India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (30 page)

“Hurry,” I said. “There’s a crowd outside. I think a boy has died.”

Sathy arrived about twenty minutes later. He pushed through the
crowd. One of the men said something and approached him, a
little too close I thought. Sathy stood his ground. The man pulled back, and Sathy got into the station.

A policeman tried to stop him, but Sathy just patted him on the shoulder and kept going. “He’s my man,” he said, pointing at me, and went into the inspector’s room. The policeman asked: “Who is that?”

Sathy came back out and said: “I’m the Reddiar from Molasur. This is my place. My uncle is the president of this village. Everyone knows me.”

He went into the inspector’s room again; he shut the door. They came out together a little while later. The inspector had a hat on now, and his pistol was holstered on his belt. He opened the door to the station and in a loud voice told everyone to disperse. The crowd pushed forward; a young man started shouting at the inspector. The inspector raised his hand, as if he was going to hit the man. Another man, older, pulled the young man away. The crowd receded.

The inspector turned to me. “You can go now,” he said. “Take everything from the car—CD players, cassette players, anything valuable. Take it and go.”

The boy was in a coma for three days. I was told he had permanent
brain damage. I was told he wouldn’t make it. For three days—and many after—I was afflicted by a searing sense of guilt. I wanted to visit the boy in the hospital, I wanted to visit his family. Sathy advised against it; he said the situation was volatile. Then, one day, Sathy told me that the boy had come out of his
coma and that he was discharged from the hospital. He had some trouble walking, but otherwise he would be all right. The driver went to court three months later. The judge let him off with a warning and a fine.

So everything turned out all right; the mob dispersed, the boy didn’t die; the case was closed. But what I remember most when I think of that day is the face of one of the men in the crowd outside the station. It was a round face, puffy, like a drinker’s, and it was pressed up against the metal bars of a window. He had black circles under narrow eyes. He was looking at me as he shook the bars. He didn’t seem angry; he seemed deliberate. I felt that if he got in, anything could happen.

It was clear the police weren’t going to do much to protect me. I found out later they knew the boys and their families. The police were part of the local community. I was an outsider. I had killed (or so we thought) someone they knew. I wasn’t worth saving. It was only when Sathy showed up and, as he told me later, convinced them I was someone important, someone with political connections, that I seemed worth protecting.

What scared me that afternoon was the sense of utter lawlessness. Things felt out of control. I was at the mercy of an angry mob. And all of this was happening in a police station.

I had started seeing a Hindi expression with increasing frequency
in the papers:
goondagiri
. A
goonda
is a thug.
Goondagiri
is something like a state of thuggery; it refers to a situation in which mobs have run rampant, taken the law into their hands.

The first time I saw the term was after a series of riots in Mumbai. A mob had attacked out-of-state migrants to the city. They’d beaten up a group of workers; at least one man was killed. The police stood by, helpless, or unwilling to help. A couple days later—and too late—the state chief minister announced that the government would “not tolerate
goondagiri
.”

But
goondagiri
wasn’t restricted to Mumbai. All over India, there was a sense that the law-and-order machinery was weakening, even breaking down. The papers were full of lurid stories about kidnappings and rapes and mob violence. Parts of the country had become virtually ungovernable.

In the so-called Cow Belt, a stretch of land that extended over the Hindi heartland of north and central India, corrupt politicians and landed elite (modern-day zamindars) conspired to run what the press called a Mafia Raj. In parts of the northeast, an indecipherable mix of tribes and separatist groups terrorized the local population and profited from the drug trade.

Large swathes of central India—territory referred to as the “Red Corridor”—was virtually under the control of a hardline group of Maoist rebels known as the Naxalites. The Naxal movement was fueled in part by economic and social resentment, a sense of exclusion from the fruits of development. Its goal was to overthrow the state. Every month seemed to bring new stories of Naxal attacks, of bombings and land mines and shootings that the government was unable to control.

India was in upheaval. A few decades ago, in the late eighties, V. S. Naipaul had traveled through the country and noticed an incipient “liberation of spirit.” He wrote of a nation awakening from decades of postcolonial inertia. He wrote about stockbrokers and
businessmen seizing new economic opportunities, about politicians and revolutionaries, and ordinary citizens, trying on new identities.

Naipaul was prescient. The social and economic emancipation that I was living now was just beginning to manifest when he traveled through the country; it would intensify in the nineties. This process was invigorating, and often inspiring. But Naipaul was prescient, too, about the flip side of the emancipation: the violence and even a sense of anarchy that would accompany India’s redefinition.

India’s liberation, Naipaul wrote, “could not come as release alone. In India, with its layer below layer of distress and cruelty, it had to come as disturbance. It had to come as rage and revolt. India was now a country of a million little mutinies.”

The nation was on the move. It was all very exciting. But it also felt dangerous. The process of liberation was messy; the old order was crumbling, and sometimes it seemed like all that was stepping into the vacuum was chaos.

The mutinies—the rage, the revolt, the messy sense of freedom
, tantalizing yet threatening—were all around me. In the villages near my home, gang violence had metastasized into something more random, more unpredictable. What began as organized crime—targeted assassinations, political hits—had degenerated into a culture of violence. It felt like it could erupt at any moment.

A casual comment could quickly be misinterpreted and end in a fight. A minor traffic accident led to extortionate demands for
payment. Workers who were fired in the morning returned that evening with friends to attack their employers.

People had seen their peers get away with murder. They knew the police were often pliable, the courts bogged down by caseloads that could take years to work through. Local politicians were supportive. Some politicians nurtured their own army of
goonda
s. For many young men, crime had become a way of life.

All along the East Coast Road, I heard stories about men and women who had suffered brutal attacks, and who were often murdered. Sometimes the attacks took place near or in the victims’ homes. Sometimes they happened on a highway, on the beach, or maybe at a movie theater, on a Sunday, while the victim was out relaxing with his family.

Most of the attacks involved knives and axes. Victims were cut up, dismembered, occasionally after being disabled by a throw of red chili powder to the eyes. Increasingly, incredibly, I heard stories about attacks involving bombs—crude country versions of Molotov cocktails, made with petrol or kerosene.

That was something new: bomb attacks in my country home, on a landscape I had always thought of as a rural idyll. “It’s like living in Baghdad,” a friend said one day, after we’d heard about the latest victim killed by a bomb. “Sometimes I feel like I should just get the hell out of here.” My friend was French. He’d spent all his life in India, but now he was talking about moving to France.

He was being a little dramatic. But I could relate to what he was feeling. A few of the victims were people I knew. The sense of danger—to myself, to my family—was palpable. It was frightening, and more than a little hard to believe. I found myself astonished, and often agonized. What had happened to the villages I
knew as a boy? How did those fields and forest and beaches that seemed so sedate, so peaceable, turn into places I was often scared to visit at night?

According to Sathy, one thing was at the root of the violence
: money. He said that too much money was flooding into the villages. It changed people’s sense of themselves, and their relations with others. People no longer knew how they fit into society. They were losing their bearings.

The escalating value of land, in particular, had a major role to play. The wealth being generated in cities was trickling down to the real estate market in villages. Young software professionals who a generation ago might have lived with their parents were now looking for second homes in the country. They were buying up farmland and properties that had been neglected for decades. Often, they bought without even intending to build: they bought village land as an investment, as a place to park their surplus funds.

The new money was stirring things up. It led to friction within families, and between neighbors. Sons who had migrated to cities, who had abandoned farms to their siblings or cousins, came back now and demanded their share of the family fortune. Merchants and civil servants who had always looked down on farmers—as impoverished, illiterate manual laborers—woke up one day to find that the farmers were incalculably richer than they were.