India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (33 page)

Puroshothaman talked to his brother and parents about selling their land. His family was opposed at first, but Puroshothaman convinced them. He told them that sometimes you had to give up something to gain something. He said that he’d tried everything; he was prepared to lose his ancestral property if it gave him another shot at life.

Puroshothaman had benefited from Molasur’s real estate boom, but he wasn’t happy about the way it was changing the village. Like Sathy, he complained about a culture of violence, of intimidation and impunity. “A man who makes a little money suddenly thinks he’s the boss,” Puroshothaman said. “He buys a car, he fills it with ten
goonda
s, and they drive around and do what they want. They force people to sell. They think they own the village. It creates a very unpleasant feeling.”

He worried about the future. He said his own family’s future was brighter. His daughter was studying to be a doctor, and it made him happy to know she would never have to work on a farm. But he had to wonder: What would happen to the village, to the nation, if everyone quit farming? Like pretty much everyone I talked to around Molasur, he complained about escalating food prices. “Right now, people feel good about switching from farming,” he said. “But later, they’ll regret it. Rice will be as expensive
as gold. Look at the price of onions! I worry that the country will go hungry.”

I asked Puroshothaman if he regretted selling. Not really, he said. His life was better, more secure. But he couldn’t deny that sometimes the changes in Molasur left a bitter taste in his mouth.

He pointed to a plotted piece of land next to where we were standing. He said that for years he’d rented that land from his neighbor and farmed it. It was hard, backbreaking work, in the rain and under the sun. Puroshothaman had struggled; he never really broke even. Then one day his neighbor sold the land to some people from Chennai, and they’d plotted it and made a lot of money.

“I slogged all my life on that land, and I only made a loss,” Puroshothaman said. “To see a city fellow come in, put a little paint on some stones and make a fortune in three months—how do you think that feels? Of course it creates ill feeling. This village is filled with that kind of feeling.”

At this, Sathy interjected, “Farmers can only be squeezed so much. People who were once huge landowners, today their children have to work in the homes of people who’ve made new money. Imagine that happening to me. I was the king once. Imagine if I had to work in someone’s home. I don’t think this can go on.”

Sathy was speaking from the sting of personal grievance. For him, social change had been individual loss; new prosperity had meant a slipping of his family’s status. But it was striking to me when Puroshothaman, who seemed to have benefited so much from the new order, whose daughter’s horizons had indisputably widened, nodded in agreement.

He said that Molasur was changing too fast, too much, and in
the wrong ways. He could remember when farming had been a noble profession. Now it pained him to see that farmers were no longer respected; they were looked down upon, considered old-fashioned fools who were missing out on India’s growth. It frightened him that agriculture was dying. He felt that Molasur was losing its identity. He asked: What was the use of prosperity if the village disappeared?

He looked hard at his land—his former land—when he asked that. A few goats were grazing on it. A cow hung around, with no apparent purpose. It was all quite rural, even agricultural, except that the land was dusty and dry, and desiccated yellow grass had taken the place of Puroshothaman’s crops. In the distance, I could just hear the horns from the buses and trucks traveling on the emerging highway.

Sathy said: “Farmers haven’t fought back yet, but one day, I know it will happen. A frustrated farmer around here will blow up. The pressure is building and building and building. How long can it keep building? I’m sure one day something will happen. This village can only take so much. One day, things are going to blow up.”

Life in the country had its rhythms; it was one of the nicest things
about living in Auroville. The summers were dry and quiet, with a hot wind that emptied roads and public spaces. Winters were wet, and then cool, monsoon downpours followed by a clear, clean light and crowds of tourists. The familiarity, the predictability, was comforting. The world around me was moving so fast, but the seasons stayed constant.

Then one April the summer wind brought with it an unfamiliar guest: the smell of burning plastic. It started on a Sunday afternoon, a hint of bitterness, like something rotten in the air. I barely noticed. A couple days later my wife woke me in the middle of the night and said something was burning. This time the bitterness was unmistakable, overwhelming, a chemical taste in my mouth, a trail of roughness along my constricted throat.

My older son woke up, vomiting. We nursed him through the
night. We told ourselves it was a stomach bug, something he’d eaten. But he’d eaten what we had all eaten, and as we stayed up with him, wiped his vomit and rubbed his stomach, comforted him, promised him it was nothing, it would pass, we couldn’t shake the terrible feeling that it was in fact something very real—that he’d been poisoned by the air.

The smell invaded our house throughout the following weeks and
months. Sometimes it blew in during the day, mostly at night. It came from a twelve-acre landfill south of my home, next to a village called Karuvadikuppam, just outside the town of Pondicherry. It was Pondicherry’s main landfill. Every day, almost 400 tons of garbage—plastic bags and shoes and rubber tires and batteries mixed with rotting fruit and meat and rice—were carried there by tractors, and dumped in putrefying piles that emanated combustible methane gas.

The landfill was far from my house—across fields, a village, more fields, and then a forest and cashew plantations. It was almost two miles away. It had been there for over a decade, smoldering, throwing smoke into the atmosphere, but I had never noticed it. Now, with Pondicherry growing, its residents getting richer, buying more, discarding more, the dump had swollen.

Every day, the tractors brought their loads of garbage. Over the years, hundreds of thousands of tons had built up. The dump was running out of space. The fires, some man-made, some the result of spontaneous combustion, were getting bigger. The smoke was getting thicker, and traveling farther.

To me and my wife, the situation was bewildering. For so long, we had told ourselves that we were happy with the bargain we had made by choosing to live in rural India—happy to trade the vibrancy and life of the cities for the safety and cleanliness of the countryside. We had decided to live, to raise our children, in a place where crime was low, the water was drinkable, and the skies clear at night.

But now the world was crowding in—murder in the villages, poison in my living room. I was told that the dump was emitting dioxins and furans and other toxic chemicals. I was told that these poisons could lead to cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular and respiratory disease. And I was told, too, that children, with their undeveloped immune systems, were most susceptible.

What were responsible parents to do? We kept our children off the roads after dark. We bought a new air conditioner. On a good night, a night when the fumes weren’t too thick, it filtered out the smell (though, I suspected, not the poison).

We talked a lot about moving. “But to where?” my wife would ask. Crime was everywhere, and so were the dumps, smoking heaps outside (and sometimes inside) cities, along highways, in fields and forests. In Chennai, just off Rajiv Gandhi Salai, a massive landfill spewed black smoke, making a mockery of the surrounding state-of-the-art technology complexes. I took a holiday in Goa, stayed at a high-end beach resort; every night, I choked on an all-too-familiar smell.

India produced some 100 million tons of municipal waste every year. On a per capita basis, this was still lower than most developed countries. But the problem was in the way the waste was treated—or not treated. According to the Organisation for
Economic Co-operation and Development, only 60 percent of municipal waste was even collected. A far smaller (almost nonexistent) amount was recycled. Instead, the garbage just piled up—and rotted, and smoldered, and polluted the air and water.

Sometimes, when I drove along highways lined with blazing mounds of garbage, when I passed through remote villages shrouded in acrid smoke, it seemed like there wasn’t a safe (or clean) corner in the country anymore. India, I began to feel, was burning.

India was burning—and, in a similar way, it was eroding, melting
, drying, silting up, suffocating. Across the country, rivers and lakes and glaciers were disappearing, underground aquifers being depleted, air quality declining, beaches being swept away.

The numbers were astounding. According to a government report I read, almost half of India’s land suffered from some kind of erosion. Seventy percent of its surface water was polluted. Half a million deaths a year were attributable to air pollution. Altogether, environmental damage cost about 4 percent of the nation’s annual GDP (about the same amount the country spent every year on education or health).

Evidence of this destruction had been apparent around me for years. I had, of course, noticed how beaches and fields were being despoiled, how rivers and canals were choking on plastic bags, and how every scenic picnic spot was turning into a mire of paper plates and foam containers. I had seen these signs, registered them, but never really fit them together into a bigger picture. Auroville
was green; I lived by a forest. I was shielded from—and a little blind to—the environmental calamity enveloping the nation.

But now the calamity had crept up on me, blown into my bedroom late one night, and into my children’s lungs. The smoke was in my house; I could smell the fire. I could no longer overlook the scale of the problem, or the terrible human toll I suddenly understood it was exacting across the nation.

In the weeks after I first smelled the garbage, I started paying more attention to the way we had been abusing our world. The crisis in Indian agriculture, which I had thought of primarily as a social drama, a tragedy played out in farmer suicides and disruptions to village culture, now became apparent to me as an ecological crisis. The fields around me had been abused with chemicals for too long. Farmers had taken their wells for granted. Now the land was dying, and the wells were emptying.

Everyone always said India needed better roads, that without new infrastructure the country couldn’t develop. I mostly agreed. Now, though, my eyes were fixed on the ancient tamarind and jackfruit trees that were being chopped down all over the place to make way for highways. Some of those trees were more than a century old; it took an excavator fifteen minutes to uproot them.

Along the beach, a twenty-minute drive from my house, the sandy stretch of coconut trees and fishing villages that lined the East Coast Road was slipping away, a victim of massive erosion. This was another man-made calamity. Some two decades ago, the town of Pondicherry had built a harbor farther down the coast. It was designed to spur development in the area. There was some debate about whether it had done that, but the harbor had indisputably
blocked replenishing sand flows carried by currents from the south. Now the beaches around me were starved of nourishment.

I went to the ocean one day, to the fishing village of Chinnamudaliarchavadi. It was on a beach I used to frequent as a child. I had heard about the erosion, but I wasn’t prepared for what I found. It was a shocking sight. A stretch of sand that had once extended for at least a hundred meters was now reduced to a strip of no more than ten or fifteen meters. Trees were uprooted, and fences and compound walls were breached. At least one electricity pole had come down. In the village, houses were perched precariously above the waters; some huts, I was told, had already been swallowed.

I sat on that sand, what was left of it, and I thought of just how little remained of the beach I had known as a boy. So much was being swept away. So much was being destroyed. I knew it was part of the compact of modern India: in with the new, out with the old, all in the name of progress.