The Beautiful and the Damned

by Siddhartha Deb

  But there was certainly a difference between the Biharis and the Assamese, and that was in their reasons for working as security guards. The man with the earrings made it clear that he was a Rajput, an upper caste, and so were most of the other Bihari guards. They would not take a job at the loading shed or in the rolling mill, even if it paid more. They needed to preserve their position in the social hierarchy, and being guards allowed them to be a notch above the workers. The Assamese men, by contrast, were tribals, happily outside the caste system. They had chosen to be guards because they thought it was safer than working at the furnaces. Even though none of them had been employed in a steel factory before, they assumed that the smoke of the furnaces was bad for health and that accidents were very likely to happen with the fire and heavy machinery all around.

  Mohan talked about his work as a security guard as straightforward and even dull, except when the men had to break up fights between the workers. That usually happened in the barracks, late at night, after people had been drinking. ‘There’s a lot of scrap metal lying here,’ he said, picking up an iron rod and demonstrating. ‘It’s easy for people to hurt each other if you don’t step in right away.’ Other than that, he found the night shifts difficult. Sometimes, he fell asleep, and a guard was fined if he was caught sleeping on the job. ‘It’s hardest to stay awake between twelve and two,’ he said, his eyes still reflecting the wonder of a village boy who had discovered this strange fact about the human body. ‘It’s odd how that’s the time when you start nodding on the chair. After it gets to be two, it’s easy to stay awake, but I don’t know why.’

  6

  Life in the barracks was unvarying, with sleep and work punctuated by activities like cooking and eating. The only change to the rhythm was when people left for their villages or when new workers arrived. Dibyajoti fell sick at one point, and his companions described to me in great detail – even as he listened in, looking embarrassed – that he had dysentery and had to shit every hour or so, running off from guard duty.

  As I hung around with the Assamese, I became familiar with two other workers living in the cubicle across from them. Both were from Bihar. One was the muscled man called Pradip, taciturn, unfriendly and somehow different from the rest of the workers. He seemed more confident, perhaps because of his build, and he seemed to have an important job at the factory. I often saw him lying half-naked in bed with the door of his room open. Sometimes, a plump, bearded man who seemed to be a supervisor came running into the barracks, asking Pradip to come quickly. Pradip would grunt in response, put on some clothes and disappear for an hour. When he returned, he would go back to bed and lie in the dark of his cubicle.

  Pradip’s companion was very young. He said that he was eighteen years old, although, like Dibyajoti, he seemed more like fifteen or sixteen, with just the hint of facial hair. He was friendly until I asked him his name, when he became very agitated, unconvinced by the guards that it was okay to give me this information about himself. But apart from concealing this detail and lying about his age, he was happy to speak, talking in a voice that was high-pitched, just beginning to break.

  His life as a migrant worker had started when he ran away from home at the age of twelve. No one had treated him badly, he said, looking surprised that I might think so. He was from a village near Jhajha in Bihar, with three brothers and three sisters. His father had died long ago and he felt that there was no work for him in the village. The land they cultivated was too small for all the brothers to make a living out of it, and he had received little schooling. When he ran away from home, he went north, to Delhi, and then landed up in Panipat, in Haryana, where he worked at a yarn factory. After two years, he left the job and went back to his village. He stayed there for a few months before going to Calcutta to find work. When he couldn’t get anything there, he came to Hyderabad and ended up at the steel factory.

  ‘You didn’t want to go back to the yarn factory?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not good to do that work for a long time,’ he said. ‘There’s dust in these factories. It’s bad for you. It gets inside you, and you start coughing. You fall sick, and people become old very quickly.’

  Dhaniram and Dibyajoti nodded vigorously, recalling their own yarn factory experiences. Now the boy was without work again. He had been at the steel factory for only two months, doing loading work, but he had been laid off a few days earlier, apparently because there were too many men at the factory. He was staying on while he considered what to do and where to go next.

  A few days after I spoke to the boy, I had my first conversation with Pradip. I was sitting with Mohan when Pradip came up to me, smiling. He was sorry that he’d been so rude when I approached him before. He had been having a terrible toothache and was unable to talk, but he’d finally been to a dentist and had the bothersome tooth pulled out. He opened his mouth and shoved his finger inside to show me the spot in the back where the tooth had been extracted. Most of his teeth were in bad shape, yellow and decaying, providing a startling contrast with the rest of him, seemingly so healthy and strong. But as I talked to Pradip, I was surprised by how different he looked. Until then, he had seemed like a giant, almost menacing, but walking next to me as we made our way to the tea shack outside the factory, he barely came up to my chest. He was finely proportioned, with strong arms, but quite small, with a voice that was soft, almost feminine.

  Pradip was what he called a ‘Tongsman’, a job that involved pushing iron ingots into the furnace at the rolling mill during the final stage in the production of TMT bars. He said he was twenty-five years old but, like most workers at the factory, he looked about ten years older. He was from Jamui district in Bihar, from a farming family that primarily grew sugar cane. The land wasn’t big enough to sustain everyone, so Pradip had left the farming to his elder brother and drifted around the country, spending much of his time in the western part of India.

  He had begun by working as a welder on ships in the port city of Surat, in Gujarat, but he gave up that work after six months. He had been falling sick frequently, he said, suffering a great deal of pain in his back. Pradip wouldn’t elaborate on his ailments, even though I pressed him for details, wondering how he managed to do the hard labour of a tongsman if he suffered from back pain. Like most workers, and like most members of India’s underclass, he seemed to operate at a high level of abstraction when it came to certain things, especially those that had to do with the body. Just as Dibyajoti had said that his mother died of ‘fever’ and Pradip’s young room-mate had been afraid of the effects of ‘dust’, Pradip would only say that he suffered from ‘pain’.

  In elite circles in India, this is a sign of the illiteracy of the lower classes, an indication of how they lack intellectual property as well as material property. But as I heard these simple words – ‘fever’, ‘dust’, ‘pain’ – taking the place of any complicated diagnosis or description of symptoms, it struck me that one of the characteristics of being higher up on the class ladder was the specificity with which a person could speak of one’s ailments. But there was another way of understanding the use of such simple words. The workers didn’t have access to the kind of medical care that would let them receive complex formulations of their illness. So they suffered with a stoicism that was ingrained in their social status. Given the lives that migrant workers lived, someone like Pradip had no choice but to abandon the nuances of illness for a broad, catch-all word. The same was true when it came to telling the story of his life, which was often empty of descriptive detail and rendered in thick strokes.

  After Pradip gave up being a welder on ships, he began to work in steel factories around the country, in Bombay, Goa and Bangalore. The place where he had stayed the longest was Goa, where he had been for six years. But he seemed indifferent to the attractions of most of the places he had lived in. He had not found ships and the sea glamorous, and his Goa did not contain the sun, sand and music that drew wealthy Indians and Western tourists to its beaches. Pradip’s life had bee
n defined largely by the factories he worked in, and they had more or less been the same everywhere.

  He had begun working at the Kothur factory just two months earlier. He had been called there by a labour contractor, a middleman who had worked with him before and thought of him as a dependable person. From these details, and from the way the bearded man had sometimes come looking for Pradip at the barracks, it seemed that a tongsman occupied a relatively high position in the hierarchy of workers at the steel factory.

  He had been a tongsman before, Pradip explained, and that had helped him get the job at Vinayak steel. A tongsman’s work was dangerous and managers preferred to hire a man who was already used to the arduous conditions: the extreme heat, the speed of the line, the physical effort involved in shovelling iron ingots in, and the danger of the heavy machinery and molten steel. In all other ways, however, Pradip was a migrant labourer like most of the other men I had seen at the factory. There was no telling how long he would be there and where he would go once he was done with the work – or, as was more likely, once the work was done with him.

  We were sitting outside the factory, drinking tea. The owner of the stall, a man in his forties with grey hair, was a migrant too, from Rajasthan, and he listened to our conversation with interest. Pradip refused to let me pay, taking out a battered purse from the back pocket of his jeans. The jeans were knock-off, as was the T-shirt, which said ‘Dolce & Gabbana’ in a swirl of embroidered lettering. From the clothes, one could tell that Pradip was careful about his appearance. He was also measured in his habits. He didn’t smoke or drink, and was careful about what he ate. None of the workers could afford much more than rice, dal and vegetables, but Pradip tried to eat fish or meat once a week so that he could maintain his physical strength.

  Although Pradip had been indifferent to Bombay or Goa, he said that he liked Calcutta, where he had been before coming to Kothur. ‘I have a cousin who’s a taxi driver there and spent some time with him. I wanted to find work there, but I couldn’t get anything.’

  ‘What did you like about Calcutta?’ I said.

  ‘It’s not so far from Jamui,’ he said. ‘The food is excellent and it’s cheap. I’d gone there during the time of Durga Puja, with idols of the goddess everywhere, and my cousin and I walked around all night, seeing one idol after another.’ He smiled as he remembered those nocturnal walks. ‘I could have stayed there for ever, doing that, eating the food, walking at night with so many people and music and lights everywhere.’

  He stopped abruptly as a man came out of the factory on a motorcycle and rode towards us. It was the bearded man I had seen hurrying into the barracks every now and then, calling for Pradip to come to the rolling mill.

  ‘That’s the contractor who called me here,’ Pradip said.

  The contractor parked his motorcycle and entered the shack. He had a slight swagger, a way of appearing larger than and different from the working-class men scattered around the tea shack. His face was intelligent and alert, and I remembered how I had seen him note my presence when he came into the barracks.

  He came over to where we were sitting, listening carefully as I introduced myself. ‘Yes, I’ve been wondering who you are, hanging around the workers’ quarters,’ he said. ‘Well, now I know.’

  Sarkar was a Bengali, from a village in the hills of North Bengal area. He was bigger than Pradip, but pudgy rather than muscular. That, plus his greying beard and his occasionally jocular manner of speaking, would have given him an avuncular manner had it not been for the sense he evoked of being a hard man, wary about my presence at the factory and unimpressed when I told him that I had the managing director’s permission to be there.

  ‘Pradip’s a big man,’ he said to me, and slapped the tongsman on his back. ‘Are you going to treat me to tea or what?’

  Pradip laughed and said, ‘No, you’re the big man.’

  Nevertheless, he had to pay for Sarkar’s tea. The amount was small, 2 rupees, and I would have expected the contractor to pay, if only to show me how generous he was towards the workers. Yet he had insisted on the opposite, which meant that he was either very stingy or that he didn’t care what I thought and was interested in demonstrating his power over Pradip.

  In his own way, Sarkar was a migrant worker too, but at a different level. He was a middleman, a contractor, the person who hired workers for the factory and relieved the management of any responsibility of dealing with them. He too had worked in steel factories around India – in Orissa, Kerala, Maharashtra and Goa. ‘That’s where I met Pradip, in Goa, and where I got to see that he was a good worker.’ Then he added something strange, holding my gaze and speaking in Bengali, perhaps so that Pradip wouldn’t understand what he was saying. ‘There are many bad things I’ve done in my life, and which I won’t tell you about – even though I can see you want to know about them. What I will say is that I walked a crooked path for all these years but it made my life no better. I’m no wealthier now than when I started out and so I’ve decided to go straight.’

  I was puzzled by this sudden declaration, but Sarkar wouldn’t elaborate. When I asked him about the factory, his answers seemed concocted. I wanted to know what made Pradip such a good worker that Sarkar had called him to Kothur from Calcutta.

  ‘He’s a tongsman,’ Sarkar replied. ‘Have you seen him working? It’s skilled work and he makes a lot of money. Anything between twelve to thirteen thousand rupees with overtime.’

  Pradip, who had fallen silent, had earlier told me that he earned around 9,000 rupees a month.

  ‘How long can a person work as a tongsman?’ I asked Sarkar. ‘The work looks difficult.’

  ‘Oh, these people can go on for ever. There’s one man at the factory who’s nearly seventy. What’s the name of that fellow, Pradip, you know the one I’m talking about?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Pradip said.

  I had not seen a single worker over forty, and I wondered how many years Pradip had left as a tongsman. The work available at the steel factory was for the young and so the workers were migrants in another sense – wanderers in the land of youth, from which they would disappear when they got older, to be replaced by another person from India’s unceasing stream of labour.

  I asked Sarkar if I could meet the legendary seventy-year-old worker, but he evaded the question. Instead, he wandered into a series of non sequiturs. First, he told me about a vacation he was planning to take with his family. He would go to the north-east, he said, and wanted to know of places to visit. Then he abruptly declared that having decided to go straight, he was also hoping to improve his situation in life by going abroad. ‘If things go right,’ he said, ‘I’ll be in South Africa by the end of this year. It’ll be work at a steel factory there too. I’m still working on the details involved in getting a job like this. But if it comes through, you understand, I’ll start making some real money for the first time in my life.’ Sarkar finished his tea and walked unhurriedly towards his bike. ‘Are you going to the market? I’ll give you a lift,’ he said.

  I wasn’t, but I decided to take a ride with the middleman, wondering if he would reveal anything more of himself if it was just the two of us. We rode down the highway, speeding towards the market, and it struck me how class in Kothur was directly related to the transportation one used. For the owners and managers, there were the air-conditioned Scorpio SUVs and Toyota Innova minivans. I had seen such vehicles one afternoon when a group of buyers visited the factory, businessmen wearing sunglasses and leaning back against the white covers of their seats, reminding me of Rajkumar and the rich farmer in Armoor in whose company I had gone to visit Mahipal. For middlemen contractors like Sarkar, there were motorcycles. As for the tongsmen and other workers, they walked or perhaps rode a bicycle, like the battered one Mohan and his friends had found in a garbage heap and put to use for their trips to the market.

  When Sarkar stopped his motorcycle, I asked him if he wanted to sit somewhere and talk.

  ‘Some other time,�
� he said, and his smile was a little menacing as he drove off.

  I realized that he had just wanted me away from the factory. He had removed me from the site neatly, without any fuss.

  7

  Neither Pradip nor the security guards had a sense of the steel factory as a whole. Perhaps Sarkar did, but he had been keen to get rid of me rather than show me around. For the overview I wanted of the factory, I had to visit the management. I had met Rao, the managing director, at the very beginning, but I didn’t see him again until at the very end, by which time I felt I had come as close as I could to viewing the factory through the eyes of the workers. And yet, from the tongsman to the guards, each worker had only a fragmentary, partial picture of the factory, a cog’s perspective of a large wheel. When I put these different fragments together, I got not a whole but a bewildering, cubist image. For Pradip, the factory was the weight of the metal tongs, the heat of the furnace, the repetitive motion of shovelling ingots and the induction furnace. For him, it didn’t matter that ingots came out as TMT bars, or that the TMT bars were then used to construct buildings. The end product mattered to Pradip only if the orders tapered off and he got fired, in which case he would pick up his belongings, shove them into his shoulder bag, put his battered purse into the back pocket of his jeans and take a train to the village or to some other city.

  As for Mohan and his friends, they occupied the edges of the factory, not only in the sense that they sat at guard posts on the perimeter of the factory where they looked out for sneak thieves or trouble among the workers, but also in that they had nothing to do with producing the TMT bars. Also, they were not only an ethnic minority, slightly vague to the other workers, but they had to keep themselves deliberately apart in order to maintain their authority. The factory’s actual functioning was a mystery to them, although all three of them thought the work to be dangerous. They found the surroundings of Kothur a mystery too. With time, they might adapt to the place, but all three had said they were unlikely to stay long.