India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (41 page)

“It doesn’t sound like a very pleasant reality,” I said, and Sathy shook his head. “Yes, but that’s the way it is,” he said. “That’s the truth of life around here. I don’t want to be cut off from the truth.”

Sathy told me that Banu let him go to Molasur only if he could
come up with a valid excuse. He was forced to make up reasons—stories about his mother’s health, for instance, or problems in the family fields. He was always happy when I wanted to visit the village or meet someone around there. He said my book was a perfect excuse; if I asked him to come to Molasur, Banu couldn’t say no.

I asked Sathy once if he could help me find Ramadas. I hadn’t seen Ramadas in a long time. The last time we’d met, his cow-brokering business was thriving. But so much had happened since then. I wondered if he had felt the impact at all of the nation’s
economic slowdown. I wanted to know what he thought about all the new money coming into the villages.

It was hard to track Ramadas down. He was an elusive character. I sent messages through people who knew him, but he didn’t respond. I visited the lodge where he stayed when working at the cow market; they hadn’t seen him in a while. Then Sathy told me he had a cell-phone number for Ramadas’s son. He called, set up a meeting with Ramadas at the shandy in Brahmadesan. When we went to the shandy, Ramadas was nowhere to be found.

We caught up with Ramadas, finally, at another cow market, in a village called Madagadipet. It was about fifty kilometers from Brahmadesan. Ramadas told us it was safer for him there. He was trying to keep a low profile.

Ramadas was in a bit of trouble. He had stood guarantor for a friend who bought twelve cows. The friend had a piece of land he intended to sell to raise money for the cows. When he made the deal, he had lots of potential buyers. But then the economy had slowed, the real estate market cooled, and all the buyers backed out. Ramadas’s friend wasn’t able to come up with his payment.

The cows had already been shipped to the neighboring state of Kerala, probably slaughtered. The sellers were furious. It wasn’t safe for Ramadas to show his face around. “If I go back to Brahmadesan, I could be in trouble,” he told me, when I met him in Madagadipet. “It could turn violent, I might get beaten.”

Ramadas was at the cow market with Krishnan, his friend and fellow cow broker. They were working together. When I found them, they were standing under a tamarind tree. Ramadas had shaved his beard and grown a mustache; he looked cleaner, less rough, younger.

I told him he looked good, and he shook his head and said he’d been under a lot of pressure. He said he’d been restless. He was having sleepless nights. I looked more closely, and it was true: I saw that Ramadas had deep circles under his eyes.

As we spoke, two men came up and slapped him on the back. “So this is where you are,” one of them said. “Lots of people are looking for you. We should lift you from here and take you back to our village.” Ramadas laughed, and the men went their way, but I could tell he was perturbed.

When the men were gone, Krishnan said: “If they lift a finger against Ramadas, they know what will happen to them. We’ll never allow that. They won’t dare enter the area again after that.”

Ramadas and Krishnan were done with their work for the day, but
they wanted to walk around the shandy a little. They studied the cows on display. They commented on each one they passed: too skinny, too old, nice horns, good teeth. Sathy and I followed them. I made sure to keep my eyes on the ground, avoiding the copious piles of feces and puddles of urine that had turned the dry earth to mud.

As they walked, Ramadas and Krishnan started talking about how dull the market was. They said business was down; it had been that way for a while now. “This is nothing compared to what it was a few years ago,” Ramadas told me. “There are maybe half as many cows here.” Krishnan nodded his head in agreement. “It’s because they’re all being eaten. The cow population is being reduced,” he said.

“Nonsense,” Ramadas said. “It has nothing to do with eating. If people eat them, then there’s more demand—the market should be busier. It has everything to do with what we’ve been watching on TV. We all know what’s happening in the world. Look, before, a cow skin used to be exported for six hundred rupees. Now you can’t even get two hundred rupees. So of course there aren’t any buyers. When the whole world is down, do you think we’ll be up? It’s very simple: people don’t have money.”

Krishnan insisted again that the problems at the shandy had nothing to do with the global economy. He said cows were being eaten faster than they could breed. Ramadas seemed kind of exasperated with his friend; he found an excuse to get rid of him.

When Krishnan was gone, Ramadas told me that things had changed quite suddenly, about a year or two before. Initially, he said, the price of cows started going down. It was the first time since Ramadas was a young man that he’d seen that. Then, he started noticing fewer buyers, especially those representatives of slaughterhouses that exported cow hides and meat.

For a while, Ramadas kept making the trip from Chennai to Brahmadesan. He stayed in his lodge, sleeping on the floor at the top of the building, with just one bulb to light the room. He went to the cow market in the mornings, hung out with nothing to do, came back to the lodge in the evenings. He wasn’t making any money. He wasn’t even able to cover the cost of his bus fare from Chennai.

Now, Ramadas said, he no longer held out any hope for his business. He had resisted the thought for a long time, but he’d come to an undeniable conclusion: Cow brokering was gone, and it wasn’t coming back. Maybe what he’d been watching on TV had
led to this situation, he said, but he thought it had only precipitated something that was already under way. “It’s a hopeless line of work,” he told me. “What kind of a living is it to sell cows? I don’t think it will ever be the way it was again.”

I tried to encourage Ramadas. I told him I was sure if he just stuck around long enough things would get better. Already, I said, the world economy was picking up. India was doing well again.

Ramadas wasn’t convinced. He curled his upper lip, disgusted, and he said again that his line of work was gone. Then, unexpectedly, he started smiling. He told me he didn’t really care anyway. He’d already decided to get out of the business. He was almost sixty years old. He’d been working in this field for forty-five years. It was tough work. He said it wasn’t worth it anymore; Ramadas had decided it was time for a change.

“What?” I asked. I was astonished. “But you said you’d do it as long as your blood flowed. You said you’d never stop, no matter what happened.”

“So what?” Ramadas said. “Can’t a man change his mind? Yes, it’s true I told you that, but now the whole situation has changed. An era has passed. A moment in history is gone. I grew up doing this work with my father. But you know, I don’t really mind. It’s fine. This business is over. I wouldn’t recommend it to a young man today. The country has changed, and I’m happy to move on.”

He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket. It was for a real estate developer he’d met in Chennai. The developer had told Ramadas that real estate was the future. He’d convinced Ramadas that he had bright prospects in land. He said the business needed people like Ramadas—men with energy and know-how, who knew how to swing a deal.

Ramadas was enthusiastic. He told me he’d seen for himself how land prices had jumped in recent years, how young fools, uneducated kids, had made more money in a few months than he had made in all his time as a cow broker. He wasn’t interested in sticking with a dead business. Maybe he was sixty years old, but he wasn’t finished; he still had a future.

“Won’t you miss this business?” I asked him. “Are you sure you won’t regret leaving it?”

“Not at all,” Ramadas said. “I didn’t invest crores and crores into anything. I just made my money and went home. Maybe if a prostitute quits prostitution, or if an arrack seller stops selling arrack, they might have regrets. They don’t know how to do anything else. But I have so many skills. I can make money so many other ways.”

He stopped at a vendor’s stall and bought himself some juice, an onion-and-millet mix. “I won’t miss any of this,” he said, “nothing at all. All I’ll remember is how I slogged—slogged and slogged for forty-five years, and no savings to show for it. Even my wife—she works as an unskilled laborer, but she has a fixed deposit. She asks me all the time what I have, and what can I say? Nothing.”

He drank his juice, he wiped some off the tips of his mustache. Then he turned around, pointed at two cows tied to a tree, and asked Sathy and me if we had any idea how much they cost. We said we didn’t. “I bet they cost around twenty-three thousand to twenty-five thousand for the pair,” he said.

He went up to a group of men sitting on the ground. He asked if the cows were theirs, and one man said yes, he had bought them earlier that morning. “How much did you pay?” Ramadas asked, and the man told him he had paid 25,000 rupees.

“See, see,” Ramadas came back and said. “See how right I was? After all my time in this business, I knew exactly how much they would cost.” He was beaming. “I know my trade,” he said. “I know it inside out.”

“He’ll miss it,” I said to Sathy.

“He’ll miss it,” Sathy said.

We laughed.

“I won’t miss it at all,” Ramadas said. “I’m making a new start. I won’t miss a single day.”

On our way back from the market, past a row of scrap metal shops
and rusted tractors and sugarcane fields, I told Sathy I thought it was a bit depressing that Ramadas was quitting his line of work. I said I understood that times were tough, but it didn’t make sense to me that Ramadas was going to start a new career at the age of sixty.

To me, Ramadas was a victim—of difficult economic times, maybe, but even more, of changing times. I saw him as a man being forced out of the profession he had followed—and loved—for forty-five years. I saw him as yet another casualty of India’s development.

Sathy said he saw it a little differently. He didn’t think it was so depressing that Ramadas was going to stop working as a cow broker. For him, it was exciting that Ramadas had found a new line of work. Yes, times were changing, and Ramadas was being forced to move on. But, Sathy said, I had to admit he was entering a much more promising field. Ramadas was right that real estate was the way of the future.

“Just one deal goes through and he could make a lot of money,” Sathy said. “Why should he sit around and waste his time at the shandies? He’s right when he says that’s the past. Those days are over, Akash. These days, if you have drive and ambition, it doesn’t matter who you are or even how old you are. It’s a whole new scene in this country. Who knows? Ramadas could get rich.”

He started talking about his own situation. He said Banu always told him farming was history. She asked why he couldn’t be more enterprising. The whole country is getting rich, she would say, and we’re the only ones missing out on the action.

“For years, I told her she didn’t know what she was talking about,” Sathy said. “I was like Ramadas. I told her that I was a farmer, that farming was in my blood and I would never leave it. But I have to admit: When I see everything that’s happening, part of me wants to start a new life also.”