Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (32 page)

I glanced at the one-armed girl, who was smiling anxiously at me. Her sunken eyes were strangely yellow, like those of a nocturnal animal, and
the skin of her good arm, pressed against mine, was very dry and hairy, suggesting malnutrition.

It was perfect, this secluded place, with the insinuating old woman who was, I was pretty sure, pimping these children. It was one of the pleasanter districts in Mumbai, and she must have had luck buttonholing foreigners like me or else she would not have been so confident. I wanted her to tell me what she had in mind—what activity, what price, what length of time, what sort of promises she'd make.

She had told me how near she lived; now she began telling me how clean it was, how private. "So quiet, sir. Very good building."

I had many questions. But what kept me from asking them was the flow of people into the teashop. The shop was a kind of snack bar, with plates of food in glass cases—buns and samosas and sandwiches. We were sitting near the entrance, and every person that entered—mostly men—stared hard at me. It was about six-thirty in the evening. I was the only foreigner in the place, and here I was, in a booth with a procuress and two sallow and debauched-looking children and a teenage whore.

I wanted to ask, How much? And, What's the story?

I started to ask them their names, but I realized that if I did that, the people around me would hear and instantly know what was up. I tried to pretend we were old friends.

"He's really hungry!" I said. "Want another ice cream?"

Three tough-featured young men walked past, then chose to sit in the booth opposite, where they could hear and see everything.

I cringed, thinking how I looked there. I wanted to say: I'm a traveler. I'm writing a book. I'm just asking questions. I have no designs on these young children!

"Let we go," the old woman said, perhaps realizing how awkward I felt.

I said, "Look, I'm going to be around for a week or so. I'm pretty busy right now. We can meet again."

"When?" the old woman said. "Where?"

"Anywhere," I said evasively.

"Tomorrow," she said. "What time?"

"Anytime. I'll find you—here," and I put down 200 rupees. "That's for the food." And I whispered, "I have to go."

"Mr. Paul!" the woman called out as I slipped past the booths. Now
everyone was staring at me, thinking, He's a perv! And I hurried through the door, murmuring, "Get me out of here."

But for days afterwards, I kept thinking of the small children, the one-armed girl, how hungry they'd been, how they'd sucked at the tea and eaten with their heads down, in a concentrated and famished way, with animal delight. I did not see them again—I had looked. They'd probably found another foreigner.

***

KILLING TIME IN THE CHOR BAZAAR
, the Thieves' Market, looking for reverse-glass paintings along Mutton Street, with its mainly Muslim dealers in glass and porcelain, silverware and lamps, I strayed into a narrow lane to look at some old coins and found a man who said he admired George Bush. Lingering and chatting, putting an antique dealer at ease, often had the effect of causing him to open drawers and cupboards and show me objects, not to sell them, but just for the interest, their curiosity value—an ancient piece of pottery, a glazed tile, a moonstone, a lime pot in the shape of a yoni, a monkey skull pendant from Nagaland, a human skull from Tibet.

"Look at this, from Persia," Rajendra, the dealer, said, taking the lid off a narrow box.

He showed me a foot-long dagger, silver inlaid with gold, inscribed with a Farsi poem and elaborately engraved, with a thick ivory handle. Uncapping the handle, Rajendra withdrew a smaller knife—an ivory-handled shiv, also traced with gold.

"Damascus blade. Very old. Very rare. Very costly."

One of the gorier bits of trivia regarding damascene blades was that after they were heated and worked they were quenched by being plunged into a living human, a man who died giving strength to the blade. I mentioned this to Rajendra.

"I know nothing about that, but..."He allowed the sunlight to dance on the details of the blade and the gold of the haft and the veins of ivory. "Pure gold. Ivory from whale."

"How much?"

"Crores! Crores! But not for sale," he said, and leaned closer, sounding angry. "I want to present it to the U.S. ambassador in Delhi. He can put it into a museum, or give it to President Bush, or sell it and give the money to the families of the American soldiers who died in Iraq."

"You want to give this dagger to Bush?"

"Bush is a great man." He wielded the dagger. "Bush was right! History will prove him right."

"Right about what?"

"Islam! The brutalness of it!" He pointed outside, where the Chor bazaar was thronged with Muslim shops and secondhand dealers and car repairers and watch menders. "Bush had to do that. Look at history. Aurangzeb killed his father."

He also killed his brothers. He was a notorious bigot, a mosque builder, a warrior king. "That was, what, about four hundred years ago?"

"They kill animals. They eat them. Have you seen them kill a goat? It is horrible."

"Hindus in Jodhpur kill goats during religious festivals. They did it a few weeks ago at Navratri."

"But Muslims bleed it while it is still alive!" Rajendra said. "We have always had problems with Muslims. Look at Indian history! Twenty years ago a maharajah came to me to buy some things. I said to him, 'Never mind these few things. You can have them. But I want to say to you that Islam will be the main problem in the world. The main cause of the world's troubles.'"

"What did the maharajah say?"

"He didn't listen. But Bush knows better. People say—even my friends say—Bush is wrong. But no, Bush is pukka right. Without Bush the world would be finished!" He now held the dagger in both hands, as though offering it. "I want to give this to those who have died. Maybe you can talk to someone."

"There's an American consul general in Mumbai. Just call him and tell him what you want to do."

Rajendra put the dagger back into its silk-lined box. He said, "People will be angry with me if I do this, so I am hesitating. They will say, 'Who is he? Just a
bunniah
[trader],' but I know I am right. I know that Bush is right."

On my trip of twenty-eight thousand miles and hundreds of encounters, I met two people who supported the American president: the man in Baku who wanted the United States to invade Iran, and Rajendra. No one else.

***

EVERYBODY IN INDIA
—and in the States too—talked about outsourcing. India was making shirts and shoes and electronics, and the growth area was IT (information technology), BPO (business process outsourcing), and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing). These were labor-intensive businesses that had helped swell Mumbai to its present size of twenty million, overfilled its trains with commuters, packed its hotels and restaurants, and impelled developers to look at Dharavi slum as a real-estate opportunity. Hundreds of millions of Indians lived below the poverty line—the suicide rate in rural areas was unusually high—but hundreds of millions were also making money.

"The Indian miracle, I tell you," Indians said to me as we drove through the streets of Mumbai, past the slums, the sidewalk sleepers, the lame and the halt. Was the miracle, I wondered, just an illusion?

I badgered friends to connect me with some moneymakers. The biggest IT company in India was Tata Consultancy Services. In the month I visited the TCS office in Mumbai, the company was worth $4 billion. It had more than eighty thousand employees in seventy-four cities worldwide, but this place in Mumbai was one of the largest, and since the Tata family is from Mumbai, this office was perhaps the firm's hub and headquarters.

Instead of taking the train, I allowed myself to be persuaded that a car would be quicker. But the car took twice as long—one and a half hours to get to Vikhroli, on Mumbai's sprawling outskirts. The company lay behind a high wall, traffic-choked and desperate on the outside, serene on the inside, tree-shaded and orderly, like a college campus. This was the Godrej and Boyce Industrial Garden, and though the Godrej Group manufactured soap, detergent, hair dye, hair oil, diapers, "stylish wedding napkins," machine tools, and furniture, its large tracts of available land also made it an outsourcing heaven. Dozens of American companies were also located behind the walls of this shady compound.

"Welcome, sir," said Mr. Burjor Randeria, the CEO of this branch of TCS. He was sixty-one, a Parsi, very hospitable and helpful. He was a Zoroastrian—a flame flickered on a dish on his desk, where there was an image I took to be Ahura Mazda. "We know him as Asho Farohar," Mr. Randeria said. Next to this bearded guardian was a portrait of the frizzy-haired guru Sathya Sai Baba, a small statue of the elephant god Ganesh, and a Ganesh mantra box, about the size of a large matchbox, which cleverly buzzed with intoned mantras day and night.

"It creates vibrations of Ganesha," Mr. Randeria said. "I have it on all the time."

"But you're a Parsi."

"I find this soothing"

We talked about the Parsis. The Tatas were a Parsi family, noted for their philanthropy, having founded hospitals, schools, training colleges, and orphanages. There were, Mr. Randeria said, only seventy-three thousand Parsis in the world, most of them in Mumbai. They were a dying breed.

"We marry late. We seldom have more than one or two children. And Zoroastrians don't convert others. You have to be born a Parsi."

He had been born in Sanjan, Gujarat. This was where the first Parsis landed after Muslim persecution in various jihads from the eighth to the tenth centuries, which ultimately drove almost all of them from Persia. "Parsi" means Persian.

After Mr. Randeria worked for Swissair for a number of years, looking for places to outsource Swissair's revenue accounting—labor costs were much too high in Switzerland—in 1995 he founded a company that provided financial support services for airlines. Tata had a stake in this company, but then Tata has a stake or part ownership in many companies. The name Tata was stamped on the back of most Indian buses and trucks and cars. Tata owned Tetley Tea and many retail stores. Taj Hotels was owned by Tata, and its hotels included the Pierre in New York and what had been the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Telecom, steel, software, utilities, Internet, and insurance companies were all Tata enterprises.

One of the curiosities of the company, founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839-1904), was that a sizable portion of the immense Tata profits went to charitable groups. This was the case from the beginning, the company endowing research institutes and hospitals. Ratan Tata, the current CEO of the whole business, is a single man in his mid-sixties about whom very little is known, other than the fact that he lives rather modestly. He continues to build up his company, buying steel mills and telecommunication giants and, recently, producing affordable family cars—and, as always, looking for constructive ways to give most of his money away. In 2006, the year I poked my nose into Tata Consultancy Services, sales in the conglomerate brought in $24 billion.

Walking through the marble halls of the huge building, I asked Mr. Randeria who his competitors were.

"Microsoft, Infosys, many others," he said. "But our motto is 'Top Ten by 2010.' We will get there by various ways. Growth both organic and inorganic. Code of conduct. Culture. Ethics. Expansion. Also acquisition—we recently acquired Pearl Insurance and the banking and financial giant Chile Comicron. We are very serious. We have an office in Budapest that caters to European languages."

"I passed through Budapest. I had the idea that a lot of Hungarians were looking for jobs."

"If they are willing to work and have skills, we will hire them."

"Funny to hear that from an Indian company," I said.

"But consider our advantages. English language, a legacy from British rule," Mr. Randeria said. "And education. We are on the whole a very well-educated country."

"So everything's rosy."

He knew I was baiting him, but he took it well. "No. I toe the line, but everyone knows there's corruption in India and that you can buy a degree. And there's our population. It's growing at a hectic pace."

It was six hundred million in 1973. It was now more than twice that. I said, "What can you do about it?"

"You can only bring it down by education," Mr. Randeria said. "Adult literacy. You see, if you have an education, you have many sources of pleasure and intellectual stimulation. Ways of using your time. Without education, it's only sex in the rural areas."

"Do you remember what Mumbai was like before this population explosion?"

"Oh, very well indeed." He smiled at the memory. "When I was a boy in Jogeshwar, streets used to be deserted by seven or eight in the evening. It was dark. My parents wanted me home. We saw foxes and hyenas, and so many snakes. Now it's a very crowded place."

Jogeshwar, once a remote area of Salsette and the site of a famous cave, was a large and congested population center about ten miles from central Mumbai. Mr. Randeria said that four hundred families a day—an average of four people per family—migrated to Mumbai.

Swiping his security card from door to door, leading me into the call center, he said, "We are the call center for"—he named an American retailer he made me swear I would not reveal—"at levels one to four. If you have a problem with your electric drill, we will sort it out."

He showed me the rooms where advanced classes in English language
were taught (including American intonation), and the technical rooms where employees learned the inner workings of the products, so they could answer a flummoxed buyer's question or offer advice.

Please remove the chuck key from the pouch, insert it in the chuck of the drill, and turn clockwise to tighten the teeth against the bit...

That sort of sentence was practiced and rehearsed in the classrooms and then recited over the phone by Indian employees, who gave themselves American names ("Rick," "Andrea") and spoke in American accents.

Through soundproof windows, I could see the cubicles—sixty or eighty to a room—where Indian employees wearing headphones were speaking to American callers who had problems with their products. A large banner at the front of one room read,
What can I do to resolve your issue today?