India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (7 page)

In the late eighties and early nineties, the area around Molasur was hit by a series of often violent caste clashes. Once, after the statue of a Dalit leader in a nearby town was found garlanded with slippers, thousands of Dalits took to the streets, blocking traffic, breaking the windows of passing vehicles, and even burning a few buses. The police were called out; they charged the crowd, swinging sticks and firing in the air.

Another time there was a scene on a bus when a Dalit from Molasur accidentally touched a passenger, a member of a higher caste from a neighboring village. The higher caste took offense and accused the Dalit of contaminating him. That evening, several higher castes showed up in Molasur and started beating Dalits. When they were gone, the Dalits regrouped and decided to send a gang of young men to the neighboring village to teach the higher castes a lesson.

On their way to the village, the gang came across a man walking on the road. They didn’t know the man; they didn’t know if he had anything to do with the scene on the bus or the subsequent violence. But the gang stabbed the man in his stomach. They stabbed him so deep that his intestines poured out. There was blood all over. They left the man on the road.

Das stopped and looked at me when he told me that. He was well groomed, with dark hair that might have been dyed, and a comb in his back pocket. His eyes were bloodshot, red from dust or fatigue, and I thought there was something defiant in them. He wanted to see how I would react to his story.

“Why did your people attack an innocent man?” I asked him.

“We wanted to instill fear,” he said. “We wanted to show their community not to play with our community. We wanted to show them that they couldn’t control us.”

Sathy said it was a “useless thing to do.” Das looked at Sathy and nodded. “Yes, you are correct,” he said. “But we were young. We had to show that we weren’t weak.”

Das’s house was a two-story concrete structure, with whitewashed
walls that had somehow kept from peeling despite the rains. By the side of the house, overlooking a covered veranda, was the thatch hut where Das had grown up, and to which he had returned when he came back from Chennai. It had a low entrance, about a meter high. It was around fifteen square meters in size. I couldn’t really imagine twelve people squeezed into it.

Das’s wife, dressed in a blue sari, with a welcoming smile on her face, set up some plastic chairs on the veranda. Das told me about his childhood. He said his parents had been poor, illiterate, but that he had a good childhood, playing in the fields, picking tamarind from the groves that surrounded his hut.

Even as a boy, though, he knew that his parents’ life was tough. His father worked as a farmer and a cow broker. He didn’t make a
lot of money. During the monsoons, their hut would leak, and his parents would stay up at night, catching the drops in metal plates. His father was a frustrated man. Das said he drank heavily.

Das said that things were so much more promising for his children than they had been for him. After returning to Molasur, he’d done some work in real estate. He started with small plots in the fields around Molasur. But he worked hard, he moved on to bigger pieces of land, and he had made some money.

Now two of his children were in a private college in Chennai, studying engineering. When they visited home, he could afford to send a taxi to pick them up. His youngest son went to an Englishmedium school near Molasur; it was the same school where one of Sathy’s nieces was enrolled.

“Can you imagine that?” Sathy said. “Going to the same school as the zamindar’s children!”

Das gave me a tour of his house. Downstairs, in a kitchen set behind the veranda, he showed me his washing machine and television. Upstairs, he showed me his bedroom, with an air-conditioning unit in the window, a treadmill in the corner, and another television, this one with a cable box.

We stood on a balcony outside Das’s bedroom, looking over the colony. The rain had stopped; there was a cool breeze. The sounds of the village—screaming children, a few motorcycles, some devotional music—were muffled.

Sathy pointed to the no-man’s-land between the
ur
and the colony. He showed me some property he had sold there a few years ago. The land was being plotted out now by a group of developers from Chennai. They were selling it for fifty times what Sathy had sold it for just five years ago.

“I’m a fool,” Sathy said. “I sold too early.”

He said that anyone with land now was rich. He said Das was a rich man. Das flinched when Sathy said that, and he started to deny that he was rich. But Sathy cut him off, and Das didn’t argue.

I asked Das how it felt to have money. He said it made him feel like he was someone. He said his father had recently been diagnosed with cancer; he’d paid 1 lakh, 100,000 rupees, for his treatment. His wife had needed an operation; he’d paid 50,000 rupees for her. It gave him satisfaction to be able to afford things like that.

Das said: “To tell you the truth, when I think of my situation, when I think of how much things have changed, I feel that it is one of the wonders of the world. I’m telling you this from my heart, not my head: My life is a miracle. It’s a miracle that Sathy comes to my house, that he and I can sit side by side like this, that we share water from the same bottle. It’s a miracle that I can go into the temples around here and no one can stop me. My father was always at someone’s mercy. I don’t have to depend on anyone.

“You know, in the past, when Dalits went to a village meeting we were forced to stand with our arms crossed while the other castes sat and talked. Even if there were seats available, we weren’t allowed to sit. Now when we go to meetings, even if there aren’t enough chairs, the other castes stand up for us and give us their chairs. You ask me about change? This is the change I have seen in my life; this respect, this dignity that I have gained. I don’t know who to thank or how to thank him for it. But I know that my life is a miracle, and I am grateful for that.”

“It’s true,” Sathy said. “Well put, well put,” he said, shaking his head with something that looked like wonder.

On the way back to the ur, with the rain picking up a bit, falling
in a warm drizzle, Sathy was full of stories. He opened his umbrella again; he talked a lot. I thought our time with Das had affected him, brought out old memories and his conflicted emotions about change.

At the no-man’s-land between the
ur
and the colony, Sathy put his hand on my shoulder. He wanted to show me the land he had sold all those years ago. The ground was muddy, slippery. I was reluctant, but Sathy dragged me across the wet fields.

He showed me the yellow stones marking the plots being sold by the developers from Chennai. He showed me a house they had already started building, a concrete shell where work had stopped, presumably because of the rain. “Look how ugly it is,” Sathy said. “Is this a house? Can you even call this a house?”

He said that in a few years, the whole field would probably be full of ugly buildings like that. There would be no gap between the
ur
and the colony. Molasur would be just one big stretch of houses. Outsiders would come in, people from Chennai looking for second homes, maybe even people from as far away as Bangalore. Probably, Sathy said, he wouldn’t know half the villagers anymore.

He told me a story about hunting in the tall grass that used to grow where we were standing. That was at a time when farming was still a viable profession. Sathy said he had grown rice and
varagu
, a millet, in these fields, but that pigs from the village kept breaking in, destroying his crops. He hired a gypsy to shoot the pigs.

The gypsy showed up one evening with his rifle. Sathy and the
gypsy made their way across the fields, got on their stomachs in the grass, and the gypsy started shooting at the pigs. He fired shot after shot, but he kept missing. “Ayo,” the gypsy would say. “What’s wrong with me today? Ayo, I’m missing everything.”

Sathy said he couldn’t figure out what was going on. He knew the gypsy was a good shot. He used to hunt owls for Sathy. Sathy couldn’t understand how he could hit a small owl but keep missing a pig. It didn’t make any sense. Sathy was upset—perplexed and annoyed by the gypsy.

Later, he told some of his friends what had happened, and they laughed at him. They told him the pigs belonged to the gypsy. They said the gypsy had been pulling his leg. He’d missed his shots intentionally.

“They all mocked me, they said I was a fool,” Sathy said. “I went after that gypsy fellow. I caught him and slapped him. I literally beat him. He was begging for mercy. He said, ‘What can I do? Those pigs are my living.’”

Sathy paused. He laughed at the memory of the gypsy who had cheated him.

“His name was Kuppam. He’s no more. He became head of the state gypsy association. He was fighting for his rights, always standing up for his people. A nice chap, actually. I used to have to stand in line with him during election time at the Collector’s office. We had to surrender our weapons during the elections—he had his rifle, and I had my pistol. We used to stand together and he used to feel bad about it. That idiot was so embarrassed standing next to me, worried that he was bringing down my status. I told him not to mind, I said it was like that now. It was fine, it didn’t bother me.”

Sathy kicked at a crab shell on the ground, and I asked him what it was doing there. He said the crab had been eaten by a jackal. He said jackals put their tails down crab holes, and when the crabs latched on to their tails they pulled them out of the ground, turned around, and grabbed the crabs in their mouths.

“All these stories about jackals,” I said. “Do you really have them here?”

“Of course,” he said, and he told me that just a couple months ago he’d taken his son out to the fields, in the tractor, and they’d been surrounded by jackals, at least fifty of them. The jackals were running around, barking and howling, and Sathy made his son get off the tractor and chase them with a stick. His son was terrified, but Sathy wanted him to learn. He wanted his son to know country life.

“I used to do it as a kid,” Sathy said. “I enjoyed it so much. He’s such a city boy now, I wanted him to enjoy this, too. It used to be so much fun, chasing away those jackals across the fields.”

Sathy talked about working the fields as a young man—planting, watering, clearing irrigation channels, keeping pigs and birds at bay. He said that the very land we were standing on now, the land that was dotted with yellow stones, used to be piled high with rice and millet. The whole area would have been crowded with semi-naked laborers, shirtless, dressed only in loincloths. Everyone would be out in the fields. Molasur was still a farming village then.

“How can I tell you about this, Akash?” he asked, and he held his palm up, as if requesting a pause. “How can I explain to you what it was like? They were the golden years of my life. Those were golden times.”

There was a sunny morning in Bangalore, not too long after I
returned to India. I was in the offices of an American software company, in a cafeteria overlooking one of the city’s main thoroughfares.

It was mid-morning. Below me, sunlight glinted from the hoods of cars, off the chrome handlebars and helmets of motorcyclists. The road was jammed. I knew it was miserable in that traffic. But from where I sat, several floors up, behind tinted glass and air-conditioning, Bangalore was gleaming.

I was visiting the American company because I thought they might have a job for me. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, and, looking back, I can’t imagine how I could have been useful. But technology was driving India’s economic surge, and Bangalore was India’s technology capital, and I guess I wanted a piece of the excitement.

I had tea in the cafeteria with a young man who worked at the company. I’ll call him Harsh. He was square-jawed, clean-cut, and well dressed. He had graduated from one of the country’s top business schools. He had a good job, and now he was weighing his next step. He told me he’d been offered positions in America and Europe. They were well paid; they’d look great on his résumé.