The Beautiful and the Damned (35 page)

Lansi’s confidence and legal profession allowed her to deal with the city in a way that wasn’t possible for many of the women who arrived here from the north-east. Lansi could voice her anger, as she had done in an article where she had described eloquently how ‘both boys and girls [from the north-east] are grabbed from behind and asked: “Chinky, sexy, how much?” ’ The article had made me want to meet her and find out more about the kind of cases she dealt with at the support centre, but Lansi was less combative in person, more reflective and funny.

The support centre had been set up, Lansi told me, with the help
of local church leaders. She herself was a practising Christian, but she emphasized that the cases of harassment they came across were not limited to Christians and neither was the assistance provided by the centre. They had a helpline that people could call at any time, but the helpline was really the mobile numbers for Lansi and a colleague of hers. Lansi took out a few visiting cards with the numbers on them, pausing briefly to pass one on to the waitress from Churachandpur. The waitress looked surprised but slipped the card into her apron, and Lansi began talking about the kind of cases she dealt with.

She told me about two women working for a Pizza Hut outlet who had not been paid their salary for three months, and who, after repeated complaints, were informed that their dues would be released in instalments; of a woman locked inside her apartment by the landlord; of another woman taking Hindi lessons from a man who insisted that she make him her boyfriend — a euphemism for wanting sex — in order to improve her Hindi. The harassment moved easily along the bottom half of the class ladder, targeting semi-literate women who worked as maidservants as well as the more educated ones with jobs at restaurants.

It was possible to see a pattern in Lansi’s stories, of the clash between women from the north-east and local men, two disparate groups thrown together by the modernity of the new India. It was the sudden explosion of malls and restaurants that had created jobs like the ones at Pizza Hut where men and women worked together; it had drawn thousands of women from the north-east, prized for their English and their lighter skin; it had also stoked the confused desires of men from deeply patriarchal cultures. From the names of the Delhi neighbourhoods that Lansi mentioned — the areas where women had been harassed, assaulted, raped and even murdered by landlords, colleagues and neighbours — it was possible to tell how they had been villages not too long ago and had been haphazardly absorbed into the urban sprawl of Delhi. These were neighbourhoods where the local women went around wearing veils while the men eyed the outsiders, lusting after them and yet resenting them, considering themselves to be from more superior cultures while also
feeling that they were less equipped to take advantage of the service economy of globalized cities like Delhi.

But just as not all men in such neighbourhoods were violent towards women, there were also men who were seemingly more modern, more capable of benefiting from the new economy and who still turned out to be predators. The case that bothered Lansi the most was that of a young Assamese woman who had worked at a food stand in Gurgaon with her boyfriend. It was a stand selling the Tibetan dumplings called ‘momos’, ubiquitous in all Indian cities these days. One of the customers at the momo stand, a middle-aged executive working for a multinational, offered the woman a job cleaning his apartment.

‘The girl had come straight from a village,’ Lansi said. ‘She was so naive. And I think the boyfriend encouraged her to take the job. She went to clean the apartment and the man locked her up and raped her. He kept her there for days, raping her while going to work every morning as usual.’

Eventually, the woman managed to escape and approached Lansi. Because this had happened in Gurgaon, Lansi had to fight the case at the High Court there, something that worried her. The Gurgaon High Court was not as cosmopolitan as the Delhi High Court, Lansi felt. She thought it was more patriarchal, more prejudiced against women from other parts of the country. In the end, it didn’t matter because the woman refused to testify in court and the charges were dropped. Lansi assumed that something had gone wrong between the filing of the case and the trial. She thought that the executive had very possibly paid money to the woman’s boyfriend and used him to put pressure on the victim, but this was a guess, something Lansi had been unable to verify. When she went to talk to the woman again, she found the momo stand locked up. The couple had apparently left Gurgaon and gone back to Assam.

Esther’s experience of Delhi had been nothing like the people Lansi had talked about. She was smarter, tougher and perhaps more fortunate. Yet the initial sense of optimism she had conveyed to me, especially about F&B, gave way gradually to a more complex reality.
If Esther had left home, she had done so as much out of a strong sense of independence as out of a need for employment. ‘I’m a graduate,’ she had told me the first time we met, clenching her fist to emphasize the point. ‘Why should I have to depend on my husband for money?’

But Esther’s independence in Delhi had turned out to be a strange thing, with others depending on her. ‘Most of my friends in Imphal didn’t finish graduation,’ Esther said to me at the Barista café a few days after I had talked to Lansi. ‘I did my degree and came here to work. But still, in spite of the money I make, I have to think twice before I do anything. I am not a hi-fi type, you know. I have a prepaid phone, on which I spend about three thousand rupees a month on refills. That’s the only luxury. I don’t have money to buy new clothes or even a pair of chappals.’

Although Esther’s salary at Zest was 13,000 a month, the money was not just for herself. She paid a major share of the rent and household expenses. Mary contributed too, but she earned less than Esther. Renu didn’t work and neither did the elder brother.

I asked Esther if she resented her brother.

‘How can I be angry with him?’ she said. ‘He’s so good to me. He massages my neck, clips my nails, washes my hair. Sometimes, he’ll get aloe vera juice from Renu’s plant for me to put on my hands.’

Yet Esther couldn’t help getting frustrated with her situation and how all her hard work hadn’t resulted in a significant improvement in her life. She talked resentfully at times of her bosses — all men — and sometimes even of the women who worked with her. ‘There’s this friend of mine who works at the restaurant, but she’s also a call girl,’ Esther said. ‘I asked her why she does such a thing and she said she needed money. But I need money too, yeah? I don’t stoop to selling my body because of that. If you go to Munirka, you will see some of these girls from the north-east waiting around. They have the taste of money and do these things to get the money. It feels so shameful. I can’t even look at them. I keep thinking that other people will consider me to be just like them.’

Her attitude was unsympathetic towards the women who might be working as call girls. ‘Look, you have to be extra careful if you’re a woman. It’s not like it is for boys. At work, these younger girls who
do F&B, they have no sense sometimes. There are staff parties, and the boys try to get you drunk and come on to you. The younger ones, they let them. Me, I have a sharp tongue. I say, hey, stay away from me, but these young girls just don’t care.’

Even though Esther had earlier talked about how she resented the way people in Delhi were prejudiced against women from the north-east, she herself sometimes exhibited a similar attitude. ‘Sometimes, I wish I looked different,’ she said. ‘I wish I had bigger eyes. That I looked more Indian.’ She began to tell me about how when she had worked at Shangri-La, she had seen the most beautiful woman in the world.

‘Who was that?’ I asked.

‘Priyanka Gandhi,’ she replied dreamily, naming the heiress apparent of the Congress Party, a woman descended from a long line of prime ministers, part Indian and part Italian. Esther had been filling the water glasses at the table where Priyanka Gandhi was having lunch with her husband. ‘She was so beautiful,’ Esther said, ‘so fair that she looked transparent, as if she was made of glass. I watched her drinking water and it felt like I could see the water going down her throat.’

The home that Esther had left behind was a long way from Delhi. She had told me that her family lived in a rented house near the RIMS hospital in Imphal, and even though I hadn’t seen the house, it wasn’t hard for me to picture the setting. The last time I had been in Manipur was in December 2007, flying in from Delhi with a short stop in Guwahati, the capital of Assam. Those of us going to Manipur weren’t allowed to get off the plane at Guwahati. While the Guwahati passengers disembarked, the rest of us sat on the plane while policemen came on board with metal detectors, checking that every piece of luggage in the cabin belonged to a passenger still on the plane. Then the aircraft took off again, flying low over hills and ridges thick with forest cover until it came down over Imphal Valley
with its small, rectangular agricultural plots and slender bodies of water edged with dark conifers. The airport was new and clean, but as soon as I stepped outside I found myself facing soldiers in black bandannas bristling around a ring of armoured jeeps with gun turrets cut into the roofs.

Imphal hadn’t changed much since the last time I had been there some ten years earlier. In the cool winter afternoon, people picked their way past the rubble and refuse on the streets, surveyed at every corner by armed policemen and soldiers. The electric supply in the town was intermittent, and the small generators chugging away in buildings that looked on the verge of collapse added their diesel fumes to the squalor, the grey of the streets rising to meet the grey of the sky until you could no longer see the hills surrounding the valley. When dusk came, there was a final, frantic burst of activity around the marketplace, creating traffic jams along the main avenue, but by seven in the evening everyone was off the streets, leaving behind a ghost town.

Even by the standards of north-eastern India, where the unemployment rate is twice the national average and the per capita income 30 per cent lower than the rest of the country, Manipur is an especially failed state. The periodic infusions of cash from Delhi seem only to have lined the pockets of local politicians and bureaucrats, leaving Manipur bereft of the most rudimentary infrastructure. Such neglect has been accompanied by the harsh authoritarianism of the government in Delhi, which has subjected the state, since 1958, to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which gives security forces the right to detain and to kill without having to answer to the local government.

Half a century after the imposition of this act, Manipur remains as violent a place as ever, with at least twenty-three insurgent groups operating among a population of only 2.5 million people. Some of these groups owe their allegiance to the Meitei culture of the valley, while others represent the diversity of tribes up in the hills, but all of them offer one of the two main employment options for young men in the state, the other being to join the police or paramilitary and fight the insurgents.

When I last came to Manipur, I had just quit my job in Delhi. I took my final pay cheque from the magazine in Connaught Place, locked up my flat in Munirka and headed out of Delhi. I was sick of the city and filled with longing for the north-east. I travelled cheap, going sleeper class on the slow Brahmaputra Mail, making one of the longest train journeys in India, some 2,000 kilometres from Delhi to Guwahati. Then I took a bus to Shillong, my hometown, and another bus to Silchar, a small town in Assam where my sister lived. From Silchar, I flew to Imphal, a flight of some fifteen minutes with the ticket, subsidized by the government, costing me only 600 rupees. It was my first time in Manipur, and there was a dusk-to-dawn curfew in Imphal, the only sounds at night being the rumbling of paramilitary convoys heading for the hills. In the morning, I read or heard about young men suspected of being insurgents who had been picked up from their houses by jeeps that had their licence plates covered. In the countryside, there were battles going on between the Naga and Kuki tribes, the latter apparently supported by Indian intelligence agencies to take on the separatist Nagas.

The violence wasn’t quite as overt when I arrived in Imphal in 2007, but there were still ‘encounters’ between security forces and young insurgents, with the corpses of guerrillas being dragged out feet first from the hotel rooms or houses in which they had been shacked up. A few days into my stay, a bomb went off in an Imphal marketplace, killing eight people. In the countryside, meanwhile, the paramilitary was engaged in operations in Chandel district, bordering Burma, pushing back insurgents from a landmine-strewn area where they had successfully maintained a base for some years. All this seemed to happen silently, like a film with the sound off. Not a word of any of these events appeared in Delhi. It was all too far away, too remote, and since few of the insurgents were Islamists, they evoked no interest from those obsessed with the clash of civilizations.

One day I headed south-west of Imphal, travelling along National Highway 150 towards the hill district of Churachandpur. This is classified as a backward district, the epicentre of the clashes between Kukis and Nagas when I had last been in Manipur. The ethnic violence had simmered down since then, giving way to a more everyday
combination of grinding poverty, skirmishes between security forces and insurgents, and an especially high rate of HIV infection. In fact, Manipur has the highest concentration of HIV-affected people in India, with 17 per cent of total cases in the country. Among those particularly vulnerable to HIV infection are drug users who share needles and women who are sex workers, and I was going to Churachandpur to interview some of these women.

Although 150 was called a highway, it was little more than a narrow track built on an embankment raised above paddy fields. The driver of the jeep I had hired came to a small village where there seemed to be a roadblock of sorts. A car was parked on the road, with a group of scruffy-looking boys gathered around the driver’s window. Another boy straddled a wooden bench that had been placed on the road. My driver tried to squeeze past the makeshift barrier while everyone was busy with the other car. He accelerated, the bench shot out and closed the gap, and the boy sat back again on the bench, his hard gaze meeting ours. The driver sighed and reached for his wallet.