hills ahead of me, a low range with jungled ravines, would have been the Seoni range, but in the magic sphere I had entered they were still called, in the old fashion, Seeonee. In their jungles I might chance
upon legendary beasts, talking animals who never were, created by a writer who put them in this faraway wilderness without ever seeing it with his own eyes: a panther and a bear and a tiger and a jackal and an elephant and monkeys and a snake. And on the hills’ high ridges I might at any moment glimpse the mythic figure of a human boy, a Non-Existent Boy, a figment, a man-cub dancing with wolves.