Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  Past Pune, in the early afternoon we came to Daund Junction, where a gathering of aged but highly ornamented women—"tribals"—were waiting for a later train. Mirrors the size of silver dollars were sewn or woven onto their embroidered bodices, and each woman had a small filigreed ornament in the shape of a chandelier depending from her left nostril. They wore russet or yellow shawls, and veils and bangles, and the huddle of them, all in finery, about twenty altogether, could have been Gypsies. India is full of them; indeed, India is the origin of the Gypsy nation. It is a thrill to see people wearing traditional clothes, especially in a place where so many had become assertively Western in their dress. I always have a sense that where people wear traditional clothes they are keeping their folklore and the subtleties of their language alive as well.

  So, the slow way to Bangalore ("like Silicon Valley!") revealed the eternal and stubborn and in some places desperate India. Crushed-looking villages where women squatted in fields of onions and stunted corn, planting or weeding. Nothing had changed for these people. I wrote in my notebook: Flying over this I would have missed the splendor and the misery. When someone says "India" I don't see one thing or even a hundred, but rather ten thousand images, and many stay in the mind. I keep noticing small children working at hard jobs, loading donkeys with sacks of gravel, or cleaning and mopping; or here at Daund boys hardly more than 9, scurrying around with big sacks, emptying trash bins.

  Indians in cities often wail, "Too many people!" But these people in rural Maharashtra were growing their own food and drawing their own water and building their own houses and making their own fuel.

  Their land had the flat and parched appearance of the African bush: low trees too thin to give any shade, dead grass, dusty paths. Even something African in the villages of stucco huts with verandas and tin roofs, the farm buildings with thatch roofs and walls of woven branches.

  Hours passed, but the landscape of plains and plowed fields did not change. A familiar melancholy descended on me, the effect of a long hot afternoon on a train rolling through a landscape of sparse trees and stricken fields. Near a halt in the middle of nowhere, a man was squatting on his haunches at a level crossing on a country road, and two men on bikes and an old red bus waited for the train to pass by. As the train continued across the great abdomen of India, I thought that if you didn't see this—the immensity, the destitution, the emptiness, the ageless solitude—you would know nothing of India.

  The huts could not have been simpler: made of piled-up boulders, the roofs formed of bundles of straw. The crude plow was pulled by a bullock, a man guiding the animal and whipping it with a switch. To say "Mumbai is in Maharashtra" is meaningless, because nothing could be less like Mumbai than this vast plain and its fields of lentils, a herdsman watching from an embankment as his twenty or so buffaloes bathed in a river. They rolled and wallowed, dipping their heads. Their horns were painted red.

  The day was very hot, over 100 degrees, but the heat did not slow down the hawkers at Sholapur.

  "Jews—fruity-fruity jews!"

  "Mag-zeens, mag-zeens!"

  "Pani, pani, pani, pani—vohta!"

  "Biscuits, cheeps! Biscuits, cheeps!"

  Seeing me, a man said, "Luntz?"

  "What have you got?"

  He was dispensing dahl in cups. I bought some, and a bag of pistachios and a bottle of water, and ate and watched India pass. After eleven hours the landscape had hardly changed, flat to the horizon, fields plowed by oxen, a gathering of women with brass jars at a well among grazing sheep, like a lithograph plate from the Old Testament—and even now, in the state of Karnataka, the villages seemed as remote and ruinous as any I had ever seen on earth, and many of them clearly visible to anyone traveling to the much-hyped city of Bangalore.

  Towards the end of the afternoon, two young men joined me in my compartment. They were information technology employees, working in Bangalore. They spoke in what I took to be their own language—anyway, incomprehensible to me—for about fifteen minutes before I realized they were speaking English.

  Rahul, the older of the two, complained that some IT workers in Bangalore were making the almost unheard-of sum of $30,000 a year, raising real estate prices.

  The other young man, Suresh, talked about his travels, training IT people in places such as Singapore and Bangkok. He claimed that Indians were tormented by the police in both of those cities.

  Just at dusk, at a stop in Dudhan, in the last light of day, a man with a withered foot and foreshortened leg limped with a stick, poling himself down the platform. Then the sun buried itself in the dust beyond the shacks. A woman approached the train, pleading for money, holding a skinny naked child, obviously ill, flies on its face and flies crawling between its lips.

  The sight of these desperate wraiths stayed with me in the darkness. I slept. I woke to sunlight, the train gliding through palm groves, all the windows open, the fragrance of the countryside filling the coach.

  ***

  SMALL, SLEEPY, TREE-SHADED, and bungaloidal Bangalore was so inconsequential at the time I crossed India on the Railway Bazaar that I didn't stop on my way to Madras. It was a town of retired people, many of them British, Indian army officers, fading God-botherers, with all that implied: gardening, bowling, cricket-watching, churchgoing, running Women's Institute jumble sales, among the clubbable and the soon-to-be-decrepit in the limbo of Staying On, the Indian equivalent of Cheltenham or Bognor Regis or Palm Beach. They could sit on the veranda, sipping cups of tea or chota pegs of locally distilled brain damage and moan how India was going to hell.

  "It was pensioners' paradise, you can say," an Indian told me soon after I arrived. His name was Vishad Gupta, and he laughed as he said it.

  He was laughing because, about four or five years ago, a dramatic thing happened: Bangalore exploded, becoming the center of India's high-tech industry. The placid city of fewer than a million inhabitants became a boomtown of seven million.

  "It happened for three reasons," Vishad said, putting up one finger to indicate the first reason. Vishad's title was Director of Strategies and Business Initiatives for one of Tata's subsidiaries, in a new Bangalore business-only suburb called Electronics City Phase 2. Phase 1 was full. It was a short distance from the center of Bangalore, but a long car ride because of the nightmarish traffic, which included bikes, scooter rickshaws, ox carts, sacred cows, and hurrying pedestrians, all of them in the road—the broken, dusty road under construction.

  "First reason, weather and climate. Nine months of moderate temperatures," Vishad said, and put up another finger. "Two, lots of educational institutions—lots of graduates, lots of talent. And lastly"—finger three—"people are quiet and calmer, more relaxed. It is safer here. Delhi is aggressive. Mumbai is crowded and hot. This is the right place."

  And the government of Karnataka, where Bangalore is situated, introduced tax incentives in the mid-1990s; this gave benefits to start-up companies and attracted foreign companies, too. Language was another factor. Because there is no single dominant language in a babel of contending tongues (Coorg, Konkan, Tulu, Kanada, Hindi, and others), English was widely spoken. The two men in my compartment said they spoke English at home, though theirs was almost an idiolect, or at least a variety of English that I did not find easy to understand, with the usual archaisms, of which "thrice" and "mountebank" and "redoubtable" were just a few.

  I took the very large number of Christian churches in Bangalore (I counted nine without going out of my way) to be a reflection of the culture of the British residents, whose retiring here was the penultimate stop on their way to salvation. Some quiet streets survived, with many old trees at their margins—unusual in India, where road-widening is a government policy. So some of old Bangalore remained, but it was overwhelmed by new buildings and construction sites: gated communities, new hotels, a real estate boom, speculation in land and housing, and the sort of eternal work in progress that I saw in every Indian city I visited.

  "This will be our
new flyover..."

  I saw the thing everywhere. It was always under construction—people sleeping under it, cows congregating near it for shade, slogans painted on it. And I had the feeling that when at last the flyover was finished, it would be inadequate.

  On my way to International Tech Park at Whitefield, at one corner of Bangalore, my driver said, "You know Sai Baba? That is his ashram."

  So instead of going to Tech Park, I went to the ashram.

  Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba was born not far away, at Puttaparthy, on the train line to Chennai; and he set up his ashram here for the same reason all the rest of the companies did—the agreeable weather, the shady streets, the gentle nature of old Bangalore.

  The ashram sat behind a big wall, but the security guards welcomed me with namastes. Love in Action was printed in big letters on the ashram's inner wall. A huge open-sided hall with a high roof housed the fresh-air platform where Swami held his daily darshan, or spiritual meeting, with his followers. To comprehend the Swami's teachings you had only to look at his symbol, which was a circle containing the emblems of the world's great faiths: a cross representing Christianity, a crescent for Muslims, the Zoroastrian flame, and so on for Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Conflating all these faiths, Sai Baba had created a belief system that included almost everyone. But he seemed to reject the idea that he was leading a religion.

  "'No religion, no prayer,' Swami says." This homily was from a volunteer caretaker wearing a badge with a Swami saying: Work is worship.

  "Just follow your own religion. Love yourself."

  The unmistakable image of the Swami I had seen in many taxis, many homes, on many desks and office walls: the kindly smile, the frizz of hair.

  The caretaker was Narayan. "Swami says, 'Heart to heart. No preaching. Only serve humanity with true heart.'"

  This sounded agreeable to me, so I decided to dismiss my taxi and look around the ashram. The Swami was not in residence. His art deco villa sat empty, in lovely gardens, behind a high fence.

  I chatted with some devotees, but they were oblique and wouldn't lin ger or tell me their names ("Don't use my name, use Swami's"). They were emphatic in saying that Sai Baba had had no guru as a youth, though he did have a previous incarnation. And a new incarnation would appear in the near future—probably the year 2030.

  Swami in recent pictures was smaller, slighter, older than his celebrated photographs suggested, the hair a less symmetrical frizz-ball, his smile more fatigued than impish. But he was eighty. His direct confrontation, his practical advice, his refusal to preach—the essential Swami appealed to these people.

  "He will leave his body at ninety-six," one devotee said. "And after some eight years, the third and last incarnation will be born. Named Prema Sai. I wish to observe this."

  The non-Indian devotees had the least patience with my questions, but one of the Indian ashramites explained some of the subtleties of Sai Baba's thought. "Swami teaches that there are four types of people. Artha type. Poor in all senses, scarred on the inside. Arthathee type. They want things. They seek to have things. Jidnyasu type. They only have questions. They need answers. And the Jnani type, who are enlightened. They know everything. They see a cloud and they know it will rain."

  I said, "I think I'm a Jidnyasu. Just questions."

  "Yes. I can see." I was taking notes—these were hard words to spell.

  "Swami says, 'I'm not here to preach new thoughts.'"

  That was a good approach.

  "Don't search for God out there—search within yourself. Attain happiness. Search for ananda"—bliss or serenity.

  I said, "I've been trying."

  "'What is God?' Swami asks. And he answers, 'It is experience.'"

  "I like that."

  "Believe in yourself."

  With that, the devotee left me to find my own path. I sat near the twice-life-size statue of the tuneful goddess Saraswati, who was depicted playing her sitar. I remembered someone had told me that Sai Baba could work miracles, but lovable ones, such as producing chocolates in his hand for children.

  "Yes, he does miracles," another devotee said. "But only to attract illiterates. Chamatkara, they are called. They are meant to astonish you."

  There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts of Sai Baba's miracles, claiming they were proof of his divinity. These included mak ing objects such as crucifixes and Bibles appear, multiple healings, miraculous messages, instances of translocation—the transfer of humans, some of them dead—and a celebrated manifestation of the Koh-i-Noor diamond when Sai Baba criticized an audience for being dazzled by the gem: "Did any one of you even glance at me who created it, as you clamored for a look at that piece of creation?" Many former adherents had come forward to denounce Sai Baba for faking his miracles.

  But the basic philosophy emphasizes the inner light that people can find in their own hearts, and the power of practical work. Hands that help are better than lips that pray—one of the Swami's sayings would not have sounded strange if spoken by Lenin, Mao, Jesus, or Jimmy Carter.

  "People come here from all over," the guard at the front gate said. "Some imams from Iraq. And Ravi Shankar. Hillary Clinton wanted to come, but security was a problem, so she didn't come."

  Near this quiet compound of spiritual renewal—down the noisy congested road—was more of booming Bangalore. I walked outside the gate and took a taxi to International Tech Park. Its new buildings loomed in the distance, rising from watermelon stands, clusters of rickshaws, fix-it shops, juice stands, and food stalls.

  Behind the walls of Tech Park, among the towering glass-and-steel buildings with glittering signs—Infosys, Oracle, Disa, Think Inc., and others—was one for Perot Systems. I recalled the diminutive, quack-voiced, jug-eared Texan, Ross Perot, running for president of the United States on a platform called United We Stand America, which included the pledge to prevent jobs from being outsourced to places like India. Perot spoke of how we would hear "a giant sucking sound" as American jobs were lost. Now, having failed in his bid for the presidency, the quacking tycoon had found that Indians in Bangalore would work for a fraction of what an American would earn.

  Many of the jobs being done in the Bangalore call centers had once been performed in the United States by college students and housewives. All were part-timers. The work was tedious and poorly paid.

  But around 2001, American companies—and there were now thousands of them in this city alone—discovered that young Indian graduates with good degrees, fluent in English, well-mannered, patient, and persistent, would do the same jobs, full time, for very little money. The city had become so widely recognized as a business alternative that in an April 2006 episode of The Simpsons, the town of Springfield outsourced the operation of its nuclear plant, and Homer Simpson went to Bangalore to find Indian employees for the plant. Bangalore was perhaps the best-known center of cheap, trainable labor in the world. I wondered why, until I went there and found that at the time I visited the call centers, the entry-level employees (most of them university graduates) were earning less than $2,500 a year. Bangalore's prosperity rests on these people—their need for work, their high educational attainments, their skills, their good character, their prudent austerity, their punctuality, their humble status, and most of all their willingness to work for low pay.

  "Cannot proceed," the security man at the gate in Tech Park said to my taxi driver. So I made some inquiries and got permission to visit another call center, this one in yet another gated compound of big company offices, Electronics City Phase 2. This phase was only two years old but was already filled with flourishing businesses—that is, foreign businesses with Indian employees.

  I went in the evening, because that was when the callers would be dealing with the western United States, California specifically. I was led through another gateway, another security fence, into a modern building with a few Indian touches—a shrine to the elephant god, Ganesh, god of new endeavors, and an artificial waterfall. I was given an ID badge
for security purposes, I was signed in, and I was shown through the labyrinthine headquarters.

  "Bangalore used to be quiet and sleepy," Hardeep, the night manager, told me. "It is now working day and night. It's cosmopolitan, people from everywhere. Less than thirty percent of the people in Bangalore are local, because of IT growth."

  I said, "The IT people in Mumbai said they were worried about Chinese competition."

  "Yes, the Chinese are trying to compete, but they have a different mind-set. Ask a Chinese worker to tighten a screw, he will make three turns. The Indian will give an extra turn."

  "I'll try to remember that. What about money?"

  "Our cost of business is going up, but we are still forty to fifty percent more cost-effective. Now the IT industry in India is sixteen to eighteen billion dollars. By 2008 it will be sixty to eighty billion."

  "I meant what does a call center worker earn?"

  Hardeep hemmed and hawed, but I found out by nosing around that the answer was from $50 to $60 a week, often a fifty-hour week, and that might include a night shift that ended at three or four in the morning.

  "We don't think about China—China is already playing a role. We think, What is the next India?"

  "What's the answer?"

  "Maybe Philippines. But political instability is there. Attempts have been made in Africa. Ghana was looked at, but no good results were found."

  I was impatient to see and hear Indians on the phone. I hadn't managed much of this in Mumbai. Hardeep said that he could show me those rooms but that I could not divulge the names of the companies involved. I said okay, though I recognized some of them—banking and mortgage groups, and the names of some airlines.

  "This wing is tech support," and he named a large airline. "Let's say someone is processing a boarding pass anywhere in the world, doing a check-in, and they have a problem with anything. They call, and the call is answered by one of these tech people."