The stranger was waiting for me with a smile on his face, as unlikely a figure as I could have expected to encounter in that blighted landscape. He was rather handsome, hair cut cleanly and moustache trimmed well, a man in his twenties dressed in a cream-coloured polo shirt and trousers, with strapped sandals on his feet. He had a brown office bag on one shoulder.
‘Sir,’ he said politely, ‘where are you coming from?’
‘The steel factory,’ I said irritably. ‘What about you?’
‘I’m looking for work,’ he said, gesturing at his bag.
We stood there amid the puddles and the dirt, the man telling me about himself against the sound of cars passing by high up on the highway. His name was Amit Mishra, and he was from Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh. He was working as a clerk at a company in Gujarat and had come to Hyderabad to visit a relative. He wasn’t too happy at his job or with living in Gujarat, and when he had heard from his relative that there were many factories in the Kothur area, he had decided to visit them and see if any of them had a position for him.
This sounded quite futile to me, and there were parts of his story that didn’t fit. Gujarat was a long way from Uttar Pradesh, I said, but so was Andhra Pradesh. He smiled and nodded when I said this, not contradicting me, seemingly much more interested in my reasons for being in the middle of nowhere than in his own reasons for being there. When he heard that I lived in New York, he asked, in the reflexive manner of poorer Indians, whether I could help him emigrate to America. I deflected the question and asked him about his plans for the day. He had taken a bus to Kothur in the morning, he said. He would try as many places as he could before returning to Hyderabad in the evening. Here, then, was the reality of India, and middle-class India at that. In spite of all the talk about technology and the Internet, the educated, clean-cut Mishra was looking for work the way a man might have fifty years ago, walking the many miles from one random factory to another, hoping that his civilized demeanour would get him an interview with an official, dropping off a CV but in all likelihood never hearing back from any of these companies.
Mishra was an accountant, but before he had done accountancy, he had been a student of history. His head was still full of the books he had read, and standing in the muck, he wanted to have a discussion with me about what democracy meant.
‘Sir, have you read Amartya Sen?’ he said, referring to the Harvard economist and Nobel laureate best known for his work on hunger and inequality. ‘You remember what he said about famine, that it doesn’t necessarily happen because there isn’t enough food but because the powerful take food away from the powerless? It’s still like that in India. Are you going to write that in your book?’
I asked Mishra if he wanted to come to the market and have a cup of tea, but he shook his head. The sun was beginning to drop over the horizon, and he wanted to put in as many job applications as he could before taking the bus back to Hyderabad. He asked me for directions to the steel factory and then left, walking under the highway towards the smokestacks of the factory.
5
The way to the factory led past the security booth, which was Karthik’s domain. He was the security supervisor, always present when I entered the factory, painstakingly writing down the numbers of trucks in a thick ledger or answering calls from the office. When I first came to the factory with Vijay, he was reluctant to let us in to meet Rao, the managing director, but he adjusted swiftly to my subsequent visits, slightly amused by my interest in the factory and quite willing to talk about the place.
A tall man with glasses and a neat moustache, Karthik carried himself well, his striped tunic marking him out as higher in rank than the other guards in their solid-grey shirts. Although he didn’t seem officious, usually speaking in a quiet voice, he was careful to maintain hierarchy, never socializing or eating with the guards.
The supervisor’s position was, nevertheless, a kind of coming down in the world for Karthik. He had imagined other careers for himself and he reconciled himself to a job as a security supervisor only after these other possibilities vanished. He was from a village in Orissa, and his father had died when he was young. Karthik had wanted to join the air force and had passed the exams that would allow him to become a non-commissioned officer on the ground staff. But his mother had become distraught just as he was about to leave, afraid that her only son would die in combat in some distant place. Karthik gave up on the air force job and instead decided to have a business of his own. For five years, he ran a poultry business, buying chicks from hatcheries in Andhra Pradesh and selling them wholesale in his village.
At the time, Karthik thought that he was doing rather well. Now, when he looked back at the time, he said, he could see that the business had been rather precarious. Karthik ran the buying end in Andhra Pradesh and left the sales to be managed by a couple of partners, childhood friends of his from the village. He found out later that they had been cheating him and that his business was running at a loss. But he made things worse for himself by putting a lot of money into building a new house in his village. ‘I saw other people doing the same thing,’ he said. ‘I fell for the disease too, making the kind of house you see in the movies. It had city-style furniture, sofas and all that, a big television. I got into debt building that house and buying so many things. Now I live in a rented shack in Kothur and a tenant lives in the fancy house.’
He laughed as he told me the story. Workers dressed in grease-stained clothes signed off at the booth before going out, submitting first to a body check by the guards. Trucks idled behind them, sending clouds of diesel smoke rolling through the yard. A Bihari guard, striking-looking with his big eyes, carefully twirled moustache and gold earrings, came to ask Karthik for a break. Karthik’s manner became reserved and officer-like as he listened, and it struck me that he was living a diluted version of the air force career he had wanted, wearing a uniform while supervising other men in uniforms.
‘Does your tenant pay a good rent for the fancy house?’ I asked Karthik when the booth was quiet again.
‘He doesn’t,’ Karthik said. ‘But it’s hard to blame him. No one would pay a high rent for a house in a village. After all, it’s a village.’ He thought for a while. ‘It was stupid to build a house like that there,’ he said. ‘They belong in cities.’
Three years earlier, Karthik closed down his business and joined a private security company. He was posted to different factory sites around Kothur and had arrived at the steel factory only seven months ago. His duties here involved supervising sixteen guards, one of whom was a woman. ‘The factory hires Lambada women on a daily basis to clean and cook,’ he explained. ‘They need to be checked when they go out. They could smuggle out three or four kilos of iron under their skirts and sell it to a scrap dealer. They would get good money for that.’
In terms of the factory’s hierarchy, Karthik was relatively privileged, with a steady job, a decent salary and benefits like annual leave. The guards who worked under him were in a different category altogether, including the Assamese man I had met on my first afternoon at the barracks, and whom I went back to see the following day to get a sense of his story.
Mohanta, or Mohan, as he preferred to be called, was from Dhemaji district in Assam. This was his first time away from home, which might have explained why he had looked so unscathed by the misery of the barracks. Mohan had travelled from his village with two other men, both more experienced than him at making a living as migrant workers. They had taken a bus from the village to Guwahati, the capital of Assam, and then travelled southwards by rail, switching trains once before reaching Hyderabad. Eventually, Mohan and his friends made their way to the steel factory, where they were hired as security guards.
As Mohan told me about his journey to the factory, his companions appeared on the verandah, taking unauthorized breaks from their shifts. There was Dhaniram, older than Mohan at twenty-eight, and Dibyajoti, who said he was twenty but looked about sixteen. They were small, wiry men, looking even smaller
in the uniforms that were too big for them. Both of them seemed pleased to discover that I had some familiarity with Assam. ‘Here they have no idea of where we’re from,’ Mohan said, laughing. ‘They call us Nepalis.’
The Assamese men didn’t mix much with the other workers. All the workers interacted only with men from their own communities, and this might have been one of the things that made the barracks so squalid. It was utterly masculine in its atmosphere, without the women and children who would have been more likely to break ethnic boundaries and perhaps create a sense of a larger community. In other ways too, the barracks were shorn of the softening aspects visible in the worst slum, from the liveliness of children playing to women talking with each other. In a slum, there would have been colourful saris hung out to dry, the smell of cooking that was more than just functional, and small plants like chillies and basil. Here, there was none of that, as if the workers resisted putting down any kinds of roots at all.
The Assamese men too were surprised by the sheer wretchedness of the place they had ended up in. Dhaniram and Dibyajoti had been away from home before but, even so, they found the steel factory to be different, and difficult. Dhaniram had worked in North India, for ten months in Himachal Pradesh and for another ten months in Punjab. His job at these places had been at dhaga factories where yarn was made. The pay had been poor, around 3,000 rupees a month, and in Punjab, he had also had to pay 700 rupees to share a room with five other people. In between these jobs at the yarn factories, Dhaniram had returned to his village, living there for as long as he could until the money he had made ran out.
This was a common pattern for the migrant workers. Since there was no security in the jobs they found, and little chance of upward mobility, they extracted from the work a freedom of sorts, cycling in and out of jobs and returning to their villages to recuperate from their hard labour and loneliness before setting out again when the money ran out.
The baby-faced Dibyajoti, only too happy to chat instead of returning to his post, had held an even wider range of jobs than Dhaniram. He had worked at a yarn factory in Ludhiana, Punjab, for a year; in Siang district in the north-eastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, where he had made furniture; and in his home district of Dhemaji for a year on a road gang. He had even lived in my hometown, Shillong, where he had been a mechanic in a small auto repair shop. Of all the different kinds of work he had done, Dibyajoti had liked making furniture the most. If he was ever free to pursue his dreams, he would settle down in his village and have a furniture workshop there. ‘He’s really good with his hands,’ Dhaniram said. ‘But no one in the village has any money to buy furniture. Maybe once in several years.’
Dibyajoti’s cheerful manner belied the circumstances that had sent him out to work at all these places around India. ‘His life is really sad – just ask him,’ Mohan said, and then he and Dhaniram began giving me the story of that life. Dibyajoti listened quietly, offering a clarifying detail every now and then.
His parents had died when he was still young, his mechanic father from cancer, his mother from what he said was ‘fever’. He had three brothers and a sister, and his eldest brother had killed himself a few years ago by drinking poison. ‘He was a poultry farmer,’ Dibyajoti said, ‘but all his birds fell sick and died. He lost his money and became depressed. Then he drank poison.’
Dibyajoti and the surviving siblings left their village after the brother’s suicide. They moved to Mohan’s village, where Dibyajoti’s two other brothers, one older and one younger than him, worked as agricultural labourers. Over the years, they had saved enough to buy a plot of land, but they earned little money from their farming. Most of the rice they grew was consumed at home and so Dibyajoti had become a roving worker to supplement the family income.
His sister, however, was in school and studying in the twelfth grade. ‘She’s really talented,’ Mohan said with a touch of romantic wistfulness. ‘Good in studies. And then she dances so well, you should see her during the Bihu festival.’ The three brothers were trying their best to keep her in school. They felt that she had the best chance of breaking through their poverty and unhappy family circumstances to become something other than a farmer or a migrant worker.
I asked Dibyajoti what he thought of his new job. He looked at himself, at the uniform that was too big for him, with the military belt and epaulettes that made him look not tough or smart but like a teenage boy acting in a school play. Then he looked at his surroundings, with the other workers going through their afternoon routines, including Rabinder hunched over a pot, cooking. ‘There’s nothing here,’ he said. ‘At least when I was in Punjab, there were temples to see, sometimes even a circus or a mela to go to. Here, there’s nothing and I don’t even understand the language they speak.’
‘It’s a strange life, going out to work in other places,’ Dhaniram said. ‘I remember this thing that happened when I was working in the yarn factory in Himachal.’
‘The dead boy, you mean?’ Mohan said.
‘There was this boy who used to work with us in the factory, and with whom I shared a room,’ Dhaniram said. ‘He wasn’t from Assam, but from some other state. I don’t know from where. He didn’t come to work one day and when we went back to the room, we didn’t see him there either. The next morning, somebody went to fetch water from a nearby spring and he was just lying there, dead. No marks on him, nothing. The police came, asked some questions, went away. Nobody came for him and we didn’t know any of his family. So we put money together and burned him, and as for his few belongings, we distributed those things among ourselves.’
The door to the cubicle in front of us opened and a man came out, bare-chested, wearing a lungi folded up to his knees. He was strikingly different from the other workers I had seen so far. He was powerfully built, with muscles rippling on his arms, a broad chest and a tapered waist. I was about to talk to him but I checked myself when I saw his expression, jaws clenched tightly under a thin moustache.
The Assamese men invited me inside their room. It was Mohan’s turn to cook because he was on the evening shift, and he began preparing dinner while we talked, chopping vegetables and getting the rice going on the stove. The room was about ten feet by ten, an unadorned cube of concrete with a naked bulb dangling from the ceiling. The only piece of furniture was the single bed on which one of them got to sleep once every three nights, the others taking the floor. They had found the bed when they moved in. The legs at the foot of the bed were missing, and someone had piled a stack of bricks underneath to hold the bed up. There were nails driven into the wall from which hung three duffel bags and three pairs of trousers, while some combs and a broken mirror sat on the window ledge. Other than that, there was the stove on the floor, a pan, a bag of rice, a bottle of cooking oil and a few jars containing salt and spices. Since the men were still waiting for their first month’s pay, they had bought their groceries on credit extended to them by vendors at the Kothur market. They had no mobile phones, no other belongings. Human life had been reduced to its very essence in the room, to just the basics required to live.
Karthik later filled out the story of how the Assamese men had come to be hired at the steel factory. There was a colleague of Karthik’s, called Chilli, who worked as a security supervisor at the Pelican Rubber factory, close to the new airport. Chilli was also from north-eastern India, from the state of Arunachal Pradesh, and the Assamese had found him through common acquaintances. ‘Chilli sent me seven of these Assam people,’ Karthik said. ‘Three we took in here, four we sent to another factory our security company has a contract for. We gave the three here the room to stay in and their uniforms. They’ll have to pay for their uniforms, but we’ll take that out of their first month’s salary.’
‘How much do people make as guards?’ I asked Karthik.
‘You can get anything from three thousand five hundred to six thousand rupees as a guard. And maybe up to nine thousand as a supervisor.’
The work was seven days a week, in alternat
ing shifts of twelve hours. If people took a day off, they lost that day’s pay. It was apparent from talking to Karthik that there wasn’t much in the way of training and that the security company was used to people coming and going in these jobs. Mohan had complained that people took the Assamese to be Nepalis, but this had worked slightly to their advantage as far as getting jobs as guards was concerned. In a crude carry-over of colonial stereotypes, the security business tended to be dominated by men from Nepal and from Bihar who were perceived to be good at being guards, and the Assamese had slipped in as faux-Nepalese. The other guards at the factory were all from Bihar.
I asked Karthik what he thought of the Assamese guards. ‘They’re okay,’ he said. ‘A bit too shaukhin,’ he added. He meant that they had a taste for the finer things in life. ‘Very careful about how they look, how they dress. If they have money, they’ll buy jeans and mobile phones. But the Biharis, they’ll save the money to buy land or start a small business. These Assamese fellows, they’ll go off home as soon as they’ve made some money.’
When I spoke to some of the Bihari guards about Karthik’s perception that they saved money, they laughed at the idea. The man with the gold earrings, slightly arrogant in his demeanour, said, ‘That’s what he thinks. He should visit me where I live and see it for himself.’
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