When I called him, he sounded neither very interesting nor particularly coherent. Yet he seemed so eager to talk that I asked him if he would come and see me at Koshy’s, a restaurant in central Bangalore, where I was meeting Akshay, my photographer room-mate. Kartik showed up soon after I got there, looking hesitant as he made his way towards our table. He was dark and stocky, his face gleaming with sweat, and I began to lose interest in him as he talked. He was alternately opinionated and nervous, making random statements that seemed to have no point to them. When I asked him to clarify a comment he had made, he would run his palm through his hair and say, ‘I will have to think about that. I am not good at expressing my thoughts.’
I put my notebook away and ordered dinner, asking Kartik to join us. I didn’t like him, but I felt bad for him. He seemed lonely, a little confused, and I made it clear that dinner was on me. But even though he didn’t want to leave, he refused to eat. He ordered a coffee and sipped at it while continuing to make rambling comments. There were things about him that didn’t quite add up, I thought. He had grown up in Bangalore, but he had never been to Koshy’s. He looked around at the other customers uneasily, a middle-class gathering of men and women, some of them poets and journalists, whose conversation rang in an easy, animated tone, interrupted by their banter with the uniformed waiters. Then there was the fact that Kartik was in many ways a member of the elite. He was a Brahmin, someone who had done engineering at an IIT and studied management at an IIM, both elite institutions. Yet there was no polish on him, and he didn’t have a job. When I asked him why, he mumbled, ‘I am still looking for the right thing.’
He grew slightly animated when I asked him about the online group through which he had been put in touch with me. ‘What does it mean to be libertarian?’ I asked.
‘We believe in free-market economics, the kind that has made America so successful,’ he said.
I had assumed that civil liberties would be no part of this Indian-style libertarianism, and I was right. Kartik began to talk about a column he had read in the Financial Times in which, he claimed, the writer had commented harshly on the unproductive, welfare-seeking mentality of black people in America.
‘Is that right?’ Akshay asked me. ‘You live in America.’
I said I didn’t agree, but Kartik grew increasingly vehement that the Financial Times columnist was right. He began to speak disparagingly of black people, although he admitted he had never met any. He also spoke dismissively of what he said was my tolerance, comparing it to the similar attitude of his parents.
‘What’s wrong with your parents?’ I said. ‘They sound like decent people to me.’
‘They’re old-fashioned,’ he said. Then he added, ‘My father is an atheist.’
‘And your mother?’ I asked.
‘She’s religious,’ he said. ‘But she’s just like my father. They’re too easy-going when it comes to other kinds of people.’
‘Do you mean people from other religions?’ I said.
He refused to answer and instead stared at me, sweaty and nervous, playing with his empty coffee cup.
‘So what about your religious beliefs?’ I said.
‘I believe in Hindutva,’ he said, using the name coined by right-wing organizations to mean an assertive Hindu identity.
‘Do you belong to any organization?’ I asked.
A sudden change galvanized the man in front of me. He sat erect and puffed out his chest. Then he gave me a fascist salute, right arm swivelling to meet his chest, palm pointing down. ‘I belong to the RSS,’ he said.
Akshay stopped eating and stared at him with shock. I stopped eating too, feeling both angry and interested. From then on, Kartik did most of the speaking, in a long rant that was perfectly articulate in flow if incoherent in thought. He had turned his attention from blacks in distant America to Muslims and lower castes in India and to their backwardness. He who a little while ago had been scratching his head and had talked about not being good at expressing his thoughts spoke clearly and disdainfully now about the Muslim and lower-caste students he had seen at the IIT and IIM. ‘They had no academic standards, no social standards, they couldn’t think. They have such poor communication skills. They didn’t deserve to be there.’
We had finished dinner. Kartik made a fumbling attempt to pay, but I stopped him. He lived with his parents, quite far from central Bangalore, and would take a bus back. He had once again become a polite, diffident man, and I wondered what his story was. He had gone to an IIT and an IIM, but they had not given him polish and confidence. He possessed what were extremely desirable qualifications in India yet did not have a job. He had been in the RSS, but although he admired its quasi-military discipline, he found it hard to immerse himself fully in the organization. The only thing he truly felt he belonged to was the online libertarian forum that had the same hate objects as the RSS but that had modernized it further with inputs from Ayn Rand and Western right-wing columnists.
Kartik wasn’t a whole, just bits of conflicting impulses swirling around a self, and it was hard not to wonder if the anger at the seeming backwardness of minorities, of those socially and economically disadvantaged, was a disguised anger at himself. He looked troubled as he left our table, as if he too was puzzled by these bits of himself. He halted at the door and turned to stare at us, as if he was disappointed that we hadn’t liked him, as if he wanted to meet with us again but knew that there was no place for him among us, and that we had rejected him as firmly and unequivocally as he had rejected his shadow selves among people from different backgrounds.
9
A few days later, I ran into Chak at Koshy’s. I was there to meet a journalist, but she was running late and I was sitting on my own when I saw Chak come in, accompanied by his son and nephew. He’d brought them to the neighbourhood for shopping, but he also had a lunch meeting at Koshy’s with alumni from BITS Pilani. Chak had earlier told me that he avoided alumni gatherings. Sometimes, he visited their online discussion group because he could read ‘nice and curious and interesting’ things, but he himself didn’t post. ‘It’s too much of a nostalgia trip sometimes and there are some blabbermouths going on about who met who,’ he’d said.
It was the first time Chak had been to Koshy’s, and in spite of all that he had told me about keeping his distance from fellow alumni, his face lit up when he saw the group sitting at the back, their beer bottles and cigarette packs creating a happy picture of male camaraderie. ‘I’ll go and hang out with those guys,’ Chak said. ‘You two can sit here.’ Chak’s son, pudgy, bespectacled and possessing a Midwestern twang, looked at me with embarrassment. He and his cousin sat down with me, but then the journalist I was meeting arrived, and there wasn’t room at the table for everyone.
Chak’s son looked despairingly at his father, but Chak was busy with his friends, looking happier than I had ever seen him. ‘You know what,’ Chak’s son said, ‘we’ll just hang around outside till Dad’s done.’ They must have done so for a long time. When I left, Chak was still deep in conversation with his friends.
I was thinking about the son when I went back to Chak’s office next week. I remembered how Chak had pointed to his son’s bedroom while showing me around the new house and said, ‘If he ever comes back.’ When I met Chak in his office lobby, I asked him about his family. He began by talking about his parents. His mother died when he’d just finished high school, he said. He didn’t see much of his father during the years he spent in Pilani. When he got married, Chak said, the traditional thing would have been for his father to move in with him and his wife. But that was also the time Chak left for America, and it was the elder of his two sisters who took the father in.
‘At heart, men are more independent,’ Chak said. ‘Women are more attached to the family. So the old paradigm where parents stay with the son is changing. These days it’s the daughters who keep the parents.’ It sounded rather convenient, but I wondered if he was thinking of his own children. He seemed closer to his da
ughters than to his son, who was studying engineering in the United States. Chak said that there was a distance between him and all his children, but especially with his son. ‘We like to believe that we’re closer to our children,’ he said. ‘I like Western music. I grew up with the Beatles, Pink Floyd, that sort of thing. I listen to rap, even when it’s vulgar. It’s not the lyrics that appeal to me but the rhythm, the music. But when I listen to music my children like, they see this as something artificial on my part, something I am doing either to get closer to them or to spite them. My youngest daughter is forgiving, but the elder daughter, who’s fifteen, and the son, who’s nineteen, they’ll turn off the television or leave if I sit down to listen to a song with them on VHI.’
‘What kind of song?’ I asked.
‘Something like “Delilah”,’ he said, laughing with embarrassment. ‘They want me to act my age, whereas I think I would have preferred my parents to be slightly closer to me.’ But Chak also thought that things were harder for his children than they had been for him. They had more opportunities, but that meant that they had to take many more decisions. ‘They have a stronger sense of privacy, they need to maintain a greater distance.’
I thought that his account of what happened when ‘Delilah’ played on television showed some interaction within the family. At least they weren’t each watching television in his or her own room.
‘It’s getting like that here too,’ Chak said. ‘But their machine is not the television. It’s the laptop, portable, always connected to the Internet. They don’t want a desktop because it’s too restrictive and doesn’t offer enough privacy. With a laptop, when I walk into their room, my son or daughter can turn the screen away so that I can’t see what they’re doing.’
‘Will your son come back to India?’ I asked.
Chak smiled but didn’t answer.
‘What does he want to do?’
‘He’s not interested in a career,’ Chak said. ‘He’s pretty open about the fact that what he wants is to make easy money.’
‘Is that different from your outlook?’
‘Well, I guess I went to the US to make money too.’
The conversation about family had made Chak mellow, even more reflective than usual. He looked around at the lobby, at the people walking purposefully past the electronic ID machine, the men wearing jeans and the women in baggy salwar kameezes. ‘Will the priority of my spiritual life demand more time?’ he said abruptly. ‘That is what I am waiting for. I could do more for the mission then. In the company there is no retirement age. You keep going on, like the Energizer bunny.’
I let him talk, and he began assessing his life, including the two decades he had spent in the United States. ‘In America, there was no free time, you know. The home environment is demanding everywhere, but here it’s a tiered society that allows you to have quality time. In the US, when it was Fall, you had to rake the leaves, in December you had to winterize the sprinkler system, and when it was February, you had to use the weedkiller. Mowing the lawn, washing the cars, I don’t have to do any of that here. The bulk of the US is caught in this mediocrity. You’re really a machine, an automaton. It’s a programmed society that is trained not to allow weeds on its front yard. If you do let weeds grow on your lawn, you get a note, you get ostracized because you’re not maintaining the property value. Lots of Indians struggle with this. There I was the Home Depot king. You’re told it’s good to know how to do these things yourself. That’s bullshit. Nobody wants to be a jack of all trades and master of none. Sure, there’s discipline and improvement in America, but it comes at a huge cost. Sometimes, I wonder, “Did I really enjoy it?” Then I think, “Did I have a choice?” ’
I was surprised at this sudden criticism of America, especially since he had spoken of it admiringly at the beginning of our interaction. I asked Chak whether it was fair that India was so tiered, even if that worked better for him in that it allowed him more free time and let him be less of an automaton.
‘It’s always going to be a tiered society here,’ he said, ‘and actually it’s not wrong. Just because I have a driver doesn’t mean I am a slave-driver.’ He laughed at his play on words. ‘I’m supporting his family and he’s doing the best he can in his stratum. And besides, you really think the US isn’t a tiered society?’ He sounded both energized and sorrowful, as if he was delivering a final, complicated lesson to me. ‘We in India think it’s a free society,’ he said. ‘It’s a lie. The reality is that America is hugely regimented. It’s just a different caste system in the US, an economic caste system. It’s an unfair system. The rich protect their interests and keep away from the poor. The bulk of the people are in between the rich and the poor, without much of an idea of what’s going on.
‘Have you ever been to a downtown in an American city?’ he asked suddenly. I was confused, but then it became clear he was talking about inner-city areas. ‘What about those Americans who are born in poor neighbourhoods? They are born poor, they stay poor. They won’t get access to proper schools because schooling depends on the tax base. It’s not like in India where you can have a five-star hotel next to a slum. We embrace each other.’
10
Bangalore did not seem like a good example of five-star hotels sitting next to slums, or of people from different tiers embracing each other. That might have been possible in the old India, but the new India was all about gated communities, like the SEZ next to Chak’s office, where Hotel Shangri-La would sit near the million-dollar houses whose uniformity and property values would be maintained in the very spirit of American regimentation that, Chak said, had made him a machine. In such a landscape, the poor – all those left behind by the creation of a low-context society – were like ghosts. If they appeared at all, they did so without warning.
I was in the flat one evening, sitting in the bedroom, when I heard Akshay come in. I could hear him speaking on the phone. When I came out, he cried out, ‘You missed me getting extorted. These guys want five thousand rupees.’
It took me a while to figure out what was going on. Akshay had an iPhone, an unlocked one because Apple hadn’t released the phone in India at the time. When he got home, he found that the phone wasn’t in his pocket. Akshay thought that he had dropped it while getting out of the auto-rickshaw. He had a second phone, which he used to call his iPhone. The man who answered did not identify himself. ‘It was the auto-rickshaw driver!’ Akshay said. ‘I recognized his voice.’ Then he looked thoughtful and said, ‘But, man, how did he know how to use an iPhone? I mean, come on, it’s not easy to figure out that you have to swipe the screen to open it.’
Not only had the man known how to use an iPhone, he had also known its value. He asked Akshay to come to the Majestic cinema hall with 5,000 rupees in cash. The area around the Majestic was desolate, so Akshay had suggested meeting near the Indian Express office, but the man had refused to do so.
‘So what did you agree on?’
‘He’s coming here.’
‘Here? Now?’
‘Right now. He’ll call me when he gets here.’
For a second, I thought we should just grab the man when he showed up. Then I realized that he wouldn’t be stupid enough to come alone. Akshay’s old phone rang. They were waiting outside, across the street, which, in spite of the traffic streaming through, was deserted in the sense that there were no pedestrians. ‘The bastard is using my iPhone to call me,’ Akshay said.
We went out of the flat, crossing the street to where a lonely auto-rickshaw sputtered in the darkness, right in front of the State Bank of Mysore. The driver, who stepped out, hadn’t come alone. There were two other men with him. The driver and one of the other men were still wearing their khaki uniforms. They also had red tilaks on their foreheads, which declared that they were Hindus, and that they belonged to the Karnataka Rakshana Vedike or Karnataka Protection Society, an organization that was Hindu and nativist in its politics, modelling itself on the fascist Shiv Sena organization in Bombay and equa
lly ill disposed towards those they considered outsiders in Bangalore.
The driver who had found the iPhone stayed quiet. It was the third man, the one not in a uniform, who did the talking. He was in his early twenties. His face projected the hardness of a street tough and the tiredness of a man who lives by physical labour. His grey T-shirt and pants were smeared with grease, as if he had come straight from work on fixing an auto-rickshaw, and that seemed to give him a sort of moral superiority over us, especially over Akshay, who kept pleading that he was poor and incapable of coming up with such a large sum, but who looked much too plump and well-off for this plea to carry much force.
The three men listened silently, staring at us with contempt from behind their thick moustaches. I asked them to bring down their asking price a couple of times, and they finally said they would take 4,000 rupees, a 20 per cent discount. Akshay kept bargaining, but they wouldn’t budge, and he eventually went into the State Bank of Mysore to get cash from the ATM. The rest of us loitered around, not talking, as if we had all taken a liking to this one unremarkable spot in Benson Town, as if we were just hanging around rather than taking part in a process that was either extortion or redistribution of wealth, or possibly both.
The men looked utterly confident as they stood around their auto-rickshaw, displaying no worry that a police van might come by. I thought I would take the number of the auto-rickshaw when they left. Then, if Akshay wanted to, the Indian Express could make a fuss to the police. If enough pressure was put on the police, they would find the men. Akshay came back and made one last bargaining effort, which failed. Finally, he handed over 4,000 rupees and received his iPhone. The auto started an uproar and made a sharp, squealing U-turn. Akshay and I waited for the licence plate to be visible and glimpsed it as the auto began to speed away. The law in Bangalore was that licence numbers had to be in English as well as in Kannada, but these men hadn’t bothered with the law. We looked stupidly at the squiggles on the licence plate, at the Kannada numbers neither of us could read, and we kept staring until all that was visible was a red tail light blinking in the distance. A few days later, Akshay lost his iPhone again. This time, when he called the number, no one answered.
The Beautiful and the Damned Page 14
