India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (10 page)

I remain fascinated by how Babu views the world around him, especially in a city such as Mumbai, where the divisions between the haves and have-nots are so stark. Doesn’t it frustrate him to be surrounded by so much wealth? When he’s driving past Anil Mabani’s two-billion-dollar skyscraper palace or watching the banking crowd feast on fresh salmon at Olive, doesn’t it make him jealous?

Over lunch one day in a greasy Chinese joint along Colaba’s main strip, I put the question to him directly.

He places his fork on the table and thinks a moment. Slowly, he works the chicken chow mein around his mouth. (Our lunches are exceptions to his usual veg diet.) He eyes squint ever so slightly with deliberation, as if he’s trying to work out if my question is somehow more complex than it appears.

‘I am not jealous with them. They are more studied than me.’

It is both an answer and not an answer, a politician’s response. Could he expand?

‘Maybe they come from a royal family, that’s why they have a good house. Maybe they have black money. Who knows?’

The truth of the matter doesn’t seem to bother him. He assumes no relation between his own lot and that of Mumbai’s moneyed classes. The two – the loaded and lacking – might be living cheek and jowl, but, in this driver’s mind at least, they are occupying different orbits.

‘Doesn’t it make you feel angry?’ I press, placing my fork on the table as well.

It suddenly feels as though we’re sparring, as if a duel with pronged cutlery is about to kick off.

‘No, I don’t feel angry,’ he replies, part indignant, part confused. ‘Why should I?’

It falls to me to wonder whether his puzzlement is genuine or if there’s more to his response. ‘Because of the unfairness of it all!’ I want to shout. ‘Because your kids go hungry while theirs grow fat!’ But I hold back. If he can’t see it, then I can’t explain it to him.

Maybe jealousy is too localised an emotion to feel about people
so far removed from his own affairs, from the world of Ganesh Murty Nagar? Perhaps envy requires relational proximity to foster? Towards his neighbours – for their new extensions or their foreign remittances – its sting is stronger. But for those across the invisible wall, the visible divide, that separates India’s rich from its poor? No, it’s senseless, a futile waste of precious energy. It would be like me harbouring a hatred against Neil Armstrong for walking on the moon instead of me. What’s the point? The logic makes sense, but something about it – the impassivity, the resignation, the detached acquiescence – still doesn’t feel right.

I try another tack: ‘What do you think the best thing about being rich is?’

The tension dissipates. He chuckles and picks up his fork again. ‘The best thing is – what you call it? – a stylish life. Without doing anything. Just attending phone calls. Not doing big, hard work.’ He traps a straggle of stir-fried noodles and searches out a piece of chicken around which to wind them. ‘Not like my work. Running in the traffic all day. And police harassment for the parking. And dying in the pollution. I hate those things actually.’ I ask if he’d like a job in a big company. He says he would. The trappings of a ‘good position’ appeal to him particularly. ‘I’d like a car and a driver and a good flat along with the maid.’ He looks wistful and then a smidgen dejected. ‘But that is not possible because my education is low.’ He despises ‘the maths subject’ especially. ‘I don’t want to kill my mind by giving interest in those things.’ He bites down decisively on the noodle-wrapped fork and begins to chew.

Several months pass before I am back in Mumbai. When I return, Babu tells me he has been thinking about our previous conversation. ‘About the jobs and all.’ We’re in the lift going up to his boss’s apartment block. I’m staying there temporarily, borrowing his spare room as well as his car. Babu has an hour to kill. I suggest he comes in.

The flat is on the twenty-eighth floor. It is the maid’s domain. Babu rarely enters, spending his days in the basement car park instead. He wanders across the room towards the floor-to-ceiling window. Mumbai soars up towards him, India’s Manhattan. The
double-glazing and altitude combine to seal off the space from the world around it. Free from car horns and chaos, it is like living in a light aircraft: semi-suspended, both literally and figuratively. For Babu, whose home is down to earth in every sense, this is good society living in the flesh.

After a few minutes, he pulls himself away from the window and takes a seat at the large dining table. The piece of furniture, I find myself thinking, would fill half of Babu’s house.

‘So I’ve been thinking’, he tells me, ‘driver is not such a good job.’

He explains his rationale: the ‘much less salary’, the long hours, the lack of stability (his boss’s secondment is due to finish within the year), the risk of accident. He returns to the issue of status. ‘A driver is just like a small people. He is just an ordinary man. He is nothing.’ He describes how his driver colleagues steal petrol from the tank and use their employers’ cars for private work, cruising here and there and ‘putting their mind to doing the sex with the madam or maid’.

‘Are you thinking about a career change then, Babu?’ I enquire, wondering where this is all leading.

He shrugs. He mentions again his lack of education. Inspired by his friend’s brother, he’d once thought about applying for a job on a P&O cruise liner. But it would mean being away for ten months a year. He didn’t feel he could leave his parents for so long. ‘You only have one dad and mum once in life.’ He’s also thought about trying his hand as a kitchen helper or a cook. He has seen the physique of restaurant employees. ‘They have got a good body and big muscles because they have good food to eat inside.’ The food is free, he thinks. If he had such a job, he would eat his way through the menu. ‘From a young age, I have wanted to be a muscles man.’ Realistically, though, he will probably have to become a security guard or a lift operator once his driving days are over. ‘Or maybe a gangster.’ It’s a joke, I think.

He stops tapping. He’s been mulling over one idea, he confesses. But he doesn’t think it will work.

‘Come on, Babu,’ I chide him. ‘Tell me. What is it?’

He shifts in his seat, uncharacteristically shy. ‘Lately, I am thinking very much about the foreigners’ guidance actually.’

His voice betrays a lack of confidence. I tell him that I think it sounds like a great idea. His face lights up.

‘Yes, I am liking very much one day to help with the tours and all.’

His excitement grows. He knows all the places ‘for the sightseeing’. And the hotels need English-speaking drivers.

‘So how would you go about it?’

‘I would have, like, ten cars. And with them I would have drivers who are speaking English very good. When tourists are arriving in Bombay [Mumbai], we would be taking them for the sightseeing and for the heritage tours and for the shopping. They want to know about that thing. So I want to guide them to each and every spot.’

‘Do you have a name for the company?’ I ask.

He doesn’t, as yet. The name will come when the cars come, he says, as if it were an automotive component. And there lies the rub. He has no money of his own to invest. Even if he did, cars are like elephants. ‘I can buy an elephant, but can I pay for his food? He has big stomachs.’

First he would need a ‘jak’, or contract, with the big hotel chains and the large ‘travels’ (travel agencies).

‘Could you go to the bank and ask for a loan?’

He shakes his head. He has no collateral. ‘I am a strong human being of more than six foot. That’s all I can say.’ I agree, that might not wash with a bank manager. Anyhow, he has ‘a little panic in his heart’ about borrowing money.

His best option, as he sees it, is to find a private investor. He has a picture of the sort of individual who might help. ‘Like, some rich guy or a normal person who has money but doesn’t have knowledge about how to use the money.’ If that fails, he’ll try borrowing someone else’s car. That way he could possibly raise enough money to make a down payment for a car of his own. ‘Then from one car to two cars to three cars and many cars will come. My wish is there to do.’

The alarm on his phone rings. He should go. His boss needs picking up. It’s been good to talk, he tells me, patting his pocket for the car keys. He ambles towards the door and heads back down to the basement.

The coffee comes in a small white disposable cup, hot and steaming. I hold it to my lips and blow. It tastes strong and grainy, and nearly scalds my tongue. The heat mocks the cup’s thin plastic casing, which bulges and bends in my grip as though squirming in pain. Fingers burning, I put the drink down hurriedly. A splash of the dark brown liquid spills onto Nitesh’s self-assembly MDF table.

Nitesh, a branch manager at micro-finance firm Svasti, calls over the barefoot cleaner. The elderly lady lays aside her short-handled sweeper’s broom, picks out a dirty rag from her bucket and wipes the spilt coffee away. I thank her, but she shows no acknowledgment, immediately crouching back down on her haunches and resuming her sweeping. To the swish-swish-swish of her grass broom, Nitesh boots up his netbook computer.

We are sitting in Svasti’s headquarters in Mumbai’s Andheri East district. Tucked away on the ground floor of a drab apartment block, the office squeezes into a single room. It is decorated with peeling paint and dark mildew stains. In the entrance stands a small counter. A tall glass panel with two semi-circular boreholes provides a barrier between customer and teller. The rear of the room is fitted with several desks, each the size of a primary-school classroom table. An Internet router clings like a slug to the far wall. It is sprouting black computer wires. Three scratched
motorbike helmets and a couple of well-worn rucksacks lie dumped on a fibreboard desktop. Plastic chairs are stacked high in the corner, their crooked legs slotted just so, as if each were sitting on the knee of the one below.

The room evinces a careful administrative hand, despite the apparent jumble. Lever-arch files teeter from narrow shelving. Neatly written descriptions mark their spines: ‘Deepak processing files’, ‘Collection Docs’, ‘Santosh: Cancel Files’. On the main wall hangs a white melamine noticeboard. On it, the work rota for the week is laid out in square grids. The far left-hand column reveals the names of Deepak and Santosh within a list of fourteen CRMs (‘Customer Relationship Managers’, as I later learn). Just enough wall space remains beside it for a small poster. ‘Know Your Notes’, the title reads in bold capitals. Illustrative graphics below show how to spot fake intaglio printing and counterfeit watermarks.

The universal sing-song sound of Windows booting up brings my attention back to Nitesh. In his late twenties, he is one of Svasti’s oldest and longest-serving employees. He reads through a set of PowerPoint slides verbatim. ‘Set up in September 2008. First loan dispersed on 9 October 2008. Total loan portfolio Rupees 124 lakhs (
c.
$US280,000). Default, zero.’

He shows me a map of Andheri East, one of the city’s poorer suburbs. An elongated circle with the letter ‘A’ identifies our current location. Around it is drawn a jagged blue line. The demarcated area measures five square kilometres. Two hundred and thirty eight slums are within its contours. Svasti has identified roughly half as viable markets for its loans, which start at ten thousand rupees a piece.

One of the slides in particular catches my eye. When Nitesh is finished, I ask him to click back to it. The page in question reveals several multi-coloured pie charts. Each delineates a particular characteristic of the loan recipients. All are women. Most have large families, four offspring being the approximate average. Roughly a fifth describe their primary profession as ‘housewife’, with a slightly smaller percentage working as
seamstresses, caterers or domestic help. The formally ‘employed’ occupy by far the thinnest slice of the pie.

Away from the skyscraper offices that dominate the Mumbai skyline and the ‘boom India’ storylines, the country’s economy remains a largely informal affair. More than nine in ten (ninety-three per cent) of working-age Indians are employed off the books. That translates into roughly three hundred and sixty million working-age adults with no regular salary, no labour rights and none of the benefits that come with a signed contract.

Few are unemployed, however. As Gopinath observed and my time with Babu illustrated, Indians work hard. In many cases, they are compelled to do so. India’s industrial sector is not without its sweatshops and near slave-like treatment. No one bar the most unfortunate bonded labourer is technically compelled to work under such conditions. Presumably the alternatives are even more appalling: hunger, homelessness and the continuation of a wretched life.

Plastering the charge of workplace abuse onto the informal sector as a whole would be misleading, however. Small family-owned businesses abound. One-man bands proliferate. The Mumbai slum of Dharavi, said to be Asia’s largest, is reckoned to house more than fifteen thousand single-room factories. In a good year, ‘Slum Inc’ (as one headline writer put it) generates revenues in excess of eight hundred million dollars.

In the past, India’s economy has always been a top-down affair. Under the British, the Crown’s representatives dominated and directed every step in industrial and trade affairs. Space for private ingenuity was negligible and economic independence nil. Post-Independence, the job of industrial overseer fell to elected government officials. It was the politicians who bequeathed licences, set production targets and delegated the management of state-owned companies. Back then, the idea of slum dwellers striking out for themselves would have been preposterous. According to Nitesh, the loan-maker, that is precisely what is unfolding now.

The branch manager invited me to see for myself. It’s collection day. Aniket, a junior salesperson with spiky hair and hips as
narrow as a waifish model’s, can take me. Nitesh hands me one of the worn helmets and packs me off.

Most of Aniket’s week is taken up with forming women into lending groups and registering first-time loans. New to the job, he has a list of ambitious monthly targets. He missed last month’s, he tells me. He took ten days off to get married.

Armed with his accounts ledger, he sets off on the office’s black Bajaj motorbike. I ride pillion. For a kilometre or two, we weave between the traffic. Then, on reaching a T-junction, Aniket ignores the opportunities to turn left and right and heads straight across the road. On the other side, he mounts the kerb, driving along the pavement, waving pedestrians aside before suddenly ducking down a narrow alleyway.

Fifty yards later, we emerge from the walled walkway into open space. Greenery is rare in this impossibly overpopulated city. Yet for the next twenty minutes we cruise along dirt track and country roads, through woods and empty grasslands, past boys playing cricket and pigs snorting in the mud.

The journey ends in a slum community at the bottom of two neatly bordered rice fields. Unit Seven comprises a hamlet of concrete-box shacks climbing up the slope of a small rise. A woman in a cotton slip is laying a cement step beside the snaking footpath that serves as the slum entrance. The atmosphere is tranquil, almost village-like. The view across the forested valley is uninterrupted. It feels like an experiment in urban resettlement, as though Mumbai’s town planners had squared off a corner of unregulated shanty and deposited it wholesale in the countryside.

We walk down the footpath, passing open doorways, inquisitive chickens and children playing the mud. At a modest three-room house, identical to those squashed up against it, we stop and knock. Aniket issues a brief word of welcome to Manjula, the young Tamil lady who opens the door. Then he takes his seat on a tatty sofa and pulls out his accounts book.

His style is perfunctory and pragmatic, his tone not so much impolite as abrupt. He is obviously a regular. Coming every week, the young salesperson sees no reason for chitchat. The women are
equally taciturn. They hand over the money, see it counted and leave. As financial transactions go, it all feels very clinical.

Over the next fifteen minutes, four groups of women file in and out of Manjula’s cramped front room. Each leaves with their payment slip stamped, another week down on the fifty-month repayment schedule. We repeat the exercise in four similar communities in and around the semi-rural Adarsh Nagar district.

On every occasion, the women are waiting patiently. Each is part of a ‘limited liability group’ of five, the idea being that each individual member vouches for the others. Once or twice, someone is missing. ‘She’s gone back to her village,’ one member explains. Or, ‘Her mother fell suddenly sick.’ Aniket doesn’t raise an eyebrow. He doesn’t need to. The absent person has always left their contribution with another of the five. Not one payment is missed the whole day.

At each stop, I ask about the use of the loan. Nitesh had assured me that the money was borrowed with ‘productive purposes’ in mind. Svasti had entitled its product ‘Pragati’ (meaning ‘Development’ in Hindi) for that reason.

The answers that come back are varied. One woman, Laxshmi, runs a ‘lady wear’ shop. She buys the underwear at the wholesale market in Malad and sells it back in the slum at a small profit. Another, Gaolachi, buys cheap metallic hairclips, paints a simple floral design on the back and hawks them in batches of a dozen at Goregaon station. Kanti, meanwhile, a widow in her early forties, runs a small corner store out of her house. Half the profit she makes goes into building her stock of washing powder, soap, sweets, biscuits and pre-paid phone cards. The other half goes to repaying the Svasti loan.

Micro-finance in India has come in for heavy criticism of late. Its opponents claim the interest rates are ‘usurious’ (Svasti charges fifteen per cent, around average for the industry). They point to borrowers in rural states committing suicide. They accuse micro-loan providers of growing rich at the expense of the poor. No doubt, such examples exist. India is a big place and micro-finance a nascent, under-regulated industry. Yet in Andheri, at least, I
witnessed no evidence of foul play. Nitesh did not have the air of an unscrupulous money-lender, nor Aniket that of his burly henchman. Likewise, the women claimed to have been liberated by the loans made out to them, not subjugated. The alternatives to micro-credit, it should be said, are credit at exorbitant interest or no credit at all. Each of the women entered the agreement aware of the repayment burden. And all welcomed the extra income it had helped them generate.

Nowhere is this more true than in Gautan Nagar, the slum abutting the gates of Film City. The untidy collection of wood and concrete huts plays home to a community of dalits, untouchables. Aniket refers to the tumbledown township as ‘No Electricity City’. A large banner sporting the bespectacled face of Dr Ambedkar, champion of the dalit cause and author of the national constitution, stretches across the approach road. Gautan Nagar’s men mostly work as part-time ‘setting wallahs’, constructing backdrops for the Bollywood movies created in the adjacent studios. Their wives supplement their family incomes as seamstresses, making and repairing costumes for the actors and actresses across the fence. The hillside shacks hum to the sound of sewing machines, many of which are financed through Svasti loans. I peer through a window glazed with chicken wire. A woman is sewing the hem of a skirt. Her foot presses rhythmically on the pedal. ‘No power, you see,’ Aniket explains.

Gautan Nagar marks our last stop. In the film lot opposite, a Marathi-language movie is being shot. We crawl through a hole in the perimeter fence to take a closer look. The director is barking through a megaphone. ‘Action,’ he shouts, prompting an actor dressed as a gangster to approach a waiting car. The window is open, the engine idling. The criminal-looking character passes a briefcase to an unseen accomplice in the driving seat. The engine revs and the cars speeds off. ‘Cut,’ shouts the plump director, who’s wearing a sleeveless Puffa jacket despite the heat. ‘Let’s roll it again. One more time.’

We return to Svasti’s cramped branch in Adheri, this time passing the huge government dairy in the woods behind Film City.
Cows moo, not four hundred yards from where Indian blockbusters are being put together.

Back at base, Aniket counts his takings for the day. He carefully notes the figure in his account book. ‘Rupees 24,150.’ The young sales agent is entrusted with a similar amount from two of his colleagues. He sets off on his motorbike to deposit the sum in the bank. I warn him not to misplace the bulging rucksack. He laughs, mimicking the macho walk of the briefcase-carrying gangster from the film set.

The young newlywed mounts his bike, this time his own. It’s black and flash, a Hero Honda CB2. Babu would approve. He sees the admiring look on my face. ‘Brand new,’ he chirps. It must be worth a year’s salary. I ask how he paid for it. ‘A loan, of course,’ he replies, shouting over the roar of the twin exhausts. ‘From the bank.’