India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (43 page)

Veena quit her job and started a business with a partner. Building her own business was a challenge, but she told me she’d decided there was nothing she could do in life anymore that would feel risky. Her health was stable. She was trying to write about her experiences with cancer. She told me: “I’m less scared as a person.”

Naresh finished and published an excellent book about the history of jazz in Mumbai. He quit his job as a full-time editor. He continues to rail against the poor state of urban planning in the country. I suspect he might one day write a book about all of this.

Vinod continues his various struggles for social justice. He called me one morning to say that city contractors had shown up and cleared all the garbage in his backyard, on the beach outside his apartment. He was happy. We spoke a few months later; it had accumulated again. “We’re back to square one,” he said.

As I write this epilogue, I am nursing a sore throat from the dioxins in my own backyard. It’s summer, and the smoke has been blowing in my direction again. The news isn’t all grim, though. The government has been working with a private company to reduce the burning. So while the unsegregated waste continues to pile up, there have been fewer fires, and overall less smoke recently. The nation’s garbage problems are far from solved, but the disaster in my backyard, at least, seems to merit a cautious—very cautious—optimism.

Every day, I try to live by that cautious optimism. I hold on to a degree of faith—faith that the nation’s great self-confidence will prove prophetic rather than merely boastful, that the tremendous wealth of a few presages a prosperity of many, and that the great churning that is modern India will eventually settle into some kind of equilibrium.

It is customary to thank one’s family last but not least, but I’ve
never understood that custom. This book could never have been finished without the support, wisdom, and generosity of my wife, Auralice, and the unstinting (if unconscious) patience of my two sons, Aman and Emil. I also owe a deep debt to my parents, Dilip and Mary; to my siblings, Vikas, Milan, and Ayesha; and to Jacqueline.

My editor, Sarah McGrath, and my agent, Elyse Cheney, had faith in this project when it was just a couple sheets of paper and a few semi-coherent ideas. They nurtured it through multiple drafts, and helped turn the sheets of paper into a book. At Riverhead, I am also grateful to Geoffrey Kloske, Sarah Stein, Matthew Venzon, and Lydia Hirt; and at Elyse Cheney Literary Associates to Alexander Jacob. I would also like to thank Kimberly Burns for all her efforts on behalf of the book. At Penguin India, a special thanks to Varun Chaudhary, Udayan Mitra, and Chiki Sarkar; and at Albin Michel, in France, to Vaiju Naravane.

Every book (especially a first book) owes a debt to certain individuals who have played a role in the author’s life long before the book was begun. Over the years, I have been fortunate to benefit from conversations and correspondence with Anthony Appiah, Jonah Blank, Ram Guha, Suketu Mehta, Pankaj Mishra, Bronwen Morgan,
Amartya Sen, Ashutosh Varney, Stefaan Verhulst, and many other fine writers and thinkers and teachers. I am grateful for the time and energy they have given me, and for all I have learned from them.

I am also grateful to all the editors who have had faith in my work over the years, and who have taught me to write better, more clearly, and less dutifully. In alphabetical order, I would like to thank Jack Beatty, Alida Becker, Jason Cowley, Toby Lester, Wen Stephenson, Divia Thani, Mike Vazquez, and Bill Whitworth. At
The New York Times
and
The International Herald Tribune,
where I wrote a fortnightly “Letter from India” column, I want to thank Len Apcar, Marc Charney, Philip McClellan, David McCraw, Jeanne Moore, and especially Marty Gottlieb and Alison Smale. Jeanne Moore took time from her busy schedule to read a draft of the book, and I am grateful for that.

At
The New Yorker,
where an excerpt from this book was published, I want to thank, again in alphabetical order, Owen Agnew, Blake Eskin, Jiayang Fan, Henry Finder, Giles Harvey, David Remnick, Nick Thompson, and Dorothy Wickenden.

I would also like to thank Rohan Bagai, Roy Bahat, Jason Bush, Roy Chvat, Priyam Cornuit, Sebastian and Marcella Cortes, Mauro de Lorenzo, Darryl D’ Monte, Dipen Desai, Naresh Fernandes, Jesse Fox-Allen, Nell Freudenburger, Dirk Gastmans, Luk Gastmans, Elliot Gerson, DW Gibson, Christopher Gray, Parag Khanna, V. Laxmi, Gillian Walker and Albert Maysles (and their wonderful family and cats), David Nagel, Kami and Kapil Narayan, Muniandi Radhakrishna, Janmejay Rai, Devendra Saharia, and Matt Weiland. A special thanks is due to Vlatko Balic and Gniewko Lubecki—friends, godfathers, and patient partners, who, like so many others, gave me the space to write this book.

There are many others who have helped me along the way, and I’m sure I’m forgetting some. The people I could never forget are the ones who allowed me to write about them. I am humbled by the patience, generosity, and friendship shown to me by my “characters” (the word fails to do justice to their humanity). None of them knew what they were getting into when they signed on to this project. None of them ever showed any signs of resentment or impatience.

I have changed some names and identifying details, in order to protect the privacy of a few of these characters. In certain cases, I have also compressed or edited quotes, usually for clarity, but sometimes in order to protect the speakers. In the interest of full disclosure—and because the standard practices of narrative nonfiction have suddenly become so contentious—I should also say that I have sometimes moved events and scenes around in time, or compressed them, in order to form a coherent narrative. Occasionally, a statement or event from one scene may have been inserted into another, usually, again, in the interest of narrative coherence.

This is a work of nonfiction. There are no composite characters or invented “facts.” In moving things around, I have always tried to remain faithful to the original intent of speakers and meaning of events. In the rare cases where I have had any doubts, I have shown the passages in question to the speakers or characters to make sure that I was not distorting their statements.

Beedi: An unfiltered, hand-rolled cigarette, consisting of tobacco rolled in a leaf.

Crore: A numbering unit used to signify 10 million.

Goonda
: A rogue or a hooligan, often (though not necessarily) violent.

Kurta
: A long shirt (often knee-length) worn on the Indian subcontinent, usually with pajama pants.

Lakh: A numbering unit used to signify 100,000.

Lungi
: A long cloth wrapped around the waist, usually worn by men. Similar to a sarong.

Pakka
: A Hindi word (though widely used in other languages, too) signifying good, proper, or wholesome.

Pakoras: A dish consisting of various vegetables (e.g., potatoes, eggplant, onion) dipped in chickpea-flour batter and deep-fried.

Panchayat
: A traditional village assembly that serves as a local court or body for dispute resolution;
panchayat
s have existed for
centuries, often as unelected bodies consisting of village elders or wise men, but recently have been formally incorporated into the Indian Constitution, and many are now elected bodies. Often, too, traditional unelected
panchayat
s exist in villages alongside more modern, elected bodies.

Pongal: A harvest festival observed primarily in South India and Sri Lanka; occurs in mid-January.

Pooja
: A religious ceremony marked by the worship of deities, and often by the burning of incense or a candle and other rituals.

Roti: A flat bread made from flour; a staple of much Indian cooking, especially in the north.

Salwar kameez
: A two-piece outfit, consisting of shirt and pants, worn by women; traditionally from North India and seen as somewhat less conservative than a sari.

Sambar
: A brothlike dish, common in South India, made of lentils and vegetables.

Sari: A dress worn by women on the Indian subcontinent, consisting of lengths of silk or cotton fabric wrapped around the body.

Shloka
s: Sanskrit verses, usually in praise of the gods or otherwise sacred in nature.

Tabla: A percussion instrument, like a drum, played with the hand.

Zamindar: Dating from the precolonial and colonial eras: a landlord with authority to collect taxes and rent from tenants. The authority of zamindars was legally abolished in India after independence, but many zamindar families retained large landholdings and influence.

Akash Kapur
is the former writer of the “Letter from India” column for the
International Herald Tribune
and the online edition of the
New York Times.
He has also written for
The Atlantic
,
The Economist
,
Granta
, the
New Yorker
, and the
New York Times Book Review
. He holds a BA in social anthropology from Harvard University and a doctorate in law from Oxford University, which he attended as a Rhodes Scholar. He lives outside Pondicherry, in southern India.