Authors: Suketu Mehta
Sunil grew up in the slums, very far from the Taj. When he was eight, in the second standard, both his parents were seriously ill. His father worked the night shift in the Premier Automobiles factory and didn’t bring home a lot. He developed an ulcer, then appendicitis, and at the same time his mother had what Sunil calls “a ball in her stomach.” They were in and out of the hospital for three years; his father was declared to be in the “last stage.” At home, there was only Sunil and his slightly older sister; there was no earning member, and the relatives didn’t help out much; if the parents died, his uncle stood to gain some three lakhs. The food at Cooper Hospital was very bad, so most of the patients had their meals brought by relatives from home. Sunil would run out of school when it finished at twelve-thirty, take the 253 bus, and go home. There, his sister would be waiting with the tiffin; she went to school at seven in the morning, then came home and cooked lunch. Sunil would dash to the hospital with the food, for he had to be there before two o’clock, when visiting hours were over. Often, he couldn’t make it in time, and the doorman would tell him he couldn’t go in till four, when visiting hours resumed. He would beg and plead, pointing out that his parents were upstairs, right above them on the second floor, hungry, waiting. The guard was inflexible; Sunil was only a little kid, without money. So the boy would sit by the door for two hours with the rapidly cooling lunch and watch as a procession of people who bribed the guard with a few rupees were let in. “I didn’t have ten or twenty rupees, so I sat there thinking: If I can’t do this, take my father his tiffin, then I can’t live. If one has to live, one should live in a proper way. Then I realized that a man has to make money anyhow in Bombay—through the underworld or anything—and that even murder is all right.”
Seventy-five percent of the country is below the age of twenty-five. Sunil is representative of this group—a generation that expects something better than their parents had. If they don’t get it, they will be angry. And no family, no country, can withstand the anger of its young.
It is an exact and precise hell, the life of an unemployed young man in India. For eighteen years you have been brought up as a son; you have been given the best of what your family can afford. In the household, you eat first, then your father, then your mother, then your sister. If there is only so much money in the household, your father will do with half his cigarettes, your mother won’t buy her new sari, and your sister will stay home, but you will be sent to school. So when you reach the age of eighteen, you have your worshipful family’s expectations at your back. You dare not turn around. You know what is expected of you; you have been witness to all the petty humiliations they have suffered to get you to this place. You now need to deliver. Your sister is getting married, your mother is sick, and your father will retire next year. It’s up to you; you carry a heavy burden of guilt from your childhood for having heedlessly taken the best of everything. So when you go out with your matriculation certificate or your BA and find there are no jobs—the big companies have stopped hiring or are leaving the city altogether, and the small companies will hire only relatives of people already working there, and your family is from Raigad or Bihar and has no influence here—you will look for other ways of making money. You will look for other ways of assuring your family that their investment wasn’t lost. You can take beatings, you can take rejection, but you can’t face your family if you don’t do your duty as the son. Go out in the morning and come back at night; or go out at night and come back in the daytime if you have to, but take care of the family. You owe it to them; it is your dharma.
In his teenage years, Sunil started hanging around the Maya Dolas gang, doing errands for them, bringing them cold drinks and food, watching and learning how men make money in Bombay. He took the tenth-standard examinations and failed. He tried again and passed. When it came time to take the exams for the twelfth standard, Sunil was wiser. Studying, trying, and trying again till you succeeded was fools’ work. He hired a stand-in to take the exams for him, with a forged hall ticket. He got 67 percent, First Class. After his schooling was over, Sunil joined the Shiv Sena. When he had needed transfusions, the Sena boys gave blood
for him. This act touched him deeply—they are, literally, his blood brothers.
These days, his position has changed; he is no longer a tapori, a street punk. His cable business is expanding, and he has also started a small factory making pens, a mango-trading operation, and, with the purchase of a van, a tourist business. The police use Sunil’s good offices to put an end to minor disputes; when a group of boys was bent on breaking a rickshaw, Sunil offered them free entry to the circus if they behaved themselves. Sunil has a stack of business cards in his front pocket; prominent among them is a card issued by the Government of Maharashtra which confers on him the title Special Executive Officer. “With this card I can do anything in Bombay. I have the power of a judge,” says Sunil proudly, although he is just a glorified notary. When a political party comes to power, one of the ways it rewards its cadres is to issue such cards, making hundreds of people Special Executive Magistrates and Special Executive Officers. It often becomes an embarrassment, because a large percentage of those honored in this way have extensive criminal records. Legally, it confers almost no power on Sunil. But the card gives him status, legitimacy; when he flashes it around, few people think to ask him what it means, since it bears the seal of the government of Maharashtra.
The treatment he gets at hospitals has also changed. His father had to have another operation recently; his left testicle was removed. Sunil could afford to pay 15,000 rupees for the procedure, at Hinduja Hospital, one of the city’s best, with five-star facilities. And they didn’t make him wait by the door. “Now I can cross the door of any hospital—Hinduja, whatever. I can talk to Balasaheb Thackeray, and he will phone the hospital, and they will fear him.”
Sunil is very pleased when his daughter calls him on his mobile phone, less because of the sound of his little girl’s voice than because of the opportunity it affords him to show off his pricey gadget. He hands me the phone so I can talk to Guddi. She is in an English-language school, St. Xavier’s. The admission was arranged by the minister who bailed him out during the riots. In return, Sunil arranges to round up the boys for the minister “when they are needed to burn a train or break a car.”
But Sunil is still trying to understand the ways of St. Xavier’s. One Parents’ Day, Sunil went with Guddi to the elite school. There was a stall with books from Japan; his daughter put one into her bag. The teacher said
something in English that Sunil didn’t understand and asked him to sign something. The teacher was smiling, patting Guddi on the head and saying “good parents.” “I also felt good,” Sunil recalls, so he signed. He went home with his daughter clutching the book. The next day a deliveryman knocked at their door and deposited an entire set of encyclopedias in the middle of their shack. Sunil found he had just bought it, for 4,500 rupees—over $1,100.
Sunil met his wife while playing the contact sport of kabbadi for the school. They knew each other for almost a decade before he decided to marry her. She is of his caste, although from a poorer family, so his parents objected. “My wife is not so good in looks,” he says. But she recently stood as an independent for the city council and came within eighty votes of winning. The BJP and Sena had made an adjustment, put up a joint candidate against her. I ask Sunil if there was pressure on him, as a Sena man, to withdraw his wife’s candidacy. “It’s democracy in the household. It’s my wife’s decision; what can I do?” The Sena, in the next election, will have to give her a ticket or pay large sums to buy her off and make her withdraw. This election was just an “apprenticeship.” Even now, if there is a dispute among the ladies of the area, they come to Sunil’s wife. At twenty-three, she was the youngest candidate in the election, and there is to be another election in three years. Sunil told her, in his English: “Try to again and again, but don’t cry.”
Sunil knows firsthand about the virtues of political participation. He went shopping with his wife two days ago, for his son’s birthday, and as they were standing with their shopping bags at the rickshaw stand, they saw a pregnant lady arguing with a rickshaw driver. The driver was refusing to take the lady to an unsafe area of Jogeshwari near Radhabai Chawl. Sunil’s wife stopped a police constable, pointing out that there was a pregnant lady trying to get a rickshaw. The constable ignored her. When Sunil’s wife came back to him, he told her to go back to the cop and say, “I stood for the elections and I got eight hundred and seventy votes, and I can shut down this rickshaw stand.” Thus the lady was seated in the rickshaw and the cop was reported to his superior officer. “I made my wife realize what kind of power she has,” Sunil says.
As he walks me to a rickshaw, he points out a plot of ground where he expects a circus will be coming, from which, since he holds the parking concession, he’ll be making extra income. He makes 50,000 rupees a month
from his cable business, and another 25,000 or so from his other activities, legal and illegal.
“Seventy-five thousand,” I calculate. “That’s more than what some executives make.”
“That’s why I like myself so much,” he responds.
S
UNIL WILL INHERIT
B
OMBAY
, I now see. The consequences of his burning the bread seller alive: When the Sena government came in two years later, he got appointed a Special Executive Officer; he became, officially, a person in whom public trust is reposed. He has energy; he gets to work by 10 a.m., roams far and wide over Bombay, from Jogeshwari to Dahisar, and beyond to Goa and Raigad, and still gets home late at night to be with his daughter. He is not afraid of getting his feet dirty in politics; in fact, he participates with zest and puts his wife up for elections as well. He is idealistic about the nation and utterly pragmatic about the opportunities for personal enrichment that politics offers. Sunil, in fact, can be held up as an exemplar of the capitalist success story.
The new inheritors of the country—and of the city—are very different from the ones who took over from the British, who had studied at Cambridge and the Inner Temple and come back. They are badly educated, unscrupulous, lacking a metropolitan sensibility—buffoons and small-time thugs, often—but, above all, representative. The fact that a murderer like Sunil could become successful in Bombay through engagement in local politics is both a triumph and a failure of democracy. Not all politicians are as compromised as he is, but the ones that aren’t have to rely on people like Sunil to get elected. Most of the Bombay politicians need to mobilize huge sums of money for campaign expenditures. The salaries they get, the money their party officially sanctions for campaign funds, are a pittance, so they have to look elsewhere.
This shift is happening all around me. The Bombay I have grown up in is suffering from a profound sadness: the sadness of lost ownership, the transfer of the keys to the city. No longer is the political life of the city controlled by the Parsis, the Gujaratis, the Punjabis, the Marwaris. This passage was marked by the candidacy of Naval Tata in 1971. The powerful industrialist ran as an independent from the Mumbai South constituency, the richest and smallest in the country, and still he lost. In India, unlike in
America, fabulous wealth by itself can’t buy you an election. Just about the only way the upper class will get into politics now is by being nominated to the upper house of parliament.
Among the former owners, there is a sense that the barbarians have been let into the city gates and are sleeping on the footpath outside their palaces. There is resentment that Bombay has to deal with the country’s detritus. The only consolation is that the huddled masses are also the talent pool for South Bombay’s maids, drivers, peons. That is part of the attraction of living here: You can find a maid and pay her a monthly salary smaller than the cost of breakfast at the Taj Hotel. Politics, too, has become yet another of those menial tasks that is assigned to servants or subordinates, something you drop as soon as you acquire the financial means to do so, like cleaning the toilet, doing the accounts, answering the phone, or standing in line at a government office. “Send your man,” I am told again and again, when I need service for my mobile phone or money picked up from the bank. “I have no man,” I respond. “I’m my own man.” They do not understand. In business, in politics, in government, those who can afford it never go in person. They send their man.
But it is also these rich who create wealth, who create the conditions that will allow the mother on the streets to find a home for her children. They must be allowed their penthouses, their brandy, so the poor may be allowed their simple clean room, their rice and dal. In the post-Marxist age, we can no longer believe that redistribution solves anything, that making the rich poorer will make the poor richer. It is the death not just of ideology but of ideas. Nothing in the national debate has any strong conviction. On the right, a vague belief in foreign investment; on the left, a vague and poorly articulated fear of it. The left is apologetic about being left. Who can defend the work habits of the employees of nationalized banks? After fifty years of experiments in socialism, who can argue with a straight face that central planning is the answer to poverty? One slogan that has been conspicuously absent from the electioneering this year has been
GARIBI HATAO.
“Remove Poverty.” It’s as if there is a tacit acknowledgment on all sides that the poverty is insurmountable, so we’ll move on and tackle something else, corruption or multinationals or whether we should have a temple or mosque in Ayodhya.
The cities of India are going through a transition similar to what American cities went through at the turn of the twentieth century, when
the political machines of the Democratic party dominated, bringing new immigrants jobs and political power while breaking a few heads along the way. Eventually, as in the American cities, there will be reform movements, reform candidates, to clean out the muck. In Bombay, this has not yet happened. “The dregs at the bottom have become the scum at the top,” Gerson da Cunha, a civic activist and figurehead of the old guard, tells me. When people in South Bombay mourn the loss of the “gracious” city, what they are really mourning is the loss of their own consequence in the city’s affairs. It was never a gracious city for those who had to live under the shadow of their mansions; it was actively pestilential. It will take them a few generations, the new owners, to learn how to run their house and keep it clean and safe. But how can we begrudge them that when we, who had been the owners for such a long time and had still botched it, handed it over in such terrible disrepair?