India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (19 page)

We ended up in Cariappa Park, a twenty-two-acre expanse of green in the heart of the city. There weren’t too many people around, just a few middle-aged couples, men in shorts and women in pants, on evening walks. The sounds of traffic and commerce felt far away, softened by the trees.

“I love the parks in Bangalore,” Veena said, and I agreed. But the truth was that the trees didn’t seem to be in very good shape. They were droopy and pallid. Many were denuded, their dead leaves scattered around. I thought the gardens in the Garden City were dying.

We sat on the ground, Veena on the brick ledge of a flower bed, and I on a newspaper. “I’ve never been in here before,” I said, and Veena said she hadn’t, either. She’d been in Bangalore only a few months; she was still getting to know the city.

She said that she and Arvind spent the weekends exploring; it was one of the best things about living in a new place. They went to shopping malls, to movie theaters, and they tried new restaurants. Arvind, who had never lived in a big city before, had tasted Japanese and Thai food for the first time. The variety, the diversity of people and experiences, was exhilarating.

Things were going well for them; I could tell they’d landed on their feet. They’d found an apartment they liked, and jobs that were satisfying. She worked at a technology start-up. He worked with a retail franchise, helping to set up new stores. She said they were learning a lot. The pay was good, too; combined, they were earning twice as much as they had been before moving to Bangalore.

She was, in fact, about to switch jobs. She would soon be starting at an advertising company. She hadn’t gone looking for the job; they’d found her. Now, she said, they were going to pay her “obscene amounts of money.” At the interview, they asked how much she wanted, and when she named her price, they just threw on an extra 70,000 rupees to her package.

She never really imagined she could make so much. She had moved to Bangalore hoping she could improve her prospects, but she didn’t think it would happen so quickly. She knew it was only money, but still, she said, it gave her a real sense of accomplishment.

“The money is important,” she told me. She put her hand gently on my forehead, pressed it down. The park was full of mosquitoes.
“The money is important because you need it, but also because, in the end, it’s a measure of achievement. That’s the way it is. In a place like Bangalore, the kind of money you’re earning tells you where you are and where you’ve reached. It gives you a kind of value.”

Even more important than the money, she said, was “the power.” She would be managing fourteen men in her new job. That would be an experience.

“Power is good,” she said, laughing. “I grew up with this very Indian concept that a woman doesn’t do a lot of things. I grew up thinking that a woman was essentially less than her husband. So of course the power gives me a kind of high—knowing that I’m doing equally well or better than all these men, and knowing that they have to listen to me.”

She laughed again. She said: “I know I probably sound power hungry, like one of those Western women in pantsuits you see on TV or whatever. Well, you can see I’m not like that. But still, sometimes when I watch them, I think they’re on to something.”

It wasn’t strictly true that the current generation of Indian women
was the first to work outside the home. As far back as I can remember, I have always seen and known Indian women working in shops, offices, hospitals, farms, and markets. My aunt, now in her late sixties, has worked as a doctor all her professional life. My grandmother worked in an embroidery workshop even during the 1950s.

Women have always worked in agriculture. When I was a boy, it was mainly women, their saris stained red with mud, sometimes
a wet cloth covering their heads to protect them from the sun, that I saw bent over in the fields around Auroville.

Of course the number of working women has increased as the economy has changed. (Between 1981 and 2001, the percentage of women in the workforce grew from 19.7 percent to 25.7 percent.) Although a formidable glass ceiling remains—and although India continues to perform abysmally on global rankings of gender equality—pay for women employees has also increased over the last few decades. But the real change is in the way women approach their jobs, and in the significance those jobs have for their lives.

Veena told me one time that when she was younger, in her twenties, she had a job as a customer agent in Jaipur. She said that virtually all the customer agents in her office were women. It was seen as female work—placating customers, calming them down. She said she did the work primarily as a “time-pass kind of thing.” It didn’t mean much to her. She did it for a little pocket money, to get out of the house, for a small sense of independence.

This, in Veena’s opinion, was the big difference between the way women worked now and the way they had worked before. In the past, women took jobs primarily to supplement the household income, or maybe to get away from the house or a bad marriage. Now women took jobs because they were ambitious—because they wanted to build careers, because they wanted independence, or quite simply because they wanted power.

From a “time-pass” thing, work had become a vehicle for self-expression, and even self-creation. “You get defined when your career does well,” Veena told me. “If you do well at what you’re good at, then you become a better person. It defines you in your own eyes, and also the eyes of others.”

Veena was certainly ambitious. It was one of the first things that struck me as I got to know her. She complained that some people saw her as “aggressive,” and it’s true that she had a gentle side, a caring personality that seemed always to be worried about or supporting friends in need. But I could see why people might think she was aggressive; when it came to work, to getting ahead, she exuded a kind of clarity, a single-mindedness and sense of purpose that I thought was in many ways characteristic of the new Indian generation.

She was ambitious for herself, and she was ambitious for Arvind. She told me that the first time she met him, he was working as a salesman in the town where she was living with her husband. She felt right away that he was a man with potential, that he could really make something of himself—if only he could escape the narrow horizons of the small town where he had grown up.

Arvind and his college friends would go out late on weekends, and often on weekdays. They’d get drunk, get into brawls with strangers. He didn’t take his job seriously. It was frustrating to Veena. She felt he was bogged down, restricted by the pettiness of his world.

When they moved to Bangalore, Veena was determined to help Arvind grow beyond that pettiness. She helped him adjust to city life. She taught him how to dress formally, how to talk to colleagues at work, and how to conduct himself in interviews. She felt he was sometimes a little too easygoing; it was her role to make him more disciplined.

Now, she said, Arvind was flourishing. He, too, was about to start a new job, and it was a big job. He’d been hired as the head of retail at one of Bangalore’s largest shopping malls. He would be
managing tens of thousands of square feet of shops, and hundreds of people. It was a major step up for him.

Arvind told me one time about how he got that job. He said that Veena had encouraged him to try for it. So he applied, he went through a few rounds of interviews, and then one night a woman called him and asked if he’d come out to the company’s headquarters for a final round. It was about eight p.m. The headquarters were far out of town. Arvind told the woman he could come only the next morning.

When he called Veena, who was at work, and told her what he’d said to the woman, Veena asked him if he was crazy. She told him it was a test; they were gauging his level of commitment. She told him to head straight home, get dressed, and wait for her. She left work early and met him at their apartment, and they took a taxi together to the interview.

After the interview, the woman who had called, the head of human resources for the company, confirmed that the call was a test. Arvind said he passed his test because of Veena.

He told me this one afternoon at the mall, as he gave me a tour of the area he managed. The mall was impressive, new and airy, filled with natural light. We were standing outside a row of fashion stores, with sparrows circling and chirping at our feet. Arvind said they lived in the mall.

I asked him if he thought Veena was more ambitious than he was. “Yes, definitely,” he said. “Much more. She’s much more confident than I am to go for things.” He smiled when he told me that. He had a pleasant, relaxed smile. He was, as Veena said, easygoing.

Once, I asked Veena where she got her confidence. We were sitting in the garden of a hotel, having a coffee. She put her cup
down, wiped her lips, and smiled. She said she’d been asked a very similar question recently, in a job interview. The interviewer had looked at her résumé and pointed out that she lacked an MBA, the typical qualification at the position for which she’d applied.

“Why should we hire you?” the interviewer asked.

“It’s very simple,” Veena told him. “People like me don’t know anything about anything, so we end up being very fast learners all the time. You can throw us into anything and we’ll manage very well.”

The interviewer asked Veena where she got her confidence. She told me she gave him a generic answer, something about her parents and hard work and determination. Now, sitting with me in that hotel, she said that the truth was that she didn’t really know; she wasn’t sure how she had ended up believing in herself.

But one thing she did know: She hadn’t always been that way.

Before getting together with Arvind, Veena had been married to
another man for six years. She’d never believed in herself during that time; she was neither confident nor ambitious. She said her mother had always been a housewife. She figured she’d be the same.

In Jaipur, her husband was the breadwinner. She cooked his meals, organized his laundry, supported his career. When his company, an engineering firm, posted him to Chennai, she followed despite her misgivings about moving so far from friends and family.

She became what she called a “full-time housewife.” She stayed at home and did the chores. She supervised the servants,
she cleaned up. One day her father visited from Jaipur. He surprised her in the middle of the afternoon. He found her mopping the floor. He asked what was happening to her. “Why are you sitting around doing this with your life?” he asked. “Is this why you got an education?”

His questions got Veena thinking; she decided maybe she should get a job. She interviewed for a position at a store. She started as a personal assistant, but she was quickly promoted. She got a lot of praise at work; she started making decent money. “It was the first time I started thinking I was smart,” she told me. “I mean, I’d thought I was smart in other ways—I was a good dancer or a good sister or good at relationships—but I never thought I was smart in that way. I never imagined I could have a career. It was just not something I had considered.”

As Veena’s self-confidence went up, her marriage went down. Things had already been tough in Jaipur. She’d married a childhood friend; she had her doubts from the start, but she didn’t have the confidence to resist her family’s pressure. She hoped for the best. Soon, though, she found out that she and her husband were incompatible in many ways. The “physical side” of the marriage wasn’t working, she said, and, perhaps as a consequence, they bickered a lot.

Things got worse when Veena started working. Her success seemed to threaten her husband. She said that if she stayed out late, he’d get upset. When, at a subsequent job, she was sent to Europe, he seemed unhappy with the way she was building her own life. Veena said her husband was a good man, but they just seemed to have different ideas of their roles in the marriage.

One night there was a big scene at home. Veena was on the
sofa, sick with a fever. Her husband got angry about something she said. He kicked a table. The table broke and a piece grazed Veena’s shoulder. She felt she had to get out. It was raining outside.