The Beautiful and the Damned (31 page)

The fallout from Satyam, however, continued unabated in Hyderabad. I was told by people that Raju was in prison not as punishment but to be protected from awkward questions that might reveal the extent of even more widespread fraud. Like Bangalore, the boom in Hyderabad had been about land while pretending to be about
software – and Maytas, I was told, was Satyam spelled backwards, a doppelgänger of sorts for the more famous company. ‘Places like Hyderabad don’t become software capitals of the world unless there’s a real-estate dividend,’ a local journalist told me with a touch of bitterness. ‘Maytas was earlier called Satyam Construction, and that company predates Satyam software, which is to say that the Raju family was about real estate and construction before it was ever about software.’

There were in fact two Maytas companies – the construction firm Maytas Infra, and the real-estate business of Maytas Properties – each partially owned by Ramalinga Raju’s sons. Just before admitting his fraud in Satyam, Raju Senior had tried to push for the acquisition of the Maytas companies by Satyam. He had apparently known that the Maytas ventures were in trouble and had been hoping to pass on the losses to Satyam shareholders while extricating his sons from the mess.

The move failed, and the Maytas companies became part of the collapsing empire of software, outsourcing, construction and real estate. I had been hearing of wealthy property owners from Maytas Hill County demonstrating in front of the Raju residences, demanding completion of their expensive villas, and I met up with one of these owners one day. His name was P. Sivakumar, or Siva, a friendly but tired-looking man with dark circles around his eyes. He took me to Maytas Hill County, and the drive turned out to be a pilgrimage of the Cyberabad so loved by McKinsey and Chandrababu Naidu. We rode past the Satyam tower and the Microsoft campus, driving along a wide road known as the ‘IT corridor’. The horizon was filled with giant yellow cranes standing still over the shells of buildings, and it was apparent that many construction and real-estate firms had run out of money.

We came up to the Maytas development, sited on a slight rise. The giant letters spelling out the name MAYTAS HILL COUNTY were visible from far away, the letters carefully arranged to look like the iconic Hollywood sign. We stopped in front of Siva’s incomplete house, a two-storey structure surrounded by others exactly like it. The only difference was in the degree to which the external facades
had been finished, with the first few houses almost complete, the next few half finished and so on to the very end of the line where the houses were grey concrete blobs. In the distance was a thirteen-storey apartment building, but here the narrative was vertical, the money having run out after Maytas had completed the third floor.

As I looked around with Siva, a few of the other owners came up to talk, mirroring Siva much in the way their houses mirrored each other. There was a woman in a salwar kameez and sneakers (‘from Dallas, Texas’), and a man on a little scooter (‘from Virginia’). Their Indian-American accents rang out loudly in the empty development, interrupted occasionally by the sound of hammers and picks. Each of the owners had hired workers independently to finish the villa he or she owned, intending to move in as soon as the houses were liveable. The wind approached, blowing through the empty approach roads to this ghost of an American suburban town, and then it left the area, sending clouds of dust spiralling up towards the apartment building.

Siva took me inside his house, for which he had paid 85 lakh rupees. A group of carpenters, migrants from Rajasthan, worked on the cabinets, while a barefoot teenage worker, his pants rolled up, balanced precariously on a metal frame jutting out from the house. The house would be painted and finished soon, Siva said. He explained why it was so urgent that owners move in as quickly as possible. They believed that Satyam had transferred money to Maytas illegally. Siva was oddly specific about the details – 300 crores had been moved out of Satyam, he said, through an offshore account in Mauritius, to Maytas – and since Satyam had many creditors, the villa owners were worried that the government would seize the Maytas properties. If they moved in, however, they would have a better chance of fighting the case – possession, as the saying goes in India, being one half of the law.

We went and stood on the roof, next to the solar heaters that reflected a rather modern touch. Otherwise, Siva’s house seemed dank, and the rooms were quite cramped. It reminded me of the time I had gone to see Chak’s house in Bangalore. But where Chak had been optimistic, Siva’s mood was darker, just as his house, although quite expensive, seemed like a cheaper version of Chak’s place. When
I said I was surprised that Siva had paid so much money for the house, he replied that the properties had gone rather quickly when they were put up for sale at the end of December 2006. The entire stock had sold out in a couple of days. It had been a boom time, after all, with plenty of money everywhere. Siva had paid a 20 per cent down payment, with the rest financed from the State Bank of India, and at that point he hadn’t been particularly worried about money.

Now he was beginning to get a little stressed, he admitted. Siva was from Anantapur district in coastal Andhra, but he had moved to Hyderabad in the late eighties to study science. In 1992, he had gained admission to a graduate programme at Bradley University in Illinois. But his visa application was rejected – this being before the Y2K craze led to the generous distribution of US visas for Indian engineers and engineering students – and he worked in Hyderabad as a computer programmer. In 1997, however, he finally went to America, sent there by the Indian company he was working for. He lived at first in a Virginia suburb, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with three other engineers. He got married, had a son and a daughter, worked in Baltimore, and then moved to Edison, New Jersey, where he lived for ten years. In 2007, he became an American citizen, which, as he put it, was ‘the trigger for moving back’ to India. He had been worried about his daughter growing up in America. ‘It’s not such a problem for boys,’ Siva said, ‘but girls, they have only one chance. If things go wrong, they can’t ever recover.’

Siva had also wanted to do something of his own in India, and besides, once he had US citizenship, he was no longer tied to the place.

‘You don’t feel hampered by not having an Indian passport?’ I asked.

‘See, we’re from here. We know how to work this system,’ Siva said. ‘You don’t really need an Indian passport for that.’

Yet although Siva had moved back to India, the attraction of Maytas Hill County had been that it was close to the American lifestyle he had become used to. He said that 70 per cent of the property owners were NRIs (non-resident Indians), sharing a common culture, eager to live in a gated community where things wouldn’t be as chaotic
as they were in the rest of Hyderabad. Of course, he reflected, most of the things people had paid for had not been put in place. There was no swimming pool, no tennis court, no movie theatre and no 56-acre clubhouse. There was no water treatment plant, and tankers drove in periodically to supply water, workers from individual villas running after them with plastic bottles. There was electricity, but it was a commercial line, charging a higher rate.

But at least the housing development had been built, even if partially. The entire development was 300 acres, with the residential portion spread over seventy-five acres. Of the remaining section, eighty-five acres had been planned for an SEZ, but all Maytas had done with that was dig a hole in the ground. The company had presumably received tax breaks for that part of the property, the rationale being that the factories put up in the SEZ would create jobs, but the SEZ had been far lower on the list of priorities than the expensive private housing that had gone so quickly when offered for sale.

It seemed to reflect perfectly how little of the boom in Andhra Pradesh had been about creating jobs for the working classes, and a report by the Planning Commission pointed out that from 1995 to 2001, at the peak of its growth, the entire state had added fewer than 2,000 industrial jobs. This was an absurd figure, and no doubt more manufacturing jobs had actually been available, but they had gone to migrant workers who were not on the records, who slipped off the trains and buses to work for a few months before heading somewhere else.

At the steel factory, Sarkar had talked about how good the prospects were for migrant workers, especially for skilled people like Pradip. They could go on till they were seventy or eighty years old, he had said. It was a vision of the future that the workers I spoke to hadn’t accepted. But they had been unable to give me an alternative future, saying that they couldn’t think beyond a few months. Mohan intended to go back to his village. Even though there was little money to be made there, he felt that the drifting life wasn’t for him, but before he returned, he wanted to make back the money he had used up travelling to Kothur and perhaps have a little more that he could
spend back in the village. Dhaniram and Dibyajoti, both more seasoned, would also return to the village. But they expected to head out again for work, even as Dibyajoti kept dreaming of having a furniture shop of his own. Pradip’s room-mate, the nameless boy, would go back to Bihar and recuperate there for a while before going on the road again. As for Pradip, he didn’t know what the future held for him, although as long as those muscles held out, or until he was laid off, he would remain a tongsman somewhere or other.

For what happened to workers who fell through the hole, I didn’t have a person I talked to, only a vision. It appeared the afternoon I was talking with Pradip and Sarkar at the tea shack. It was the middle of the day, the sun blazing down on the steel factory and its surroundings. A man came walking down the middle of the road, although it wasn’t a walk as much as a stumbling dance. As he came closer, the workers who had gathered outside the tea shack and at the factory gate began to stare.

He was young, maybe in his late teens, dressed in a black T-shirt and trousers. His feet were bare, and he moved on those bare feet down the middle of the road, unheeding of any of us. His eyes were bloodshot, staring into the void. He was most likely a Nepali and he was almost certainly drunk. But there was something about him that suggested a terrible violation, as if he had been raped and set loose on the street. Everyone stared, no one moved, either because they were stunned by his appearance or because they were used to such figures. He went past us, drifting towards the new highway. ‘Someone should stop him,’ I thought, ‘he’s going to get killed by a car.’ But I couldn’t move and just stared on with the other men, as if he was our scapegoat, our sacrifice to unappeasable gods. A police jeep was parked near the edge of the highway, but the policemen made no move either, and the man was soon on the road, a barefooted figure plunging into the onrush of cars from Bangalore. I couldn’t watch any longer and turned away. When I looked back again, I saw that he had just made it across and was still moving, a small but distinct figure heading towards the green fields pockmarked with black heaps of slag.

Esther once worked as a waitress at Hotel Shangri-La, serving breakfast, high tea and happy hour drinks at the Horizon Club on the nineteenth floor. Some of her guests were businessmen passing through Delhi, while others maintained small but expensive office suites along the corridors twisting away from the club lounge. In the evening, these men sat in the lounge sipping Black Label Scotch with lots of ice, appreciative of the quiet, smiling demeanour with which Esther brought them their food and drinks, leaving them to talk to each other or on their BlackBerries while outside the sheer glass windows the sun went down softly over the parliament building and the palatial bungalows of industrialists and politicians. One of the men who sat in the club lounge was an arms dealer. I met him before I met Esther, although the reason I went to see the arms dealer was because I was looking for Esther.

All through these past few years in India, sometimes in Delhi and sometimes in other cities, I had noticed the women who worked as waitresses in cafés and restaurants and as sales assistants in retail stores. They were usually in their twenties, soft-spoken and fluent in English. In the shape of their eyes, their cheekbones and their light skin, I could read their origins in north-eastern India. They were polite but slightly reticent until I spoke to them and told them that I too had grown up in the north-east. Then they seemed to open up, and often there were extra touches of attention as they served me.

I flattered myself that they liked me. After all, I knew where they
were from, I was generous with my tips and I thought I understood something of their loneliness in the loneliness I myself had felt when I first began to leave my small-town origins behind and started my drift through cities. But in most ways, I wasn’t like them. I had grown up in Shillong, the most cosmopolitan of urban centres in the north-east, while the women were from Nagaland or Manipur, the first generation from these states to abandon their poor, violence-ridden homes for the globalized metropolises of the mainland. Their journey was longer and harder than mine had ever been, and although there were tens of thousands of them in Delhi alone, they were in some sense utterly isolated, always visible in the malls and restaurants but always opaque to their wealthy customers.

Samrat, whom I had stayed with in Bangalore, and who had moved back to Delhi since then, knew I was looking to interview one of these women. He took me to meet the arms dealer because he thought the man might be able to introduce me to a waitress who worked at the hotel. The arms dealer, who did not like being called an arms dealer and referred to himself as a ‘security specialist’, was also from the north-east. He had grown up in a small town in Assam called Haflong, a picturesque stop on the train I used to take during my college days and where local tribal men often sat on the platform selling deer meat on banana leaves. But Haflong was also a place riven by poverty, ethnic violence and insurgency, shut down from time to time by floods, an ambush by insurgents or a retaliatory rampage by paramilitary forces.