Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

by Paul Theroux

  "Can I listen?"

  I cocked my head to the earphones and heard an American voice at the other end, perhaps in Los Angeles, saying, "So do I just put that ten-digit code in?"

  The tech person was a friendly-looking man, about thirty, studying a computer screen as he helped the airline employee in an airport far, far away.

  "This is internal organization support," Hardeep said, "not an end customer."

  "What's the difference?"

  "End-customer support is voice-based, requires accent—U.S. or U.K. You are identified with a particular country. 'Hello, I'm John...'"

  "But it's really Mohun, isn't it?"

  "For our purposes, it's John."

  We were passing down a corridor and into a new room with about a hundred cubicles and workstations. At each one sat a young Indian man or woman. They looked like students working late at the library, except that they were on the phone and the room was humming with their voices. The call center employees worked from scripts, and all calls were recorded so they could be reviewed for effectiveness.

  "The brand image from a consumer perspective should not change, or else the person on the phone in the U.S. will think you're taking a job away."

  Which was exactly what was happening: an Indian helping an American to solve a problem with a computer or an appliance or an insurance form.

  This fascinated me: Indians mimicking Americans, not just in the way they were dressed (short-sleeved shirts, blue jeans, sneakers), but in the American jobs they were doing, using broad American accents. All had American first and last names.

  I met "Lynn Hayes," who was born Hasina, in Kerala, on the coast. She was twenty-two, unmarried, and worked from 5:30 P.M. until 2:30 A.M. at the call center—the best time to call California. She was cold-calling contractors in the San Francisco area, to sign them up for a home warranty company that wanted its own fix-it men.

  Listening in, I heard a blunt "Who's this?"

  "Lynn Hayes," Hasina said in a neutral, regionless American accent. "May I please speak to the manager?"

  "He's out."

  "When is he expected in the office, please?"

  The accent was American, this politeness wasn't.

  "I dunno," the woman at the other end said.

  "May I call you back?"

  "Up to you. He's pretty busy."

  Lynn Hayes persisted until she was able to find a time when the manager of this firm of contractors might be in.

  "We have to sign up two hundred and twenty-five American contractors a month for this company," Hardeep said. "They have to be involved in plumbing, electrical, building, and so forth. It's almost impossible to find them in some states. New York is tough. Arizona is better. California is hard."

  "How does she know who to call?"

  "We purchase telephone numbers."

  These were the leads—I thought of them as the Glengarry leads, and I imagined this room of callers fitting neatly into the plot of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, the definitive drama on cold-calling and rejection. The workers in Bangalore were not vying for bonuses or a set of steak knives, but every time one of them snagged a contractor, he or she got a gold star on the leader board.

  "David Lewis" (Nitish Chandra) said, "I make about one hundred and thirty calls a day. It's really hard. Every twenty calls we get to speak to a contractor. Out of, say, six interested, we sign up one."

  "Hello, this is Tina," said Aisha, in an accent that was nicely nasal, and after a brief exchange, "Can I leave my number?"

  She dictated a number that was in the 212 area code—New York City—and when the person phoned back, from somewhere in the USA, the call would be routed to Bangalore.

  As I was writing this down, someone called out, "Chris just got another star on the board!"

  "Chris Carter," who was Subramaniam to his parents and friends, had been working in the call center for over a year and had a pleasant and persuasive manner. He also had mastered a forced but fairly convincing American accent—all of them had been drilled intensively.

  "Do you say route or rowt?" I asked. "Roof or ruff?"

  Rowt and ruff, they said. And in-surance. And ree-peat. And minny for many, peenless for painless. All the pronunciations that I found annoying.

  "This is Sean Harris," Ramesh was saying, tapping his pencil on a scribble pad. "We require a contractor in the Santa Rosa area. We have minny jobs. May I kindly speak to the manager?"

  This would go on until two or three in the morning, the whole room cold-calling California, doing the impossible, looking for willing plumbers. There were a hundred callers in this room, a thousand employed by this firm, ten thousand callers in Bangalore—a figure that was expected to triple in the next few years.

  It was difficult for me to get accurate salary figures from any of the managers—every one shrank at my question; it was a sensitive issue. Twenty-five hundred dollars a year was the lowest amount I heard for a newcomer; some earned $4,000. Someone at the top of the pay scale could expect to earn $30,000 or $40,000, which was a very high salary in India, and few achieved it. Most stayed at the bottom, averaging about $50 a week, but because of the stressful nature of the job, and the unsocial hours, there was a high dropout rate. Some techies and software support men I met at the company gym said they earned $6,000 or $7,000 a year, and some software designers earned $10,000—more than enough to tempt them to stay, but a pittance to the American client. There was never a shortage of applicants: Hardeep said he was besieged by new graduates looking for work. Again I recognized the paradox, that India's poor were its wealth.

  Since the time of the East India Company, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labor had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labor was the basis of the British Raj, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, whether it was growing cotton for the textile mills, or jute for rope, or tea to satisfy the imperial thirst, or (as in the 1850s) Indian opium for the purpose of weakening China, turning it into a nation of addicts, and enriching the British. Indians were still being exploited, but grunt labor and muscle power had ceased to be of much use; the workers now were intelligent, educated, mostly young, a whole workforce of cultivated coolies.

  One of the older municipal buildings in Bangalore was Mayo Hall. A two-story ecclesiastical-looking structure built at the end of the nineteenth century, it was dedicated to the memory of India's fourth British viceroy, Lord Mayo. Lord Mayo's pomposities led him to make a ceremonial visit to a penal colony in the Andaman Islands, some distance from India's eastern coast, and there he met his end, a crazed convict knifing him to death. This same Lord Mayo once said, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race."

  In my succeeding days in Bangalore, I met some of the dropouts. Vidiadhar and Vincent had managed one of the earliest call centers, processing mortgages for an Australian company, providing tech support, and selling software.

  "It was fun for a while, but the hours were awful," Vidiadhar said.

  "The big problem was the perverts," Vincent said. "Aussies! They'd hear a woman's voice on the line and say, 'Go out with me on a date and I'll buy everything you're selling.'"

  "Some would say, 'What are you wearing?'"

  "That was only the beginning!" Vincent said. "It could get pretty rough. I'd rather not repeat it."

  Vidiadhar said, "For the U.S. customers we said, 'We're in California'—well, the headquarters of the company was in California, so it wasn't really a lie. If we'd told them we're in India, they would have said, 'How can an Indian understand the problems I'm having with my product?'"

  They too said that they'd bought telephone numbers and customer profiles, which was reminiscent of the Glengarry leads.

  "We had hot leads and cold leads. We paid a lot of money for some of them, but we knew so much about the people—their age, their address, if they'd refinanced their mortgage, what sort of credit rating and financial history."

  But the st
ress had got to them after a few years, and the women objected to the heavy breathers. So Vidiadhar and Vincent entered that other growth area in Bangalore, making deals in the American clothing market.

  "Any labels I'd recognize?"

  "Are you familiar with Kenneth Cole, Banana Republic, and Tommy Hilfiger?" Vincent said.

  The usual routine was that one of these companies would give them a specific pattern. The cloth, cotton or silk, was generally from India; the buttons and waistbands were from the United States. They would run up a sample, get it approved, and sign a contract for a certain number of units.

  I said, "Banana Republic sells a type of pajama bottom that I usually wear on the train. Drawstring type with pockets. They cost about forty dollars."

  "We make them for seven."

  Vidiadhar said, "Any U.S. clothing company could sell their clothes for fifty percent off and still make a good profit."

  The men and women who cut and stitched these clothes, the low-level tailors, earned $1,000 a year.

  "That polo shirt you're wearing," Vincent said. "It looks familiar. I'm pretty sure it was made here."

  ***

  I FOUND SOME GLASS PAINTINGS in Bangalore and got acquainted with the man who sold them to me, Mr. V. K. Reddy, who said he dabbled in antiques. He was blimpish and backward-looking, opinionated and very funny in his conceits, with a big mustache, as outlandish as an actor's comic prop, that he continually twirled with his big blunt finger. He was stout, with a dyspeptic scowl, and his manner, his booming voice especially, was that of a former Indian army officer, which he might have been.

  "What a lot of bosh!" he said when I told him that Bangalore was regarded as an example of the Indian miracle.

  "What do you think it is?"

  "This town was nothing, I tell you! Just little retired ladies and gents living out their days as pensioners. And now this! For the past three years!"

  "Nightmarish traffic," I suggested.

  "You are naïve, my friend! Worse than nightmarish."

  "Noisy," I said.

  "Noisy is not the word, sir!" Mr. V. K. Reddy said and worked on his mustache, tweaking its sticky tips. "It is hellish din."

  "But you have your antique shop."

  "No more than a hobby." He leaned forward and said, "It so happens that I have in my possession Mother Teresa's personal rosary, with a letter in her own inimitable handwriting, testifying to its authenticity. I can offer this for your perusal, and should you purchase it, you would not regret it."

  "Must be unique," I said.

  "Of unparalleled interest," he said, still plucking at his mustache. "And don't forget spiritual value."

  If I should return to Bangalore, Mr. Reddy said he would take me to lunch at the Bangalore Club. "There you will see the old Bangalore. The old India."

  He meant the Raj, and the genteel and dusty Anglo-Indian aftermath of tiger shoots and high tea and polo matches and dented tureens of mulligatawny. But a day or so later, near where I sat, at breakfast in my hotel, a cup of coffee in one hand, the Times of India in the other, I read that four members of a family at a local court had just been given life sentences "for abetting self-immolation." Two were the sons of the victim; that is, to help in the ancient (and outlawed) practice of suttee, they had thrown their sixty-year-old mother on the funeral pyre of her husband, joining his burning corpse in death. Everyone talked about the new India, but the old India was never very far away.

  THE SHATABDI EXPRESS TO CHENNAI

  THE LONGER I STAYED in Bangalore, the less I liked it. Many of the Indians I met there wanted me to be dazzled by the changes, but I was more horrified than awed. What went under the name of business in Bangalore was really a form of buccaneering, all the pirates wearing dark suits and carrying cell phones instead of cutlasses. The place had not evolved; it had been crudely transformed—less city planning than the urban equivalent of botched cosmetic surgery. The proud, tidy, tree-shaded town of the recent past was now a huge, unfinished, and deforested city sagging under its dubious improvements, where it was impossible to walk without falling into an open manhole or newly dug ditch. Most of the sidewalks had been torn up and the trees cut down in the interest of street-widening. The bypass roads and flyovers were all under construction, wearing a crumbled and abandoned look, and the skinny men working on them, poking the clods of earth with small shovels, suggested they'd never be completed.

  In a few years you won't recognize it, the developers said, but was that a good thing? The whole place smoldered in the foul dusty air of a building site. I realized that what I had liked about Amritsar and Jaipur was that they hadn't changed much since my first visit. They were larger, of course, but they were finished and habitable. Mumbai and Bangalore were simultaneously being torn down and built up, works in progress, but Bangalore's distance from the sea, from any body of water, made it grittier and gave it a look of anguish. And there was something else: I attempted many times to walk in Bangalore, but the traffic was so bad I seldom succeeded in crossing the street.

  So, one morning at five, while the city was still asleep, only the call center shuttle buses and the temple monkeys and the sacred cows stirring, I slipped out on the express to Chennai, sliding through rice fields and palm groves to the coast. The train was fast: it was an eight-hour journey, short by Indian standards, and I arrived in time for a late lunch of Tamil food—steamed buns called idlies, masala dosa (a kind of crepe), soupy curry, and spiced potato, coconut, and curd, served on a freshly picked palm leaf. The city I had known long ago as Madras had quadrupled in size and yet looked the same: mildewed colonial buildings, tropical gardens, the streets thick with traffic, and just to the east a long sandy shore and the sea breeze from the Indian Ocean, which was a relief.

  I had planned, in retracing my steps, to take a train from here to Rameswaram, at the tip of India's nose, and then the ferry to Sri Lanka.

  "But there is a trouble in Sri Lanka," a travel agent told me.

  "What kind of trouble?"

  "A new offensive."

  Tamils were well up on developments in Sri Lanka, since they had a stake in the guerrilla war. He meant the Tamil Tigers—they had attacked some Sri Lankan soldiers. The train to the south, the night ferry to Sri Lanka, had been fairly simple, even pleasurable, thirty-three years ago, but no information about this route was available in Chennai. It was another obstacle, like the Iranian visa I'd been unable to get, the war (and the kidnapping and murder of Western travelers) in Afghanistan, and the xenophobia in Pakistan. I was trying to follow in my own footsteps, but now and then I had to make detours.

  The Chennai I had known as a city of around two million was now a sprawl of eleven million. Because Chennai had few tall buildings, it could grow only by spreading and overwhelming the surrounding villages, eating up the rice paddies and wheat fields, filling them with people and cars and hastily erected houses. Long ago, I had visited the outlying hamlet of Tambaram, beyond the southern outskirts of the city. Wooded, with tall trees and palm groves and gardens, a railway station, and a small college, Tambaram was now a crowded and urbanized precinct of Chennai, its rural atmosphere overwhelmed and altered. It was strange: as Indian cities underwent name changes—Bombay to Mumbai, Madras to Chennai—their character seemed to change too, as though they no longer had to live up to that old genteel image and could become nightmarish in new ways.

  "Where going, sir?" said the doorman at my hotel.

  "For a walk"

  "Take car, sir," he said, and signaled for a taxi.

  "Never mind."

  "Walking not possible, sir!"

  My hotel was near Mount Road. I intended to walk west, perhaps to St. Thomas Mount, a landscape feature mentioned by Marco Polo, where (so the story goes) the doubting apostle was martyred by a Brahmin wielding a lance. Both the lance in question and the remains of the saint were enshrined in San Thome Cathedral. I also wanted to stroll along Beach Road and look for evidence of the tsunami that had hit the year before.r />
  "I'm walking," I said, and kept going.

  The main road, with its emporiums and bazaars, was just a few minutes away. I reached it and began to negotiate my way, but the crush of jostling pedestrians and broken sidewalks forced me into the gutter. I stumbled along at the curb, bumped by rickshaws and spooked by honking cars. I kept this up for a hundred yards—hating it, growing frustrated, appalled by the huge number of people, their push and pull, shouldering me aside. I was bigger than any of these bandy-legged Dravidians, but it was all I could do to stay upright and moving forward.

  I liked to think of myself as unflappable, but the simple walk gave me pause: the hot day, the mob, the car fumes; my making so little progress on what I'd intended as a stroll down Mount Road, which was memory lane. I did not look for pleasure in travel, and I expected nuisance and delay. But this was something else, pointless and unrewarding effort of a sort that no one wants to hear about.

  Only the natural courtesy, good nature, and geniality of the Tamils in the mob kept me from being trampled—that was a discovery. Overpopulation was made bearable by politeness. But, trying to walk, I was getting nowhere, seeing nothing, merely protecting myself.

  "You see, sir?" the doorman said, summing me up on my sudden return. "Difficult"

  Difficult was not the way I thought of the mobbed streets in Chennai. They were something else—unendurable, pure horror, cauchemardesque. They were freaking me out.

  "Walking is not possible. Take taxi."

  So I took a taxi to Beach Road and on the way reflected on the life of the expatriate American in India: the multitasking businessman or lawyer with his driver, his air-conditioned office, and his secretaries—India is the land of retainers, gofers, body servants, door openers, waiters, and flunkies. The spouse of such an expatriate is similarly elevated, transformed from a simple soul, possibly unlettered—who would have trouble finding India on a map—to a memsahib, the status of an important lady in society, with a cook, a cleaner, a chowkidar, a dhobi or launderer, and if she has a garden, she will have two gardeners.