FOURTEEN
“THIS NAKED, HUNGRY MASS”
In the fall of 1994, at the time that my dispute over Alexander’s article was unfolding, I was awarded a grant by a US foundation that would enable me to research and write a book that I had long dreamed of: a nonfiction book that would use the first-person story of a destitute Indian family to depict the larger account of how India’s impoverished masses had fared in the country’s first half century of independence, coming up soon on August 15, 1997.
Faced with the prospect of actually moving back to India, which I had fled with Tandavan just four years back after the terrifying incident with the police, I hesitated. But I had dreamed of writing this book for many years—indeed, the seeds had been sowed more than a decade back, in my undergraduate years. I felt that nothing I might achieve personally could be more important than this book because the history of the poor in India was the history of India. And soon the generations who had lived through the epochal first decades of independence would die and their history would be forever lost. I had to write this book.
So at the end of 1994, age thirty-three, I left the World Bank to return to India. As with my first return—back in 1986—my work passions propelled me homeward, despite my knowing that to live in India as a gay man was fraught with the potential for disaster. As in the past, Delhi was my base. I was hosted as a visiting fellow by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, a progressive think tank I had long admired.
For my field research, however, I had chosen an area far from the capital, in the outback of Uttar Pradesh, the vast state that was then home to nearly one in five of India’s 950 million people. Baba ka Gaon, the small village of a hundred families that I had settled on, was marked only on detailed maps of the state, roughly a hundred miles from Lucknow, the state capital. I had selected the area because it was there in 1920, during a fierce revolt that had pitted impoverished peasants and landless laborers against rapacious zamindar landlords and the British colonial government, that Jawaharlal Nehru—already a leader of the Indian National Congress and eventually to become independent India’s first prime minister—had first confronted the country’s poverty.
In his autobiography, Nehru confessed that encountering “this naked, hungry mass” had filled him with “shame and sorrow.” The peasants had looked at him and the other Congress leaders with “loving and hopeful eyes, as if we were . . . the guides who were to lead them to the promised land.” What more fascinating perspective could there be than to record what a representative family from this area’s “naked, hungry mass” truly felt about how far Nehru and his successors had led them toward “the promised land”?
Every month, I drove the exhausting seventeen-hour stretch from Delhi to Baba ka Gaon, stopping only to sleep over in Lucknow. The tarmac road ended over two miles from the village, following which the jeep clawed its way across a dirt track cratered with potholes and swampy irrigation channels. At the village, the track broke into two, the one to the right broad and sweeping, the other a broken mud rut that eventually ground to a halt. The broad, motorable track led to large homes and numerous temples in the areas occupied by Brahmins and Thakurs.
The broken track took me to the area that I soon came to know like a second home—where those formerly called “untouchables” and other impoverished communities lived in mud-and-thatch huts cramped close to one another, so tiny that fifty would fit into one of the dominant-caste mansions. The men and women there were visibly poorer, thinner, and smaller than on the wealthy side—they were the tiny, sinewy people seen everywhere in India doing every kind of backbreaking, dangerous, and inhuman work for a pittance, pulling rickshaws and carts, ferrying head loads in quarries and kilns, handling industrial waste, swabbing floors and bathrooms in home after home, cleaning stinking garbage dumps barefoot and barehanded, clambering neck-deep into manholes to clean shit-choked sewers.
Here, on the impoverished side of Baba ka Gaon, I began documenting the life of several generations of the extended family headed by Ram Dass Pasi and Prayaga Devi. They were both born in the 1930s in nearby villages to Dalit landless laborers, bonded by generations of debt to the local landlords. Ram Dass was one of the few individuals who knew for certain, from family lore, that his father and other relatives had fought in the revolt that had drawn Nehru to this area seventy-five years back. Gradually, through recording tape after tape of oral histories, I began to piece together the lives of Ram Dass, Prayaga Devi, their two adult children, and their older grandchildren, as well as more distant relatives living in Baba ka Gaon and other nearby villages.
The days in Baba ka Gaon usually sped by. In the mornings, there were inevitably practical things to help with: ferry kids who had been bitten by a rabid dog to the hospital an hour’s drive away, try to arrange a wheelchair for a young man severely crippled by polio, take someone to the district government offices to sort out land ownership titles or secure their pension (invariably eaten up by a network of corrupt officials). In the afternoons, I waited patiently to get an hour or two of interviews with Ram Dass and the others when they finished working in the fields.
Apart from a few nights spent in the village itself, I would set out before dusk back to my room at the “circuit house”—the Indian term for a government guesthouse for officials on tour—a half-hour drive away. I made it a point to return before dark, as the interior roads were deserted and it was risky for me to be driving alone.
From then on until I returned to Baba ka Gaon the next morning, the hours would stretch endlessly and bleakly. If the electricity did not fail—especially in summer it was cut for hours at a stretch through the day and night—I would read from the stacks of Agatha Christie, Ruth Rendell, and P. G. Wodehouse books that I had brought along from Delhi. Dinner would be daal or vegetables from the roadside dhaba.
On one or two evenings a week I queued up at the sole telephone booth—it being some years before mobile phones or internet access came into use in India—to call my friends in Delhi or New York, my brothers or my father. Even that inevitably had mixed results, as on hearing about their full lives, replete with the everyday pleasures of movies, good meals, and convivial time, I ended up feeling acutely that I had set out on a foolish, quixotic search. My forays into rural India had until now all been time-bound and consequently had had a feeling of adventure to them—but this one stretched on and on, without a foreseeable end, as though I were undertaking a solitary, risky swim across an unmapped ocean. At many moments, I wished fervently that I had not begun at all and had settled for life and relationships in surroundings to which I belonged.
Every three weeks or so, I drove back to Delhi. That time back in my quiet apartment was a desperately needed respite. I was invariably physically exhausted and would sleep endlessly. For days, I would barely leave the apartment, grateful to be in a clean space, to have a veranda from which to admire the seesham and semul trees, to be among my familiar things, to have home-cooked food again, to have friends over. All those prosaic things had become wondrous treats.
Even though I was never there for long, that apartment felt like home. My beloved friend Nilita had lived here when Tandavan and I were still living in Delhi. She had left everything as it had been then—and the familiar books, the homey furniture, the earthy rugs, the cheery blue-and-white Jaipur crockery, and the posters of her documentary movies felt as though they were mine, too.
It was a haunting place as well, full of memories of Siddhartha. He, Nilita, and I had often whiled away happy hours here, drinking cups of chai, cuddling on the bed. In my first months there, I was certain that I felt Siddhartha embracing me, wrapping his cool, thin arms around my neck or resting his head on my shoulder. I would choke with tears and fight away those memories. Things that I had thought were sureties, that would last my lifetime, had ended forever. Siddhartha was dead. My relationship with Tandavan was extinguished. Those were the kinds of seismic losses I had naively imagined happened when one was old, not in one
’s thirties.
This time, I was unable to connect more broadly with life in Delhi. I couldn’t overcome a sense of alienation to do with the unbridgeable differences to the life of the people I knew in Baba ka Gaon and the thoughtless relishing of comfort and privilege here as India’s embryonic economic boom and the beginnings of globalized culture eroded the self-denying values that had defined the post-Independence decades.
So, too, beyond being with old friends, I found myself unable to participate in gay life in Delhi. From the handful of gay parties that my friends dragged me to, I saw there were striking new developments. In the late 1980s there had invariably been just a dozen or so of the same faces of gay men and women at those gatherings. But, to my astonishment, there were now hundreds of men at the parties. And although the essentially tame affairs of the past had always been hosted at someone’s home, they were now thrown at the palatial country houses on Delhi’s outskirts that the rich were building as weekend retreats, and behind the high walls and secured gates men freely kissed and made out in the swimming pool, bedrooms, and grounds.
The changes were not confined to the rich. At a huge dance party held at the community center of a middle-class housing association, I was struck that so many middle- and lower-income young men unequivocally told me that they were gay, a notable break with the earlier norm when men had invariably said they were merely having fun with men because women and men were prohibited from dating or having premarital sexual relations.
Though it seemed that the lives of wealthy and middle-class gay men and women in Delhi and Bombay were changing in unexpected ways, it seemed doubtful that those changes augured any kind of broad, nationwide progress. The legal challenge to the sodomy law filed in the Delhi High Court in early 1994 by Siddhartha’s ABVA had made no headway. India seemed not to care one whit about the progress on gay rights that was visible on every continent—that countries from Albania to Venezuela had recently decriminalized same-sex relations; that numerous others were moving toward equality by passing antidiscrimination laws and equalizing the age of consent; that South Africa had become the world’s first nation to explicitly prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation in its constitution; that the UN Human Rights Committee had ruled that sexual orientation was included as a protected status under the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, making sodomy laws illegal.
The snatches of time I had in Delhi over those years were so transitory as to leave me feeling that I had not even lived there. But there was one lasting, wonderful development: my relationship with my father deepened in transformative ways.
On moving back to India, I found that my father’s life was in a state of upheaval. Some weeks before my departure from Washington, DC, he had told me on the phone that he had moved out of our family home in Calcutta and was going to live apart from my mother. He would continue to look after her, he explained, but her worsening mental illness made it impossible for them to inhabit the same space.
My brothers and I empathized. Over the past decade, our mother’s mental illness had become incapacitating. Her moods swung between depression and rage, and it was only in rare moments that I could still see the gentle, loving person to whom I had been so deeply attached as a child. She had angrily refused to allow a psychiatrist friend of ours to visit her at home to see if he could help. After our father moved out, she isolated herself completely, living alone in a worsening spiral of disrepair. My father’s staff would deliver cooked food, groceries, and asthma medicines but would inevitably have to leave them at the front door as she refused to answer it. Our worries were intensified because her chronic asthma every so often spiked into a life-threatening emergency. She soon refused to even speak to any of us, her sons, on the phone, let alone to let us visit. Months began to go by without her seeing another person, speaking on the phone, or leaving the house. We got updates only when her doctor made a house call or she was admitted to his clinic in an emergency. The only shred of comfort came from knowing that our father could always be counted on to do his best to look after her.
Meanwhile, his businesses were hemorrhaging funds. A decade earlier, after a damaging rupture with the vast tea company that he had long headed, he had begun an ambitious project to grow tea in areas where it had never been grown before, including the central reaches of Orissa state, three hundred miles to the southwest of Calcutta. This area was home to indigenous adivasi communities who had been pauperized as the bountiful tropical forests where they had lived for generations had been razed by illegal timber operations and large-scale mineral mining. My father dreamed of reforesting those hills with tea bushes and shade trees, and of working with the adivasis to provide them with an ecologically sustainable livelihood that respected their bonds with nature.
Against all the odds, he had succeeded. On my visits over the years, I had seen barren hills transformed back into verdant green, once again alive with wild animals, including sloth bears and leopards. More than a thousand adivasi women and men were now employed there, earning far more than their peers anywhere else in the region. My father was now praised not just by other tea experts but also by leading advocates for indigenous peoples’ rights. He dreamed of turning over ownership of the land to the adivasis so they could run it as a self-sustaining cooperative of smallholders and reap direct benefits forever.
But the mammoth investments needed to establish the plantation—coupled with the state government’s failure to provide the infrastructural support it had promised—were now draining his finances. For years, he had pumped the profits from his other businesses into the plantation, but those ventures were coming to an end. He refused to think of closing down the plantation, given the countless defenseless people who would lose their jobs, let alone his own investments of money and effort. There seemed no solution in sight.
My father began to visit me in Delhi virtually the moment I returned there from my research trips. I always welcomed him, and we began to talk in a way that we hadn’t before. He had always spoken candidly to me since we had begun to grow close in my last year at Doon, but now, perhaps because he was grappling with the course of his own life, on which blow after unrelenting blow had fallen, he left out nothing. It was just how I was getting to know Ram Dass in Baba ka Gaon, of exactly my father’s generation but from a background that couldn’t be more different.
He told me how strange it was to have spent his entire childhood in a state of embattled fear, knowing that it was only his grand-uncle’s protectiveness that had kept him and his mother from being dispossessed or even killed by his relatives after the murder of his father. Even Doon School and its savagery had been preferable to life at home. He had gone on to St. Stephen’s College, graduated, and walked away from his inheritance, saying he wouldn’t touch something that was tainted by his father’s murder.
One evening, sitting on the veranda at dusk, he told me about how he had fallen in love with my mother. I knew the story of their first accidental encounter well already, from being told as a child, but I could see that he was longing to tell me again now, almost as if it would help him make sense of what had gone wrong since. Age twenty and already working as an expert tea taster in Calcutta, he was visiting relatives in a small Madhya Pradesh town, when, on a drive into the countryside, he found the road blocked by a car from which a beautiful young woman was leaning out of the driver’s window, waving at the crows pecking at something on the road in front of her. She was beseeching them in Hindi, “Crows, please move, please, come on, how can I drive if you keep sitting there!” He was smitten by that vision—and on coming to know her during his stay there he had fallen in love, drawn by her gentleness and love of nature, a world apart from the sophisticated women he had dated so far.
He fell silent. We were both quiet for a long while. I wondered whether, like me, he was thinking about how much each of us in our family, my mother foremost, had lost to her mental illness.
I had always admired my father’s ability to rem
ain balanced and cheerful at the most stressful moments. (Even when he had run a business empire, he had somehow set aside those preoccupations the minute he reached home, and we children had had his undivided attention.) Even at this nadir, when life would have seemed unbearable to most others, there was never any complaint, no bitterness even toward those who had wronged him needlessly or cruelly. His joie de vivre was undimmed. He relished every routine pleasure—his morning yoga and prayers; sports; whisky and cigarettes—while his determination to save his beloved tea plantation for the adivasis never flagged.
I can only describe what I saw revealed in him not as stoicism but as an upbeat resilience, an astonishing ability to remain joyous in the face of tragedy. It reminded me of Albert Camus’s counterintuitive reading of the myth of Sisyphus, where Camus writes that despite Sisyphus’s full awareness of his doomed predicament, condemned by cruel gods to eternally pushing a boulder up a hill, he succeeds in triumphing over that punishment and indeed the gods themselves by somehow remaining joyous. Camus wrote, in words that moved me profoundly, “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” It struck me that my father was becoming more and more heroic to me at the precise time that he was losing the wealth and power that had made him an admired, larger-than-life figure to many others.
We took huge steps forward in addressing the one cause of awkwardness and discomfort between us: my orientation. Perhaps simply because of our growing closeness he came to reach a level of relaxed comfort about this matter that transformed our equation for the remainder of his life.
His views on same-sex matters were rife with contradictions that I could never resolve. “Son, did I ever tell you that Uncle X was gay?” he asked once, smiling, as he was telling me a story about his college days. X had been one of his closest friends from St. Stephen’s and was now married with children. I took the chance to ask as many questions as I could. How did you know he was gay? “Oh, son, he was having sex with lots of other Stephanians who lived on campus. He was gorgeous then, probably the best-looking man I’ve known.”
An Indefinite Sentence Page 20
