I meet Varsha at the front gate of her neighborhood benefactor, Shubha. Varsha has been head down in physics homework. Her face lights up when she sees me. She says she is glad I have come. She needs to talk. We walk aimlessly around the neighborhood. A litany of grievances pours out.
“I have a lot of problems. At school. At home. Everywhere,” she says. She is flustered. I knew this already because she has sent me several text messages throughout the day, demanding to know where I am, how much longer I would take. This is vintage Varsha. Pushy. Anxious.
I learn today that Varsha’s troubles stem not just from her father’s traditional views on a girl’s ambitions. There’s also that boy she likes—and he seems to have a caveman’s view of a girl’s ambitions.
“Didi, don’t mind, but can I ask you one thing?” Varsha ventures while we walk. “Before marriage, was there any boy you liked very much?”
“Many,” I reply, which cracks her up. “Why? Is there someone you like very much?”
“Not very much,” she says. “A little.”
The object of her affection turns out to be a ne’er-do-well who lives in the neighborhood. He tells her he loves her. He calls her on the phone whenever he thinks she is alone. “Have you eaten anything today?” he asks, which she takes as a sign of his affection.
He belongs to the Jat caste of landowning peasants, old-time Gurgaon folks who sold their land to real estate developers and made small fortunes.
The boy is as uninterested in his own remaking as she is obsessed with hers. He has dropped out of school, and he tells her he sees no reason to study. His family has money. He has a motorcycle, a phone, and a house. He tells her he will never have to work a day in his life. When she nudges him to take the high school matriculation exam, he snaps at her. “I don’t want to discuss this business of studying with you,” he says.
It’s unclear what she sees in the boy. She admits he is neither handsome nor smart. He seems to be fiercely possessive. He appoints one of his cousins to spy on her at school and report back on whom she talks to. He gets on her case about talking to boys. He tells her she shouldn’t wear jeans and T-shirts, which he apparently sees as symbols of immodesty. Still, she speaks to him nearly every night on the phone; sometimes she falls asleep with his voice in her ear.
They are on the phone late one night, when everyone else is sleeping. Come run away with me, he says.
It is an excruciating night. She stays up for hours in the darkness, thinking. She feels so torn.
There are moments when it feels like she can’t live without him. But running away with him? That is different.
She thinks and thinks. Sleep doesn’t come at all. She can hear her sisters’ breath rise and fall in the bed next to hers.
By dawn, she has her answer. To run away with him would mean being cast out of her family forever, and this thought she can’t bear. Her family is everything to her. No matter how much they frustrate her, they are her world: Papa, Mummy, her sisters and brothers. Without them, who would she be? Unmoored, truly alone.
She knows also that the boy would inevitably pull her down.
“He’s not doing anything with his life, and I have so many dreams” is how she explains it. “If my future will be with him, I’ll be sitting in the house and crying every day.”
Her eyes fill with tears. She is trying not to talk to him at all. But it’s not easy. She is sixteen, after all. “I love him. But I know I won’t be happy if I have a future with him,” she says.
Varsha adjusts her dupatta, wiping her tears. Mummy now makes her cover her breast with a dupatta whenever she steps out of the press stand. Her phone rings. Papa is on the line. He wants to know exactly where she is and with whom. “I’m coming back now,” she says. She blinks back tears and begins walking back to the tin-roofed shed.
I am struck by how carefully she has weighed her choices. Her decision reflects not just that she is her father’s daughter—she will submit to Papa’s choice of a husband for her—but also by how determined she is to make her own path in the world. Her father, if he finds out about the boy, will inevitably be very, very angry. I hope he will also be proud.
A few months later, in May 2013, Varsha nails her Class 10 exams, earning the second highest score in her class. Papa agrees to let her enroll in a local high school, but insists that she wear only trousers and not a skirt. He softens that stance after a few months, but keeps a tight leash on her nonetheless. No going to the library after school. No going to a friend’s house, not even to do homework together. I sense he suspects something about the boy.
Varsha does not stop goading Papa to let her take the police service exams. There are practical upsides, she tells him. Women are in high demand in the police force since the December 2012 gang-rape. The Delhi government alone promises to hire thousands of female cops, so each police station in the city can be staffed by at least a dozen policewomen.
It is hard to imagine another profession in which a grown-up Varsha would feel safer.
Varsha makes this case to Papa too. He is not convinced. No daughter of his is going to become a cop.
It is not that he doesn’t love her. He loves her fiercely. He wants her to have a good life. He wants no harm to come to her, which is precisely why he cannot let her pursue this foolishness. He tells her he will find a husband for her by the time she is twenty. If the in-laws let her work—say, at a bank—she can work.
She pleads with Papa to let her take a dance class. He says no; it won’t even fetch a job. She wants to learn to play guitar. Waste of time, he tells her. Varsha seeks beauty. Papa is consumed by fear.
That evening, during wedding season, when the burnt-toast smell of fireworks lingers in the air, she seems more dejected than I have ever seen her.
“Now I’ve changed my dreams. In my heart it’s still there: can I become a police officer?” she said. “But when I see my family situation my confidence gets down.”
Darkness falls. Varsha leans into the glowing-red iron. Someone lights a pile of garbage and dead brush on fire. A man approaches, shouting. Who lit this fire? he wants to know. He pets the mangy dogs that follow him. Varsha tells me later that he is an environmentalist. Madan Mohan says the man has gone mad. “Sometimes you study too much and this happens,” he concludes. He is only half-joking, the half-contempt of a man who works with his hands for a man who works with his head, or who is comfortable enough not to work at all.
From next door come two young women who are about Varsha’s age. They are flight attendants in training for one of the new private airlines. They are staying at a new bed-and-breakfast on the block. They want to go to a club at Gurgaon’s largest mall. They are wearing skinny jeans and shimmer on the eyes, going out well past dark on a Saturday night. Varsha has been pressing clothes since midafternoon. When the work is done, she will ride home in Papa’s auto-rickshaw to roll chapatis.
Varsha is not yet eighteen when the 2014 elections come around, so she is unable to vote. She says the one thing she wants the new government to focus on is women’s safety. “I want that girls should be able to walk on the road at any time” is how she puts it.
I could tell you about the many girls in India who are so anemic, hungry, or beaten down—or all of the above—that they can’t even imagine studying psychology or learning to dance or enforcing the law. I tell you about Varsha because she does imagine it. She imagines it vividly.
I think about Anupam. True, he was an extraordinarily gifted child. But he was also blessed with an extraordinarily loyal mother. She didn’t laugh when he told her he wanted to explore the prospect of life in outer space. She simply said, “Beta, perhaps when you’re old enough, you can see if there is.”
The contrast with Varsha is inescapable. Bright and headstrong, she is every bit as ambitious as Anupam. Her ambitions are repeatedly doused. Her resilience is repeatedly tested. She has had to rewrite her dreams, again and again, all because it would be unthinkable for her to cross the line, to defy
her papa.
I try to be sympathetic to her father but find it difficult. He knows she is special, that she is smarter and more driven than all his other children. He relies on her to help run the household. He guards her. He also thwarts her at every turn. He is a product of the very traditions that she is trying to outrun. School isn’t enough of an exit strategy.
Reluctantly, Varsha signs up to take business and economics classes in Class 11. Papa has it in his mind that bank jobs are good jobs for young women. A teacher mentions there are jobs in accounting. So she signs up for an accounting class. It is a breeze for her. It is also boring. Every hour spent on accounting homework, she begins to see as an hour away from preparing for her police service exams.
I briefly consider printing out a police application for Varsha—and then decide against it. It is her life. This is her father.
She tells me she intends to finish Class 12 and look for a job as soon as possible. She intends to enjoy a year or two of freedom before her father marries her off. Maybe, just maybe, she can persuade her would-be in-laws to let her continue to work. That way, she could at least stand on her own two feet. That will have to be her escape.
Ah, but stubborn, smart Varsha.
At the end of May 2015, she nails her final exams, scoring well above the 80th percentile, which nudges her papa to let her chase her dreams a bit further. He says she can go to a university in Delhi! This is unexpectedly good news, and they are discussing the details of her commute. She is trying to allay his fears about when and how she will walk back home from the metro station.
In the back of her mind, she is still plotting to be able to take the Indian Police Service exam, still pushing Papa every step of the way.
Epilogue
While my parents clung to the idea of the country they left, India was busy reinventing itself. The old houses near Gariahat Market became six-story apartment blocks. A spa opened on the ground floor of Jasoda Bhavan, where my father’s father had once persuaded residents to make room for Partition refugees in 1947; there are no signs of the communal kitchen that once fed refugee families, but you can get a tummy tuck.
My parents and their Calcutta friends in California deftly improvised home. Can’t slaughter a goat to supplicate Ma Kali in the suburbs? No problem. Slaughter an overgrown zucchini instead for the goddess. No Ganges holy water to sprinkle at the altar? No big. Tap water from the California aqueduct will do. (It’s cleaner anyway than Hinduism’s holiest river, I want to tell them. But I keep quiet.)1
Some of the certainties of twentieth-century India have dissolved. These include a belief in the idea of a state-led economy and state institutions that protect the poor, though in fact India’s poor never really had anything like a safety net and still do not. They include the conviction that the state should deliver water and electricity to all of its people, as well as basic services like education and health. Those certainties have vanished, as the state proved incapable of providing basic services and those who can afford it managed to buy them privately. My father was educated in government schools. None of my friends or cousins in India would even contemplate sending their children to government schools. Private companies still complain of the state’s heavy hand in putting up obstacles to business, which sometimes require bribes to remove. For more than twenty years, there have been demands for labor reforms, although in fact, only a fraction of India’s workforce is employed in the formal sector, where labor laws apply; the rest are in the informal sector, with no protections, and most workers are in what the International Labour Organisation considers vulnerable jobs.2
There are new certainties. By 2022, India is poised to become the most populous country in the world. Also its youngest.
Noonday’s generation is not like the generations that have come before it. These young Indians expect democracy to deliver something—for them. The idea of democracy is no longer just topsoil, to invoke Bhimrao Ambedkar, India’s first law minister. It has become very much part of the undersoil. Millions of Indians coming of age in the last two decades take it for granted that they ought to be able to make their own fate. They are hardly going to bottle their aspirations forever. They may not give their elders much time. They can be pushy.
Mani, the young woman who once looked after Supriya’s children, in her own quiet, introverted way, refuses to accept the lot of a girl born in a drought-prone adivasi village, just like she refuses to be cheated by a man.
Anupam, a child of remarkable grit, pushes his way through a tiny hole in the fence to the other side, where the hi-fi people are. Varsha has even a smaller hole in the fence open to her. Whether her papa will let her get anywhere close to the fence is not yet known, although, clearly, Papa is already a changed man because of her.
Rinu, on the other hand, is as outgoing and outspoken as she is because her father has her back. He believes in her completely. I hope she becomes the next Miley Cyrus of India and that Shaheen, having done her part to strengthen free speech laws in India, is never again afraid to express herself—on Facebook or anywhere else.
Rakhi’s is a story of despair, but it ought to be a wake-up call to the leaders of her country. India’s original people, the adivasis, have gained the least from seventy years of freedom. Their jungles have been denuded for timber. Their land has been stripped for minerals and their water polluted. No Indian child deserves the fate of Jeevan Munda, the adivasi boy who prepared to die because he could no longer go hungry. For a nation that aspires to be a world power, too many of its young are hungry, too many are forced to live in filth, and too many of them grow up, like Rakhi, as though they have nothing to lose.
That is why I think the stories of Anupam and Ankit, Varsha and Rakhi, Mani and Shaheen matter to the rest of us. From their generation could come an invention that changes the way we live, or a song that blows our minds, or a yearning, a hunger, to which we all have to pay attention.
Most of all, they reveal the fault lines in their own country. They will no doubt keep pushing India to be a more genuine democracy.
Narendra Modi, the current prime minister, knows he will have to address the needs of ordinary Indians—and fast. He has, after all, stoked their ambitions—perhaps more than any other Indian leader. The son of a tea seller, he has stood alongside the president of the United States of America, in a pin-striped suit with his name stitched in gold thread, hundreds of times. I am who I am. I wear me on my sleeve. I wear me up and down. The ultimate reinvention. Bold—no matter what you think of his taste in suits.
Because India is so big, its trajectory is going to inevitably bear on the rest of the world. Any global consensus to end hunger or reduce childhood deaths or ensure equal rights for men and women—all of it depends in large part on India’s progress.
Yes, of course, China’s size and economic power make it an important country to study. But India’s challenges are sui generis and instructive, precisely because India is so young and because India is a democracy. That is to say, where goes India’s young, so go the rest of us.
The first challenge stems from the sheer size of its youth bulge. How does a country’s economy create meaningful jobs for at least 10 million people coming of age every year, especially in the age of automation? The world economy is not creating nearly as many jobs as it needs. Can India put its ambitious, young people to work, or will Indians spread across the world to work in countries that are aging? The countries of Western Europe, with their rapidly aging populations, certainly don’t seem ready to open their doors to migrants from India—or anywhere else.
Related, how does India fix its schools so that the millions of children streaming into its classrooms learn how to read and master basic arithmetic? This is an urgent challenge. No country has ever faced an education challenge at India’s scale. But if something works in India, I bet it could work in other big, developing countries with large cohorts of first-generation learners. Education innovators in India are trying to crack that code, not least Rukmini Banerj
i’s organization, Pratham. (Her group is also offering vocational programs to prepare young people for work opportunities that are available—as cooks, beauticians, plumbers, etc.)
Third, how can a country famous for exporting doctors and nurses around the world ensure that its young people grow up healthy? Groups like the Naandi Foundation are drilling down to better understand how to curb childhood hunger. Economists with the Abdul Jameel Latif Poverty Action Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have shown that small incentives—for instance, a bag of lentils—can nudge mothers to immunize their children. India has a rich tradition of harvesting scarce water; hopefully, the ingenuity of Indian engineers will yield new solutions so children no longer die for lack of clean drinking water.
Prime Minister Modi’s ambitious target to develop solar and other renewable energy sources can go a long way in arresting the degradation of the environment. This raises the next challenge: how can India be a global leader in growing its economy without spewing as much carbon into the atmosphere as the rich world has during the last century.
These are global challenges, but India’s scale and diversity make them all the more urgent.
Fifth, how India tackles the growing divide between rich and poor can hold lessons for the rest of us. Its experiment with the cash transfer program—putting money directly in the hands of the poor, following Brazil’s lead—deserves to be carefully studied.
India’s raucous free speech arguments mirror the arguments that many Western countries are having about how much political speech, even offensive speech, we can tolerate in a world of competing beliefs. India’s intellectual legacy—perhaps its greatest soft power in the world—is the idea that free expression does not have to be squelched in order for so many different kinds of people to live peacefully in one republic. That also calls for a unique culture of tolerance, as the Nobel Laureate Kailash Satyarthi says. That would make for a truly strong and muscular India.
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