India Becoming: A Portrait of Life in Modern India (5 page)

Molasur was a few hundred meters off the main road, on a crumbling village track that hadn’t been tarred in decades. Sathy’s house was at the head of the village. It was a traditional house, built in the nineteenth century, with whitewashed walls, a sloping tile roof, and cement floors that stayed cool even in the summers.

Sathy always served me coffee when I visited. It was delicious coffee, filtered in the South Indian style, made with fresh milk from a cow tied to a post in a courtyard at the back. Sathy’s mother sat just off the courtyard, surveying the kitchen, in a cane chair positioned at the edge of the sunlight—close enough to get the light, but not the heat.

Sathy lived in that house with his mother, a sister, and various other relatives. His room was upstairs, by a veranda that overlooked the village. It was usually unkempt, clothes and books and sometimes a comb strewn across an unmade bed. It was a bachelor’s room. Sathy’s wife and children lived in Bangalore.

His wife was originally from the city. Her name was Banushree Reddy, or Banu. After marrying Sathy, Banu had moved to Molasur for a while and tried to adjust to the village. But it hadn’t
worked out. Village life was constraining; it was tough for a modern woman like Banu—someone with engineering and business degrees, brought up to believe that women could work and have careers—to fit in. She moved back to Bangalore, and she started a consulting business. She trained new recruits at the city’s technology and outsourcing companies.

His family’s absence was a constant source of tension to Sathy. He talked a lot about his children; he saw them only on weekends, when he drove or took the bus to Bangalore. Banu told him he should move to the city, that his children needed their father. But Sathy was too attached to his ancestral land—to the fields he walked every day, and to the villagers whom he still seemed to consider his charges if not his subjects.

“What can I do, Akash?” he asked me once. “This is my place. This is my village, and these are my people. They need me, all these people depend on me. What would happen to them if I left and moved to Bangalore?”

I loved going for walks in the fields around Molasur. Sathy and I
would start in the village, on narrow lanes lined with thatch huts and tile-roofed houses. The lanes felt crowded; more than five thousand people lived in Molasur. We’d pass by a sandy children’s playground, and then an ancient temple, its turret blackened by the years, which stood at the edge of Sathy’s land.

The land was wide open. It was always exhilarating, like a breath, to step from the congested village into the open fields.

Sathy carried a bamboo stick whenever we walked. He swung
it in big back-and-forth motions, up and down, sometimes passing it horizontally between his hands. He said the stick was to protect us against jackals, but I never saw any jackals. I thought the stick was a way of asserting his authority.

There was a gray afternoon in November, an interlude between monsoon showers, when Sathy said he wanted to show me something on his land. He said we would be going farther than he had ever taken me before—past the fields, past the reservoir, to what he called his “forest land.” It was almost one hundred acres of wild, uncultivated property. He said it had been used in the old days—by “the Britishers”—to hunt for rabbits and pheasants.

We began outside his house. As we passed through Molasur’s winding streets, people ran up to greet Sathy, many of them with folded hands, some of them bowing a little. Sathy was paternalistic. He inquired after their education or health, he asked how their jobs were going. He chided one man who worked in Chennai, reminding him to send money home for his ailing father. He scolded another who had been without a job for several months.

One man jumped off his cycle, ran up to us, and began grinning somewhat deliriously. “Get lost,” Sathy said, playfully, and when the man was gone, Sathy told me the cyclist had been indebted to him ever since he’d saved his marriage. The man’s wife was going to leave him because he didn’t make enough money in his job as a watchman. Sathy had found him a new job, as a stone crusher on a road project. He was paid twice as much at the new job; his wife stayed with him.

“These days, women are fussy,” Sathy said, and he chuckled.

We came across a group of young men standing around a motorcycle. They were dressed in polyester shirts and dark pants,
with synthetic belts wrapped tight around the narrowest hips I had ever seen. They were sharing a cigarette, and when Sathy saw them, he shouted, demanded that they drop it.

The men looked straight at Sathy. They laughed, kind of a sneer, and Sathy, taken aback, kept walking. “It’s just something that matters to me,” he said. “It’s from the old days. People would never smoke in front of my father.”

When Sathy’s father died, of a heart attack at the age of sixty-three, Sathy had been attending law school in Pondicherry. He was forced to return to Molasur to tend to the family’s property. He tried to fill his father’s shoes, but it was the early nineties, and people in the village were developing new ideas about their place in the world. Young people, in particular, were no longer in awe of the Reddiars.

As Sathy walked me around Molasur that afternoon, he talked about the social reconfiguration he had come up against when he moved back home. Partly, he said, this reconfiguration was driven by the new sense of self-esteem that was transforming villages across the country. But it was also driven by the dwindling fortunes of agricultural families like the Reddiars. Throughout India, agriculture was in crisis. Farm yields were down, input prices (the price of labor, fertilizer, and pesticides) had soared, and people were abandoning the profession. While India’s overall economy was growing at 7 to 9 percent, agriculture was growing at below 3 percent.

Sathy acknowledged that his family was better off than many. Smaller farmers, unable to achieve the necessary economies of scale, too poor to buy tractors and other mechanized tools, had been decimated. Many small farmers were swallowed by debt:
tens and perhaps hundreds of thousands of farmers committed suicide in the decades following India’s economic reforms. Still, Sathy said, even families like his had felt the pinch. They could no longer rely on the vast fortunes they had used to build patronage and buy loyalty in the village.

“It was really a shock for me when this started happening,” Sathy said, speaking of the difficulties his family faced in keeping the farm running. “We were never poor—we didn’t suffer as badly as so many others. But I remember how freely my family used to spend. I never imagined that we would have to worry about money. It was something new, a new challenge we had to face.”

“I don’t need the money for myself,” he went on. “I’m happy to live simply. But it’s true that people see us differently now. Everybody knows the Reddiars aren’t as rich as they used to be. And the sad truth is that even in the village, money buys respect. People admired us for our status, but I’m not so simple to think they weren’t also impressed by our family’s wealth.”

We came upon an old man in a loincloth. He, too, was smoking, a beedi nestled discreetly in the palm of his hand. Sathy yelled at him to drop it, and the man did, immediately and without hesitation. Sathy was satisfied. He told me that the young men who had refused to stop smoking probably weren’t from the village; they must have been daytrippers from the city.

“Most people in Molasur still remember the old ways,” he said. “They know who I am, and they know how to behave. They know how to give proper respect.”

Respect
was one of Sathy’s favorite words. It cropped up all the time in our conversations. Sathy said his wife mocked him for using the word so much. She told him he was a fool, that he was
so hung up on the past, so intent on maintaining a semblance of his family’s old dignity, that he cared more about respect than the practicalities of life.

“Can you eat respect?” she would ask him. “Will respect educate your children?”

“In a way, she’s right,” Sathy said. “But she doesn’t understand. Banu is from the city. She doesn’t know what matters in the village.”

It was late afternoon as we walked through Sathy’s fields. The sun
was low. It had just emerged from gray clouds, into a narrow band of blue stretched over the horizon. It was a gentle, blurry, winter sun; it hung like a butter ball over the land.

Sathy talked, kind of babbled, as we walked. He seemed preoccupied. He had just returned from a trip to Bangalore. One of Banu’s relatives, an uncle who had made a fortune in real estate, had given a party to celebrate the purchase of a large property. He invited six thousand guests; they were served a lavish meal, with hundreds of dishes, and live music for entertainment.

After the party, Darshan, Sathy’s son, asked him if they could give feasts like that, too. Sathy said: “I told him, ‘Never. Never. Don’t expect these kinds of extravagances from me. I’m just a farmer. I can’t rise to that level. But I get good respect, everyone knows who I am, and I can give you a good life. That’s all you can expect from me.’

“People are so superficial in this country nowadays,” Sathy said. “All they care about is showing off. I go to Bangalore and it’s full of all these IT workers—all these young kids with their cell
phones and money and all that. They’ve become like Americans: they have wallets full of credit cards, and pseudo-feelings. You meet them and they say hi, and then they say bye. They might even say they love you, but there’s no real feeling. It’s just like America. We want everything big and quick.

“The thing is, I understand why it’s like that in America. Americans need everything big because they have nothing old. But why does it have to be that way with us? The other day I was driving past a new temple. It was huge. I turned to my driver and I asked him, ‘What, are we building temples like the Americans now?’ It’s not necessary, Akash. Look at the idols in our old temples—they’re tiny, they’re ancient, and they have all the power. We’re losing sight of what really matters: our history, our past.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he went on. “I’m happy for my people. I want them to develop, I want them to get rich. Development is good for them. It’s educating them, making them more confident. People stand up for themselves. Even the women—they’re so bold. My mother never dared to raise her voice with my father, but look at Banu: she does what she wants. She moves to Bangalore with my children, and what can I do? I can’t say anything.”

I said: “You sound like you’re contradicting yourself.”

He said: “No, I’m not contradicting. I know it’s good for the country. I know things have to change; they should change. Some people rise, and others have to fall. My family was high for so long. I know my status can’t stay the same forever. But still, the ego is there—the ego clings to what it had.”

He told me that some nights, lying in bed, he woke up thinking about how different life in Molasur had become. He thought of the farms that were turning fallow, and of the old country road running
by the village that was becoming a highway. He knew things would change even more; he figured he had about five years before the village became unrecognizable. His kids would never live in Molasur. They would never be farmers; he would have to sell the land.

He woke up in the middle of the night, and the knowledge of all this change, of a way of life he’d never share with his children, would seize him. He’d feel a tightness in his chest. He would think of how his father had died, and the tightness frightened him.

He would sit outside his room, on the veranda. He took deep breaths. The village would be quiet, the lights off. It was something like the way it used to be, before everyone got motorcycles and televisions and electricity, and the silence would calm him, give him strength. At moments like that, he felt like he could handle anything.

“We have to learn to let go, Akash,” Sathy said, swinging his stick as we walked through the fields. “We have to learn to accept. It is difficult, of course, but we have to accept.”

He read a lot; that helped him. He read spiritual books. He quoted a line from the Indian philosopher J. Krishnamurthi, his favorite author: “There are no solutions; there are only problems, and the resolution of each problem lies in the problem itself.”