India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (5 page)

I leave the Mysore campus with a graphic appreciation of what Optimistic Entrepreneurs can create. As the taxi pulls away, I glance back over my shoulder. Through the rear window, the miniature world of Infosys lies out in the sun, all pristine and packaged for consumption. Can the country’s best brains be blamed for buying in?

Entrepreneurs are the dashing lead characters in the surging New India story. They remain the exception, though, not the rule. Not all Indians can be, or even want to be, the next Captain Gopi or Naveen Tewari.

Industriousness, in contrast, is more generous in its bounty. It welcomes all bar the idle. Few in India can afford to sit on their hands. They have mouths to feed and bills to pay. And, now, at long last, they have money to make too.

Babu parks his boss’s white Maruti Swift on a kerb of loose gravel. With considerable effort, he begins manoeuvring his long legs from the pedals to the pavement. His knees bang against the steering wheel as he twists and turns. Once his feet touch the sun-sizzled tarmac, he makes much of stretching his back and exercising his neck muscles.

‘This is not a flashy car,’ he says as he bleeps the electronic lock. ‘In fact, it has bad status actually.’

The practicality of the two-door hatchback – a small car in a traffic-choked mega-city – is of little consequence to the lanky product of a Mumbai slum. Babu doesn’t care that it parks easily or squeezes between lanes. A Toyota Innova. That’s what his boss should buy. Seven-seater, SLX. That is the ‘best good status car’ in his opinion.

As a retained chauffeur, Babu’s professional standing is directly linked to his employer’s choice of vehicle. As he sees it, the Swift is doing his image no favours. Babu feels that depreciation keenly.

A Muslim (his formal name is Mohammed) in a Hindu-dominated city, the gangly driver already senses himself on the defensive. His niece, for example, who keeps the faith and wears a burkha, recently lost her job as a teacher in the slum. ‘After seven years
there, they required her to change her religion.’ She chose to resign instead.

‘In Maharashtra, the party says only Marathi people should work,’ Babu remarks, his shoulders hunching in resignation. ‘Every government office wants to employ their own man.’

By the ‘party’, I presume he means Maharashtra Navanirman Sena, a radicalised offshoot of the already ultra-right Hindutva group Shiv Sena. The Mumbai-based party (which enjoys a somewhat turbulent alliance with the nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party) is hell-bent on closing the city’s doors to outsiders. The list of unwanted includes Muslims, whether Maharashtra-born or not. If he could, Raj Thackeray, the nephew of Shiv Sena supremo Bal Thackeray, would oblige all Mumbai’s taxi drivers to speak fluent Marathi. The sectarian proposal preoccupies the Hindi-speaking chauffeur.

Babu’s sensitivity about his status has a more personal edge too. By Indian standards, he is extremely tall – six foot two inches, ‘without shoes’. Everything about him, from his nose to his toes, looks one size too big. It’s as though his mother had anticipated him shrinking in the wash. He never did. What he is most conscious about is his receding hairline. A protractor-shaped patch of naked skin runs from his forehead to his crown. A bald pate is the source of great anxiety for Indian men. A fulsome crop of hair symbolises virility and general manliness. And not just on the head. There are coffee-table books dedicated solely to the wonder that is the Indian moustache. Babu keeps his hair close-cropped, brushing it forward for an extra few millimetres of coverage. Regardless of his efforts, the taunts of children still hound him through the slum’s congested alleyways. ‘Ganjaa, Ganjaa,’ they shout. ‘Baldy, Baldy.’ Their parents chide him too. This time for his bike, a rusty Yamaha RX 100. Babu tells them to go to hell, but the jokes bite. He admits that his two-wheeler is old (‘1987 model’) and rusty and so small that he has to crouch over the handlebars like an overgrown child on a toddler’s tricycle.

He has his eye on a 150cc Honda Unicorn. His wife, Jyoti, is needling him to buy one. ‘She tells me, “I said nothing about a
car. Just a good bike. That’s enough for me. To take the kids and go for chapatti.”’ Babu doesn’t know where he’ll get the money. The thought keeps him awake at night. ‘I tell her, “Don’t break my heart and my mind.”’

We cross the road towards Ganesh Murty Nagar colony, the crowded slum where Babu lives with Jyoti, his two children – Nabi, aged six, and Sameer, aged four (also known as Ashu, meaning ‘fast’) – and around ten thousand other people. The community clings to the rocks at the very southern tip of Mumbai, a populous barnacle lapped by the Indian Ocean and encrusted in sea salt and poverty.

Babu suddenly grabs my elbow. I halt mid-stride. As I do so, full laundry bags of dirty linen swoosh by, inches from my face. The bulging bundles are riding pillion on a speeding moped. A blast of hot air fragranced with sodium bicarbonate knocks me back on my heels.

‘They used to deliver on bicycles,’ Babu says, half-heartedly cursing the laundry man as his rattling dragonfly of a bike drones off down the road. ‘Now all is change. Now they have good money.’

The near-miss brings the motorbike dilemma back to Babu’s mind. He turns to me once we’ve safely navigated the road. ‘What exactly is a Unicorn, actually?’

I tell him what I know: that it’s a mythical creature, like a horse but with a horn protruding from its forehead. I imagine them to be white, but – presumably like the Honda – they could come in other colours too. ‘If I’m not mistaken, the ancient Greeks used to believe they originated in the plains of India.’

‘Really? In India?’ replies Babu, his scepticism alerted by this last point.

He is an avid fan of
Animal Planet
. (‘It’s true, I heard it on
Animal Planet
’ is, I would later learn, one of his stock phrases.) He takes a special enjoyment from watching big cats hunt, ‘but they’re mostly in Africa only’. India has tigers, but ‘we Indians kill them in large numbers and export them. So now no tigers are left.’ The revelation is delivered with no sense of regret or remorse.

Babu’s evaluation of Mumbai’s animal life is equally matter-of-fact. Dogs, cats and cows basically comprise his list, a four-legged fraternity of three. And maybe some pigs (something his secular Muslim nose still turns at). Oh, and an elephant or two as well. ‘They come to beg.’ But as for unicorns? He thinks he would have heard about unicorns if they really came from India.

Meantime, he has another question: ‘What do you mean by “mythical”?’

‘Like stories,’ I suggest hesitantly.

The explanation seems to please Babu, who nods vigorously. ‘Oh, so like cartoons then.’

I had grown used to Babu’s questions over the weeks. We first met at Mumbai International Airport. His boss, a friend of a friend, had sent him to pick me up. For the young Englishman on a princely salary, Babu forms part of the expat package, along with a live-in maid and a small militia of sentries at the gate.

New India shows one notable similarity to Old India: it is swarming with foreign officialdom, most of them white and privileged and overburdened with staff. Their allegiances have ostensibly changed. Today, they answer to suits in the City rather than in Whitehall. British India was always a commercial project first, and a political concern second.

Still, I often wonder what it must be like for these modern-day vassals of Empire when their assignments finish. There will be no Babus waiting for them at home, just the jam-packed District Line chugging slowly in from Putney every morning. Will they miss their ‘ridiculously over-wrought baroque’ lives, to use the words of India’s chief foreign writer-in-residence, William Dalrymple?

Babu’s life, at least, contains no such dualities. His reality is stark and his life no more wrought than the simplest of iron railings. In the morning, he picks up his boss and drives him ten minutes to his office. Nine hours later, he has to be back at the same spot to retrieve him. In the interim, he twiddles his thumbs or takes a nap in the driver’s seat.

His only other fixed task comes at four o’clock in the afternoon, when he has to drop off the maid at Mahalaxmi
Racecourse. He waits in the car as she walks the dog. Occasionally, his employer might just have meetings outside the office or require a lift to the airport. Babu’s napping may also have to work around the odd errand, such as dropping off a suit at the cleaners or stocking up on dog food.

The nights are different. If his boss is heading out, then Babu will often stay late to ferry him home. He’ll eat at a pavement cafe as his boss wines and dines. His knowledge of the city’s top eateries (‘Did you try the smoked salmon at Olive?’) and hottest clubs (‘Prive, Fridays. China House, Saturdays’) outstrips that of most guidebook writers.

All this for a base wage of just over eleven thousand rupees a month. With his Diwali bonus and overtime, he might add an extra three or four thousand on top. That makes him better off than most in the slum. The average income of his neighbours is around eight thousand rupees, Babu reckons. Still, in a city with some of the highest property rents in the world, his salary doesn’t stretch very far.

Indians – poor Indians especially – are unnervingly direct about their incomes. On that initial drive back from the airport, Babu had interrogated me about my income. I answered evasively. Journalism, he resolved, was a poor career choice. I struggled to disagree.

Unperturbed, he offered me in return a full breakdown of his personal finances. His largest single expenditure is his rent, which sets him back two thousand rupees per month. Babu gives his elderly parents a similar figure ‘for rations and all’. An extra one thousand goes on their medicine. At home, he has the children’s schooling and extra tuition to cover, plus the food and electricity bills. Jyoti, meanwhile, is anaemic and has bleeding gums that require expensive treatment. She’s also just started on a weight-loss programme. The course requires a half-kilo jar of diet supplement, at one thousand three hundred and fifty rupees each. ‘She’s lost one kilogram in a week,’ says Babu, evidently pleased with the result. Other than that, he spends fifty rupees every day on petrol
going to and from work. Occasionally he buys beer, although he claims to ‘hate the alcohol’. He usually skips lunch.

‘By the tenth of the month, you are finishing the money. On the fifteenth or twentieth, you ask for advance from your boss. Because money doesn’t wait. It has to spend,’ he’d concluded philosophically.

During our morning ride to the slum, Babu had been in typically expansive mood. Weaving down the thinning peninsula, the born-and-bred Mumbaiker pointed out the tourist spots. Victoria Terminus (‘built by the Britishers, actually’), Churchgate station (‘one million commuting people every day’), the University of Mumbai (‘India’s oldest university’), the Session Court (‘today the crime is too much’), Old Maiden (‘for the playing of the cricket’), the Lawn Tennis Association (‘for the playing of the tennis’).

Parallel to his official tour ran a more personalised commentary. He’d shown me the office block at Nariman Point where he’d had his first job, pulping fruit at his cousin’s juice kiosk. He’d pointed out the evening college by Metro Cinema where he’d studied English. I’d been taken past the bodybuilder’s gym in Colaba where he’d exercised as a younger man (‘You know
Shantaram
, the book? The author used to train there actually. Madonna went once. Her picture and all is on the wall’). We’d briefly parked up at the apartment block in Kuffe Parade where he’d met Jyoti. She was working as a maid at the time. Finally, I’d been introduced to the fishing colony where the Mumbai terrorists had landed in 2008 before unleashing their infamous bloodbath on the city.

Now, standing on the doorstep of the slum, his focus is more immediate. Back up the road stands a public park, a precious smudge of green on a bulwark of seaweed grey. A well-worn path runs around the fenced edge. It measures half a kilometre. Babu knows the distance well. He runs the full circuit twenty times every morning, usually before six o’clock. He wears the same sole-worn RB running sneakers to work. The fabric is fraying along the seams. His knees must be shot. Or soon will be.

Across the way is the Spastics Society of India School. Nabi
used to study there, although – as Babu is quick to inform me – ‘he is not a spastic actually’. Further down sits the Gothic church of St John the Evangelist. In years gone by, its pyramidal spire is said to have beckoned ships into port. Today, its view to the coast is blocked by the drab apartment blocks of a Navy compound.

We walk past the Backbay Bus Depot, a subdued rectangle of diesel puddles and idling motors. The access road to Babu’s slum falls under the jurisdiction of the Navy. For decades, the men in uniform refused to widen it, effectively depriving thousands of residents of public transport. Three years ago, they got their bus. No longer do they need lose hours every day trudging on foot to work or the market.

The bus station is hedged in by an expansive empty lot on one side and a half-built skyscraper on the other. Both are incongruous in an area where people live bunched, horizontal lives. I ask Babu about the discrepancies. There used to be houses on the abandoned lot, he explains, but government bulldozers recently came and levelled them.

Demolition is a constant threat for Mumbai’s slum dwellers. (That and diarrhoea, which kills nearly one thousand children every day in India.) Many have lived for years on the same plot, although often without legal title. This severely weakens their immunity against the onslaught of parasitic real-estate developers. Babu heard that Reliance Industries, India’s largest conglomerate, has acquired the site as a helipad.

If the slum rumour mill is true, developers have their eye on the rest of Ganesh Murty Nagar too. In exchange for selling up, Babu and his neighbours are promised homes in soon-to-be-built tower blocks on the edge of the city. He’s not sure whether to believe the pledge or not. The slum’s official neighbourhood committee, which negotiates such matters, is backing the resettlement plan to the hilt. They would, Babu observes wryly. ‘They receive bribes from the builders, so we never believe anything they say.’ For the moment, he and everyone else is staying put.

As for the whir of rotor blades, they have yet to add their particular rhythm to the hubbub of the slum. In the interim, the
empty space is fast turning into a public rubbish dump. A topsoil of plastic and garbage covers large portions, creating a living patchwork of decaying mulch. Young boys still play cricket on the less sullied squares, but their wickets are gradually shrinking. Soon their pitch will be smaller than a long-jump pit, and only pigs, rats and half-famished dogs will occupy the space.

As for the skyscraper, Babu’s understanding is that it will act as a retirement home for the Navy’s top brass. It is built on top of what used to be the slum’s only play park. Babu has no idea how they plan to provide water for such a large construction.