India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (17 page)

“Still,” Varun said from his stool on the floor, “I wish he would quit his work.”

“Why?” I asked, and he told me that his father was getting old. He said his father hardly made any money anyway. It was too much work, and it just wasn’t worth it.

“Is that the only reason?” I asked.

Varun hesitated. I could see he was trying to decide whether to say something. Then he said it: “When my brother had his accident, some relatives said it was because of my father’s job. They said he died because of the work my father did.”

“How did that make you feel?”

“I felt very bad. I felt very bad that people were talking that way.”

“But did you believe it?”

Varun turned to his father; he looked like he was asking his father a question. “Maybe,” he said, and he nodded. “Maybe something in me believed that that was why it happened.”

I asked Malligeswari if she felt the same way. “I did wonder,” she said. “I had to wonder, and sometimes I still wonder if that’s why my son died.”

Everyone was very calm; I didn’t sense any animosity or conflict in the room. Ramadas’s chin was up, like he was looking over his
family’s heads, at nothing in particular, maybe at the blue-green walls of his living room. I asked him how he felt when he heard that kind of thing. “I don’t care,” he said. “People might say that, but I don’t believe it. It’s nonsense. I told my son not to go out that early morning, I told him not to go driving in the dark. Had he listened to me, nothing would have happened to him. I don’t think it had anything to do with my job. I don’t care what people say. They can believe what they want.”

“You don’t care?” Varun asked. “What do you mean, you don’t care?”

“You want to know the truth?” Ramadas said, and he looked at me. “The truth is it makes my heart feel hard. It makes me feel heavy.

“What can I say?” he said. “How do you think it makes me feel that my family believes my work killed my son?”

He said that when his son died, he participated in all the religious ceremonies. He was there at the traditional eleventh-day ceremony, where a priest came to their house and performed a
pooja
, and he sat with his relatives a year later, when another
pooja
took place. After the eleventh-day ceremony, he spread his son’s ashes in the ocean. He tried to throw himself in the water; he wanted to die. His family members held him back.

He felt that all the
pooja
s and religiosity were wrong, meaningless. He didn’t believe in any of the things he did at those ceremonies. But he did them because of what people might say. “I didn’t want people to think I didn’t care about my son,” he said. “I didn’t want them to say I didn’t love him.

“So now, when you ask me how I feel, when you ask me to talk about my son and how he died, how do you think I feel?” He put
his hand on his chest, flattened his palm against his heart. “It pains me here,” he said. “It hurts. That’s how I feel.”

Sathy, Krishnan, and I went to another shandy in Brahmadesan
. Sathy had told me that Krishnan was becoming one of the biggest cow brokers in the region, bigger even than Ramadas, and I wanted to see him in operation.

We went too late. It was almost noon by the time we got to Brahmadesan, and the show was over. There were still a few traces of the morning’s business—piles of dung, some straw—but, apart from a small group of vendors packing up in the corner, pretty much everyone had moved on.

I thought I’d sit in the shade of a tree and catch up with Sathy and Krishnan. But there were no trees remaining, and no shade. A real estate developer had recently bought eighty acres of land in the area, including the clearing where the shandy was held. He’d cut down all the trees around the clearing. He’d flattened the surrounding fields, and reduced a nearby forest to a graveyard of stumps.

Standing under the sun, sweat streaming down his face, Krishnan said: “I have been coming to this market since I was a boy. Those trees have always been here. The first time that I saw they were cut, my heart felt heavy. Then I saw how the fields were also going. I felt very bad.

“Before, a man could at least plant his land with peanuts or tomatoes or rice and keep his stomach full,” he said. “Even a small farm can feed a family for months. Now there’s no land for agriculture anymore.”

Krishnan said that whenever he visited vegetable and fruit markets in the area, when he saw how prices were rising, he felt anxious. He knew that farmers everywhere were being forced by financial hardship to sell their land. It had happened to him; he could understand the pressures. Throughout India, farms were turning into real estate. Some people were getting rich off the deals, but Krishnan felt many more would go hungry.

We stood on that denuded land, under a harsh midday sun, and we talked a little about my visit to Ramadas’s apartment. I told Krishnan that I had been taken aback by Ramadas’s atheism. He laughed. He said that as far back as he could remember, Ramadas had always been that way. He didn’t even talk to Ramadas about religion anymore. Sathy laughed, too, but his laugh was less mirthful, more guarded. I felt Sathy couldn’t quite believe some of the things Ramadas had said, how he had been reluctant even to perform religious ceremonies for his dead father and son.

I asked Sathy if he was offended by Ramadas’s atheism. “No, not offended,” Sathy said. “After all, I have to respect his beliefs the same way he respects his family’s. Maybe a few years ago I might have been more upset. But these days, Akash, anything is okay in this country. People do whatever they want. Even people who proclaim their religion, who shout it so loud, often it’s just for show. So who am I to judge? It’s very difficult to know what’s right and wrong anymore.”

“The only thing I can say,” Sathy went on, “is that Ramadas is lucky he lives today. He has lots of ways to make a living, which is a good thing for him. Before, he would have had no choice but to be a farmer. And one thing I know: A farmer can’t be an atheist. We see God everywhere—in the seasons, in the crops, in the
harvest. We have to believe in God. So in a way, Ramadas is a modern man. It’s good for him that he lives at a time when no one cares about farming. These days you don’t need to believe in God to survive.”

I walked around the market by myself for a while. I went to the edge of the clearing, to a pile of stumps from ancient tamarind trees, and I stepped out of the clearing, to a field that had been green the last time I was there, but was now barren.

At one corner of the shandy, in the meager shade of a shrub, I found an old man, a farmer, hunched over. He was a tall, skinny man, with thinning hair and a white beard. He had a brown cow with him. Her eyes were gentle, sweet, but she, too, looked old, and not very healthy.

I sat on the ground with the man, and he told me his story. His name was Kathirvel. He was sixty-seven years old. He’d been coming to this market for forty years. He had come to the shandy today because he needed a new cow for his farm, but he’d been forced to confront the fact that he could no longer afford cows. The prices were too high.

Kathirvel’s story was a variation on a story I’d heard many times—from small farmers like him, from big farmers like Sathy, and from former farmers like Krishnan. It was a story I had heard, too, from people like Ramadas, men who recognized the crisis of agriculture in the region, who worried about it and bemoaned it, yet who were also in a sense beneficiaries of it. As Kathirvel told me about his troubles, I found myself thinking of just how complicated the concept of progress was, how uneven the process of development transforming the countryside.

Kathirvel listed the woes confronting agriculture: declining
water tables and soil fertility, rising input prices, a lack of support from the government, a general lack of interest among the population, especially the young. He said he had five children, three daughters and two sons. None of them made much money, but they weren’t interested in the family farm. He had asked them many times to come back and take over, but they said anything was better than agriculture.

“My children all say farming has no future,” Kathirvel said, and he stood up, pulled his cow by her rope. She hobbled to her feet. Kathirvel told me again he’d come to the market to buy a cow. Now, when he saw how expensive they had become, he thought maybe he’d be selling his cow instead. She was his only livestock. They’d been together for more than twelve years. The thought that she might be slaughtered, and then eaten, was a hard one to bear. But what choice did he have? At least, he said, if he sold her he’d have food on his family’s plate for a few months.

“And after that?” I asked him.

“After that,” he said. He seemed to hesitate. “After that, what else can I do? I will have to hope that there is still a God who watches over farmers.”

Banu, Sathy’s wife, wanted to live in the city. She wanted to be
somewhere modern—somewhere where there was life, where she could have a career, where her kids could go to good schools. She wanted to live unfettered by the constraints of village tradition.

She had invited me, at that Pongal lunch, to visit her in Bangalore, and I stopped by her family home one time, on a trip to the city. She lived with her mother, and her two brothers and their families, in the neighborhood of Kamanhalli. They lived in a big house, with thick walls and stone floors, set in a compounded garden dominated by a shady peepal tree. The house had been built by Banu’s father in the eighties. It was grand; it had ten bedrooms.

A couple of decades ago, when the house was being built, Kamanhalli was a village at the edge of a city. In the pockets of alleyways and low, plastered houses that had survived the Bangalore real estate onslaught, parts of the neighborhood still had a
rural feel. Kids played naked in the mud. Housewives beat their laundry against stones on unpaved streets. Stray dogs, their ears upright, burrowed in piles of garbage.

But Kamanhalli wasn’t a village anymore. Bangalore was at the epicenter of India’s technology boom, and the city had exploded in recent years. It had extended into the surrounding countryside, subsuming villages and farms and forests. First Kamanhalli had become a suburb, and then the suburb was absorbed into the city. Now Kamanhalli was a thriving, prosperous neighborhood in one of India’s most thriving, prosperous towns.

Banu walked me around Kamanhalli one morning. She showed
me the houses and stores that had come up since she was a girl. She showed me the fields that had been turned into motorcycle repair shops, the mango orchard that had given way to an orange mansion that belonged to a government official.

Many of the buildings Banu showed me had been built on plots of land that used to belong to her family. Her father was a shrewd investor; he bought when land was cheap, and now the family was wealthy. Banu showed me a white building with an asbestos roof. It was the office of an electronics vendor now, but it was where she had lived when she was a girl. It was decidedly more humble than the current family home.

“It used to be all farmland around here,” Banu said, waving her hand over the city landscape. “This was a rural area, it was wild. We used to be scared.”

Back at her house, she showed me a freshly painted shed in the
garden, under the peepal tree. The shed had a sign on it that said “Anvikshaki Research, Training and Counselling Center.” Anvikshaki refers to a branch of traditional learning in ancient Indian philosophy. Banu ran her consulting business out of the shed.

She had started the business soon after returning from Molasur. She taught what she called “soft skills” to employees at some of Bangalore’s leading companies. She taught them to handle international customer queries, and she helped them improve their language skills. Oddly, because Banu’s accent was distinctly local, she taught them how to talk in American and English accents.

Banu’s business was doing well. She told me she was making good money. But she also said she worked hard for her money. She got up at six-thirty in the morning, spent hours driving around the city, stuck in Bangalore’s interminable traffic jams. Often, she didn’t get back home till seven-thirty in the evening, after which she had to cook dinner, feed and bathe the kids, and then put them to sleep. She didn’t usually get to bed until past eleven.