The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  One word embodied the bullishness of this generation: “aspiration.” Young Indians were repeatedly praised for being aspirational. A wedding lehenga embroidered with Swarovski crystals was called aspirational. Cell phones were called aspirational; by 2011, more Indians had a cell phone than a toilet. So too was the budding Indian love affair with the road. In 2008, the year my girl was born, Indians bought a record 1.5 million cars, making it one of the world’s most attractive car markets. That year, the Indian conglomerate Tata unveiled the world’s cheapest car—a tiny, no-frills automobile, known as the Nano, that was marketed as the very symbol of Indian aspiration. (By 2013, sales of the Nano were far lower than expected. Indians apparently wanted a bigger, more proper car, not this low-priced vehicle marketed to the lowest rung of the ambition ladder.)

  Aspiration was a meme that infected India’s idea of itself. Consider this advertisement for a vocational school in India, where you could learn to work at an office or a fancy hotel. The ad told you nothing about the courses offered, only about ambition.

  “Without ambition,” the ad declared, “you’re like a wardrobe without jeans, a sky without a single star, a song without words, a lemon with all the juice squeezed out.”

  And then this devastating punch line: “Without ambition you’ll go nowhere.”

  In the years since economic reforms began in 1991, the gap between rich and poor not only widened, the rich flaunted it. In a classic symptom of oligarchy, new millionaires sprang from industries like mining and real estate, where business success depended on political connections. The upper middle classes checked out of public India altogether; they neither went to public hospitals nor public schools, nor rode the bus. Economic reforms offered them better alternatives. They retreated into new gated enclaves, seeking reprieve from power cuts, water shortages, noise, open sewers, heat, and the psychic brutality of having to live amid the poor. This too was desire for a certain freedom.

  There was a lot of talk of the growing middle class. But the vast majority of Indians were nothing like what the rest of the world would consider middle class. Nearly two-thirds of Indians sustained themselves on less than $2 a day.19

  Since liberalization, poverty also declined, though the number of Indians in extreme poverty remained pretty stubborn. By 2012, more than 300 million Indians lived below the national poverty line, which Biraj Patnaik, an activist, rightly called the starvation line.

  Ambedkar was remarkably prescient. India still struggles to be democratic in everyday life. Not long ago, I came across a full-page advertisement in one of the English-language daily papers. The ad was for a new private school. It featured a picture of a little girl, probably five years old, with a broom in her hand and a grinning housemaid at her side. The caption played on the apprehensions of a privileged parent. “While your child is learning the maid’s language,” it warned, “someone else’s child is learning a foreign language.” The ad went on to boast of an Olympic-size swimming pool and classes in French and German.

  What this ad neglected to show was the aspiration of the maid. Across India, where for centuries a life’s possibilities were circumscribed by the caste into which you were born, housemaids, sharecroppers, and bricklayers are sending their children to school like never before. In primary school, there is almost universal enrollment, and for the first time in the country’s history, girls are as likely to be enrolled in primary school as boys. On every reporting trip across India, I am struck by this remarkable shift, and when I ask their mothers why they bother, I hear answers as vague as this: I will educate my daughter because I want her life to be different from mine.

  The stakes are higher now than ever before. A million young men and women turn eighteen every month. They go out in search of work and dignity. They push their leaders to deliver.

  And yet.

  India is the land of And Yet.

  Ramachandra Guha, the leading historian of modern India, calls India a “fifty-fifty democracy.”20 I take this to mean that it works about as well as it doesn’t.

  I think of it as a democracy that makes promises it has no intention of keeping.

  And this is the tension that prevails in India—and why the noonday generation is so important in rewriting India’s freedom story. It is a tipping-point generation in the arc of independent India’s history. It makes new demands on India’s democracy in at least three important ways: genuine equality of opportunity, dignity for girls, and civil liberties. It pushes India to keep its promise.

  Aspiration is like water. It needs a place to go, or else it drowns everything in its path.

  By 2014, Indians had elected a man who embodied aspiration itself—a man who also inspired as much fear as admiration. Self-made, iron-fisted, known to harbor zero patience for the country’s English-speaking privileged elite, Narendra Modi had risen up the ranks of a Hindu militant group called the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, or RSS, and helped his party sweep the 2014 parliamentary election. He promised voters a government that worked, no matter what it took. “Good times ahead,” his campaign slogan boasted. By now, 40 percent of the electorate was under the age of thirty-five.

  There are two kinds of people in my family: those who, having been uprooted early and often, choose to stay rooted and those who keep uprooting. I belong to the second category. I am most at ease when there’s a suitcase packed at the door, with sensible shoes and a silk sleeping-bag liner in case I find myself in a skanky guesthouse somewhere out in the world. I avoid nailing bookshelves to the wall because it signals a settle-down that makes me uncomfortable. My favorite apartment of all time is one that abuts the Nizamuddin railway station in Delhi, where the stationmaster’s voice announces the comings and goings of trains all night long, and I dream of trips not yet taken.

  My toing and froing continues. Before my daughter turns four in the spring of 2012, we move back to the United States. This is the twenty-third time I have moved. My girl is now an immigrant to the United States, just as I was once. Except that America is a different country.

  As I return, the United States is struggling out of its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Roads are potholed, one in five American children is hungry, and many, many American mothers are no longer certain that their children’s lives will be better than their own. Most striking, the American dream seems further from reach for so many Americans.

  The idea of upward mobility—the evidence casts doubt on whether it was ever more than an idea—now seems remote for millions for hardworking families. Inequality, a word that was never really spoken of while I was growing up in California, is greater than it has been in generations, and Americans are talking about it openly. Rising inequality shapes the New York mayoral race in 2013. And as I write this, in 2015, nearly every presidential candidate is having to pay at least lip-service to the growing gap between rich and poor.

  My girl settles in quickly. It takes about three weeks for her Indian accent to vanish. She learns to camp in the California redwoods. She learns to love ketchup, which is far sweeter than what Indians call tomato sauce. I sign her up for Sunday morning Kathak class, the sixteenth-century classical dance tradition that has blossomed in cities across America, to cater to the children of Indian immigrants. “That’s so N.R.I., dude,” my friend in Bangalore tells me. N.R.I. is shorthand for Non-Resident Indian. It is not always a term of endearment.

  I am a second-time immigrant to the United States. Toing and froing. Escaping, only to come right back.

  “We are like turtles, me and Mama,” my daughter says, parroting what she has heard me say. “We carry our homes on our back.”

  When I set out to write this book, I imagined it would be an American’s journey through the old country. Becoming a parent changed everything. For one thing, it took so much longer to write. It also changed course. My stake in India deepened. I wanted to understand the time and place that made my child—and to chronicle it for her. I found myself thinking about what kind of a country it coul
d become as she grows up, and how far it would go to deliver on its audacious, original promise of freedom.

  So this book became a highly personal chronicle of today’s India, told through the stories of ordinary Indian men and women who represent the yearnings of India’s most transformative generation. They are from country and city, and for the most part, they are born and raised, like my girl, in the years since economic reforms began in 1991. Their journeys tell the story of aspiration—its triumph and its undoing—in one of the most important democracies in the world. Taken together, they are meant to be a portrait of the noonday generation.

  I have tried to tell their stories with affection and humility. I know they don’t represent the whole of India. They are only seven in a billion.

  They include Rakhi, a country girl who turns into a ruthless killer, and the ghost of Monica, shot in the head for falling in love. They follow Mani, a young woman who escapes the wasteland, only to face a terrible reckoning in glossy gated India. There’s Rinu, who wants to be the next Miley Cyrus, but becomes famous instead for speaking her mind on Facebook, and Varsha, who wants to be a cop, so she can help girls like her feel safe. There’s Shashi, the political strategist of my generation, who sells Modi to the young. There’s Anupam, the son of an auto-rickshaw driver. Each one of us makes our own destiny, he told me once, as we were sitting on his college steps one afternoon, batting away mosquitoes, and he said it so matter-of-factly, as though it were so obvious, that he looked perplexed when he saw me taking notes.

  The story of India at noonday is the story of ambition, and it is a story of ambition thwarted. That story will inevitably shape the world in the years to come: By 2015, India’s population had peaked past 1.3 billion, and shortly after 2022, India is expected to surpass China and become the world’s most populous nation.

  I am reminded of the freedom stories of American women in the late 1950s and ’60s. They too were impossibly ambitious. Educated, creative, tough women, they too found their ambitions blocked. In turn, they gave rise to one of the most transformative social movements in modern history. Ambition is ambition. When it’s thwarted, it can unleash demands for change, perhaps even a new freedom struggle.

  My parents were among midnight’s children. Their India faced a test that no other modern nation had before: how to build a democratic republic from a hungry, fractured, feudal society. India at noonday faces a tougher test: how to make democracy something other than topsoil.

  “HI-FI”

  How to Outrun Fate

  Anupam Kumar grows up in a three-room house made of naked bricks and tin, along an unpaved alley popular with stray pigs, in an ancient city that has come to be known as India’s most disorderly, called Patna.

  His papa is Srikrishna Jaiswal, a small man of few words who, for as long as Anupam can recall, has plied an auto-rickshaw through the streets of Patna twelve hours a day, seven days a week, inhaling exhaust fumes, dodging careening buses, sometimes getting a whack from the pistol butt of a local cop.

  Also for as long as he can remember, Anupam has wished not to be his auto-rickshaw-driving father’s auto-rickshaw-driving son. Since childhood, his single-minded goal has been to outrun that destiny. Mummy has been his chief co-conspirator.

  At age seventeen, his escape plan involves getting into what is possibly the most competitive university in the world and studying the possibilities of life on other planets—Earth having become too dirty, in his view, and too crowded. Look around, he says in the spring of 2005, when he is preparing for the college entrance exam at home. His narrow unpaved lane is bordered by a shiny, black ribbon of raw sewage. The air reeks of piling rot. By monsoon all will melt to muck. The brick-and-tin houses are pressed so hard against one another you can practically hear the drunks burping nearby.

  What makes his escape plan all the more audacious is that Anupam is a Class 4 dropout. He is nine years old when he comes home and tells Mummy that his teacher cannot read a textbook properly. So he teaches himself, hunching over books morning, noon, and night, usually by the light of a kerosene lamp, since the electricity supply in Patna is even shoddier than its schools. His mother pounds the pavement for private tutors. She hushes the younger children so Anupam can study. She never, ever rolls her eyes when he tells her about his dreams, like wanting to explore life in outer space. She never clucks her tongue when he says he would like to conduct research, even though she’s never heard of the word “research.” Naturally, because he is a boy, she never orders him to sweep the floors or roll chapatis. When he tells her he’d rather study than attend a family function, she makes excuses for him. He’ll go mad, her relatives say, he’ll go blind.

  She knows Anupam is her golden child. And a golden child is different. Also, a golden child needs someone to watch his back. And so, during the hottest mosquito-ridden afternoons, she sits behind him on their hard wooden bed while he studies, keeping him cool with a handheld bamboo fan.

  She doesn’t have to tell him how she feels. He can see it in her eyes. Mummy looks to him to outrun his destiny—and take them all with him.

  “I feel a lot of pressure,” Anupam says the summer of the college entrance exam. “It’s from inside.”

  Coiled, anxious Anupam.

  At seventeen, his hair has flecks of gray.

  During British rule, on the vast, fertile Gangetic plains of Bihar, the north Indian state whose capital is Patna, grew fields upon fields of poppy. In the nineteenth century, an opium factory was erected along the banks of the Ganges, not far from where Anupam grew up. Steam ships traveled downriver to the port in Calcutta, from where their precious cargo was ferried to Shanghai as part of a lucrative opium trade.1

  Indigo came from Bihar too, engorging cotton in vivid blues for the cloth mills of northern England.

  Bihar’s plantation economy was marked by exceptionally large landholdings. The powerful zamindars who owned them lorded over a hierarchy of traders, teachers, cattle herders, cobblers, tailors, candle makers, farmworkers, and so on. One measure of Bihar’s misery could be seen in the large numbers of Biharis who left home for a life of indenture on the other side of the world. By the mid-1800s, as the transatlantic slave trade began to be abolished in the European colonies of the Caribbean, laborers from Bihar left by the boatloads for the sugar plantations of the New World. If you crossed the black ocean, it was said that you lost the caste you were born into. Thousands and thousands of people were willing to do just that—even if they were born to the highest caste of all, Brahmins.2

  By independence, in 1947, Bihar was one of the most feudal parts of India, with a prosperous zamindari class plus many, many landless peasants. Its sharecropping system meant that tenant farmers and their children were often bonded for life to landlords or moneylenders. Peasant uprisings were ruthlessly put down. One landlord was known to have thrown rebellious peasants into the maws of his pet tigers: For this, he was called the Maneater of Manatu.

  By the late 1970s, when Anupam’s mummy was still a child, Bihar’s stubborn feudal system came face-to-face with modern, democratic wants. Then began nearly three decades of violent caste wars, pitting landless peasants against those who had lorded over them for so long. The landowning upper castes, known as the Rajputs, had their own militias. So did the Yadavs and Kurmis, communities that were several rungs below on the caste ladder. Each militia was armed with country rifles and fanciful names: Bhoomi Sena, Sunlight Sena, Ranvir Sena. They clashed, often over land, leaving a trail of terror in the countryside. Dalits, as those at the very bottom of the caste ladder called themselves, were often the most brutally assaulted.3

  In a typical case, in a village called Parasbigha in February 1980, a dispute over who had the rights to a plot of land led an upper-caste militia, Brahmeshwar Sena, to torch the mud huts of Dalit peasants in the dead of night. At least eleven people were killed, among them four children. Some burned to death; others were shot. This was the Bihar of Anupam’s parents.

  Srikrishna Jaiswal
was born shortly after independence, in 1955, in a town encircled by lychee orchards called Muzaffarpur. The family sat on the lower reaches of the caste ladder, part of a community known as Kalwars. His father, who had made his living as a small shopkeeper, died when Srikrishna was young. The family shop was sold, and the proceeds were divided among four sons. Srikrishna, the youngest, quickly spent his small share, taking his mother to visit Hindu temples here and there and, just as quickly, becoming the butt of family jokes. He would amount to nothing, his brothers said. He would have to go around with a begging bowl to earn his keep. Anupam was raised on the story of his father’s humiliation. He held it close to his chest, as though it were an amulet.

  Srikrishna was in his thirties by the time his marriage was fixed to a girl named Sudha. She must have been around fifteen at the time. Small and lean, she had bright, fast-moving eyes, and though she had attended school only up to Class 6, she had a good deal of practical good sense. We may not amount to much, she told him, but our children can rise. With this, she persuaded him to leave Muzaffarpur for Patna, the state capital, where Srikrishna hired an auto-rickshaw, black and yellow, noisy and noxious, with two wheels in back and one in front. What he earned, he turned over to his wife. He had learned his lesson with money.

  The Patna they came to in the 1980s was in the midst of political turmoil. Some of Mrs. Gandhi’s loudest, most prominent opponents came from Patna. Their protests had prefaced Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency, and their victory in the elections that followed, in 1977, transformed the political landscape. Among the new leaders to emerge was a charismatic student activist from Patna University named Lalu Prasad Yadav. He soon became the most outspoken leader Bihar had seen from the lower rungs of the caste ladder.