by Suketu Mehta
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.
BEFORE 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.
In families like the Thakkars’, there is no individual, only the organism. Everything—Girish’s desire to go abroad and make and send back money, Dharmendra’s taking a wife, Raju’s staying at home—is for the greater good of the whole. There are circles of fealty and duty within the organism, but the smallest circle is the family. There is no circle around the self.
In inquiring about Girish’s family, I ask if they’ve found a match for his sister yet. She will be married by Diwali, he says. He does not look happy about it.
“There’s a problem?” I ask.
He nods.
“Love marriage?”
She has chosen for herself—a Marwari boy, a fashion designer with two or three of his own shops. He is relatively wealthy and comes from a good family. Girish and the other brothers—all four of them—have not been on speaking terms with Raju for two or three months now, even though they live in the same house.
“Everyone in our society comes to my father for advice. Now how will he be able to advise them?” asks Girish. At first I think he is referring to his building society in Mira Road. Then I realize he is talking about his caste. The brothers are angry at their only sister for wanting to marry outside the caste. The parents, on the other hand, have reconciled themselves to it. I tell Girish he is being silly. He should accept her choice and be happy about it, since there is nothing wrong with the boy. But he doesn’t like the manner in which she told him. She had asked Girish to come downstairs for a moment; there was something she wanted to say to him. He left the flat downcast. He thought he would have to explain why he wasn’t contributing to the family income, why his businesses kept failing. But instead she told him about this boy. Girish heard her out, then told her that in six months he was going to be earning a lot of money through his Internet business, and then he himself would go out with his father and look for a suitable boy from the caste for her. Somehow Raju’s finding a boy on her own, and a Marwari boy at that, became linked in Girish’s mind with his not earning and therefore not contributing to the prosperity of the family, a prosperity that would have attracted many eligible boys for its sole daughter. But Raju was adamant; she would marry the Marwari boy. And Girish stopped speaking to her.
I tell him his sister needs him, needs his support in all that she is going through. He shakes his head. She has stained the reputation of their father in his society. I persist, asking him what is wrong with the boy and isn’t it a good thing that she has chosen on her own? I tell him to make peace with her. I tell him I myself had entered
into a love marriage.
He stops arguing and says, “You’re not from here. It is different for you.”
He cuts off his words, but the implication is clear: I am a foreigner. I cannot understand the Indian customs. Here is the difference between us, out at last in the sunlight.
Babbanji: Runaway Poet
One day, my friend the poet Adil Jussawala was browsing among the books on the sidewalk opposite the Central Telegraph Office. The boy who was behind the stall got into conversation with him about a book of French short stories, and Adil saw something different about him. So he invited him to a writers’ salon at an open-air courtyard behind the Tata Theater, not far from there. He is a runaway from Bihar, Adil tells me. The boy told his employer, the stall owner, that he would be going; a time of five o’clock had been given. The employer said, If you go, you’re fired. He went to the salon. He got fired.
The boy is interested in poetry, a slender youth with a thin mustache and wispy sideburns creeping into a beard. He appears very self-confident, even stubborn. He may have come to the group lured by the possibility of meeting poets, but he may also find a proper job through connections with English-speaking people. Through most of the evening, he is quiet, looking down at the table. He can’t join in our conversation, which is in English. When people want tea or chairs, he gets up and fetches it for us without being asked. It is his station.
An architect-poet asks him to recite some of his poetry. And so he does, a metrical piece about destinations, in Hindi. I like the sound of it. At the end, nobody says, “Wah, wah,” as they might have in Bihar. There is, instead, an embarrassed silence. The architect asks him if he has any more. He reads another, one he wrote just the previous night—on the footpath, under the streetlamp—to the same reaction. Then I ask him if he’s written any on Bombay. He brings out a sheaf of papers, all written over, every inch of every sheet. But by this time the people around the table have lost interest in his poetry. He brings out a calendar, and that too is all written over. “More poetry?” I ask.
“No, it’s my diary. Every day I write it.”
I write down my name and phone number for him. In my notebook, in a fine script, he writes his name, “Babbanji.” He pauses. “What else?” There is nothing else. He has no phone number. Tonight, he is going to try to find a patch of footpath to sleep on. He’ll try Churchgate. He has a tote bag with him that contains all his belongings. He is to call me the day after. I will try to find him a job.
I enlist Girish, who finds many people jobs while losing money at his own. I watch him listening to Babbanji. “How much money do you have? Do you have any relations in Bombay? Anybody who knows you, who can give you a recommendation?” Then Girish asks for my mobile and phones his friend Ishaq. Ishaq’s cousin Dr. Shahbuddin is starting a dispensary and could use an assistant, to work from 9 a.m. to 1:30 and then 6 p.m. to 9:30. That would leave plenty of time for Babbanji’s writing, the whole afternoon. Plus he could stay in the dispensary, get off the footpath.
Babbanji is not enthusiastic. “I’ll do anything that involves writing or reading. In some magazine, some newspaper.” But Girish has tried; he has reached out to a boy he has met half an hour ago and tried to make his life better.
Ishaq’s immediate reaction to the possibility of hiring Babbanji: “All Biharis are thieves.” This from a man himself from Azamgarh, crime capital of Uttar Pradesh, the state next to Bihar. But Bihar has an even worse reputation than UP. Bihar and Bombay are the two polarities of modern India, the success story and the disaster. If Bombay were only rid of its Bihari migrants, I have heard society people argue, it could be a booming city-state like Singapore, like Hong Kong. Biharis come to Bombay with hat in hand. Babbanji carries his state’s reputation like the mark of Cain wherever he goes: All Biharis are thieves. It was recently stated in those exact words by the captain of the Indian cricket team Azharuddin when he found his cap missing after playing a match in the state.
BABBANJI COMES to my uncle’s apartment and looks for several minutes at the sea from the eighteenth-floor window. He has with him his blue cloth travel bag, bearing the Marlboro logo. He is wearing the same plaid shirt I have seen him in before, with metal buttons. It is not dirty; he must find a way to wash it during his bath. Without saying anything, he sits down, takes out a piece of paper, and begins composing a poem. Periodically he peers at the view for fresh inspiration. When he is finished, he reads it out to me. It is about the sea, and how all the rivers of the world can flow into it; it will refuse nobody. He will not leave the sea, the poet promises.
He asks me why everyone in Bombay speaks English. He had been to Matunga earlier today and heard a chaiwala’s son speak to his father in English: “Hey, Dad.” The tea vendor gamely struggled to respond. The boy’s mother insisted that he speak in English. Babbanji is perturbed about this; in Japan, he points out, it is all right to speak in Japanese but in India it’s a liability to speak Hindi.
Babbanji’s friends at the writers’ salon have also been making calls, trying to find him work. Madan, the photographer I had gone to the red-light district with, took Babbanji to meet the film writer Javed Akhtar and his wife, the actress Shabana Azmi. Babbanji was struck by the fact that Javed and Shabana have a simple home—“They have a simple way of talking”—and that the great actress was actually writing. She is a member of parliament and an activist. She is his father’s favorite heroine.
But Akhtar made fun of him for his Bihari origins. He declared his certificates must be fake since he’s heard these things are manufactured in Bihar. He doubted Babbanji’s ability to read and write. Akhtar was joking, but it is part of a now-familiar suspicion that the citizens of this city share against his home state. Adil has approached friends at the Navbharat Times, the country’s leading Hindi-language paper. “We are looking for people who can write Allahabadi Hindi. We don’t care for Bihari Hindi.” This is the state of Pataliputra, capital of the Sun King, Vikramaditya. This is the state where the Buddha was born and where he achieved enlightenment. This is the state of the great Buddhist university of Nalanda, one of the world’s foremost centers of learning from the fifth to the eleventh centuries. But that was all in the past. Bihar is now the state of the buffoon Laloo Prasad Yadav, who stoops to the extent of stealing animal feed. Babbanji cannot escape the historical tragedy of his homeland. He has come to Bombay to steal. He brings nothing with him but a sheaf of poems.
I tell him what Ishaq said about why he couldn’t get Babbanji a job: “All Biharis are thieves.”
“Absolutely true!” the young man responds, with the bitterness of someone who recognizes his tag and has almost lost the will to fight it. The bookstore owner he had worked for, a Rajasthani, had told him the same thing to his face: “Bihari bastards are thieves.” Then he fired him. “In Bihar people are not literate,” Babbanji explains to me. “The rate is 39.51 literacy data. It is twenty-one percent lower than the Indian data. A simple villager, who is illiterate, comes to the city to work. He is innocent. But he can’t find work in the city; he wanders about. If someone takes pity on him, that villager will take him to be as a god. But if anyone gives two rotis nowadays, he doesn’t give it without a reason; his charity has a motive to it. Now if the patron turns out to be a bad man, a smuggler, he will take the villager into the bad business. The Bihari will take roti from anyone. But if he gets out from the net, runs away, he will be called a thief.” Hence their reputation all over.
Babbanji is not yet seventeen. He is confused about why I want to write about him and advises me of the arduousness of the task if I’m really interested: friendly advice from one writer to another. “A story is written about those who have a destination in mind. I have come here to start my story. If you are interested you will have to wait. The road is very long, and I have to walk on it. I have to let the story develop. What can you write about sixteen years?”
His bag is filled almost entirely with papers: certificates, poems, a notebook. He picks up odd piece
s of paper to write on. He shows me one such: a dust jacket he found on the road. “Angela Lansbury’s Positive Moves: My Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being.” The copy on the back of the jacket reads, “I believe it’s never too late to take certain measures to maintain our mobility and engage life more fully. . . . By being involved in a positive way, you reward yourself, and you can then move forward with enthusiasm for life and its multitude of possibilities.”
Inside, on the blank space, there is a poem Babbanji has written on Bombay:
What could be sold in this carnival?
What intoxication could there be in this earth
that the naive and innocent
come to this crossroads of rushing and thieving?. . .
They are in search of dreams that will clash with their dreams.
After reading out the poem, he looks at the picture of Angela Lansbury for a moment. “I had a need to come to Bombay,” he says, beginning something. Then he looks up at me. “Will you keep this to yourself?”
“Yes.”
Babbanji’s father is a college lecturer in geology, in an intermediate college in the small Bihari town of Sitamarhi; he dreamt of his son becoming a scientist. Babbanji did well in chemistry and participated in a school science competition, devising an apparatus that could make petroleum from waste plastic. He came in third. The girl who came in second, Aparna Suman, came to congratulate him. He smiles, recalling the moment. “Maybe she came to tease me. I normally came in first.”
“Was she beautiful?” I ask.
“No. She was of medium class.”
Babbanji enrolled in the college where his father taught and found that Aparna was in the same college. She asked to borrow a geology textbook. When she returned it, she had enclosed a love poem, which began, “From my loneliness I am speaking to you. . . .” She borrowed a second book. This time it came back with a photograph of her and lyrics from film songs. Word got around in the small town that they were having some sort of affair, which attracted the attention of some thuggish students his father had expelled from the college. Prodded by a jealous rival—a boarder in Aparna’s house—they walked into the college classroom and beat up Babbanji in front of the professor. “Bihar is such a place that if you are beaten in front of the professor, he won’t do anything,” he says bitterly. If the professor interferes, he himself will get beaten. The goons threatened the young poet with their knives and commanded him, in front of the whole laughing crowd of his classmates—in front of Aparna—to get up on the bench, cross his arms, hold his ears, and do fifteen sit-ups, double-quick.
