Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "Anytime. I'll find you—here," and I put down 200 rupees. "That's for the food." And I whispered, "I have to go."

  "Mr. Paul!" the woman called out as I slipped past the booths. Now everyone was staring at me, thinking, He's a perv! And I hurried through the door, murmuring, "Get me out of here."

  But for days afterwards, I kept thinking of the small children, the one-armed girl, how hungry they'd been, how they'd sucked at the tea and eaten with their heads down, in a concentrated and famished way, with animal delight. I did not see them again—I had looked. They'd probably found another foreigner.

  ***

  KILLING TIME IN THE CHOR BAZAAR, the Thieves' Market, looking for reverse-glass paintings along Mutton Street, with its mainly Muslim dealers in glass and porcelain, silverware and lamps, I strayed into a narrow lane to look at some old coins and found a man who said he admired George Bush. Lingering and chatting, putting an antique dealer at ease, often had the effect of causing him to open drawers and cupboards and show me objects, not to sell them, but just for the interest, their curiosity value—an ancient piece of pottery, a glazed tile, a moonstone, a lime pot in the shape of a yoni, a monkey skull pendant from Nagaland, a human skull from Tibet.

  "Look at this, from Persia," Rajendra, the dealer, said, taking the lid off a narrow box.

  He showed me a foot-long dagger, silver inlaid with gold, inscribed with a Farsi poem and elaborately engraved, with a thick ivory handle. Uncapping the handle, Rajendra withdrew a smaller knife—an ivory-handled shiv, also traced with gold.

  "Damascus blade. Very old. Very rare. Very costly."

  One of the gorier bits of trivia regarding damascene blades was that after they were heated and worked they were quenched by being plunged into a living human, a man who died giving strength to the blade. I mentioned this to Rajendra.

  "I know nothing about that, but..."He allowed the sunlight to dance on the details of the blade and the gold of the haft and the veins of ivory. "Pure gold. Ivory from whale."

  "How much?"

  "Crores! Crores! But not for sale," he said, and leaned closer, sounding angry. "I want to present it to the U.S. ambassador in Delhi. He can put it into a museum, or give it to President Bush, or sell it and give the money to the families of the American soldiers who died in Iraq."

  "You want to give this dagger to Bush?"

  "Bush is a great man." He wielded the dagger. "Bush was right! History will prove him right."

  "Right about what?"

  "Islam! The brutalness of it!" He pointed outside, where the Chor bazaar was thronged with Muslim shops and secondhand dealers and car repairers and watch menders. "Bush had to do that. Look at history. Aurangzeb killed his father."

  He also killed his brothers. He was a notorious bigot, a mosque builder, a warrior king. "That was, what, about four hundred years ago?"

  "They kill animals. They eat them. Have you seen them kill a goat? It is horrible."

  "Hindus in Jodhpur kill goats during religious festivals. They did it a few weeks ago at Navratri."

  "But Muslims bleed it while it is still alive!" Rajendra said. "We have always had problems with Muslims. Look at Indian history! Twenty years ago a maharajah came to me to buy some things. I said to him, 'Never mind these few things. You can have them. But I want to say to you that Islam will be the main problem in the world. The main cause of the world's troubles.'"

  "What did the maharajah say?"

  "He didn't listen. But Bush knows better. People say—even my friends say—Bush is wrong. But no, Bush is pukka right. Without Bush the world would be finished!" He now held the dagger in both hands, as though offering it. "I want to give this to those who have died. Maybe you can talk to someone."

  "There's an American consul general in Mumbai. Just call him and tell him what you want to do."

  Rajendra put the dagger back into its silk-lined box. He said, "People will be angry with me if I do this, so I am hesitating. They will say, 'Who is he? Just a bunniah [trader],' but I know I am right. I know that Bush is right."

  On my trip of twenty-eight thousand miles and hundreds of encounters, I met two people who supported the American president: the man in Baku who wanted the United States to invade Iran, and Rajendra. No one else.

  ***

  EVERYBODY IN INDIA —and in the States too—talked about outsourcing. India was making shirts and shoes and electronics, and the growth area was IT (information technology), BPO (business process outsourcing), and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing). These were labor-intensive businesses that had helped swell Mumbai to its present size of twenty million, overfilled its trains with commuters, packed its hotels and restaurants, and impelled developers to look at Dharavi slum as a real-estate opportunity. Hundreds of millions of Indians lived below the poverty line—the suicide rate in rural areas was unusually high—but hundreds of millions were also making money.

  "The Indian miracle, I tell you," Indians said to me as we drove through the streets of Mumbai, past the slums, the sidewalk sleepers, the lame and the halt. Was the miracle, I wondered, just an illusion?

  I badgered friends to connect me with some moneymakers. The biggest IT company in India was Tata Consultancy Services. In the month I visited the TCS office in Mumbai, the company was worth $4 billion. It had more than eighty thousand employees in seventy-four cities worldwide, but this place in Mumbai was one of the largest, and since the Tata family is from Mumbai, this office was perhaps the firm's hub and headquarters.

  Instead of taking the train, I allowed myself to be persuaded that a car would be quicker. But the car took twice as long—one and a half hours to get to Vikhroli, on Mumbai's sprawling outskirts. The company lay behind a high wall, traffic-choked and desperate on the outside, serene on the inside, tree-shaded and orderly, like a college campus. This was the Godrej and Boyce Industrial Garden, and though the Godrej Group manufactured soap, detergent, hair dye, hair oil, diapers, "stylish wedding napkins," machine tools, and furniture, its large tracts of available land also made it an outsourcing heaven. Dozens of American companies were also located behind the walls of this shady compound.

  "Welcome, sir," said Mr. Burjor Randeria, the CEO of this branch of TCS. He was sixty-one, a Parsi, very hospitable and helpful. He was a Zoroastrian—a flame flickered on a dish on his desk, where there was an image I took to be Ahura Mazda. "We know him as Asho Farohar," Mr. Randeria said. Next to this bearded guardian was a portrait of the frizzy-haired guru Sathya Sai Baba, a small statue of the elephant god Ganesh, and a Ganesh mantra box, about the size of a large matchbox, which cleverly buzzed with intoned mantras day and night.

  "It creates vibrations of Ganesha," Mr. Randeria said. "I have it on all the time."

  "But you're a Parsi."

  "I find this soothing"

  We talked about the Parsis. The Tatas were a Parsi family, noted for their philanthropy, having founded hospitals, schools, training colleges, and orphanages. There were, Mr. Randeria said, only seventy-three thousand Parsis in the world, most of them in Mumbai. They were a dying breed.

  "We marry late. We seldom have more than one or two children. And Zoroastrians don't convert others. You have to be born a Parsi."

  He had been born in Sanjan, Gujarat. This was where the first Parsis landed after Muslim persecution in various jihads from the eighth to the tenth centuries, which ultimately drove almost all of them from Persia. "Parsi" means Persian.

  After Mr. Randeria worked for Swissair for a number of years, looking for places to outsource Swissair's revenue accounting—labor costs were much too high in Switzerland—in 1995 he founded a company that provided financial support services for airlines. Tata had a stake in this company, but then Tata has a stake or part ownership in many companies. The name Tata was stamped on the back of most Indian buses and trucks and cars. Tata owned Tetley Tea and many retail stores. Taj Hotels was owned by Tata, and its hotels included the Pierre in New York and what had been the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Telecom, steel
, software, utilities, Internet, and insurance companies were all Tata enterprises.

  One of the curiosities of the company, founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839-1904), was that a sizable portion of the immense Tata profits went to charitable groups. This was the case from the beginning, the company endowing research institutes and hospitals. Ratan Tata, the current CEO of the whole business, is a single man in his mid-sixties about whom very little is known, other than the fact that he lives rather modestly. He continues to build up his company, buying steel mills and telecommunication giants and, recently, producing affordable family cars—and, as always, looking for constructive ways to give most of his money away. In 2006, the year I poked my nose into Tata Consultancy Services, sales in the conglomerate brought in $24 billion.

  Walking through the marble halls of the huge building, I asked Mr. Randeria who his competitors were.

  "Microsoft, Infosys, many others," he said. "But our motto is 'Top Ten by 2010.' We will get there by various ways. Growth both organic and inorganic. Code of conduct. Culture. Ethics. Expansion. Also acquisition—we recently acquired Pearl Insurance and the banking and financial giant Chile Comicron. We are very serious. We have an office in Budapest that caters to European languages."

  "I passed through Budapest. I had the idea that a lot of Hungarians were looking for jobs."

  "If they are willing to work and have skills, we will hire them."

  "Funny to hear that from an Indian company," I said.

  "But consider our advantages. English language, a legacy from British rule," Mr. Randeria said. "And education. We are on the whole a very well-educated country."

  "So everything's rosy."

  He knew I was baiting him, but he took it well. "No. I toe the line, but everyone knows there's corruption in India and that you can buy a degree. And there's our population. It's growing at a hectic pace."

  It was six hundred million in 1973. It was now more than twice that. I said, "What can you do about it?"

  "You can only bring it down by education," Mr. Randeria said. "Adult literacy. You see, if you have an education, you have many sources of pleasure and intellectual stimulation. Ways of using your time. Without education, it's only sex in the rural areas."

  "Do you remember what Mumbai was like before this population explosion?"

  "Oh, very well indeed." He smiled at the memory. "When I was a boy in Jogeshwar, streets used to be deserted by seven or eight in the evening. It was dark. My parents wanted me home. We saw foxes and hyenas, and so many snakes. Now it's a very crowded place."

  Jogeshwar, once a remote area of Salsette and the site of a famous cave, was a large and congested population center about ten miles from central Mumbai. Mr. Randeria said that four hundred families a day—an average of four people per family—migrated to Mumbai.

  Swiping his security card from door to door, leading me into the call center, he said, "We are the call center for"—he named an American retailer he made me swear I would not reveal—"at levels one to four. If you have a problem with your electric drill, we will sort it out."

  He showed me the rooms where advanced classes in English language were taught (including American intonation), and the technical rooms where employees learned the inner workings of the products, so they could answer a flummoxed buyer's question or offer advice.

  Please remove the chuck key from the pouch, insert it in the chuck of the drill, and turn clockwise to tighten the teeth against the bit...

  That sort of sentence was practiced and rehearsed in the classrooms and then recited over the phone by Indian employees, who gave themselves American names ("Rick," "Andrea") and spoke in American accents.

  Through soundproof windows, I could see the cubicles—sixty or eighty to a room—where Indian employees wearing headphones were speaking to American callers who had problems with their products. A large banner at the front of one room read, What can I do to resolve your issue today?

  These were voice-based technical supporters, whose accents and manner needed to be reassuring.

  Just rotate the prahduct until the bahdum is verdigal, and look for the ten-digit serial number. It should start with B. B for Bahb.

  In other departments, accents were less important. One room was staffed entirely by medical technicians and doctors, fielding medical questions from a Danish HMO. They were speaking to Danes in Esbjerg and Aalborg and Copenhagen, brainstorming problems pertaining to diabetes.

  Another zone at TCS was devoted to number crunching: several thousand cubicles of clerks at computers helping to redeem frequent-flier miles, or deal with pricing, or explain other ticket matters for international airlines.

  "You see this man," Mr. Randeria said. "He is speaking to a ticket agent in—it could be New York, it could be Dallas—who has a problem with a ticket."

  The employees in this room didn't need American accents or names; they were providing backup, emergency service, and tech support. The room was a racket of undifferentiated voices, like a cage of macaws.

  "Airlines are some of our best customers. For them to get the maximum benefit from a flight, they need advice on space control and yield management."

  From ticketing to pricing to seating logistics (which is what I took "space control" to mean), all this was managed by these techies in Vikhroli, who worked every day and every night of the year.

  "It's stressful work," Mr. Randeria said. Because of that, TCS provided a gym, a cafeteria, and a resident doctor. And all employees commuted to work by the company shuttle service, which stopped at various hubs in the city.

  "Suppose there's a power cut?" I asked. Such things were common, and barely concealed under the euphemisms "brownout," "rolling blackout," or "load shedding." "What happens then?"

  "Last July we had power cuts. Ninety-three centimeters of rain in sixteen hours." That was more than three feet of rain in a little more than half a day! But Mr. Randeria was smiling. "We had two hundred percent redundancy backup. I'll show you."

  He took me to a towering building at the rear of the complex. "This is the UPS—uninterrupted power supply. But we also have additional backup generators. In India these are essential."

  "This seems a success story," I said.

  "If IT and BPO hadn't happened, India would be twenty years behind. Look at China. China is already the leader in hardware and is attempting to be the leader in software. But we have the advantage of language."

  "Can China learn English fast enough to be competitive with India?"

  "Time will tell," he said. "We put a big emphasis on training."

  It was obvious that such an enterprise succeeded because there was a large workforce of intelligent, polite English-speakers with a good education and a need for money; people who could not leave India; who, at an earlier time—as when I was here last—would have sought jobs as schoolteachers, civil servants, accountants, pen pushers, and paper chewers; who filled the traditional Indian occupations for the educated, as pundits and bunniahs and box wallahs.

  This was the cleanest and most orderly building I had so far seen in India, and even as I was leaving I was asking Mr. Randeria questions about training and expansion and salaries.

  "Mr. Paul," he said gently, "what you should do is see our operation in Bangalore. Just Bangalore itself—you will be awestruck."

  NIGHT TRAIN TO BANGALORE

  THE UDYAN EXPRESS

  EARLY MORNING MUMBAI was sunlit and damp and somewhat slimy from a night of condensation on the old dark paving stones, a city of empty streets, before workers and traffic hit town and the sun was at its worst. But now, at six or so, as I was hurrying to Victoria Station, the slime helped me remember the city I had seen long ago, a city of squatters and sweepers and rickshaws, with a ripe and reeking smell—of money and death.

  Victoria had a new name. The grandiose, cathedral-like building (more "disappointed Gothic"), commemorating the queen's 1887 jubilee and one of the grandest railway stations in the world, was now called Chatrapathi S
ivaji Terminus, after the wily warrior king of the Marathas, who unified Maharashtra and battled the Mughals in the seventeenth century.

  Because of my last-minute ticket, I was able to get only second class AC: stalls in an ancient coach, berths with curtains instead of doors, like a troop train in an old movie, or the one in Some Like It Hot, with flapping drapes. Passengers peered out of them like nomads peeping out of tents. On the outside of the next coach, running its entire length, was a piece of denunciatory graffiti in tall and graceful white letters: The most corrupt person on the railway is Shyam Prakash. An aside in Hibbert's book on the 1857 mutiny was the line "One of those arcane statements, beloved by the wall defacer, whose meaning is usually known only to the cognoscenti."

  I was going to Bangalore because everyone talked about it as the site of the high-tech economic engine that was driving India's economy. And Bangalore was a stop on the way to Madras, where I had been before and wished to go again.

  I was sleepy from the early start, and drowsed in my berth. When I woke up an hour or so later, we were in a landscape of blunt brown hills and deep ravines, tiny villages in the empty India of struggling farmers. Away from the sea of people, this bulked like the mainland. The news about this agricultural part of Maharashtra was that deeply indebted and drought-stricken farmers were drinking rat poison, committing suicide in record numbers (almost two thousand in the previous six years, and eight hundred of those in the year I passed through, the deaths accelerating in the first three months of 2006 to "a suicide every eight hours").

  We were headed southeast in a region of rock temples and deep, elaborate caves, dating from the first and second centuries B.C., near the station at Lonavale and Malavli—a little under a hundred miles from Mumbai but a world apart, with a narrow muddy river farther on, trailing through the small villages and offering a chance for women to do laundry in its opaque water. Fifty to eighty women at a time were thrashing clothes against rocks while their husbands labored in the wheat fields, and their kneeling children formed cow shit into Frisbee-sized disks and dried them for fuel. This was not the Indian miracle. Less than three hours from Mumbai and its plutocrats and boasters, this was the India of the hut, the cow-dung fire, the bean field, the buffalo, the ox cart, and the bicycle—of debt and drought and death.