The End of Karma

by Somini Sengupta

  This is one of his most remarkable traits. He is supremely self-confident. He is as certain about how far he has come as he is about what he is capable of. He doesn’t ever seem to second-guess himself. And perhaps because he is not a daughter, he has never been circumscribed at home.

  “I won’t have difficulty proving myself,” is how he put it. “I know as much as a hi-fi person would know.”

  GATES

  Keeping Out the Lives of Others

  The wedding begins after dark, once lightning flashes across the sky and a spitfire of a storm lashes the trees. When the rain stops—“the clouds ran out of batteries,” is how my daughter explains these hard monsoon bursts—the air suddenly cools. It is a good omen, people say. Perhaps the rains will be good this year, enough to slosh the fields. Perhaps there will be rice, enough to fill half the belly.

  Close to midnight, two hours behind schedule, a shiny black Mahindra jeep turns off the highway and comes trundling down the muddy red dirt lane, bringing the bridegroom and his crew.

  The bride’s party advances up the lane to welcome him. The old men, lungis draped around their waists, pound on drums held in their armpits. The young men are dressed in low-slung jeans and Kangol caps of 1980s hip-hop. They tap a mean, fast rhythm on snares. The tempo picks up speed, grows agitated. The men dance, young and old, heads down, hips thrusting. They cast enormous shadows on the trees, as though some gyrating forest giants have come out to play.

  Mani stands out in this crowd. She does not dance. She does not even stir her hips. She wears the quietest sari of all, orange chiffon with a narrow band of green sequins along the border. Her hair is held back in a braid, as always. Her back is straighter than all the others. Her face gives away nothing.

  Only when I needle her does she admit to wanting to get married one day—but, she stipulates, in a smaller, more modest ceremony. This is the most lavish wedding the family has ever organized. It is in honor of the last daughter in the clan—the last not counting Mani, who is the family spinster, its reliable worker bee, its migrant, whose wages uplift them all.

  After the rain, the sky bursts with stars. This is what Mani misses. The infinite sky. The clean air. Home.

  This is why she comes back, once a year, every year, to her mother’s house, in a village pressed hard against the jungle in Jharkhand, the state next to Anupam’s Bihar. Usually, she comes this time of year, in May, when the hot season breaks for rain. The rest of the year, Mani works as a maid in Gurgaon, in a forest of steel and glass on the edge of the nation’s capital, Delhi. There are armies of women like her, mainly adivasis, India’s indigenous people, working as maids in Gurgaon.

  Mani is a child of noonday, born in the late 1980s—she’s not exactly sure of the year—and raised in the years since the economy creaked open in 1991. The fourth of nine children, she too seeks to shape her own destiny. So she leaves home when she is around eighteen. A family friend, an older woman who works as a maid, brings her to Gurgaon. Soon, Mani too is working as a maid, moving in with one family, then another. Some of her employers slap her when they are dissatisfied with her work. Some of them give her enough to eat. It is never so bad, Mani says, that she feels compelled to go back home. And anyway, at home they need the money.

  By the time I meet her, in 2011, she is a live-in maid for a stay-at-home mom named Supriya, in a seventh-floor apartment in a gated condominium complex called Central Park. Mani watches Supriya’s two young children, rolls the dinner chapatis, washes dishes, hangs the laundry. She has her own room, which opens out onto the service balcony, and food and water around the clock. She gets along with Supriya, who, like Mani, is something of an introvert. Mani finds her to be a fair employer. She is courteous. Most Sundays, she lets Mani take the day off to go to church.

  Mani saves practically all the money she makes. With her earnings, her family is able to rebuild their mud-and-tin house, buy goats, and pay off debts. Three sisters are married off. The youngest graduates from a private high school; Mani pays the fees.

  Until calamity strikes.

  One day, in the summer of 2011, during the season of the loo, when the hot wind blows in from the western desert and stings the skin, Mani comes to Supriya in a state of panic. Mani says her fourteen-year-old niece has been abducted from home, in a village deep in the jungles of Jharkhand, and forced to work as a maid somewhere in or around Delhi. Mani tells Supriya she has no idea exactly where, though she has somehow tracked down a phone number and spoken to her niece, only to learn that the girl is being held against her will in a neighborhood she knows only as something-or-other Puram. It could be anywhere in this concrete jungle of 20 million people. The girl has never been out of Jharkhand.

  Mani’s story chills Supriya’s blood. Supriya has never been to a village in the jungles of Jharkhand, never really thought about them, to be honest. And now suddenly she is thinking about them all the time. She wonders what the girl’s village looks like. She wonders how a mother who has to work in the fields, fetch water, and gather firewood can possibly keep her children safe at home. She shudders at the thought of how precarious life must be in Mani’s village. “Not a day goes by,” Supriya says, “when I don’t think, Oh! What if my child went missing? What if someone just took one of my children away?”

  Supriya resolves to help Mani rescue her niece. And in so doing, she opens a door that, like most of us, she is accustomed to keeping closed. She steps across a line, ever so briefly, into the lives of other mothers, in the other India. It burdens her with more knowledge than she bargains for.

  In stepping across that line, Supriya temporarily upsets a delicate psychic balance that confronts women of her comfortable social class. It is a balance that becomes all the more tricky to maintain in the India of noonday, where the gap between rich India and poor India is wider than ever before. A friend of mine, in Bombay, says this growing gap also correlates with a noticeable diminution of compassion. The rich seem to increasingly regard the poor as an embarrassment, she tells me, and as “a burden on the aspirations of their betters.”

  Had I not left India as a child, Supriya is the woman I might have become. She is of my generation. She grew up in Calcutta. She went to Welham, a girls’ boarding school a few notches above my own Modern High School for Girls, but likewise designed to prepare modern girls to become modern wives. She is open-minded and friendly but also a bit of a recluse. She reads a lot and despises idle gossip. She is conscientious about composting, and she enjoys hiking in the hills.

  She met Arvind, her husband, at a Delhi advertising firm where they both worked. She wasn’t into her job nearly as much as he was, so when they got married, it was she who got off the career track.

  Their daughter was born in 2002, then a son in 2007. Soon, they moved to Central Park, a neat new set of multistory buildings overlooking a golf course, encircled by gates. Supriya immediately felt a sense of relief. Inside its gates, she no longer worried constantly about where her daughter was. “I could let her be in the park and not keep a hawk’s eye on her,” she said.

  By the time I first met her, in 2011, Supriya was a devoted, full-time mother, although she let it slip every now and then that a small part of her also fantasized about what else to do with her life, once the kids were a bit older.

  Supriya and Mani were in each other’s company perhaps more often each day than they were in anyone else’s. They were not likely to confide in each other. Nor was theirs a relationship of equals—Supriya was Mani’s employer, after all. But in the rhythms of their daily lives, the two women relied on one another. Supriya needed Mani to run the household. Mani needed Supriya in times of trouble. They were not irreplaceable to each other, but vital.

  Supriya drove her kids to Kumon math sessions and dance classes. If they had to go to a birthday party outside the gates of Central Park, she accompanied them herself, rather than follow the common practice among moms of her class: sending them with nanny and driver. She planned healthy meals. She supervised
homework. She combed the Internet for books to help her daughter practice her handwriting. She was strict about limiting the children’s screen time.

  Central Park—its tagline is “Expect the world”—catered to college-educated, English-speaking professionals like Supriya and Arvind. It sponsored Diwali parties for residents and brought in a consultant to help kids apply to colleges in Texas and Singapore. It did not rely on the paltry services that the city of Gurgaon offered. Central Park’s generators came on the instant the municipal power went down, which it sometimes did for nearly a third of the day. It provided ample water, plenty of parking, a lush green playground, guards at the gate to keep out the thela-wallahs peddling everything from onions to buckets. It required maids to carry identification tags. It kept plumbers on call 24/7 in case the pipes got clogged. Some of India’s best private hospitals and schools were within a short drive. There was a Mercedes showroom across the street, and a microbrewery.

  Central Park, and the dozens of gated communities like it across the country, reflected, simply, an aspiration to live not only with basic material comforts—round-the-clock water and power—but also in safety, protected from the distress of the rest of India, which might be just across the road or miles away in the hinterland, where there was no clean water to drink, where children were stunted from hunger.

  Supriya called Central Park a “manicured paradise,” an oasis of safety amid vast disorder and want. For this she was grateful: Her day was not wasted waiting to turn on the water pump when the city water supply began to flow, nor stocking fuel for a generator, nor reminding a servant to sweep the remnants of a dust storm off the driveway. These were the headaches she referred to when she said, “We don’t have to worry about motor chalao. Diesel khattam ho gaya. Driveway saaf karo. It’s not worth it.”

  She was all too aware of the psychic costs, which made her ambivalent about the life she had chosen. This also made her unusual among her peers. She told me about the time her daughter was at her parents’ house in Delhi, when the power went out in the afternoon—and stayed out for hours. The child, then eight years old, was shocked. What do you mean there’s no electricity, she demanded of Supriya’s mother. “Our lives are a bubble,” Supriya said. “Our children, they should know how others live.”

  There were also times when the gates of Central Park offered only a gossamer curtain between this India and that, when it occured to her that the security she had procured for her own children was beyond the reach of others.

  Supriya and I were talking one afternoon while her kids raced through the playground in Central Park. Her quiet, gentle son played by himself. Her daughter, the extrovert, laughed as she ran through an open sprinkler with her friends. Supriya led me to the back fence, dividing the verdant lawn on this side from the dry brush on the other. There, one night a year ago, Supriya said, a young woman was raped and left naked one night. A security guard at Central Park, hearing her cries for help, ran over, gave her his coat to wrap around her shoulders, and called the police. Supriya knew nothing more about the girl or her rapist, except that such a thing happened here, just beyond the fence from the tidy, well-watered playground where her children play every day at sundown.

  In Supriya’s childhood and mine, India’s privileged were far more likely to live face-to-face with its poor. Across the street from her comfortable Calcutta house was a slum, where an old woman sat on her haunches and sold lumps of coal. The woman arranged her coal into neat, symmetrical piles, each one roughly the same size, for sale at the same price. With the coal dust she drew swirly designs around each pile. Supriya watched her for hours.

  As a mother, in Gurgaon, Supriya could wall herself off. Only occasionally, like a hot squall, did the lives of others blow in and disturb the order of things. Private India was only so good at keeping the disorder away. Then you had to quietly shut the gate again. You had to learn to see distress, and also to not see distress.

  That psychic equilibrium settled on me slowly, imperceptibly. I became aware of it only after I had become a parent. It became impossible to ignore each time I got in a taxi with my daughter, and we stopped in traffic, and a gaggle of children came banging on the window, peddling dirty roses, or pirated copies of American books (“The world is flat, madam,” they shouted, waving Thomas L. Friedman’s best seller), or nothing at all except their bare hands.

  Occasionally, I would bring a five-rupee packet of Parle-G biscuits to offer, but more often than not I’d forget. Shriveled by heat and traffic, I would find myself closing the car windows just before thin, grubby fingers crawled inside. I would look the other way. I couldn’t believe I was doing this: I would aimlessly look at my phone in order not to have to look at them.

  I noticed that my girl, when she was two years old, would wave and smile. At age three, she was old enough to turn to me and ask: “Mama, what are they talkin’ about?” By three and a half, she was talking back at them, with a voice that would make me wince, a voice that signaled that she was us, not them. “No, we don’t need anything today! No. I said we don’t need anything today!” A voice she learned from me.

  I would say nothing when the driver barked at the beggars. They would make a face, flip him off, and skitter like lizards.

  Gurgaon is the city that aspiration built: a Xanadu of a New Indian imagination.

  It rose next to Delhi, on a rocky stretch of dry earth and acacia trees, in the shadow of the Aravali Hills, where peasants once coaxed grain out of hard soil. In the season of the loo, great hot wheels of dust swirled in the air. Women shielded their faces with wide muslin dupattas. The men’s white cotton turbans doubled as pillows for afternoon siesta.

  Land and life here required a certain toughness. Honor mattered. Caste mattered. Guns were plentiful. And a preference for male heirs gave the state of Haryana, in which Gurgaon sits, a peculiarly stilted gender ratio. According to the 2011 census, there were 834 girls for every 1000 boys, the worst sex ratio in the country. The sex imbalance reflected the region’s prosperity too: families could afford ultrasound tests to check the sex of the fetus, and abort unwanted females.

  Gurgaon’s destiny changed forever when a developer named Kushal Pal Singh started visiting from Delhi, starting in the 1970s. He made acquaintance with the local farmers. He drank tea with the menfolk. He attended family weddings and visited ailing relatives. He took his time to earn their trust. Then he started buying their land.

  On these parched fields, Singh conjured a new metropolis. He persuaded Indira Gandhi’s government (it helped that he was a family friend) to tweak the route of a new national highway so that motorists could zip from Gurgaon to the airport, on the southern edge of Delhi. He persuaded the American executive Jack Welch to open an outpost of General Electric’s business-process outsourcing unit in Gurgaon, turning it into the hub of a booming Indian industry. He bought. He built.

  Up rose a building that looked like a ship’s helm: the headquarters of Singh’s company, DLF Limited. Then came a grove of high-rise apartment blocks, encircled by high walls. By the mid-2000s, Gurgaon was pocked with construction canyons. Singh’s example had inspired a host of developers to erect office buildings, shopping malls, hotels, golf courses, and cluster after cluster of gated apartments with dreamy names: Cyber Greens, New Town Heights, Nirvana Country.

  Soon, DLF would build a private monorail that looped around its properties; Central Park was among the six stops. The company also announced plans to build the country’s largest mall in Gurgaon, even though, as the Indian papers lamented, it was already surpassed in size by China’s largest mall. (That competition with China is a fixture of the Indian elite’s imagination, one that India repeatedly loses.)

  Singh became one of India’s richest men, while his dream city became a metonym for New India’s ambition. Gurgaon drew scores of ambitious, educated men and women to write computer code and harangue American debtors from round-the-clock call centers. It drew scores of equally ambitious but uneducated men and women t
o serve them, as cooks, press-wallahs, electricians, tea sellers, auto-rickshaw drivers, layers of roof tiles, security guards, and ayahs to take care of the children.

  Like Mani, many of the workers were adivasis, who came from the poorest swaths of the country. Their rivers had run dry. Their jungles had thinned out. So they left their homes, traveling for days in cramped trains to sweep and swab the floors in Xanadu.

  I had watched Gurgaon come into being. There were construction sites everywhere. Day and night, women ferried bowls of sand and mud on their heads. Men stacked bricks. Children rolled in the dust. Steel beams poked higher and higher into the sky. Some days, in a certain hazy late afternoon light, they looked like so many skinny fingers pointing up, up, and up. I wrote about it for the Times.1 I was drawn to it again and again.

  Gurgaon became an emblem of a country in the dizzy, post-economic-reforms era. Its population doubled in ten years, to an estimated 1.5 million in 2011, and is projected to exceed 4 million by 2020.

  There was only one problem. Gurgaon was dangerously short of water. The central government’s water authority warned that its water reserves would run out by 2017. The water table was falling by 1.5 meters each year. By 2012, the Gurgaon government could provide only about half of the water that its residents consumed. The rest came from wells that were bored deep into the ground and that drained the aquifer.

  Water wasn’t the only service that Gurgaon’s gated community residents obtained privately. In 2012, about one-fourth of the electricity they used came from diesel-fired generators; the government electricity board couldn’t meet their full demand. As for the waste they produced, only 30 percent of the population of Gurgaon was connected to the public sewage network. The rest was rescued by a thriving private sewage industry. Condominium associations hired tanker trucks to extract the waste of its residents, ferry it across town, and dump it into streams and ditches.