Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (33 page)

These were voice-based technical supporters, whose accents and manner needed to be reassuring.

Just rotate the prahduct until the bahdum is verdigal, and look for the ten-digit serial number. It should start with B. B for Bahb.

In other departments, accents were less important. One room was staffed entirely by medical technicians and doctors, fielding medical questions from a Danish HMO. They were speaking to Danes in Esbjerg and Aalborg and Copenhagen, brainstorming problems pertaining to diabetes.

Another zone at TCS was devoted to number crunching: several thousand cubicles of clerks at computers helping to redeem frequent-flier miles, or deal with pricing, or explain other ticket matters for international airlines.

"You see this man," Mr. Randeria said. "He is speaking to a ticket agent in—it could be New York, it could be Dallas—who has a problem with a ticket."

The employees in this room didn't need American accents or names; they were providing backup, emergency service, and tech support. The room was a racket of undifferentiated voices, like a cage of macaws.

"Airlines are some of our best customers. For them to get the maximum benefit from a flight, they need advice on space control and yield management."

From ticketing to pricing to seating logistics (which is what I took
"space control" to mean), all this was managed by these techies in Vikhroli, who worked every day and every night of the year.

"It's stressful work," Mr. Randeria said. Because of that, TCS provided a gym, a cafeteria, and a resident doctor. And all employees commuted to work by the company shuttle service, which stopped at various hubs in the city.

"Suppose there's a power cut?" I asked. Such things were common, and barely concealed under the euphemisms "brownout," "rolling blackout," or "load shedding." "What happens then?"

"Last July we had power cuts. Ninety-three centimeters of rain in sixteen hours." That was more than three feet of rain in a little more than half a day! But Mr. Randeria was smiling. "We had two hundred percent redundancy backup. I'll show you."

He took me to a towering building at the rear of the complex. "This is the UPS—uninterrupted power supply. But we also have additional backup generators. In India these are essential."

"This seems a success story," I said.

"If IT and BPO hadn't happened, India would be twenty years behind. Look at China. China is already the leader in hardware and is attempting to be the leader in software. But we have the advantage of language."

"Can China learn English fast enough to be competitive with India?"

"Time will tell," he said. "We put a big emphasis on training."

It was obvious that such an enterprise succeeded because there was a large workforce of intelligent, polite English-speakers with a good education and a need for money; people who could not leave India; who, at an earlier time—as when I was here last—would have sought jobs as schoolteachers, civil servants, accountants, pen pushers, and paper chewers; who filled the traditional Indian occupations for the educated, as pundits and
bunniahs
and box wallahs.

This was the cleanest and most orderly building I had so far seen in India, and even as I was leaving I was asking Mr. Randeria questions about training and expansion and salaries.

"Mr. Paul," he said gently, "what you should do is see our operation in Bangalore. Just Bangalore itself—you will be awestruck."

E
ARLY MORNING MUMBAI
was sunlit and damp and somewhat slimy from a night of condensation on the old dark paving stones, a city of empty streets, before workers and traffic hit town and the sun was at its worst. But now, at six or so, as I was hurrying to Victoria Station, the slime helped me remember the city I had seen long ago, a city of squatters and sweepers and rickshaws, with a ripe and reeking smell—of money and death.

Victoria had a new name. The grandiose, cathedral-like building (more "disappointed Gothic"), commemorating the queen's 1887 jubilee and one of the grandest railway stations in the world, was now called Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminus, after the wily warrior king of the Marathas, who unified Maharashtra and battled the Mughals in the seventeenth century.

Because of my last-minute ticket, I was able to get only second class AC: stalls in an ancient coach, berths with curtains instead of doors, like a troop train in an old movie, or the one in
Some Like It Hot,
with flapping drapes. Passengers peered out of them like nomads peeping out of tents. On the outside of the next coach, running its entire length, was a piece of denunciatory graffiti in tall and graceful white letters:
The most corrupt person on the railway is Shyam Prakash.
An aside in Hibbert's book on the 1857 mutiny was the line "One of those arcane statements, beloved by the wall defacer, whose meaning is usually known only to the cognoscenti."

I was going to Bangalore because everyone talked about it as the site of the high-tech economic engine that was driving India's economy. And
Bangalore was a stop on the way to Madras, where I had been before and wished to go again.

I was sleepy from the early start, and drowsed in my berth. When I woke up an hour or so later, we were in a landscape of blunt brown hills and deep ravines, tiny villages in the empty India of struggling farmers. Away from the sea of people, this bulked like the mainland. The news about this agricultural part of Maharashtra was that deeply indebted and drought-stricken farmers were drinking rat poison, committing suicide in record numbers (almost two thousand in the previous six years, and eight hundred of those in the year I passed through, the deaths accelerating in the first three months of 2006 to "a suicide every eight hours").

We were headed southeast in a region of rock temples and deep, elaborate caves, dating from the first and second centuries
B.C.,
near the station at Lonavale and Malavli—a little under a hundred miles from Mumbai but a world apart, with a narrow muddy river farther on, trailing through the small villages and offering a chance for women to do laundry in its opaque water. Fifty to eighty women at a time were thrashing clothes against rocks while their husbands labored in the wheat fields, and their kneeling children formed cow shit into Frisbee-sized disks and dried them for fuel. This was not the Indian miracle. Less than three hours from Mumbai and its plutocrats and boasters, this was the India of the hut, the cow-dung fire, the bean field, the buffalo, the ox cart, and the bicycle—of debt and drought and death.

Past Pune, in the early afternoon we came to Daund Junction, where a gathering of aged but highly ornamented women—"tribals"—were waiting for a later train. Mirrors the size of silver dollars were sewn or woven onto their embroidered bodices, and each woman had a small filigreed ornament in the shape of a chandelier depending from her left nostril. They wore russet or yellow shawls, and veils and bangles, and the huddle of them, all in finery, about twenty altogether, could have been Gypsies. India is full of them; indeed, India is the origin of the Gypsy nation. It is a thrill to see people wearing traditional clothes, especially in a place where so many had become assertively Western in their dress. I always have a sense that where people wear traditional clothes they are keeping their folklore and the subtleties of their language alive as well.

So, the slow way to Bangalore ("like Silicon Valley!") revealed the eternal and stubborn and in some places desperate India. Crushed-looking villages where women squatted in fields of onions and stunted corn, planting or weeding. Nothing had changed for these people. I wrote in my notebook:
Flying over this I would have missed the splendor and the misery. When someone says "India" I don't see one thing or even a hundred, but rather ten thousand images, and many stay in the mind. I keep noticing small children working at hard jobs, loading donkeys with sacks of gravel, or cleaning and mopping; or here at Daund boys hardly more than 9, scurrying around with big sacks, emptying trash bins.

Indians in cities often wail, "Too many people!" But these people in rural Maharashtra were growing their own food and drawing their own water and building their own houses and making their own fuel.

Their land had the flat and parched appearance of the African bush: low trees too thin to give any shade, dead grass, dusty paths. Even something African in the villages of stucco huts with verandas and tin roofs, the farm buildings with thatch roofs and walls of woven branches.

Hours passed, but the landscape of plains and plowed fields did not change. A familiar melancholy descended on me, the effect of a long hot afternoon on a train rolling through a landscape of sparse trees and stricken fields. Near a halt in the middle of nowhere, a man was squatting on his haunches at a level crossing on a country road, and two men on bikes and an old red bus waited for the train to pass by. As the train continued across the great abdomen of India, I thought that if you didn't see this—the immensity, the destitution, the emptiness, the ageless solitude—you would know nothing of India.

The huts could not have been simpler: made of piled-up boulders, the roofs formed of bundles of straw. The crude plow was pulled by a bullock, a man guiding the animal and whipping it with a switch. To say "Mumbai is in Maharashtra" is meaningless, because nothing could be less like Mumbai than this vast plain and its fields of lentils, a herdsman watching from an embankment as his twenty or so buffaloes bathed in a river. They rolled and wallowed, dipping their heads. Their horns were painted red.

The day was very hot, over 100 degrees, but the heat did not slow down the hawkers at Sholapur.

"Jews—fruity-fruity jews!"

"Mag-zeens, mag-zeens!"

"
Pani, pani, pani, pani
—vohta!"

"Biscuits, cheeps! Biscuits, cheeps!"

Seeing me, a man said, "Luntz?"

"What have you got?"

He was dispensing
dahl
in cups. I bought some, and a bag of pistachios and a bottle of water, and ate and watched India pass. After eleven hours the landscape had hardly changed, flat to the horizon, fields plowed by oxen, a gathering of women with brass jars at a well among grazing sheep, like a lithograph plate from the Old Testament—and even now, in the state of Karnataka, the villages seemed as remote and ruinous as any I had ever seen on earth, and many of them clearly visible to anyone traveling to the much-hyped city of Bangalore.

Towards the end of the afternoon, two young men joined me in my compartment. They were information technology employees, working in Bangalore. They spoke in what I took to be their own language—anyway, incomprehensible to me—for about fifteen minutes before I realized they were speaking English.

Rahul, the older of the two, complained that some IT workers in Bangalore were making the almost unheard-of sum of $30,000 a year, raising real estate prices.

The other young man, Suresh, talked about his travels, training IT people in places such as Singapore and Bangkok. He claimed that Indians were tormented by the police in both of those cities.

Just at dusk, at a stop in Dudhan, in the last light of day, a man with a withered foot and foreshortened leg limped with a stick, poling himself down the platform. Then the sun buried itself in the dust beyond the shacks. A woman approached the train, pleading for money, holding a skinny naked child, obviously ill, flies on its face and flies crawling between its lips.

The sight of these desperate wraiths stayed with me in the darkness. I slept. I woke to sunlight, the train gliding through palm groves, all the windows open, the fragrance of the countryside filling the coach.

***

SMALL, SLEEPY, TREE-SHADED
, and bungaloidal Bangalore was so inconsequential at the time I crossed India on the Railway Bazaar that I didn't stop on my way to Madras. It was a town of retired people, many of them British, Indian army officers, fading God-botherers, with all that implied: gardening, bowling, cricket-watching, churchgoing, running Women's Institute jumble sales, among the clubbable and the
soon-to-be-decrepit in the limbo of Staying On, the Indian equivalent of Cheltenham or Bognor Regis or Palm Beach. They could sit on the veranda, sipping cups of tea or chota pegs of locally distilled brain damage and moan how India was going to hell.

"It was pensioners' paradise, you can say," an Indian told me soon after I arrived. His name was Vishad Gupta, and he laughed as he said it.

He was laughing because, about four or five years ago, a dramatic thing happened: Bangalore exploded, becoming the center of India's high-tech industry. The placid city of fewer than a million inhabitants became a boomtown of seven million.

"It happened for three reasons," Vishad said, putting up one finger to indicate the first reason. Vishad's title was Director of Strategies and Business Initiatives for one of Tata's subsidiaries, in a new Bangalore business-only suburb called Electronics City Phase 2. Phase 1 was full. It was a short distance from the center of Bangalore, but a long car ride because of the nightmarish traffic, which included bikes, scooter rickshaws, ox carts, sacred cows, and hurrying pedestrians, all of them in the road—the broken, dusty road under construction.

"First reason, weather and climate. Nine months of moderate temperatures," Vishad said, and put up another finger. "Two, lots of educational institutions—lots of graduates, lots of talent. And lastly"—finger three—"people are quiet and calmer, more relaxed. It is safer here. Delhi is aggressive. Mumbai is crowded and hot. This is the right place."

And the government of Karnataka, where Bangalore is situated, introduced tax incentives in the mid-1990s; this gave benefits to start-up companies and attracted foreign companies, too. Language was another factor. Because there is no single dominant language in a babel of contending tongues (Coorg, Konkan, Tulu, Kanada, Hindi, and others), English was widely spoken. The two men in my compartment said they spoke English at home, though theirs was almost an idiolect, or at least a variety of English that I did not find easy to understand, with the usual archaisms, of which "thrice" and "mountebank" and "redoubtable" were just a few.