The End of Karma Page 10

  Perhaps because I knew something about India, I could detect America’s caste system. America was—and is—a highly unequal society. But the psychic costs of living in privilege in America and India are different. We Americans have mastered the art of walling ourselves off completely from the lives of others. In India, that’s much harder. It requires an entirely different calibration of compassion and its lack.

  When Mani tells her about the abduction of her niece, Supriya feels a chill down her spine. What if someone came and took her child? What if she couldn’t even figure out where her child was, or whether she would ever see her again?

  She throws herself into the job of rescuing Phoolo. She consults her building manager, who regularly deals with the Gurgaon police. She asks her husband to work his contact in the Delhi police; his advertising firm once developed a branding campaign for the department. She is glad to have the guidance of her father-in-law, a retired Indian Air Force officer who is visiting for a few days, and who can deal with cops much better than she can.

  The surprising good news comes on a hot afternoon in late April, when the curtains are drawn to keep out the sun out, the air conditioner set to a cool 17 degrees Celsius, and Supriya is on the sofa, caressing her son, who is curled up against her, groggy with fever. Supriya’s cell phone trills. She listens more than she talks. She stands up from the sofa, paces across the living room, thanks the caller, and dials her husband. “Can you talk?” she prefaces. “We have a situation.”

  The situation is that the Gurgaon police, armed with the phone number Mani procured, has tracked down the address of the house where they suspect Mani’s niece is being held. If she is in fact being held against her will, the cops are willing to get her out. But they need two things: a set of wheels to travel there and back (it’s unclear why they do not have a police vehicle available) and some cash to make it worth their while.

  Supriya has never faced a situation like this. She has no idea how to bribe a police officer, nor how much to give. She paces across her living room, visibly nervous. She changes out of track pants into a loose cotton salwar kameez, so she can accompany the police. Dad-in-law takes one look at her face and offers to go instead. To this, Supriya easily agrees. Mani will have to go too. She is the only one who can identify her niece.

  It is almost evening by then. In rush-hour traffic, it will take hours to reach the north Delhi enclave where the police suspect the girl is held. Supriya packs cold water bottles and biscuits for the trip. There is a brief discussion with her dad-in-law over how much to pay the two officers assigned to the job. On his way out the door, he assures Supriya that a bribe is justified “on humanitarian grounds.”

  Miraculously, they find Phoolo. According to Mani’s version of events, the police tell her employers that a police complaint will not be filed so long as they identify the employment agent who has brought the girl to their home. The cops find the agent. They persuade her to pay the girl what she is owed: 9000 rupees in all, which amounts to no more than thirty dollars for each of the six months that she has worked. Phoolo hadn’t been paid a single paisa until then.

  No police case is filed. No one is prosecuted.

  After Arvind gets home later that evening, he makes arrangements for the policemen to be given what is referred to as a gift. Supriya doesn’t want to know how much cash they get. She doesn’t want to deal. She is just relieved that another mother, far away from here, will have her daughter back.

  Supriya is a cautious, protective mother. The safety and well-being of her children are her greatest aspirations. Supriya learns from Mani’s ordeal how precarious, how fragile that proposition is for another mother. The membrane is so thin between the comfort on this side of the gate and the distress on the other.

  A few weeks after the rescue, at the end of May, Mani returns with Phoolo to Birhu-Patratoli. This year, the fields are cracked and dry. The rains haven’t come for two years. In the heat, the jungle swells with fruit: jamun and jackfruit, kusum, for hair oil, and karanja, to keep the mosquitoes away. Rice can be planted once the rains come, if the rains come. And then, women and men will stand ankle deep in flooded fields, bending toward the earth like a row of question marks, and sow. For now, there is nothing to do but climb a tree and steal a neighbor’s mango. It is also wedding season. Mani’s baby sister, Kalawati, the one lucky enough to have studied in a private school, is getting married.

  On the night of the wedding, Mani’s home is brightly lit. The family has procured what folks in Gurgaon rely on every night: a diesel-guzzling generator. It powers a row of bright tube lights in the courtyard. Christmas lights are strung around the house. Every room inside the house is brightly lit, as though there was never any darkness at all.

  Mani has swept and leveled the courtyard. She has arranged the altar at which Kalawati and her man will exchange vows. She has prepared the wedding trousseau: a bell metal water pitcher, a steel cabinet in which Kalawati can keep her belongings, plus a respectably large goat as a gift for the in-laws.

  I am standing in the courtyard with Mani when the chef lopes over to offer a precise count of the wedding feast. He has prepared 50 kilos of mutton, 20 kilos of chicken, and 105 kilos of rice, along with dal, parwal, and a chutney of apples and dates. Weddings are when you get your fill of protein in places like this. The entire village turns up to eat.

  Kalawati’s wedding fills Mani with a new yearning. She thinks: Why not me? Shouldn’t I be married too? No one in her family has bothered to arrange a marriage for her. So she chooses a man for herself. His name is Azad—“freedom,” in Hindi—and he calls her on her cell phone for months and woos her. On something of a whim, she says, she agrees to marry him, in a small ceremony, at his house in a village in Bihar, way up by the Nepal border. Mani tells no one but her mother. There is no official recording of the union.

  Marriage turns out to be Mani’s undoing.

  Shortly after they are man and wife, Mani says she feels like she is being treated like his bank machine. He asks her for a loan, and then another and another. Mani drains her savings, borrows from others, and a few months into the marriage, realizes he will never pay her back.

  Six months into married life, Mani says she feels like a fool. “How was I to know that he wanted to marry me just for money?” she tells me. She seems as angry with herself as with him.

  He moves to Gurgaon by then to share an apartment with a half-dozen other Bihari migrants. Mani stays on at Supriya’s home. They can’t afford an apartment of their own. They argue a lot.

  The following year brings an even greater calamity. Azad leaves without telling her. Mani hears that he has gone back to Bihar to marry someone else—and she is infuriated. She tells Supriya that she is determined to track him down, just as she once tracked down her niece.

  Mani quits her job at Supriya’s, because she doesn’t know how long this mission will take. She packs a bag, rides the train all the way to Azad’s village, and soon persuades him that it’s in his interest to return to her. Be my husband for real, she offers, or else I will press charges with the police. Mani says Azad falls on his knees and begs her for forgiveness. It is a victory, of sorts.

  This is all Mani’s version of how she got him back. I tried to reach Azad. But Mani was reluctant to introduce me to him. It is possible he has another version of what happened. My takeaway from all this is Mani’s determination to not be made a fool.

  She knows she will not get her money back from him. But at least another woman won’t get it. And no matter how much they fight, she prefers being Azad’s wife rather than the wife he left.

  For a while, Azad tries to stop her from returning to work in Gurgaon, but she refuses. Her financial independence is too important—and anyway, she can no longer imagine being a housewife, taking care of his elderly parents, in his dark village, without lights, way up near the Nepal border.

  Supriya helps Mani find another job as a live-in maid for an elderly woman, in another gated community in Gurga
on.

  In the weeks after the rescue, Supriya learns more about Phoolo’s abduction. She discovers that there are other girls like Phoolo, taken from their villages and made to work in the city against their will. For a while, this haunts Supriya. She has managed to get one girl out. Even if she gets a second one out, maybe a third, then what? She begins to look at the maids in Central Park a little differently. She wonders whether to ask her neighbors if they know the backstories of how their maids had ended up in Gurgaon. She decides not to ask.

  The more Supriya learns about what had happened to this girl, the more burdened she feels. For a while, the feeling balloons inside her. “I feel heavy,” she says.

  The feeling doesn’t last long. She shuts the door.

  Otherwise the heaviness would burst.

  GUERRILLA

  Paying for Broken Promises

  On a stifling night at the end of May 2010, when the red earth is parched for rain and the cashew grove heavy with fruit, Rakhi’s head is pounding. Tonight, she will have to kill a man.

  Rakhi is the commander of a guerrilla squad at war against the largest democracy in the world. She is roughly twenty-one years old, and a Class 8 dropout. She has planned executions and given orders to kill. But she has not yet carried out one herself. It is now her turn. She knows it. Her squad knows it. It feels like their eyes are boring through her skull.

  The evening begins fortuitously. An informant calls to say that Rakhi’s prey, a man who belongs to the local ruling political party, works for the village government council, and is therefore a designated class enemy, has been seen boarding an auto-rickshaw a few miles away. This is good news. This fellow has eluded her for months. He must know that his name is on the kill list. But now, here he is, coming up the road. It is her job to figure out how to eliminate him while sparing his fellow passengers. Only designated class enemies are to be killed. No one else. Those are her orders.

  In quick succession, as expected, more calls come in. A series of informants report on the movement of the vehicle. Rakhi’s squad is prepared by the time it approaches. They leap out onto the road, stop the driver, and order everyone to march into the darkening woods. There they tie them up.

  Rakhi keeps them bound and gagged until nightfall. When it is pitchdark, she frees all but the man she is supposed to kill. Him she orders to march up the empty country road. She keeps her eyes on the back of his head. She feels her comrades’ eyes on the back of hers. When she gives the signal, one of her subordinates thwacks the man on the head. He falls—facedown, thank god. Another comrade hands her a machete, borrowed earlier in the evening from a villager. Rakhi holds the machete handle tight with both hands, swings it up, and brings it down, as steady as she can. She does not see where the blade lands. She hears a dull thump. She feels a spray of warm blood on her arm. She runs. Someone else will finish the job.

  The killing of this man ends, as all such killings do, with a story about the killing. Rakhi walks to the nearest market, wakes up a sleeping shopkeeper, pays for paper and red paint, and writes in large block letters, putting to work the fruits of her Class 8 education: “A police informant has been killed. Communist Party of India (Maoist).” Next to it, she draws a red hammer and sickle.

  It is the rebel army’s rudimentary, pen-and-ink version of a Twitter post—a coda to the actual slaughter, part ritual and part propaganda. The note is left next to the corpse, which is left on the road. It will serve as a message, each piece of the tableau as important as the other: a pool of blood, a smashed head, a handwritten note.1

  Every killing reverberates like this. By the first light of dawn, word spreads. Maybe the police come to retrieve the body—or, in this lawless patch of the country, maybe not. Villagers say as little as they can to one another. No one wants to admit that they heard something the night before. No one can be sure who will snitch to whom. The rebellion makes people distrustful, quiet, afraid of everyone. It is like living under the Stasi, except that here in rural West Bengal, there is no indoor plumbing.

  Rakhi tells me her story a year later, sitting in a cool, curtained room in a heavily guarded police compound, where she has been staying since surrendering to the authorities. She wears a hot pink salwar-kameez, made of scratchy nylon, with a spine of sequins running down the middle. India Shining, I write in my notebook. She stares at her fingernails, also painted pink. She sips water from a recycled Sprite bottle. She seems to be narrating this story mostly to herself, as though in the telling, she might better understand who she had become.

  Rakhi agrees to speak to me on condition that neither her name nor her village be identified. She fears retaliation by former comrades. She fears especially for her mother back home. And so hers is the only alias in this book, a concession to the fact that she is in an unofficial witness-protection program in a part of the country where the government’s writ does not always run. Likewise, I’ve left out the name of the man she describes killing. Her story is corroborated by interviews with police and her family, as well as by newspaper accounts.

  It has taken me months to find her, and then to persuade police to let me speak to her. I searched for her because I wanted to understand why young Indians of her generation have chosen a path of insurgency. I wanted to know how much of it is driven by conviction and how much by ennui—and equally how this vibrant, prospering democracy can breed such rage among some of its children.

  I am drawn to the story because Rakhi’s rebellion was born around the time I was born, in the late 1960s—and returned hotter and deadlier thirty years later, in an era awash in riches and hope. In the story of this rebellion lay a different kind of ambition among Indians of noonday—this one as ruinous as lava.

  “I feel terrified when I think about those things now,” Rakhi says. “What did I do? Who was I? Did I become like a don?” A don, as in a mafia don, a gang leader, is a familiar figure in Bollywood. There is a 1978 Hindi movie called Don, and a remake, also called Don.

  A sip of water. A short breath. And Rakhi picks up the story. The machete is washed of blood and returned to its owner.

  “Why not just keep the machete?” I ask.

  Rakhi looks at me like I am an idiot. The Maoists never keep a machete, she says. They’re expensive. Villagers need them. There may be a chicken to slaughter the next day, or firewood to be chopped. Fighters are instructed to clean the blood and flesh off of the machetes they borrow and return the tools to their owners.

  The slaughter that Rakhi led that evening in a village in West Bengal state, a half day’s drive from my birth city, Calcutta, and just across the state line from Mani’s Jharkhand, is multiplied across the vast jungle belly of India. The insurgency blossoms during India’s golden age, reflecting a perfect storm of inequity, incapacity, and greed.

  At its peak, in 2010, Indian intelligence officials estimate that Maoists operated in more than one-third of India’s 600-odd districts, from Bihar in the north to southern Andhra Pradesh. That estimate is likely to be exaggerated, designed to draw in extra government funds to those areas that claim to be Maoist-affected. No matter what its real scale, the insurgency is concentrated in India’s central and eastern states, including West Bengal and Jharkhand. Those are the very states that hold the country’s natural resources—timber, coal, bauxite, uranium—as well as its most deprived adivasi hamlets.

  In the five-year period from 2006 through 2010, which is also a period of record economic growth, the war between state forces and the Communist Party of India (Maoist), as the rebels are called, kills 4212 people. It is the deadliest of India’s sundry rebellions in this period; the more widely known insurgency in disputed Kashmir province results in 3184 deaths during those same years.2

  The Indian Maoists once called themselves Naxalites, after a peasant uprising that kicked off in 1967, the year I was born, in a village called Naxalbari, nestled in the tea plantations of West Bengal. At the time, Communist guerrilla movements were flourishing across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In
India, Mao’s Little Red Book was fashionable among young educated city folks.

  My mother’s youngest brother was in engineering college when the Naxalbari rebellion erupted, and like so many middle-class youth at the time, he ran away to join them. My mamu, as I called him, grew a beard, went underground, and cloaked himself with one alias after another. His mission was to organize sharecroppers to rise up, demand their rights, and, on occasion, kill their overlords, preferably with their bare hands (which was in keeping with Maoist doctrine of the time) or, if necessary, with the aid of everyday sharecropper tools—like machetes. They were not to use guns. They didn’t have the money to buy many guns anyway. Once they had vanquished their feudal masters in the countryside, they were to encircle the city and raise their red flag.

  The sharecroppers were no fools. Once, when my mamu introduced himself as a man from a nearby hamlet, one skeptical villager pointed to his wrist. “Dada, what’s that mark there?” the man asked, pointing to the band of skin that was a shade lighter from years of wearing a watch. In 1967, no one in these villages wore a watch. They knew my uncle was not one of them.

  Every now and then he and his friends would turn up unannounced at my parents’ apartment in tidy, middle-class Calcutta. They would come for the luxury of a proper bath, to eat a piece of fish, or to reassure their loved ones that they were alive. They would bring with them the smell of cheap cigarettes and the distress of the countryside. They would bring stories from the bush, and in lieu of nursery rhymes, they would teach me revolutionary doggerel. I had no idea what the verses meant. But I relished them anyway, so I swallowed them whole and I memorized them. Sometimes, this got me in trouble.

  A story about my mischief has circulated in my family for forty years. It has been recycled and retold so many times that a few details are no doubt misplaced or made up. It takes place in or around 1970, just before Durga Puja, the most important festival of the year among Bengali Hindus. I was tagging along with my mother, as she went shopping for Puja saris in Gariahat Market. Ma plunked me down on a shop counter as she began her deliberations. Sari after sari was unfurled, each one’s provenance and price discussed, whereupon I burst into song, swinging my legs in tempo. Ma no longer remembers the lyrics—only that they were something about liberating the motherland, which was hazardous coming out of a three-year-old’s mouth, in a crowded sari shop in Calcutta at a time when cops were hunting for Maoist skulls.