Saveen suddenly leaned over the table towards me. ‘You should call and cancel the dinner,’ he said, speaking softly but with emphasis.
‘No, I can’t do that,’ I said.
‘It would not be good for you to leave at present,’ he said. ‘I know them for many years. Just cancel the dinner. This is not the right time to leave.’
I was taken aback and looked around the room. Was Saveen saying that these men would get violent if I tried to leave now? They didn’t strike me as particularly menacing, apart from Rajkumar, and the way they were speaking, shouting loudly, was nothing more than the slightly sentimental drunkenness Indian men are prone to after a few pegs.
Saveen leaned towards me again and said, somewhat desperately, ‘They will smell the liquor on your breath and they will be unhappy.’
I realized that he wasn’t worried about me leaving Mahipal’s gang, as much as about me going to Prabhakar’s house for dinner. The comrades were all anti-alcohol and would be upset with me. ‘Okay,’ I told Saveen. But I also wanted to get out, and so I finished my beer and stood up. I thought I would walk to the Ankapur market and wait there for a bus to Nizamabad, but Mahipal insisted that his driver would drop me off.
Another white Toyota Innova van was requisitioned. I climbed in next to the liveried driver, feeling slightly drunk. The driver fiddled with the air conditioner to get the temperature just right, put some Telugu music on and drove smoothly along National Highway 16 towards Nizamabad. Before heading off, he assured me that he was a very good driver and that prior to working for Mahipal, he had driven a minister in the state cabinet.
It started raining – not the confetti being sprinkled earlier in the evening, but monsoon gusts that cascaded down the windscreen. Two thin farmers ran down the highway on our right, covering their heads with plastic sheets, one of them holding a torch. Another man wheeled his scooter in the same direction as us, completely soaked in the rain. We kept moving, our big van equal to the challenge of the rain and the darkness, more powerful than our surroundings. A truck suddenly came at us out of the night, and for a second I thought it was going to smash into us. In the blaze of headlights, I saw the name the driver had chosen for his truck and that was painted above the windscreen. It said ‘Kranti’, or ‘Revolution’. Then the trucker adjusted his course and flashed past us, heading towards Armoor.
The Factory: The Permanent World of Temporary Workers
The encounter squad—India’s first Egyptian resort — the steel factory — Malda labour — the barracks — reading Amartya Sen — the security guards — the Tongsman — ghost workers — Maytas Hill County
1
The highway out of Hyderabad towards Kothur village was still being worked on, with new overpasses and exits being constructed next to the lanes that were open to traffic. Vijay and I were halfway to our destination when we saw the man appear, standing in the middle of the road and waving us down. We were travelling fast, moving much too quickly to understand immediately what the man’s appearance meant. A few days earlier, on this same road, we had been stopped by two police constables. Assigned to guard duty at another point on the highway and left to fend for their own transportation, all the men had wanted was a lift. But the figure in front of us now was not in uniform, and his objective was far less clear, although I had the impression that he was part of the knotted confusion of people and cars that had sprung up suddenly on the smooth thread of the highway.
Vijay brought his tiny car to a halt, and the man loomed up in front of the windscreen, a dark, stocky figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He put his right hand down on the bonnet of our car. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol, its barrel pointing up at an acute angle. His gaze, as it swept over our faces, was intense, scrutinizing us carefully, meeting our eyes for a few seconds. Then he abruptly lost interest in us and switched his attention to a motorcycle coming up from behind, on our right. He advanced swiftly towards the bike, pointing his pistol at the riders. A policeman in uniform appeared on our left, tapped on our window, and asked us to move on.
Vijay drove away slowly, his eyes and mine fixed on the rear-view mirror to get a better sense of the composition of the scene. There was the gunman in front of the motorcycle. Off to the side, next to the uniformed policeman, was a red Maruti car, a modest, everyday model of the kind that might belong to a minor civil servant or a doctor. There was a policeman sitting at the wheel, an officer in a peaked cap, his window rolled down. There was also a man in the back seat, but he was invisible, just a silhouette behind the tinted black window. The gunman had now moved on from the motorcycle towards an approaching bus, which he flagged down, waiting as the passengers slowly piled out on to the road.
From all this, it was possible to come to the following conclusions. The men were hunting for someone. The gunman did not know what this person looked like; it was the invisible man in the back of the car, an informer, who knew that. They expected their target to be coming this way, but they had no information as to how he or she was travelling, which is why they had stopped a car, a motorcycle and a bus. The mix of uniformed men and the armed man in plain clothes, the unmarked civilian car being used by the policemen, and the pistol – rather than rifle – in the hand of the gunman meant that this was not a legal operation. We had just run into one of the encounter squads operated by the police, what Devaram had talked about when he pointed his imaginary pistol at me. If the target had the misfortune of running into the encounter squad, he would probably be gunned down in cold blood, with a report released later to the media to say that the person had been killed in an active encounter and that he had shot first at the police.
Later, I would find out from news accounts that the police had indeed been looking for a Maoist who, fortunately, did not show up that day. At the time, though, the scene felt unreal as soon as we had left it behind, taking on the shape of a dream. And in a way, the encounter squad was a dream, surfacing from the deep regions of the national subconscious where farmer suicides, Maoists and impoverished workers swirled together to form the collateral damage of progress. In a few weeks, the prime minister would announce the dispatching of tens of thousands of paramilitary troops to encircle the Maoists in the ‘red corridor’ they had carved out in the forests of central India, but although this was one more reminder of the ways in which India was at war with its own people, it would elicit little comment from the big cities.
The truth was that India was being remade forcefully, and some aspects of that remaking were more visible than others. Once the encounter squad had been left behind, it seemed almost impossible not to give in to the pleasure of the new, smoothly tarred highway with its carefully demarcated lanes. It lifted us off the surrounding landscape like an aircraft, and as I looked down at the uneven patchwork of agricultural fields where people toiled ceaselessly in the summer heat, I could not help but think of them as marooned at a lower plane of existence. The highway was the transcendent future, with its straight shoulders and central reservations cradling flowers and topiary bushes, its green signs and electronic boards copied from advanced civilizations in the West. The signs told us that we were driving southwards, in the direction of Bangalore, and that if we wanted to, we could loop across all of India on this highway. It was part of the Golden Quadrilateral project, a six-lane band of modernity embracing the country, with only the occasional glitch of an encounter squad to remind us of those being left behind.
I had last been in Andhra Pradesh a year before, in 2008, when I spent most of my time with the farmers around Armoor. This time, Vijay was taking me to a village called Kothur in the district of Mahabubnagar. It was close to Hyderabad, about thirty kilometres from the city, and change was visible all the way up to the village. We stopped for lunch just before we got to Kothur, driving past a security guard into a walled complex. The area had once been a vineyard producing table grapes, but the land had since been acquired by a property developer. The vineyards had been destroyed and two pyramids pu
t up in their place. They were part of Papyrus Port, which was, as the brochure put it, ‘India’s First Egyptian Resort’.
The pyramids were not very large, perhaps thirty feet high, and were made of granite. They had names – Khafres and Khufus [sic] – but like all the other proper nouns echoing through the resort (‘Lawn of Isis’, ‘Lawn of Osiris’, ‘Prometeus [sic] Unbound Health Club’), the names suggested not Egyptian or Greek but an Indian sort of Disneyland. Yet although money had been spent in putting up the resort and effort expended in creating a clean and comfortable complex, Papyrus Port was still more an idea than a place, with the offerings in the brochure far more generous than what was available in the actual resort.
The pictures showed a large swimming pool, a huge conference hall, a zoo, ‘multicuisine’ restaurants and a list of ‘adventurous sports’ running from ‘Water Zorb’ – whatever that might be – to ‘Commando Net’. In reality, the swimming pool was small, the ‘Prometeus Unbound Health Club’ a tiny room with two lonely treadmills, the zoo a cage with some sick-looking rabbits whose fur was falling off, and the multicuisine restaurants of Khafres and Khufus capable at that moment of serving only local food.
But there was something other than the gap between vision and reality that added to the dissonance of Papyrus Port. Apart from a dating couple in the restaurant and a family group enjoying kebabs on the lawn, the place was empty. It had been crowded when Vijay visited it a couple of years earlier, but now, in the summer of 2009, there was suddenly less money in India. The global downturn had come home, and even the middle classes and the elites accustomed to the high-consumption side of globalization were beginning to find things difficult. The campus recruitment conducted by IT companies in engineering colleges was down or, in some cases, had stopped entirely. There were lay-offs happening in many organizations. The building boom that had thrown up condos everywhere had slowed down, and the billboards in Hyderabad offered free rent and discounts to entice customers into buying the half-built units. In my mother’s lower-middle-class neighbourhood in Calcutta, the posters offering jobs in call centres had been displaced by signs that said: ‘Sick of credit card debt? Tired of phone calls demanding money? Call this number to find a solution.’ The downturn was one reason why Papyrus Port was emptier than it should have been.
When an attendant showed us around the ‘Live Like a Pharaoh’ suites, they too turned out to be empty. Vijay had thought that I might want to stay at the resort, but I decided that I would be better off at his house in the village. The resort was comfortable, but it was hard to picture being there in the evening, all by myself apart from the staff, a middle-class pharaoh protected by security guards and an electric fence from the land and its people.
2
The land was part of the district of Mahabubnagar, and it was teeming with people. Many of them were outsiders, itinerant figures coming from as far north as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh, or from the eastern segment of India that includes West Bengal, Orissa and Assam, travelling on a long chain of trains and buses to find work in the factories of Kothur. Within that seemingly sparse agricultural landscape, so remote from the highway, there were nearly a hundred factories churning out chemicals, pharmaceutical products, steel bars and metal pipes, places that were discernible only when one got off the highway. The factories weren’t clustered together but appeared at random, across a patchwork of fields, near the village market, or next to the old road that had been superseded by the modern highway, and one didn’t see the factories as much as the marks they created on the landscape: smoke being belched out from a distant chimney; black heaps of slag that had been deposited on the fields and were being turned over with infinitesimal patience by women and children for a few scraps of iron; the infernal metallic squeaking of machinery from behind walled complexes; and the sickly sweet smell of chemicals that appeared suddenly on the wings of an occasional breeze.
The area around Kothur had been developed as an industrial zone in the eighties, and the name Kothur, which means ‘new village’, reflected that transformation, replacing the earlier name of Patur, or ‘old village’. The industrialization had been initiated, accompanied by subsidies and tax breaks from the government, because Mahabubnagar was considered to be one of the poor, ‘backward’ districts of the Telangana region. It is home to lower castes trying to eke a living out of agriculture as well as to the Lambada gypsies, a community so impoverished that it often sells its children to shady adoption agencies and sex traffickers.
Two decades after the industrialization of the area, about a million people, or two-thirds of the adult population of Mahabubnagar district, have to travel to distant parts of India to find employment. They end up in Bangalore or as far away as Bombay, often working as construction labourers. In a recent report on migrant labour in India published by the United Nations Development Project, its authors Priya Deshingkar and Shaheen Akhter interviewed Mahabubnagar workers and discovered that even though the middlemen who take them to the construction sites are often paid 4,500 rupees for each worker, the workers themselves get paid as little as 1,200 rupees a month in cash and in food. The workers – most of whom belong to the lower castes, the authors write – are often trapped in debt because of the advances they take to fund the initial expenses of their migration. Their children are regularly coerced into work, the women are often sexually abused, and all of the workers are prone to injuries since India has the highest accident rate in the world for construction workers, with 165 out of every 1,000 labourers getting injured on the job.
While the local people of Mahabubnagar go elsewhere for work, the factories in the area attract tens of thousands of men from other parts of India. It is an arrangement that suits employers everywhere well, ensuring that the workers will be too insecure and uprooted to ever mount organized protests against their conditions and wages. They are from distant regions, of no interest to local politicians seeking votes, and they are alienated from the local people by differences in language and culture.
A few miles from Papyrus Port, diagonally across from it on the other side of the highway, was the Vinayak steel factory. It stood near an intersection, surrounded by high walls and facing a muddy yard where canvas-covered trucks idled through the day. Although unlike Papyrus Port in every other way, the steel factory too had an excellent brochure that I had received when I first went to meet the managing director, Venkatesh Rao. The cover displayed a bouquet of steel rods, and when I rubbed my hand on the rods, I could feel their rough textured surface, contrasting sharply with the smooth paper. A skyscraper of concrete and glass rose towards a cloud-covered sky from the bouquet. It was an advertising agency’s rendition of how the rods built at the factory went into the making of condominiums and office towers. The picture eliminated all signs of the human labour that went into creating the rods, but it was nevertheless a reminder of the connection between this nondescript, almost invisible steel factory and the globalized cities. The steel factory was one of the countless invisible nodes of modernization in India, pulling in workers from distant rural areas to create the material that would be used for construction far away, perhaps by men and women who travelled from Mahabubnagar. It was to get a sense of the labour involved in producing the steel rods that I entered the factory echoing with metallic clangs and screeches, the yards smelling of smoke and grease, the sky above cut into thin quadrants by angled delivery chutes that groaned into life without warning and stopped just as suddenly.
The factory seemed a rather bewildering place at first, strangely empty in spite of the noise coming from everywhere. There had been some activity at the entrance, with the security guards patting down workers going out and recording the licence numbers of trucks entering the factory. But once I had walked away from the gate, I saw few people. The administrative building, a two-storey, whitewashed concrete structure, seemed deserted, its small windows revealing nothing of the clerical staff sitting inside. There was a temple as well, equally empty, although it ap
peared clean and well maintained. There were workshops scattered all around the grounds, each surrounded by black coal dust, places where raw iron ore was worked through various stages into the finished product of the TMT bars, the abbreviation standing for ‘thermomechanical treatment’. When I occasionally glimpsed workers inside these workshops, they seemed diminished by the scale of the operations, barely visible through the fire and smoke roaring in the furnaces.
It was when I arrived at the rolling mill, the place where steel ingots were turned into the finished product of TMT bars, that I finally received some sense of what went on in the factory. Here, finally, was the heart of the place, a vast, open-sided shed filled with deafening noise and the blast of heat from furnaces operating at 1,200 degrees Celsius. The men visible through the smoke and noise were infernal creatures, rags wrapped around their faces to protect themselves from the heat, inevitably dwarfed by the extremity of the place, with everything so large, so fast and so hot. It was as if they were being worked by the machines and materials rather than the other way around. There was a man feeding ingots into the furnace at the very beginning of the mill, using long metal tongs. At the other end of the vast shed there were two men who were his doubles, faces similarly wrapped in rags and wielding tongs like his with which they grabbed the rods that shot out at great speed from the belt. The rods blazed red as they came out, and the men moved in unison like drugged dancers, each picking up an end of the rod and then moving it to the side with a concentrated effort that was broken only by the expulsion of their breaths.
The Beautiful and the Damned Page 20
