India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (42 page)

We turned off the main road, onto a country path that led between rice and peanut fields. The fields were green. A few water buffaloes were resting in a pond. A woman was crouched over, picking peanuts, her head protected from the heat by a faded blue cloth.

“In a few years, none of this will be here,” Sathy said. “I’m sure this will all be plots and houses.” He was pensive, a little rueful. Then he chuckled. “That Ramadas—you have to admit he’s an enterprising fellow. It’ll take him far. He’ll probably figure out a way to make a fortune off these fields.”

Not too long after that conversation with Sathy, I went to the
beach. I went back to the fishing village of Chinnamudaliarchavadi,
along the East Coast Road. It was the evening, winter, and the rains had been torrential that year. Farmers in the area were celebrating a successful monsoon. But in Chinnamudaliarchavadi, the mood was grim.

I went to Chinnamudaliarchavadi because I had heard that another stretch of the shore had recently been lost to erosion. I heard, too, that angry villagers had staged a demonstration on the East Coast Road, blocking traffic for hours. At least fourteen homes had been swept away. I wanted to see the situation for myself.

What I found was a pitiful sight. Last time I had been in Chinnamudaliarchavadi, the waves were already lapping up against the village, but only a few thatch huts had been swallowed by the ocean. Now at least three rows of houses, many made of concrete and brick, had disappeared. All over the shore, on bits of higher ground, families had set up makeshift shelters, improvised tents of canvas, thatch, and straw sheets. The village looked like a refugee camp.

A group of women sat on the ground, amid the ruins of their homes. They told me about the buildings that were lost, about the difficulty their men confronted while fishing in those turbulent waters. Many families, their livelihoods decimated, were reduced to a single meal a day. Children had been pulled from school.

Up the shore from those women, I spoke to a husband and wife outside their shelter. It was a sorry excuse for a home: waist-high, just a couple meters long, a sheet of straw and some tattered saris draped over a few branches staked in the ground. Their original home had been lost one morning when the husband was out at sea and the woman was selling fish at a market. They came back to
the village, and all their possessions were gone. At least, they said, their son had been at school. He survived.

Their son was seven years old. His name was Ajit. He hung around the shelter, smiling, but with tired eyes. His mother told me that Ajit wanted to be a doctor. She laughed when she said that. “Who has the money to make him a doctor?” she asked.

She wanted her son to be a fisherman. Her father and grandfather had fished for a living, and her husband’s father and grandfather had, too. Her husband, himself a fisherman, shook his head. “What kind of living can he make from fishing?” he asked. “Look at this ocean. Let him get a job. Let him become something real—something with a future.”

I walked away from that family. I walked along the narrow beach, past all the debris, past a house that had been cut open, as if sliced in half, slabs of concrete suspended midair from thin steel rods. I walked and I walked. I walked fast, as if I was trying to get away from all the devastation.

I sat on a catamaran. Waves crashed at my feet. There was a strong breeze lifting from the ocean; the air was crisp.

In the distance, I could see the town of Pondicherry. Its lights were bright in the advancing evening, multicolored. I could see the outlines of a pier, and a beach promenade where I knew traffic was busy and tourists crowded into swanky hotels. Pondicherry was a thriving town. It was everything Chinnamudaliarchavadi was not: prosperous, self-confident, with a future.

Sitting on that catamaran, my thoughts turned to the shandy I’d recently visited in Madagadipet. I thought of the conversation Sathy and I had about Ramadas on the way back from the market.
I had seen pathos, even heartbreak, in Ramadas’s story. I thought his decision to leave cow brokering was a modern Indian tragedy—less dramatic, certainly less painful, than the tragedy being played out in Chinnamudaliarchavadi, but not dissimilar in its sense of exile, of banishment from a way of life established over centuries.

I saw Ramadas and Chinnamudaliarchavadi as forms of collateral damage. They were the losses Indian society had to bear—was willing to bear—in order to enjoy its new prosperity.

Sathy had a different opinion. He saw Ramadas’s interest in real estate as cause for optimism. Now I wondered: Which one of us was right? And, on that beach, with the detritus of an ancient village on one side and the shine of a newly rising town on the other, it struck me that, in fact, we had both been right. Ramadas’s story was a quintessentially Indian story—a story of loss and renewal, of ruin and reinvention. This duality, this delicate dance between destruction and creativity, between tearing down and building up, was what defined the Indian condition at the start of the twenty-first century.

It was a small realization, something I’d been aware of—if less explicitly, as if in the background of my consciousness—for some time. But that evening, my understanding of India’s duality came as a form of release. It came as comfort, a relief from all the questions and doubts and anger I’d been harboring recently about the nation. For the first time in months, perhaps in years, I was able to locate a certain equanimity within myself when I thought of India and what it was becoming.

I had returned from America full of enthusiasm. I celebrated what I saw as the rejuvenation of my home. Later, the enthusiasm
started seeming naive, the rejuvenation something of an illusion. My optimism turned to skepticism, occasionally to despair. Now it seemed to me that I had perhaps rushed to judgment on both occasions—that my initial, positive reaction was as hasty as my later, negative one.

India didn’t lend itself to easy judgments. The central fact (perhaps the only incontrovertible fact) of modern India was change. The nation was on a journey. It was still sorting through the contradictions of a rapid, and inevitably messy, transformation. Who could say where the journey was leading?

I realized that evening that there was only one thing, really, of which I could be certain: I was lucky to be part of the change, to be witnessing and living it every day. India was in the midst of one of the most momentous transitions (at least when measured by the number of people affected) ever undertaken by mankind. I was a privileged spectator, with a ringside seat at one of the greatest shows in history.

The show was still unfolding. I resolved just to sit back, stop trying to figure out what I thought of it—and enjoy it.

Later that evening, leaving Chinnamudaliarchavadi, I turned
onto the East Coast Road. I drove away from the broken village, I drove past the yoga centers, restaurants, and guesthouses that had come up over the past few years.

It was the end of the day. The road was dark. Traffic was dangerous. Almost every day, I knew, people were hit on that road.
Many were killed. Families were destroyed. But I was trying to keep my mind off destruction that night. I was trying to hold on to some of the equanimity I had found on the beach.

I knew that if I kept going, just followed the highway, tracked the curves and angles of the coast, I would retrace (in reverse) the trip I had taken all those years ago, when I first landed back home. I would drive through villages and farms, along plotted-out developments, past mango and coconut plantations whose owners were considering selling out, trading the familiarity of farming for the riches of real estate.

If I continued, I would end up in the town of Mahabalipuram, with its shore temples and thriving tourist economy. Then, past Mahabalipuram, at the outskirts of Chennai, I would turn off the East Coast Road, onto Rajiv Gandhi Salai, where the excavators were no doubt digging up fertile soil and the cranes lifting shiny plates of glass at that very moment into the night sky.

I imagined the evening shift beginning in the office buildings along Rajiv Gandhi Salai. I pictured the rush of young technology workers as they took their seats, powered on their computers, and prepared for a night of phone calls and e-mails with Americans just waking up on the other side of the world. I thought of those young men and women—all their dreams, the way their dreams were India’s dreams. They were the future; they carried the hopes of the nation on their shoulders.

I thought of the remarkable voyage those workers were on—where they were going, and where they had come from. Many, I supposed, would have grown up in places like Chinnamudaliarchavadi, communities where ancient certitudes were crumbling, where the fixity of life was being shaken. People they knew, people they’d
left behind—their parents, older relatives, friends who hadn’t studied or worked as hard—were caught up in the turmoil.

Many of those people wouldn’t survive the turmoil. Their lives, and their way of life, would be shattered. So much was being broken in the new India. But I knew, also, that in those office buildings, in front of those computers and behind those glass panes, something remarkable—something inchoate, something full of promise yet still, in many ways, frighteningly undefined—was being built. A world was dying. I resolved to hold on to this conviction: that ineluctably, if at times haltingly, a new world was rising to take its place.

A book ends, but lives go on. Since finishing India Becoming, I
have stayed in touch with many of the people I write about. Some of these people have become friends; I have been in regular contact with them. Others, I hear about through mutual acquaintances, or exchange the occasional email or SMS with.

Readers often ask me about these people. They want to know how their lives have developed. Here are some brief updates.

Sathy is still living in Pondicherry, still trying to figure out how to stay with his family but keep a leg in the village. Banu has had a few business ideas—one in e-publishing, the other having to do with organic products—but her main role is still as a homemaker. The highway being built by Molasur has been completed. Sathy complains that there are more cars, and more real estate plots, in the village.

Das bought himself an air-conditioned Tata Safari car. He parks it outside his house. He’s started a few new real estate projects in villages around Molasur, but he says business is dull. His son graduated from engineering college and is working at a technology company in Chennai; his daughter is in her third year of college, also studying engineering.

Hari left his job, drifted through a few others, and then ended up working in a Gulf country with security concerns. He goes to work every day under military escort. He isn’t allowed to leave his
room or go into the neighboring town without permission. I’ve met him a couple times on his visits back home. He chafes under the restrictions at his new job; his social life is poor. But he’s been making good money, and he’s managed to pay off his debts. All his siblings have been married. He is under intense pressure from his parents. He hasn’t come out to them yet.

I never saw Selvi again. Through her landlord, I heard that she’d left the city and moved back to her village. Her landlord also told me that he’d received an invitation to her wedding, which he hadn’t attended.

Dr. Reddy’s practice continues to flourish. He told me that many doctors, even from small towns and remote parts of the country, contact him now, looking for training in his field. Patients are less shy. Earlier they would look the other way if they saw him in public; now they acknowledge him. “The shame has gone,” he said.

Ramadas’s career in real estate didn’t work out. I met him one evening in Chennai, and he said, with that disgusted look on his face I remembered so well, that real estate was a business for young men. He’d taken a job as a salesman at a textiles store in Chennai. He worked a regular day now. The last time I saw him, he said he never went to cow markets anymore. He said he was happy that way, but he asked many questions about life in the villages, and I thought he seemed nostalgic. I noticed that he’d lost a lot of weight.