Lessons from a Dark Time and Other Essays

by Adam Hochschild

  Baker has not always been able to follow this principle, but he has come close. He is profoundly hostile, for example, to glass and steel: Making each requires large amounts of fossil fuel, and in Kerala the steel has to come from other parts of India. He also hates plaster, which he regards as a costly prestige item that does nothing except cover up a handsome wall of bricks made from local clay.

  Bricks he loves. Standard red bricks do require energy to make, but in the brick-makers’ kilns of south India, he points out, much of the fuel would not be used for much else: brush, tree branches, and scraps of palm wood too small for lumber. On a construction site, Baker often lays a brick wall with his own hands. For him this is not a matter of Gandhian self-humbling but one of sensual pleasure: “Designing a house and getting someone else to build it is like preparing a menu with great care and then leaving it to someone to do the cooking and the eating. It’s no fun.”

  Mortar for bricks normally would require cement—another Baker enemy, because it takes energy to produce, and until recently most cement in India had to be imported. He prefers local substitutes, such as lime. When building the Centre for Development Studies, he made lime on the spot. Sending people to gather bullock-cartloads of seashells on beaches a few miles away, he then had the shells baked in a mud kiln (its fan powered by someone pedaling a stationary bicycle) and ground up into powder. Few of the scholars from India and abroad using the graceful, sturdy brick buildings at the Centre realize that their office walls are partly held up by pulverized clamshells.

  Nor do they know that they’re walking on bamboo. Concrete floors and steps are ordinarily reinforced with steel rods, but Baker has found that a grid of split local bamboo, carefully lashed together in the right pattern, does just as well—and at less than 5 percent of the cost. Skeptics claim that the bamboo will rot, but Baker replies that if the contractor pours the concrete properly, the bamboo is sealed tight within it, protected against moisture, insects, and bacteria. Twenty-five years of footsteps on the concrete stairways at the Centre have proved him right.

  Baker would like to work more with that greatest of renewable materials, wood, but widespread deforestation in India has made this impossible. He would love to see Kerala’s devastated forests replanted with a traditional building wood, the jack tree, a fruit-bearing Indian member of the mulberry family—“a very beautiful wood, a nice rich amber color”—which can be rubbed with oil from local cashews that acts as a preservative. It would be so easy, he muses, gesturing plaintively, for the state forestry authorities to plant groves of jack trees: “They could do it with picnics for the foresters’ children! Give them each a jackfruit and have them go wandering spitting out pips.”

  The trouble with Indian policy-makers is that “they haven’t the faith in their own materials,” he believes. Everyone who can afford it wants to use only concrete, steel, and glass. His own favorite building material of all is one that uses no fuel to produce, is usually only a few steps away, and is free: mud. To those who laugh, he points out that if you count everything from village house to New Delhi office towers, 58 percent of all buildings in India are built of mud, and a good number of those are more than a hundred years old. Mud is also completely reusable. You can tear down your old house, add water, and make a new one in a different design. Try that with glass and steel.

  When building a mud house, he says, you have to put an overhanging roof above the outside walls and a drainage ditch around the outside of the house; otherwise, the monsoon rains will turn your walls back to liquid again. Sometimes also, depending on the composition of the local earth, you need to add a stabilizer to the mud—“to make it stick together, to act as a sort of glue or binder. There are dozens and dozens of stabilizers—from latexes to the wild cactus in the forest: If you cut the cactus stalk, a white milk comes out and it’s a very good stabilizer.” In his early years, he had one memorable lesson in stabilizers: “We used to go through a place on our way from the Himalaya to Delhi, where we had to wait for a train. There were beautiful mud houses, but the soil was totally unsuitable. So I tried to find out what the stabilizer was that they used. But they would not tell me! What was this nosy blighter from outside wanting to know this for? Eventually, I discovered that they were using pig’s urine! We chased pigs and got their urine analyzed. The urea content is very high, and urea is a binder.”

  Unfortunately, few middle-class clients share Baker’s enthusiasm for this building material. “I say, ‘Have you thought of using mud? It would save you a lot of money.’ And they say, ‘Well . . . no, you don’t know our rain, Mr. Baker!’” Where he has most often been able to design mud buildings has been in public housing. A family sleeping under a tarpaulin or under nothing at all won’t worry if its first real house doesn’t look like one in the San Fernando Valley.

  Baker has designed tens of thousands of low-income housing units in Kerala, but outside the state he has had few such commissions. There are too many enemies: his fellow-architects “feel that I’m somewhat of a traitor to the whole profession” because of the low fees he charges when designing housing for the poor. When Baker showed that homes could be built for a fraction of government estimates, contractors saw their opportunities for fraud diminished. And public works bureaucrats haven’t liked the way Baker’s plans fail to fit their idea a proper housing project: his homes are specifically designed not to all look alike; they are on winding, village-like streets, not an orderly cross-hatched grid; and there aren’t separate living areas for Hindus, Muslims, and Christians.

  • • •

  Laurie Baker has not turned his back on the modern world; the homes and offices he has built have running water, electricity, telephone lines, and sometimes garages. But in his embrace of brick, mud, and bamboo, in his recognition that letting hot air escape is wiser than air conditioning, and much more, Baker has done what tragically few people in any field in the global South have done, which is to be selective about what they take from the North.

  His ideas have caught the imagination of younger, environmentally minded Indian architects and engineers, and nearly a hundred of them now work for a Kerala nonprofit organization that practices his approach, COSTFORD, or the Centre of Science and Technology for Rural Development. In the past fifteen years, COSTFORD has built homes for ten thousand poverty-level families, for which it charges no design fee. It has also built government buildings and homes for fifteen hundred middle-class and professional families—which has helped pay for the other work. The organization’s Trivandrum office is run by Shailaja Nair, a 34-year-old architect, and her engineer husband. Here in one of the most caste-conscious parts of India, the two of them, most unusually, come from different castes; their marriage caused much tension between Nair and her family. It meant a great deal to the couple that when this happened, at the outset of their professional lives, Laurie Baker, who also knows something about being an iconoclast, took them in and gave them space to work in an outbuilding of his own home. They have been with COSTFORD ever since. A picture of “Bakerji” is on the office wall. “He’s half a century older than us,” says Nair. “But he’s one of us. How do you explain a man like that?”

  Nair is a tall, fast-talking, dark-haired woman who wears a dazzling salwar kameez. She energetically sketches designs on a piece of scrap paper to describe forty-five primary schools COSTFORD is now building for the state government. All of these are four-room schools in rural areas, each built for the equivalent of about $15,000. Nair’s quick drawings show me first the long, rectangular shape of most schools, “like a factory”: classrooms in a row, opening off a corridor. Instead, the schools she is working on are all variations of a Baker-inspired design that looks like part of a sliced pie. The four classrooms are each shaped like the broader two-thirds of a slice. Normally each teacher will stand at the wide, outside end of the pie slice. But when need be, students can turn their chairs around to face the narrower, inside end of the slice, which has no end wall. The inside ends of all four sl
ices open onto the center of the pie, a space that can be used as if it were the stage of an auditorium, with the classrooms as seating areas.

  Over the course of a day, Nair takes me on a tour of COSTFORD projects. We end up in a rural village called Koliyacode to visit five recently completed mud homes of several rooms each. Government subsidies provided the equivalent of around $400 per house, and the village residents contributed more, in some cases their own labor. Most of the money went for wood (roof beams and window and door frames) and roofing tile. There is no glass in the windows, but wooden bars keep out the crows. Except for the roof tile and the wood, everything is dried brown mud: inner and outer walls, and even the large mud bricks that hold up some living room shelves. The earth in Koliyacode has just the right consistency and requires no stabilizer.

  The weather has gotten hotter than ever since I arrived in Kerala, but today, inside these buildings, it is wonderfully cool. The one place inside where it’s hot—the loft area underneath the tile roof, where the sun’s heat has seeped through the tile and hot air from inside has risen—is used to dry grain or freshly washed clothes. The sturdy outer walls are about six inches thick. They do not crumble to the touch and feel hard as concrete when I bang my fist on them. As I tour the houses, an increasing flock of villagers and their children gather, curious that a foreigner would come all this way to punch a wall of mud.

  • • •

  Sometimes Laurie Baker doesn’t bother about blueprints; he prefers informal sketches and talking with construction workers on the spot. And so I ask if I can see a home he is now building. The house is for a government official and his wife, a poet. Appropriately, it is the poet whom Baker is mainly dealing with. She is, he says happily, his first client who is as eccentric as he.

  “One of the things I’m noted to be crazy for is that I use old colored bottles set in cement—they give a nice light. In the drawing room, about half the main wall is going to be made of bottles only. And then we’ve got some holes in the roof to let sunlight in and air out.” Baker seizes a piece of chalk from a pouch slung over his shoulder and uses the brick wall of the house as a crude blackboard: He shows how each roof hole will have a raised rim of bottles. The rim will support a concrete cap to keep the rain out, like that covering a chimney. And, he adds gleefully, these round skylight-vents will also function as sundials. An even more unexpected feature of the house is that—like many Baker buildings—it is in the form of a spiral. A rising ribbon of smaller rooms, interspersed with a few desk-sized nooks for writing poetry, curls around a central living room, whose ceiling is two stories high.

  A spiral home with poetry-writing nooks is not likely to be reproduced en masse as housing for India’s poor, as Baker himself would be the first to admit. But even here, at his zaniest, Baker has built a house that costs vastly less than one of the same square footage designed by a conventional architect. First of all, as any high school geometry student knows, a circle is the shortest line that will contain a given amount of space. The outer wall of a rectangular house would use far more brick. Second, the fact that most inside walls in the poet’s house are also curved means some can be built with just a single thickness of brick, instead of the double thickness that straight brick walls of equal length would require to remain stable.

  And finally, Baker is using a remarkable variety of recycled materials beyond the several hundred glass bottles. In the bathrooms, for example, bits and pieces of waste glass are put to work as tiles: “If you want a piece of glass to fit a window you go to the glass place and they cut your size, and there’re always these little strips left that they throw under the table. So I said, ‘Can I have some?’” In addition, several hundred chipped or broken roofing tiles are embedded every foot or two in this building’s concrete roof, a signature Baker technique. As you look up at it, the inside of the roof looks like a checkerboard whose squares have been battered and then flown apart. These otherwise wasted tiles add so much reinforcement that Baker can use 30 percent less concrete in the roof.

  Furthermore, once finished, the poet’s house will consume far less energy than many homes half its size. Thanks to jali walls, cool air flows in; and thanks to the bottle-rimmed roof vents, hot air flows out. There are no electric ceiling fans (even modest Indian homes often have one in each room) and no air conditioning.

  As we continue our tour through the house, Baker gives instructions to the workmen, who today are making windows—some of which, incidentally, will contain no glass, only rough vertical wooden slats which can be tilted one way or the other to catch the breeze. After several dizzying loops, we have spiraled up to the roof, and climb out onto it.

  Here too, Baker says, “You can sit and write poems.” The nearby trees tower another fifteen or twenty feet overhead, their breadfruit and coconuts dangling almost within reach. The real poetry of this house is that it respects its surroundings and doesn’t try to overpower them.

  The same cannot be said, unfortunately, for what we can see from here of the city skyline. A few older buildings in sight, such as the maharaja’s palace, respect the ancient unwritten law that no building should be higher than one of Kerala’s coconut palms. But dotting the horizon are the palaces of the new maharajas—slablike eight- and ten-story modern luxury apartment buildings for India’s burgeoning business and professional class, all of them, Baker points out, requiring huge amounts of scarce electricity to run their elevators and air conditioning. Baker’s poetry in brick and mud is, by contrast, in harmony with its surroundings, not only aesthetically but in its knowledge that the Earth will not forever permit us to be so profligate with its riches.

  1999

  FOURTEEN

  The Impossible City

  CITIES, LIKE COUNTRIES AND FAMILIES, have an official currency of power and a real one. The official currency is votes and laws: citizens elect mayor and city council members; politicians pass laws; police supposedly enforce them. But the real currency of power is always different. In the Mumbai of Suketu Mehta’s dazzling book Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found that currency is a combustible mix of threats, violence, bribes, sex, and glory. If someone owes you money and won’t pay, you hire a gang to kidnap one of his children. If the cops capture a particularly dangerous gunman, they call up the gang leader and ask how much he’ll pay to get his man released. In one district, plumbers bribe local officials to turn off the water to public taps so that people have to hire them to install private pipes. In another, drivers of water-tanker trucks pay off the government so that it installs no pipes at all. A group of traders calls a public meeting to complain that extortion costs are soaring; they threaten to stop paying sales taxes unless police death squads kill more extortionists. (The city’s High Court has ruled that extortion payments are tax deductible as a business expense.) The huge local film industry, heavily financed by all this crime, completes the circuit. When some gangsters are hired to do crowd control at an outdoor shoot, they are thrilled to see the glamorous stars up close. An actress, in turn, is fascinated to meet real gangsters. She asks Mehta, “Can you point out someone who’s killed?”

  Mehta, who is happy to point out to readers more than a few people who have killed, seems to have known for a long time that his real subject was the city where he grew up, and he has been working on this book, his first, for many years. He lived mostly in Mumbai—then Bombay—until coming to the United States at the age of fourteen. As an adult, he has returned to India ever more frequently to write about it, finally moving his wife and American-born children to Mumbai for several years. Being an outsider all his life—variously a Gujarati in a city dominated by Maharashtrians, an Indian in the United States, an American citizen in India, a secularist in a country brimming over with all the world’s major religions, a writer in an extended family of diamond merchants—has made him a voraciously curious observer.

  Because of his zest to put every byway of the Mumbai underworld on the page, his high-energy evoking of characters high and low, and the
way his gaze settles on the newcomers trying to make it in the great city, Mehta’s eye reminds me of no one’s so much as Balzac’s on Paris. He makes almost all other reporting on India, such as the overrated travel books of V.S. Naipaul, look pallid by comparison.

  The first few of the dozen or so extended portraits in Mehta’s gallery bring us inside the Hindu nationalist Shiv Sena movement, long powerful in the politics of Mumbai and the surrounding state of Maharashtra. (The old British-educated business elite of Gujaratis, Parsis, and others who once ran the city are as horrified by these lower-class Maharashtrians as Boston Brahmins were by the Irish who elected the machine boss James Curley as the city’s mayor in 1914.) The movement’s demagogic founder, Bal Thackeray—his father liked the novelist—professed an admiration for Hitler. In 1993, Shiv Sena mobs rampaged through the Muslim parts of town, burning, raping, and murdering. The police stood by and, before long, transcripts of radio traffic reveal, enthusiastically joined in. Over nine days, some six hundred people were killed and two thousand injured. Only a handful of the Hindu rioters were ever prosecuted, and ten policemen charged with murder were actually promoted. Some 215,000 Muslims fled the city on special trains, the homes and businesses of many of them blackened ruins.

  Sometimes, in savoring a book’s unexpected power, I imagine how a lesser writer would have handled the material. In sketching the shadow this communal violence has left on Mumbai, for instance, most would have spoken only to the victims or their families. Mehta, by contrast, goes straight for the killers. He gets a Shiv Sena member to walk him through the city, showing him the spots where the man set fire to a mosque, looted shops, and burned Muslims to death. “It was like a movie,” the man tells him: “silent, empty, someone burning somewhere and us hiding.” Mehta asks another such killer, whom he calls Sunil, “What does a man look like when he’s on fire?” Sunil tells him, and describes how he and four other men killed a Muslim bread vendor. “We poured petrol on him and set him on fire. All I thought was, This is a Muslim. . . . That day we showed them what Hindu dharma is.”