India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (12 page)

There was much I welcomed about the Americanization of India
. The estrangement between my two worlds had always disturbed me. I can still remember the family friends and distant relatives—they always lived in the cities, and they always had a monopoly on what it meant to be a true Indian—who belittled my American background. They made me feel like I could never fully belong. It was comforting, now, to know that India and America were no longer mutually exclusive.

But there were, inevitably, aspects of America’s influence that I couldn’t help feeling less enthusiastic about. I wondered if India’s new drive and sense of purpose, its optimism and self-belief, had to manifest, also, as a kind of ruthless and self-centered ambition. I wondered if the new incomes and opportunities, the rousing sense of independence felt by so many young Indians, had to be accompanied by what I often felt was a shallow materialism and consumerism.

Coca-Cola ran a survey in India near the turn of the millennium. It found that the chief goal of Indians—in both cities and the countryside—was to “become rich.”

There was a ubiquitous ad, a little jingle for an Indian financial services company that I couldn’t get out of my mind. It ran: “It’s all about the money, honey.”

These were the kinds of things I had run away from in America. Now I started wondering if maybe it was all part of a package.
Maybe it wasn’t possible to pick and choose what one took from America. Maybe the features I admired in the new India were inextricably bound with the features that I found increasingly dismaying.

Leo, the friend who had introduced me to Hari, said something interesting to me one day. He was almost forty, older than Hari. He had a little more perspective.

“Nobody knows where this is all going,” he said once, after we had seen Hari. “These guys are just trying on roles, but they don’t really know who they’re becoming. Hari is doing great today—he’s on top of the world. But sometimes I worry that the same things that make him happy today might make him miserable tomorrow.”

Hari took me shopping one day. We went with Nikhil and Leo
. We went to Spencer Plaza. It was a Saturday, shortly before the new year, and the shops and corridors of the mall were full. I felt a little daunted by the crowds, but Hari, ever exuberant, was undauntable.

A few days earlier, when he had invited me, he told me that if I went shopping with him, I would go “crazy.” “Why is that?” I asked, and he laughed. “You don’t know me,” he said. “Everyone goes crazy when they shop with me. Once I start, I can’t stop.”

He told me, walking the noisy corridors of the mall, shouting a little above the din of thousands of equally avid shoppers, that he had spent 60,000 rupees that month—around four times his
salary. He said he needed a new watch. He had already bought three that month, and he had fourteen—or maybe fifteen, he wasn’t sure—at home. But he needed “one for every mood.” “It depends on how I’m feeling that day,” he said. “I need a different color for all my moods.”

I asked him how he managed to pay for it all, and he nudged me. “That’s my secret,” he said. “I’ll never tell anyone.” I pressed him. “It’s simple,” he said. “I keep rotating.”

He had five credit cards, and around 50,000 rupees of debt. It wasn’t hard to get new credit cards; the banks were eager to lend to India’s demographic dividend.

Hari’s mother was worried about his debt. But he said he wasn’t concerned. “See, when it comes to shopping, I never feel stressed,” he told me. “I never feel poor. I just go be happy and buy whatever I want. Shopping is my natural stress-reliever. Whenever I buy something, a feeling of excitement comes automatically.”

We spent a long afternoon in Spencer Plaza. We started at a
bookstore, where Hari bought a basketful of magazines (
Cosmopolitan
,
Filmfare
,
Men’s Health
) and movies (including
The
Little Mermaid
and a Barbie Doll dance video). We moved on to an underwear store, where Nikhil and Leo checked out a male mannequin in bikini underwear while Hari browsed through boxes of jockstraps. He said he had a “fetish” about underwear; he couldn’t get enough. He bought several jockstraps.

He told me he had a policy: If he entered a store, he had to buy
something. “You’re a shopkeeper’s dream,” I said, and he said he thought it was only fair. He’d seen customers go into shops with long lists of questions. They took things down from shelves, they made a mess, and then they left without spending even fifty paisa. It wasn’t correct.

We stopped in at a music store, where Hari bought four movies and flashed a frequent-buyer card. We had lunch at Subway, where the man sitting at the table next to us asked his friends: “At the end of the day, your ultimate aim is to make money, right?”

We ended up at a cosmetics store. Hari grilled the shopgirls about menthol face-wash and the difference between anti-greasing and anti-regreasing whitening cream. The girls seemed astonished by his questions; one, giggling, said that men never asked so much. Hari dismissed them with a wave of his hand. “How can you sell these products if you don’t know anything about them?” he asked, and he picked a basket of cosmetics on his own.

Standing in line at the checkout, he told me that the reason he loved shopping so much was because he was a Gemini. He said that Geminis were very impulsive. “What Gemi wants Gemi has to get,” he said. “Gemi can’t control himself.”

This was particularly true of love. Once a Gemini fell in love, he could never let go. That’s why he would never fall in love—he wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone. “Once we get in, we’ll never leave,” he said. “I don’t want that to happen to anyone. I don’t want to kill a person. Let him be free.”

Outside the cosmetics store, Hari, Leo, and Nikhil rested against a metal parapet. Hari seemed kind of giddy. He was bouncing around, joking and playing with his friends. They were
touching each other, friendly pats and a few caresses on their shoulders and backs.

Hari started talking about Geminis and love again. He said you didn’t need love when you could shop; both were equally invigorating. He told me about everything he’d bought that month. He was especially happy with a new set-top box he’d installed at home.

He had spent more than 5,000 rupees that day, almost all on credit cards, and I asked him again if he wasn’t worried about paying off his debt. He told me again he wasn’t. “If you live in good times, then why should you worry about anything?” he asked.

“But what about the future? What about saving for tomorrow?” I asked.

Hari and Nikhil laughed. “Why save?” Hari said. “What’s the use of saving?”

“Yeah, why should we save?” Nikhil asked. “I don’t like the concept of saving.”

They gave each other a high five, and Nikhil sang a film song I didn’t recognize. They were swaying their hips.

“But what if you lose your job?” I asked.

“Then we’ll get a new job,” Nikhil said. “If we lose this job, we’ll just get another.”

“We work in technology,” Hari said. “Don’t you understand? There are thousands of jobs out there. Now’s not the time for saving. Now’s the time for enjoying.”

“Yes, there’s nothing to worry about—just be happy,” Nikhil said.

They gave each other a high five again, and Hari told me to smile. “What’s the matter, why so serious?” he asked. He slapped me on the back. He said I sounded like his mother.

Hari and Nikhil went to meet a friend, and I gave Leo a ride
home. The roads outside Spencer Plaza were jammed. The city was alive; everyone had somewhere to go on a Saturday.

Leo and I talked while we were stuck in traffic. I said I noticed he hadn’t bought anything. Maybe, I said, it was because he wasn’t a Gemini. He laughed. He said maybe he just wasn’t as confident as Hari. He couldn’t be so sure it was all going to work out.

I asked if he thought Hari’s confidence was justified.

“I guess so, if you’re willing to work like him,” he said. “If you’re willing to take crazy hours, no holidays, and no control over your life, of course you’ll always find a job in this economy. I’m sure if you put Europeans or Americans in Hari’s job, they’d snap. They’d want ergonomic chairs, they’d want more holidays, they’d want health insurance, they’d complain a lot. But this generation is just willing to do it—they’ll do anything to get ahead and make money. That’s a huge advantage they have over mine.

“But then again,” Leo said, “does Hari want to be doing this when he’s forty?” He was quiet. Then he said: “Still, I guess when he’s forty he’ll probably be earning a lot more than I am.”

We drove slowly, inching our way through the cars and vans and autorickshaws that were lined up, honking their horns. It was evening, a time between night and day, and the lights of the city were starting to come on.

We drove past the U.S. consulate, where security was tight, with guards behind sandbags and a blue riot control vehicle that looked like a mini-tank. The war in Iraq was raging.

We drove past a liquor store, where an old man with bowlegs and patchy skin on his face was swaying back and forth, leaning against a wall, while another man, maybe his friend, was spitting mucus so thick and copious onto the road that I thought he was vomiting.

We drove past a hotel that I knew had a nice bar. I asked Leo if he wanted to get a drink. He said he’d rather just get home. He seemed subdued. He started talking about what working in India had been like when he was Hari’s age. There were no opportunities, there was no connection to the outside world. There was no real reason to be confident.

“Do you envy him?” I asked.

“Yes, I guess I do,” Leo said. “I guess in a way I wish I could be Hari. It would be fun. They’re having a good time, this new generation. They’re definitely having a good time.

“Life just seems to work for them,” he said. “They’re coasting along. I guess it’s a great country to be in right now.”

It was Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival, and Sathy was having a
feast at his house. He invited me to Molasur. “Come meet my family,” he said. “Everyone’s coming down, we’re all going to be together.”

I went to Molasur on a rainy day in January, the sky a sheet of metal, the ponds and irrigation channels along the road filled with muddy red water. Pongal is a joyful holiday, an occasion to celebrate the monsoons and the gifts they bring. The rains had been generous that year. The fields were green, alive, and tractors were decked out in flowers. Villages were crowded with made-up cows, their horns painted bright reds and blues and oranges, their necks garlanded with jasmine.

Sathy was outside his house, dressed in a purple
kurta
and white pants, deep in conversation with a man on a bicycle. The man left when he saw me; Sathy told me his story. He said the man
was bereaved; he’d recently lost his brother. His brother had gone swimming in a well and suffered a seizure. He drowned. When his family found him, his eyes were missing; they’d been eaten by fish.

“Come, come inside,” Sathy said, and he led me into his home, through a living room in the front, a space for official visitors and acquaintances, to another in the back, a more intimate living room for family and close friends. There were about thirty people spread around the more intimate room, on sofas and chairs, some on the floor. A group of children were playing carrom. A TV was turned to cartoons.