The End of Karma Read online

  SOMINI SENGUPTA

  The End of Karma

  HOPE AND FURY

  AMONG INDIA’S YOUNG

  W. W. Norton & Company / New York / London

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  For my daughter, with love and thanks

  CONTENTS

  Introduction: Aspiration, Like Water

  “Hi-Fi”: How to Outrun Fate

  Gates: Keeping Out the Lives of Others

  Guerrilla: Paying for Broken Promises

  Strongman: Aspiration Gets into Politics

  Facebook Girls: Speaking Up, Testing Democracy’s Conscience

  Apostates: When They Dared to Love

  Curse: A Father’s Fears, a Daughter’s Dreams

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Nervy, glowering, your daughter

  wipes the teaspoons, grows another way.

  —ADRIENNE RICH,

  “Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law”

  The center was not holding. . . . Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together.

  —JOAN DIDION,

  “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”

  The End of Karma

  Author as a child in India.

  INTRODUCTION

  Aspiration, Like Water

  By the time I turn eight, with a cake from Flurys pâtisserie on Park Street, my parents have hawked some wedding gold, hustled for passports, and procured three plane tickets out of Calcutta.

  It is September 1975, steamy monsoon, when rain clouds break late in the day and democracy comes to a grinding halt. By now, our prime minister, Indira Gandhi, has declared a state of emergency for the first time in the history of independent India, which means that newspapers arrive some mornings with an empty front page, dissidents go to jail, and the men of the slums are enlisted in an aggressive government-sponsored birth control program. In exchange for vasectomies, they are sometimes offered a patch of urban slum. Sterilization becomes the most potent symbol of Mrs. Gandhi’s emergency rule—and the closest our country comes to totalitarianism.1

  The emergency forms the backdrop for our move. My parents’ decision to leave is material, not political. By this time, inflation has hit 30 percent. Refugees from the war over East Pakistan crowd into our city, erecting vast shanties of tin and tarp across from my grandmother’s house. Every day come new corruption scandals about politicians and civil servants. Strikes shut down Calcutta.

  My parents are not among the country’s deprived. Baba is a midlevel civil servant. Ma teaches math. They make enough to rent a two-room flat of our own, but not enough to splurge at Mocambo as often as they would like. They can pay for my piano lessons, but they’re not posh enough to become members of the Calcutta Club.

  Their frustrations are the frustrations of what is, in 1975, a tiny urban middle class. Baba gets tired of hustling for a tank of cooking gas. He scours the city for Horlicks, the malted milk powder that is supposed to fortify a skinny, sickly child like me, but which becomes more and more scarce as inflation rises and traders start hoarding. He can rarely afford a pack of Rothmans, his preferred smoke. One night, walking home along Deshapriya Park, he steps over the corpse of a rickshaw puller whom local thugs call a police informant. Calcutta, that steamy metropolis of Victoria and jazz, is fast becoming what a future prime minister would call a “dying city.”

  I imagine Baba and Ma whispering to each other in the dark, while I sleep: Is this what you call home?

  My parents want more. They want out.

  And so, late one night, long past my bedtime, the three of us board a whirring, air-conditioned British Airways jet, waving and waving to an army of relatives who remain behind. My parents are allowed to bring with them the princely sum of eight U.S. dollars each, thanks to Indian banking regulations at the time.2

  My parents don’t know how they will make it so far from home. They know only that they will not make the more conventional journey to Britain. Baba is convinced that Indians clean other people’s toilets in Britain, which is his way of saying that they do dirty, dehumanizing work—that they are, in effect, untouchables. We will not clean toilets, Baba insists. We will go to the New World. I have no idea why he believes Indians don’t clean other people’s toilets in the New World. But he does, which is why we opt to freeze to death instead.

  We land first in a town called Selkirk in the flat cold middle of Canada, where my uncle, my father’s older brother, has come before us. We squeeze into his family’s apartment, which is across the road from a mental asylum. Only a field of snow separates the hubris on our side from the madness on theirs.

  Every year, Ma, Baba, and I pack up and move. We settle into a different apartment, a different school, a different city, until, eventually, we pack up our autumn gold ’76 Ford LTD and drive southward across the continent. We stop in Minneapolis, Salt Lake City, the Petrified Forest, Las Vegas. Motel after motel after motel. What are we chasing? I don’t have the courage to ask. I am told only that there are palm trees in California and friends from Calcutta.

  In my memory, my parents are unmoored and happy. They have a new baby, my sister, daughter of the New World.

  East of Los Angeles, on the banks of rushing Interstate 10, we buy a house in a suburb of strivers. Our street is lined with identical L-shaped houses with jutting-out double garages, sloped roofs, oak trees out front. We have avocado green “wall-to-wall” carpeting and a calla lily that someone before us has planted by the door. Our neighbors are secretaries and schoolteachers—whites mostly, some Chicanos, a handful of Japanese-Americans who never speak publicly of the internment during the Second World War. We are the only Indians for miles. And so the questions thrown at me are banal—nothing terrible, just foolish.

  “Do you eat monkey brain?”

  “Hey, Gandhi!”

  “What’s that red dot mean?”

  Et cetera.

  Daughter of the Old World, I tell myself to keep my eyes on the road ahead. Draw a thick velvet curtain over memory. Dillydally, look back, and you’re likely to stumble and fall.

  This is good guidance, except that nearly every other summer, during school holidays, I am ferried back to Calcutta to commune with the past. I no longer know how to respond when a barefoot child on Park Street tugs at my American clothes, wanting coins. I cringe when Ma bargains with the hollow, barefoot rickshaw pullers. When the electricity goes out, which it does every day, because there’s a shortage of power, the ceiling fans stop rasping and the air gets choking hot. What I would have known how to handle, had I grown up there, I no longer know how to handle. As I get older, the Indian oddities are joined by prohibitions: Don’t go to the park by yourself. Don’t wear shorts. Don’t open the fridge when menstruating. Don’t touch the untouchable. There are so many rules, more because I’m a girl. They are stultifying. They make me want to run back home.

  Except that coming home to California is also awkward. How do I explain a summer in the City of Dreadful Night to friends who have spent their holiday listening to Olivia Newton-John?3

  This toing and froing, this explaining to one side and then the other, demands considerable dexterity—and occasionally fibs. When Mrs. Gandhi lifts the state of emergency in 1977, only to be ousted in the elections that follow, her political rival and successor, Morarji Desai, appears on 60 Minutes to extol the virtues of drinking his own urine. It is ancient Vedic practice, he says on prime-time American television. The next morning, I feign a bellyache and skip school. “Indians drink their own pee?” This is not a question I want to deal with during recess.
r />   Perhaps this is when my parents’ question starts to become mine: Is this what you call home?

  For my parents, the question doesn’t recede. They just roll up their sleeves and re-create the home they left behind, and, unlike me, they seem to know exactly what that requires. By the time I am in high school, they and their Calcutta friends bring over their most vital piece of home: Ma Durga, the mother goddess herself, who arrives at Los Angeles International Airport, all ten arms intact. Made of plaster of paris on the edge of Calcutta’s most storied red-light district, Durga is stashed away in a friend’s garage in another Southern California suburb, only to be brought out every fall and worshipped with ululations and prayers. A friend of my parents, a Brahmin by blood right, performs the service. Baba prepares the offering: an enormous vat of slow-cooked, chili-bathed mutton.

  I worship other goddesses. I spend hours in front of the mirror trying to feather my hair like Farrah Fawcett. My hair is too wiry to feather like Farrah Fawcett’s. I try to brush it like Donna Summer’s glossy, wavy tresses. But it is too unruly. My hair is a mess, a daily burden. The part of me I hate the most.

  Ma’s advice is to tame it with oil, which is sensible, except that greasy hair will earn me about as many social points in high school as talk of drinking pee.

  Throughout the 1980s, news of home comes on flimsy, blue, thrice-folded, international aerograms. There’s no kerosene in the market, relatives write; the government has banned Coca-Cola; so-and-so’s son is also going to America. India’s economy crawls at an average of just over 3 percent a year through the decade: Hindu rate of growth, people call it. Occasionally, and only for the most urgent of matters, comes a crackling, rushed phone call. We all speak very loudly, as though our voices have to carry across the ocean. “What? We can’t hear you. What did you say?” is how the conversations often go. I learn of my grandfather’s death this way. Baba lights the ritual fire in our laundry room; it’s the only part of the house where there’s no wall-to-wall avocado green carpet.

  Nostalgia and desire swim in opposite currents in my parents’ lives. They cling to a country they left during the rains in 1975, while India churns.

  I’m a high school senior in 1984, the year Prince releases Purple Rain. That fall, Mrs. Gandhi is shot dead by her Sikh bodyguards, which prompts deadly attacks against Sikhs across India in one of the worst incidents of communal violence in independent India.

  The Berlin Wall collapses the year after I graduate from college. Nelson Mandela, whose freedom struggle shapes the way I look at the world, is let out of jail. Our neighbors tie yellow ribbons around their trees, as America goes to war in the Persian Gulf. Global oil prices soar as a result, sending India to the edge of a foreign exchange crisis. Officials in New Delhi crack open the state-led economy. They ease government restrictions on the private sector. They do it out of necessity. They do it quietly, making no announcements, because they fear unrest. This paves the way for changes that can barely be imagined at the time. Eventually, this also paves the way for a psychic shift among Indians who come of age in the years that follow: they come to believe that they can write their own destinies, that they are not defined by the past, that they live in an age that I begin to understand as the end of karma.

  I try to find my place in the world. I work in a blues bar. I host a radio show. I try my hand at community organizing. Nothing quite satisfies, until I land in a newsroom. This is where I discover I can make a living toing and froing, poking my head into one world, then another, having to belong to none. Cognitive dissonance becomes my travel mate. I become a journalist.

  I am a fish in water. Home.

  Also, I chop off my hair.

  The Bhagavad Gita, a dialogic sermon within the Mahabharata, the two-thousand-year-old Hindu epic, offers three paths to liberation. One path is through devotion. Another is through knowledge. The last is through karma, which, according to scholars of Sanskrit, roughly translates as the merits (or demerits) that derive from the deeds of one’s previous lives. The physical body disintegrates after death, but the bundle of accumulated karma follows each being into her next life, where she might be reborn as a human being again, or a bird—or maybe move on to the realm of the gods.

  By this theory, each creature is born with a distinct karma, based on the actions of earlier lives. The earthworm’s karma is to break down the soil. The tiger’s karma is to scour the jungle for prey. And in the peculiar and degrading logic of the Indian caste system, the Brahmin’s karma is to study scripture, the warrior’s is to fight, the sweeper’s is to collect waste.

  But one’s role on Earth is not entirely predestined, according to this philosophy. Free will matters. You can choose to be an honest, hardworking warrior or a deceitful, slothful warrior. How you carry out your predestined role has a bearing on where you end up in your next life. Many lifetimes of karma can shape how you ended up where you are.

  Hinduism allows you to wipe out bad karma too. Yoga goes a long way in exfoliating the demerits of a previous life, for instance. So does offering food and drink to a Brahmin, as does deep, unbreakable faith. For all these caveats that temper strength, though, karma remains a potent force in the ancient texts. Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Hinduism, offers one explanation: “karma ex machina explains what cannot otherwise be justified.”4

  In the title of this book, I am using “karma” in its colloquial sense—as destiny. But I also invoke its richer meaning. I mean that the demands of India’s young are pushing India to break free of its past. They are no longer willing to put up with their lot. They are also, profoundly, changing the destiny of their country.

  In 2005, exactly thirty years after I left as a child, I came back to set up home in India. I was the first reporter of Indian descent to be appointed New Delhi bureau chief for The New York Times.

  I would be dishonest if I told you this was an easy position to be in. I felt enormous pressure, probably most of it self-imposed. I told myself I had to work harder than those who came before me, never say no to the demands of editors, cover everything. I worked all the time. I worried all the time that I wasn’t doing enough.

  When I arrived, India was in the midst of a historic turnaround. It was poised to be the youngest country in the world—ever.

  With a population of one billion, destined to overtake China in a few years, India had become a noisy, crowded nursery in a graying world: the vast majority of its people were under the age of thirty-five. But unlike the time I left, when they were seen as the wretched of the Earth, by the mid-2000s, India’s young were seen as its crowning asset. Also, to India’s advantage, the very shape of the Indian population was changing. The fertility rate was plummeting, with the average Indian woman bearing 2.6 children in 2010, down from nearly 6 children in 1960. Over time, India would have far fewer children to care for than ever before—and many more working-age adults—yielding what scholars were calling “a demographic dividend.”5

  Moreover, the economic reforms that began in 1991 had uncorked entrepreneurial energies at home and opened the market for all kinds of goods from abroad. Economic growth rates accelerated, peaking at close to 10 percent by 2007.6 It was predicted that by 2020, India’s economy would grow faster than China’s. This begat tremendous exuberance among the Indian elite, exemplified by a piece that caught my eye in 2009, in the Hindustan Times, one of the capital’s most popular English-language daily papers. The article reported that the Indian economy was projected to swell that year, with an illustration of a bare, flexed arm, the kind one might see in a logo for a men’s gym. “Higher Pace, More Muscle,” read the headline.

  These twin developments—a demographic shift amid economic reforms—became the defining elements of what everyone around me referred to as the New India.

  It came against the backdrop of another crucial shift: India was realigning its place among nations.

  In 1955, as a young man, my father had stood in a thick crowd to see Nikita Khrushchev appear in central Calcutta al
ongside India’s founding prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. It was the height of the Cold War. The Soviet premier pledged support for newly independent India and used the stage to excoriate the West. The New York Times editorialized ominously: “Mr. Nehru’s toleration of Soviet anti-Western attacks on Indian soil have aligned him so closely with Soviet policies as to put a large question mark behind his professed neutrality.”

  The speeches of neither Khrushchev nor Nehru could sustain my father. Asthmatic and frail, he passed out in the crowd. His father had to carry him home.

  Fifty years later, in Delhi, I sat with notebook in hand at the sixteenth-century sandstone fort called Purana Qila to cover the India visit of President George W. Bush. The fort was brilliantly illuminated. Members of the country’s political and business elite listened proudly as Bush pledged American support for this fast-growing nation, going as far as to recognize India as a nuclear power, and as such, a legitimate member of the world’s most powerful private club.7

  His successor, Barack Obama, came in 2010 and endorsed India’s desire for a permanent seat at the global table of high power, the United Nations Security Council. “In Asia and around the world, India is not simply emerging,” Obama said in a speech to Parliament. “India has emerged.” Indian parliamentarians howled with delight. It seemed as though they all wanted to kiss him.8

  Obama came again in 2015. He spoke to an audience made up largely of young people. “So young Indians like you,” he said, “aren’t just going to define the future of this nation, you’re going to shape the world.”

  From the moment I arrived in India in 2005, I would hear—from both Indian and American officials—how vital the relationship between these two unlikely democracies was. The United States, once suspicious of India’s leftist leanings, had come to regard it as a rising strategic bulwark against a powerful China. The United States wished to be a handmaiden to India’s ascent. It helped that India represented a large, lucrative market for American goods. And throughout the 2000s, American companies flocked to India to peddle everything from warplanes to Walmart outlets. Millions of young Indians were hungry for things that were previously out of reach: cell phones, high-rise apartments, cars. McKinsey & Company, the global consultancy firm, predicted in a report breathlessly called “The ‘Bird of Gold’ ” that by 2025, the Indian middle class would grow to 583 million people, making up the world’s fifth-largest consumer market.9