Speaking of strong, the seventh and last test is how India treats its women and girls. It can bear on everything else: childhood immunizations, the quality of its schools, how the government spends its money. Indian women’s groups have pushed mightily to be treated equally under the law. Groups like Jagori have urged cities to be smarter about safety by repairing sidewalks and installing streetlights. The Indian innovation of another era—ensuring that women are elected to village councils—has led to measurable changes. One of the yields is that nearly all Indian girls are going to primary school. That is phenomenal. Varsha is one among many.
What I’ve tried to show you is the vast talent, grit, and determination of ordinary Indians. Some of you may think that I’ve emphasized the stories of the marginalized—a rebel, a housemaid, a murdered girl—too much. All I can tell you is that they are Indians too. Their stories are just as important.
They do not reflect all of India, you could say. And you would be right. No single story can reflect the story of a billion Indians—not even seven stories.
As I was researching this book, I got to know a remarkable woman named Rebecca, who was setting out to understand something about India at noonday.
I met Rebecca on a bright, cool morning in the winter of 2011 at an orphanage in a leafy suburb of Bangalore. She walked through a black iron gate and into a cheerful courtyard of zinnias and swings. She wore a black cotton tunic, jeans, and sturdy hiking boots. Her eyes were beaming. Rebecca, who was then thirty-four, was here to meet a little girl who had been abandoned, and who had spent the first two years of her life in this tidy little orphanage. Rebecca had just been cleared to adopt her.
Rebecca was born in India too—and also, once, abandoned. She was briefly taken care of at an orphanage in India too, and then carried by a flight attendant on a Pan American Airways flight all the way to the United States, where a mom, a dad, and two older brothers were waiting to take her into their arms.
When I met her, she was returning to India, for the first time, thirty-four years later.
She was so looking forward to becoming a mother. It was all she could think about for a long time. All the same, in becoming a mother to an Indian girl, she was also looking back to her past, trying to fathom that which was hardest of all to fathom: Why was she abandoned, and why was her daughter? Why did India give up on so many of its girls?
The old mysteries began to come up in new ways. Who bore me? Why did she give me up? Rebecca did not know anything about her own birth parents, nor those of her daughter. She harbored no resentment either, nor suspicion.
“I am just more curious about my history and about where I came from,” she told me, in her typically sensible, unmawkish way. “It feels kind of like wanting to know the origins of the universe.”
She set out to learn as much as she could about herself. She took cheek swabs and put herself in a genetic data bank, on the off chance that she could find some biological kin that way. She sought out others like her—men and women who had been adopted from India by families in the United States. For an art project, she invited adult Indian adoptees to record their own stories. By the time she turned forty, in the summer of 2015, she planned to take her daughter to India regularly, so they could both be in touch with the country that created them.
It was one big quest to give herself a story, to answer the great who-am-I question. The trip to India seemed to make it more urgent, because sooner or later, she knew, her little girl would also ask: What’s my story, Mama, how did I get here?
The one thing that provided her some comfort—if it can be called that—was to discover the depth of how badly India sometimes treats its daughters. Over the years, Rebecca read how frequently female fetuses are aborted, and how girls are left quietly in the dead of night at railway stations and temple gates.
“It’s not about me” is how she put it. “It’s bigger than me. I don’t take it personally. I know it can happen.”
I had first made contact with Rebecca in 2010 on an email Listserv of parents of adoptive Indian children. I wanted to know what questions my girl might have one day and whether those questions would bring her any pain. I wanted to know—naïvely, you might think—how to help her. I came to really admire Rebecca’s cheerful, practical, and deeply empathetic outlook.
This book is very much an effort to understand the India that gave our daughters to us. For my part, becoming a parent changed the direction of this book entirely. It made me want to see India through the eyes of its young. It made the fault lines clearer.
In that sense, it is a love letter to my own girl. As Sly Stone would say, “Thank You (Falettineme Be Mice Elf Agin).”
With all the swerves of history
I cannot imagine your future
Would wish to dream it, see you
In your teens, as I saw my son,
Your already philosophical air
Rubbing against the speed of the city.
I no longer guess a future.
And do not know how we end
Nor where.
Though I know a story about maps, for you.
—From Michael Ondaatje’s “The Story”
A young Indian boy looks upward in Mumbai as he waits to sell statues of Bhimrao Ambedkar on Ambedkar’s death anniversary, December 6, 2013.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest debt is to the many women and men, boys and girls who let me into their lives and barrage them with questions year after year. It cannot be easy to be at the receiving end of a journalist’s excessive curiosity. I hope I have done justice to their stories. Any mistakes are mine alone.
A huge shout-out to Sarah Chalfant, my champion at the Wylie Agency. Not only did she believe in a half-baked book idea years ago, she repeatedly helped me sharpen it, nudged me gently when I needed it, and lit a fire under me exactly when it mattered. She has been the toughest, best backup that a writer could hope for. My thanks also to many others at the Wylie Agency who worked on my behalf over the years, including Celia Kokoris, Rebecca Nagel, Edward Orloff, and Nadia Wilson.
This book should have been finished long ago. I thank my editor, Jill Bialosky, for her patience and intellectual rigor. My thanks also to her assistants, Angie Shih and Maria Rogers, for tending to every detail; to Trent Duffy for careful copyedits; and to Edward Claris for his legal eye.
In Oakland, California, my writing didi Constance Hale took the garbled pages that I shared with her and helped me understand what I was trying to say and, at every iteration, say it better.
In Delhi, Mandakini Gahlot helped with reporting. In New York, Barbara Kean went through the manuscript with a fine-toothed comb, saving me from more errors than I care to remember.
Among my many colleagues and teachers over the years at The New York Times, thanks to Joe Lelyveld, Matt Purdy, Paul Fishleder, Ian Fisher, Susan Chira, Jill Abramson, Dean Baquet, Damon Darlin, Joe Kahn, Michael Slackman, Rick Gladstone, and Greg Winter, who kept urging me to have a “real” vacation, which did not involve working on this book. A special thanks to the amazing Nicole Bengiveno, for making me look presentable in the author photo.
In the Delhi bureau of the Times, my deepest thanks to Hari Kumar and P. J. Anthony, my gurus and most vital guides, from navigating the warrens of the Foreign Registration Office to climbing a glacier in the Himalayas.
A great tribe of journalists and writers across India schooled me and sustained me with laughter, cocktails, and kebabs. They include Lydia Polgreen, Candace Feit, Heather Timmons, Paul Beckett, Barkha Dutt, Randeep Ramesh, Rama Lakshmi, Suhasini Haidar, Emily Wax, Nilanjana Roy, Devangshu Datta, Mihir Sharma, Pankaj Pachauri, Pramila Phatarphekar, Subir Bhaumik, Monideepa Banerjie, Ruchir Joshi, Anurag Chaturvedi, Nandini Ramnath, Kavitha Kumar, Krishna Prasad, Yusuf Jameel, Muzamil Jaleel (including for one special hike), Mini Kapoor, Mala and Tejbir Singh, Sagarika Ghose, Bharat Desai, and Ajay Umat. My gratitude goes to Deepu Sebastian Edmond, Parvez, and Vijay Murthy for their help with reporting in Jh
arkhand. Thanks to Dayanita Singh for one exquisite summer in Saligao; Falguni Sarkar and Purba Chatterjee for offering their home in Kolkata; William and Anjali Bissell for dinners, walks, and eye-opening conversations; and Ashutosh Sharma and his crew at Sadhana Travels for ferrying me hither and yon at a moment’s notice.
My life in Delhi would have been unmanageable without a team of capable, gracious staff, chiefly Pan Singh, Chunni Lal, and Kiran Sewa. Also, through their eyes I saw every day what high aspirations they had for their children and how much they wanted their lives to be different from their own.
For teaching me about Indian history and politics, thanks to Ramachandra Guha, Mahesh Rangarajan, Yogendra Yadav, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Rajdeep Sardesai, and, specificially on Bihar politics, Shaibal Gupta. On matters economic, thanks to Kaushik Basu, Sonalde Desai, Rinku Murgai, Jishnu Das, Adarsh Kumar and Yamini Aiyar, Nandan Nilekani, and Abhijit Banerjee. The chapter on education would not have been written without guidance from Rukmini Bannerji and her colleagues at Pratham. To help me understand the Maoist conflict I am grateful to Rahul Pandita, Salman Ravi, Shubrangshu Choudhury, Gautam Navlakha, and Hasan Zulfiqar in the West Bengal police department. Julfikar Ali Manik, as courageous a journalist as he is generous, taught me everything about Bangladesh and agreed to a trip to Rangpur on a moment’s notice.
Thanks to friends who read various versions of these pages over the years and improved them greatly: Adrienne Johnson, Andrew Hsiao, Paul Elie, Raka Ray, Suketu Mehta, Ramachandra Guha, Tripti Lahiri, Shelley Thakral, Brij Kothari, and Naresh Fernandes (also for saving me years ago with chocolate chip cookies and walks in the park). My confidante and guide in pretty much everything, the super-smart Meenakshi Ganguly, read umpteen versions of nearly every chapter. Samar Halarnkar and Priya Ramani offered valuable advice at every stage of this project. Tsan Abrahamson had a very good tip.
Without my girls in Delhi, neither my daughter nor I would have ever felt truly at home in Nizamuddin: Ambika Nair, Menaka Guruswamy, and Tripti Lahiri.
My relatives in Calcutta—namely, Gautam Sen, Kalpana Sen, and Mitali Sen—generously shared their knowledge and love. I am especially grateful to my aunt Kalpana, for letting me run off on a reporting trip and selflessly stepping in to take care of my daughter, at a time when she was mourning her own mother’s death. In Delhi, my aunt Tapati Sen told me richly detailed stories of the Partition era.
My mother- and father-in-law, Hans and Marga van de Weerd, repeatedly volunteered to care for my daughter when I needed to work. Bernadette Joseph demanded that I finish the book and gave me her home for a long weekend writing retreat.
My parents, Sandip and Sipra Sengupta, made sure I am capable of making my own way in the world. Joe Wood reminded me that I belong in any world I choose. My sister, Sohini, and my cousin, Momita, are my anchors in times of joy and blinding grief. Their husbands, Chirag Menon and Gavin Hampson, keep spoiling me with love, music, and the best sirloin ever.
Finally, thanks to my husband, Hans van de Weerd, who asked no questions about how “the book” was going and let me descend into my writing cave nearly every weekend and every vacation, year after year. Our daughter tolerated my absences when she would much rather have played with me or danced to Lauryn Hill. As I was working through most of our most recent summer vacation together, she said (rightly with some exasperation), “C’mon, Mama. Just get done with it!” Thank you.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION: ASPIRATION, LIKE WATER
1. Some of the most intense effects of the emergency were felt by the poor in the slums of Delhi. It is best documented in Emma Tarlo, Unsettling Memories: Narratives of the Emergency in Delhi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). The political backdrop to the emergency is chronicled in Bipan Chandra, In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2003), while an extremely revealing insider’s account of the Indira Gandhi administration can be found in Indira Gandhi: The “Emergency” and Indian Democracy, by her onetime adviser P. N. Dhar (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000).
2. My father recalls that the Reserve Bank of India at the time restricted how much foreign currency one could take out of the country.
3. The phrase “city of dreadful night” is a coinage by Rudyard Kipling, who did not mean it as a compliment. I borrowed it in “A Walk in Calcutta,” my essay about Calcutta for the travel section of The New York Times, May 3, 2009, available at www.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/travel/03calcutta.html.
4. Wendy Doniger, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
5. The latest world population projections by the United Nations, released in July 2015, predict that by 2022, India and China will have roughly 1.4 billion people each; after that India will grow faster, reaching 1.5 billion by 2030. The projections are available at http://esa.un.org/unpd/wpp/publications/files/key_findings_wpp_2015.pdf. David Bloom, a Harvard University demographer, has written most persuasively and expansively about this notion, positing what benefits India can reap because of its demography and also what the challenges are.
6. The growth rates in India’s gross domestic product, or GDP, averaged between about 4 percent and nearly 10 percent between 1990 and 2014, as this chart shows: http://planningcommission.nic.in/data/datatable/0814/table_1.pdf. However, China and India were hardly comparable in economic terms. The per capita income of the average Indian, while growing steadily since 1991, was about $1570 in 2013, or less than one-fourth the per capita income of the Chinese, according to the World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/country/india).
7. Elisabeth Bumiller and Somini Sengupta, “Bush and India Reach Pact That Allows Nuclear Sales,” The New York Times, March 3, 2006, available at www.nytimes.com/2006/03/03/international/asia/03prexy.html.
8. Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Jim Yardley, “Countering China, Obama Backs India for U.N. Council,” The New York Times, November 8, 2010, available at www.nytimes.com/2010/11/09/world/asia/09prexy.html?_r=0.
9. McKinsey Global Institute, the economics research arm of the consultancy firm, concluded, “Income levels will almost triple, and India will climb from its position as the twelfth-largest consumer market today to become the world’s fifth-largest consumer market by 2025.” This May 2007 report, “The ‘Bird of Gold’: The Rise of India’s Consumer Market,” is available at www.mckinsey.com/insights/asia-pacific/the_bird_of_gold.
10. The American urge to see India in its own image dates back to the early days of Indian independence. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the U.S. ambassador to India between 1973 and 1975, describes it like this in his rich diplomatic memoir A Dangerous Place, written with Suzanne Weaver (New York: Little, Brown, 1978): “India was going to be like America, and America in turn was going to be like India,” he wrote of the mood in the 1950s and early 1960s. “An innocent enough affair of the heart you might suppose. And yet its end brought great bitterness in India, and there was little for an ambassador to do in its aftermath but wait until the Indians were prepared to settle for a more traditional relationship of diplomacy rather than tutelage.”
11. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (London: Jonathan Cape, 1981). I have read it repeatedly and been enriched, moved, and entertained by it every time. My term “noonday’s children” is a hat tip to him.
12. Nandan Nilekani, Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century (New Delhi: Penguin India, 2008).
13. United Nations figures available at https://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=united+states+of+america&d=WHO&f=MEASURE_CODE%3AWHS9_88%3BCOUNTRY_ISO_CODE%3AUSA.
14. The World Bank defines abject poverty worldwide as $1.25 a day, adjusted for purchasing power parity. According to its latest data, from 2011, 23.6 percent of the population were in that category. Data available at http://povertydata.worldbank.org/poverty/country/IND.
15. Some sixty-five years after the partition of British India, Guneeta Singh Bhalla, a young Berkeley physicist and the granddaughter of a Partition surviv
or from India, initiated a remarkable oral history project to capture the stories of Partition survivors and preserve them online. Known as the 1947 Partition Archive, it describes itself as “a people-powered non-profit organization dedicated to documenting, preserving and sharing eye witness accounts from all ethnic, religious and economic communities affected by the Partition of British India in 1947.” See my “Potent Memories from a Divided India,” The New York Times, August 13, 2013, available at www.nytimes.com/2013/08/14/arts/potent-memories-from-a-divided-india.html?_r=0. The best nonfiction work that I have read on Partition and its aftermath is Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000).
16. Granville Austin, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 33.
17. Sunil Khilnani’s book The Idea of India (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998) is a groundbreaking work examining this singular trajectory.
18. Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (London: Penguin, 2014), table A.5: Time Trends.
19. The World Bank: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.2DAY; also see Perspectives on Poverty in India: Stylized Facts from Survey Data (Washington, D.C.: The World Bank, 2011).
20. Ramachandra Guha, India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy (New Delhi: Picador India, 2007).
“HI-FI”: HOW TO OUTRUN FATE
1. John F. Richards, “The Opium Industry in British India,” The Indian Economic and Social History Review 39 (2002): 149–80, available at http://ier.sagepub.com/content/39/2-3/149.extract. Arvind N. Das discusses peasant rebellions in twentieth-century Bihar in Agrarian Movements in India (London: Frank Cass, 1982). Prakash Kumar offers a fascinating history of indigo production in Bihar: “Facing Competition: The Story of Indigo Experiments in Colonial India, 1897–1920,” PhD diss., Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004, available at https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/7627/kumar_prakash_200412_phd.pdf.
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