Authors: Suketu Mehta
I had told Girish about a friend of mine at the U.S. Consulate, in the visa section, and this set him thinking. Perhaps he could use my influence to secure a green card. “I haven’t asked you to take me,” he lets me know. “I just said I’d like to go, and I’m learning these computer languages. I’ll strike when the iron is hot.” If he can send $1,000 a month home to his father after he meets his expenses in America, that’s all he wants.
“Then you can buy the flat next to you in Mira Road,” I say.
“Dariya Mahal. Think big,” he immediately corrects me. “If one man goes, six people will be blessed. My entire family.” And not just his family. “If I go, I want to bring up one or two guys.” He would like to get Srinivas out of the country too. Srinivas’s father has just died; he has three sisters and a mother. Girish has another friend who is working in his uncle’s cloth shop. “I want to bring him up. I know he’s a good guy. He struggles too.” If Girish has a sum of money, he will give his friend money to rent a shop for a year. I am enchanted by this invisible network of assistance, a man going abroad and sending small sums of money back to seed cloth shops, college degrees, and weddings. It is not a Mercedes or an Armani suit that Girish craves; it is the opportunity to “bring up” others like him.
I ask him about his idea of America.
“I only know one thing for sure: If you struggle there the same amount you struggle here, the success rate is two hundred times.”
What else besides money?
He recalls a recent accident we were both witness to: An auto-rickshaw had knocked down a woman selling balloons on the street. She looked terribly wounded and clutched her head. The brightly colored balloons, which had been aloft over her, were now all bunched up on the pavement. I was alarmed, but Girish predicted, “Watch, she’ll get up and ask for money.” A rain shower suddenly drenched us, and the stricken woman got up quickly and ran for shelter under a shop. Another woman selling balloons
approached the rickshaw and abused the driver, demanding money for her colleague.
“That balloon lady had a power,” Girish notes. “She could enter the rickshaw and stand there. In America it would be different. You saw the female went into the rickshaw and asked for money. There it would be analyzed, whose mistake it is. She can’t just enter your rickshaw and say give money or I won’t get off your rickshaw.” Here is an interesting take on class: Girish, who is poor, thinks the people even poorer than him have too much power. I ask him what he thinks of them, of the very poor.
“I don’t like them, I hate them.” He thinks that the beggars of the Bombay streets spend all their money on liquor and other vices. Many of them make more than the salary of a government official, he says. He will help a friend in need but almost never gives money to beggars. He is repulsed. “They hold your feet. Little children hold your feet and touch their foreheads to your feet.” He speaks of them with a vehemence I have not seen in him before. They are uncomfortably close. There is a complex relationship between the poor and the very poor. A distance has to be maintained, always in battle with a natural sympathy. A mix of “There but for the grace of God go I” and “They have nothing to do with me.”
I ask him if he will go back to Jogeshwari to live.
“Why are you sending me to Jogeshwari again? I have a higher vision. From Mira Road I want to go to Vile Parle, and from Vile Parle I want to go to Bandra, and from Bandra to Pedder Road.” It is a train catcher’s dream of upward mobility; switching from the local to the express till he gets to his destination, in South Bombay. He wants at least to get to Vile Parle in three or four years. He can only reach even this middle-class suburb if he takes a shortcut; if he gets on the fast train to America. “Being in Bombay I can’t go to Parle. I need twenty lakhs, which in Bombay I’ll need twenty years to earn. I can spend four thousand a month all my life. But I can’t buy a ten-foot-by-ten-foot house in Bombay. I cannot do that.”
He does not think such a move—from Mira Road to South Bombay—would even be possible in a town like Navsari, where his family is from. “The reason is, the society there is small. You know what background a man comes from. In Bombay, you will never know I stayed in slums. My business partner never knows I stayed in slums. I only told him I stayed in ‘chawl type.’”
I ask him if he thinks he had a happy childhood in the chawl in Jogeshwari. It is of some interest to me, because I don’t think of my childhood in Bombay as having been particularly happy.
“At this time I can’t tell you whether I was happy or not because it is gone now. I never knew what a football was. I had a red rubber ball.” He holds out his palm, very small.
D
HARMENDRA COMES
to my house one day to invite me to his wedding, which is in his village in Gujarat. I ask him if he is enjoying the days of his engagement, if he is going around the city with his fiancée. He looks baffled. “I have not met her.”
He means he has not seen her after he went with his parents to her house, where not one word was exchanged between them. Her name is Mayuri. He asked his sister to talk to her. The second time in Dharmendra’s life he sees his bride will be when she lifts her red sari—covered head to accept him as her swami. They are getting married four weeks after seeing each other for the first and only time.
“Is she good looking?” I ask about his wife-to-be.
“Average.”
“What was it about her that you liked over the other girls you saw?” I ask Dharmendra.
He shrugs. “It was mostly the timing.” Dharmendra has seen five or six other girls, but he wasn’t ready to get married before. But now the family’s moved into the Mira Road flat, and he’s over thirty, and there are four siblings in line behind him, notably his sister. It’s getting rather late for Raju to marry. But she can’t until her elder brother does. So Mayuri arrived at the right time, and without really looking at her or talking to her he agreed to marry her.
“How do you know you’ll get along? That you won’t fight?”
“We will be adjusting. We have to adjust for some things; she also has to adjust for some things.” I notice that he doesn’t say
I
have to adjust. His whole family will have to adjust. Dharmendra, like most of the people in Bombay, lives all his life under the shelter and protection and tyranny of the We. But chances are that Mayuri won’t have to do much adjusting. The Thakkars don’t believe in dowry, to begin with. It is the custom to give the groom a new suit and a ring. Mayuri’s parents asked him to choose
material for a suit to be tailored. Dharmendra, conscious that a suit would cost more than 6,000 rupees, asked for a blazer, which would be considerably cheaper.
A
LL DAY LONG
the women of Padga Gam are singing wedding songs. Loudspeakers spread their atonal, tuneless voices all over the village. I am sitting in the Thakkars’ country home, talking to a yellow man. All the women of the family and the wives of the guests have molested Dharmendra, spreading yellow tamarind paste over every part of his body that can be touched in public: his hair, his thighs, his chest. A pair of shorts covers up the only part of his body that is not yellow. There is, says Dharmendra, a “hat trick” of marriages in the village. There are no more auspicious days after tomorrow till Diwali, five months away, which also explains the haste. Dharmendra’s marriage was decided first, so he took one of the three auspicious days. The others couldn’t take the same day, he says.
“Why not? Are they related to you?”
“No. But they are from the same village.” All the cooking, the arrangements for beds to put up visitors, is done by village people. In Padga Gam, marriages are not of individuals or even families. They are of villages. Most of Padga Gam has been invited to Dharmendra’s wedding, as it was to the wedding yesterday and as it will be to the wedding tomorrow. All the neighboring houses are thrown open to the out-of-town guests of the Thakkars. The owners of the houses will come back specially from Bombay, to attend the wedding and also to make sure their neighbors’ guests are comfortable. The village headman is coming back from New Zealand. The sense of community that the Thakkars and people in the slum areas abound in is brought to Bombay from the village.
A wide assortment of cousins and uncles attends the marriage. One works on an oil rig in Abu Dhabi (“forty-five days on, thirty days off”); another is a property dealer in Bombay who spent six years in Nigeria getting rich off the currency scam in the eighties. In the evening, the men sit on a sheet behind the house and drink warm beer, which tastes good because it is illicit; Gujarat is supposed to be a dry state.
I walk around the village with Girish. We go into one of the older houses, a cool, quiet sanctuary with thatched roofs and a mud-and-dung floor. I want to stay in here, there is such a serenity about it. But houses like
these are not the future of the village. People are now building structures like the brick-and-cement bungalow of the Thakkars’ next-door neighbor: hot in the summer, cold in the winter. Girish takes me out into the cane and rice fields, past the mango groves, and shows me a concrete ledge, site of the greatest pleasure he derives from his village: shitting in the open. He squats on this ledge and, with a view of open fields as far as the eye can see, he shits at leisure. “Thirty minutes?” I ask. “Forty-five,” he replies. I laugh, but then I think about Girish’s bathroom in the Jogeshwari slum, the one he used every day till last year. I compare the cramped, dark crevice above the communal open pit, with someone always banging at the door telling him to hurry up, to this pastoral idyll, where a man can take his time doing his business, ruminating on the beauties of God’s green earth, with the air fresh in the nostrils and the field slowly getting fertilized behind him. “I like to feel the grasses tickling my bottom,” he adds. It’s as good a reason as any to come here.
But for me, the night before the wedding is stupendously uncomfortable. The mosquito repellent I spread on my skin functions as an attractant. The rented mattress is infested with fleas, which have direct access to my body, since it lacks a sheet. I put a bath towel over my head to shut out the whine of the mosquitoes, but the wedding band is playing till early morning. None of the other people sleeping next to me on the terrace seem to be much disturbed. But then, around four, a boy wakes up and says to his father, “The mosquitoes here are small and poisonous.” This does not help me sleep either. These mosquitoes are used to getting their blood supply through the thick hides of cattle; they are biting me through my clothes. In the morning, as I groggily edge my way around the turds in the field, looking for a spot to piss, a vision of a book appears in my mind, an illuminated manuscript I saw once in Chantilly, and I have to say the title aloud:
“Les très riches heures du Due de Berry.”
I flee the village before the wedding. So does Girish’s business partner from Bombay and the property dealer from Nigeria. As the train enters the suburbs and the red buses and multistory buildings come into view, we feel excited, happy, metropolitan.
B
EFORE
I
MOVE BACK
to America, I meet Girish one last time. We go to the new Shiv Sagar on Hill Road and get idlis, a grilled vegetable sandwich,
and fresh custard apple with ice cream. He is under more financial pressure than ever. Girish’s sister-in-law is pregnant and the family is looking at Girish for money to buy the flat next door; he needs to bring in 15,000 rupees a month. He is now working with Kamal, the mob controller, in Phone-in Services. But the new business is not earning either, and the phone bills alone are killing Phone-in Services. Girish sees no way out, but he resists taking up a job. “There is no charm in a job.” It is a Gujarati’s natural inclination toward entrepreneurship.
Girish fills me in on what’s happening with his family. The new bride has taken her place in the household, and Girish is approving because “she doesn’t talk much.” When he comes out of his bath in the morning, she silently has breakfast ready for him—chapatis with butter, a vegetable, and three-fourths of a cup of coffee. “My mother really missed her when she went back to visit her parents for three days. When my father found out she likes fish he’s been buying only fish.”
In the little two-room flat, the newlyweds have been allotted the bedroom. The Thakkars have also invested in a 950-square-foot flat in Borivali, through a housing scheme for the poor initiated by a socialist politician; a flat in Bangalore; and three well-built shanties in Borivali. The three slum rooms will probably be sold to buy another flat. None of the flats have been built yet, but they are waiting there, all these rooms, comfortably in the future, so that all five children, or at least the four sons, will have houses of their own someday.
Why do people still live in Bombay? Every day is an assault on the individual’s senses, from the time you get up, to the transport you take to go to work, to the offices you work in, to the forms of entertainment you are subjected to. The exhaust is so thick the air boils like a soup. There are too many people touching you: in the trains, in the elevators, when you go home to sleep. You live in a seaside city, but the only time most people get anywhere near the sea is for an hour on Sunday evening on a filthy beach. It doesn’t stop when you’re asleep either, for nighttime brings the mosquitoes out of the malarial swamps, the thugs of the underworld to your door, and the booming loudspeakers of the parties of the rich and the festivals of the poor. Why would you want to leave your brick house in the village with its two mango trees and its view of small hills in the east to come here?
So that someday, like the Thakkars, your eldest son can buy two rooms on Mira Road. And the younger one can move beyond that, to New Jersey.
Your discomfort is an investment. Like insect colonies, people here will sacrifice their individual pleasures for the greater progress of the family. One brother will work and support all the others, and he will gain a deep satisfaction from the fact that his younger brother is taking an interest in computers and will probably go on to America. His brother’s progress will make him think that his life has meaning, that it is being well spent working in the perfume company, trudging in the heat every day to peddle Drakkar Noir knockoffs to shopowners who don’t really want them.