The End of Karma Read online

  Dr. Aind is one of Jaipal Singh Munda’s people, born and raised here in Jharkhand. She speaks a smattering of Mundari, an adivasi language, and when she can speak to patients in their native tongue, their eyes light up, and they take in what she says a bit less reluctantly.

  The Malnutrition Treatment Centre is a well-intentioned program. But it is also a stark portrait of how a democratically elected government cheats its poorest, most vulnerable citizens. The mothers’ time with Dr. Aind is brief and restful—and very often, pointless. They and their malnourished children are in her care for fifteen days. Usually, that’s long enough for her to rescue the children from the brink of death. Then she sends them out into the wasteland again. She has no way to know who among the children lives or dies, nor a way to help their families take care of them better.

  The first time I visit her clinic, I meet a boy named Jeevan Munda, who is in the bed closest to the window. He contracted pneumonia when he was around three months old. He started vomiting. He couldn’t keep down food. His mother says she gave him whatever she had on hand—saltine crackers, rice—but Jeevan, whose name means “life,” didn’t have the strength to chew. His mother didn’t have the strength to produce much breast milk, and she watched him shrivel steadily for a year.

  By the time he landed in the hospital, his big eyes had sunk into his head. His arms were like twigs. He was so weak he could barely sip the water that his mother gave him from a steel bowl. It chilled me to look at him. At eighteen months, Jeevan weighed 3.8 kilograms, barely 8 pounds. He was 61 centimeters (24 inches) long, no bigger than a scrawny cat.

  Why didn’t you bring him here earlier? I ask. There was no food at home, his mother whispers, so she and her husband went to work in a factory in a neighboring state. The child was already weak, and there were no doctors there, at least none that she could afford. And so, even as they left home to stave off hunger, their child shriveled from hunger. By the time a village health worker sent her to Dr. Aind’s clinic, Jeevan could no longer take in any food.

  This is what happens to a child who lives with hunger for so long. The body prepares to shut down.

  The Naandi Foundation study found that the overwhelming majority of mothers surveyed hadn’t heard of the term “malnutrition,” in whatever language they spoke. This is the most striking thing about child hunger in the Indian wasteland. If every child around you is scrawny and sick, how would you even know that yours is malnourished?

  I return to Dr. Aind’s clinic a couple of years later. I ask whether she knows how Jeevan Munda is doing. She does not. Her malnutrition treatment program does not track the progress of its patients. She knows only that she treated him for fifteen days, pumped him with milk and peanut butter, and cajoled his mother to take small steps to keep him well. Give him rehydration salts if he gets diarrhea. Don’t wait until he is screaming for food; take a bowl of rice with you when you take him to work with you; feed him several times a day; try to buy an egg for him now and then. Anything more, the doctor knows, is out of the question. The family can rarely afford meat. There is no question of fresh fruits and vegetables on a regular basis. Nor milk. It is too expensive.

  Malnutrition’s stubborn hold is the most hideous measure of how little India’s phenomenal economic growth has meant to those at the bottom of the country’s traditional pecking order—and it also attests to the persistence of that traditional pecking order. Aspiration has not dissolved the hierarchies, nor the state’s ambitious efforts to break them.

  How does India’s record of improving the lives of its poor rank? Terribly—and especially terribly for a democracy of the poor.

  Consider, for instance, a 2009 study carried out by Martin Ravallion, a Georgetown University economics professor who sought to measure what impact economic growth had on poverty and inequality in India, compared with Brazil and China.17

  The results offered stark contrasts. In China, he found, the poverty rate diminished most dramatically during its period of high macroeconomic growth, from 84 percent in 1981 to 16 percent in 2005. But even as poverty went down in those years, economic inequality soared.

  India reported a similar trend. As the economy grew, the share of Indians living below the poverty line fell from 60 percent in 1981 to 42 percent in 2005. During that same period, economic inequality widened, though neither the fall in poverty nor the rise in inequality was as sharp as in China.

  In Brazil, he found a very different picture. Its economy grew too, but not quite as fast as China’s. Brazil’s poverty rate fell by more than half between 1981 and 2005. But unlike India or China, Brazil’s notoriously high inequality rates narrowed. Ravallion found that was due, in part, to an ambitious government redistribution program that handed out cash to poor mothers so long as they could prove that they took care of their children—immunizing them, for example, against childhood diseases. Brazil’s conditional cash transfer program—something that India has sought to replicate in recent years, linked to a biometric identification program to stem corruption and cheating—was credited with helping poor families improve their health, education, and social well-being.18

  In other words, a high rate of economic growth was not itself enough to help the poor. A rising tide could lift some boats. But whether they stayed afloat depended on how the government used its new riches—and indeed on what sort of a society it sought to create.

  Supriya can’t pinpoint exactly how she became conscious of the dehumanizing inequity that pervades daily life in her country. She knows only that she became conscious of it after she became a parent, and that it makes her something of an oddity among her peers.

  She notices how the ancient logic of caste pollution plays out at the birthday parties of her children’s friends in modern, glossy Gurgaon. Usually, the children and their parents (if they come) are invited to a buffet table piled high with food—strawberries, samosas, chicken salad sandwiches cut into triangles, pizza, bagels, cake. They are invited to help themselves to as many servings as they want.

  The buffet table is not for the nannies and drivers. They are not to use the same plates or cups. They are to eat separate boxed meals—individually apportioned, to be touched by them only, and then thrown in the trash.

  This peculiar form of segregation rests on the notion that what the untouchable touches risks polluting everyone else—and also on the assumption that servants are likely to be low-born, perhaps Dalits, and employers likely not. It is an unspoken rule, passed down from one generation to the next.

  These taboos are not limited to servants. They might apply to a concert musician as well. My friend Ashutosh Sharma, a music promoter who also lives in Gurgaon, recalled that in the summer of 2013, he had invited Lakha Khan, an award-winning elderly musician, to his hotel room in Udaipur, a popular tourist destination in Rajasthan, about an eight-hour drive west of Delhi. The hotel waiter refused to serve tea to Khan. Never mind that the Indian government had lavished him with awards: Khan, as the waiter well knew, belonged to a community called the Manganiyars, who for centuries have served as court musicians for the royal families of Rajasthan, and are considered untouchable.

  Infuriated, Ashu summoned the manager. To his shock, the manager stuck by his waiter. Ashu was told this was hotel policy: Khan, a Manganiyar musician, would not be served tea. Ashu says he was close to wringing the manager’s neck. He gathered himself and said coolly that he would tell his friends to never patronize this hotel; Ashu owns a travel agency. The hotel manager shrugged. Suit yourself, he said. No untouchable would be served tea in his hotel.

  Supriya grew up with this segregation. Her mother used to run her household by this logic of the separate tumbler system: one set of cups for the masters, another set of cups for the help. This logic applied to furniture also. Servants were not to sit on their masters’ chairs. They could squat or stand or, at best, use an old stool reserved for them in the kitchen. Supriya never gave it much thought. It’s what everyone did. She did it too.

  Slow
ly, at the children’s birthday parties, it begins to needle her. She thinks: Why should ayahs eat from separate plates every day at home, when they cook and clean and watch after our children every day? Why should they be served out of paper boxes? One year, she quietly rewrites the rules. At her daughter’s birthday, she lays out one table of food for everyone. No more boxed paper meals for the help. To the ayahs she says: Help yourselves.

  She figures some of the other mothers might find it strange, which is fine by her. She isn’t forcing it on anyone. She just wants to make the change herself—quietly, which is her style.

  Over time, she also notices the inexplicable segregation within the gates of Central Park. There are benches on the perimeter of the playground. But the ayahs, who invariably accompany the kids to the playground in the late afternoons, are prohibited from sitting on those benches. They must sit on the ground, even when it is cold or wet, or the grass is prickly dry. It is an unwritten policy, Supriya learns, and enforced by the guards. As a result, the benches are usually empty, piled with children’s water bottles. They are reserved for parents, who rarely come.

  Supriya finds this bizarre. She takes it up with the residents association. Why should the ayahs have to sit on the grass when the benches are empty? The members of the association offer a variety of justifications. To Supriya, each is as strange as the next.

  One of them wonders: What’s wrong with sitting on the grass? We also sit on the grass sometimes.

  But we are free to choose, Supriya replies. They are not.

  This is how it has always been, another member says.

  Supriya quickly understands she isn’t going to persuade anyone. Central Park may have made it easy to retreat from the inconveniences of the past, but not its customs.

  She is telling me this story while we are out shopping for chocolate cake mix at Modern Bazaar, one box for each of the twenty girls who are invited to her daughter’s birthday party the next weekend. It will be in their goody bag—the “return gift,” as her kids call it.

  I ask if she expects these sentiments to change by the time her children host birthday parties for their own kids. Supriya clucks her tongue. “These things are so deep-rooted I don’t think it will change,” she says.

  The practice of “untouchability” is outlawed. Still, in a survey carried out in 2010, one out of four Indians said they followed this custom, keeping the cups and plates in their homes out of the reach of those whom they regarded as untouchable.19

  Shortly after I moved to India in 2005, Helene Cooper, a colleague from the Times, came to visit Delhi and joined me at home for dinner.

  Like me, Helene had moved to the United States as a child—in her case, from Liberia. And like me, she remained deeply connected to her country of birth. She wrote a brilliant memoir about Liberia, before and after its civil war.20

  “Do you feel like you’ve come home?” Helene asked.

  I scrunched my face. “No,” I said. “This does not feel like home.”

  I had arrived in Delhi only a few months earlier. I found the city too loud, too in-your-face, too feudal. The sprawling bungalow that I inherited as the Times bureau chief came with an army of domestic staff. There was a cook who did not clean, a cleaner who did not cook, not one but two gardeners (the yard was big and beautiful), a driver, a washer/presser of clothes, and a “bearer,” whose job was ostensibly to bear things on trays. I winced every time one of them called me “memsahib,” which is how you would refer to a foreign woman—the madam, or wife, of a sahib.

  I was unfamiliar with Delhi’s social rules. Occasionally I would wait for an interview at a government office, only to be asked when the Times bureau chief would arrive. They seemed not to have expected to be interviewed by a small Indian-American woman. At a dinner party, shortly after I arrived in Delhi, I was asked, “What does your father do?” My father is a chowkidar, I was about to say, which was not a lie, for one of my father’s many jobs in the New World was to work part-time as a security guard—until I saw my husband flashing me a look. Don’t be snarky, the look said. I swallowed my words. “He is an engineer,” I replied instead, which was equally true and which sufficed to shut up my interlocutor. He had found me a place on his pecking order: I was a N.R.I., as my ilk was known, whose father was an engineer in America.

  A well-heeled editor in Delhi once snorted that N.R.I. should really stand for Not Required Indians. The country had done just fine without us. She was right.

  I was a stranger in Delhi. I had not lived through its ups and downs. I did not know its rules.

  So, I remember being emphatic that night when Helene came for dinner and asked. No, I said. I don’t feel at home.

  Until I do.

  I move out of that sprawling villa with its army of staff. When my posting as the Times bureau chief comes to an end, I rent a third-floor walk-up in a neighborhood named after Nizamuddin Auliya, a thirteenth-century Sufi saint.

  I stop being a full-time reporter. For nearly two years, I am a full-time mom, aided by a highly capable housekeeper, Kiran, who has spent her entire life working as a domestic so that her daughter—her only child—doesn’t have to.

  Nizamuddin is a special neighborhood. It draws parakeets to its trees and pilgrims to the Sufi saint’s shrine. Train whistles blow day and night.

  This becomes my daughter’s domain. Driving in from the main road, she sees the sandstone dome of the Khan-e-Khana monument at the gates of Nizamuddin and she sighs in relief: “We’re home!”

  She waves every morning to the couple that irons clothes under a tree. She mimics the kabbadi-wallah who cycles by collecting old newspapers. The fruit seller offers her a banana every time she passes by his cart.

  One day I watch her waddle into our corner store and haul herself up on a tiny ladder to sit next to the storekeeper, long enough for him to open his drawer and pull out a forbidden piece of candy. Her eyes light up. Her head bobs from side to side, and I know she will be offered another until I intervene to say, “No more sweets before dinner!”

  My girl is at home here. And while I suspect she will feel at home wherever we go, I wonder if she will one day ask what I still sometimes ask: Who might I have been had I stayed?

  Khejoorperwala Park, named after the date palms that line its edges, is where she goes to play every day, between the time she wakes up from her afternoon nap and a muezzin’s call for the evening prayer. Summer. Winter. Even in the rains. This is where she chases mynahs. This is where she goes hunting for ladybugs. This is where she and her Nizamuddin pals wrestle and race.

  She is three years old when the two of us lather up with mosquito repellent one summer afternoon and head to the park. I watch her waving to the women sitting in a circle on the grass.

  “Whose mama is that?” I ask her. My girl shakes her head.

  “Those are didis, not mamas,” she says.

  Didis—literally, “older sisters”—is how polite children refer to nannies and maids. They are Indian, just like the mamas. They too wear salwar suits, occasionally jeans with a tunic.

  “How do you know they are didis?” I ask.

  She shrugs, leaps out of her stroller, and runs across the grass to play.

  She just knows. Three years old and she can distinguish between didis and mamas, servants and masters, them and us. Good thing we will not live here forever, I tell myself. I am unprepared for what awaits us back home in America.

  Growing up in America, I didn’t know anyone whose family hired domestic staff. I associated it with India. In our Southern California suburb, we kids washed dishes, loaded the laundry, mowed lawns, and babysat for our neighbors for extra cash. No one I knew back then had a nanny.

  Of course America has always had servants—it was founded on chattel slavery, after all. But servants were not really a part of the middle-class suburban economy I grew up in. If you had enough money, you hired someone to mow your lawn—and he was inevitably a Mexican migrant worker. If you were lucky enough to have a poo
l, you hired someone to clean the pool—also, invariably, a Latino man.

  But by the time I am a parent, I have inched up the American social ladder. I belong to a far more privileged class. Members of my class have grown accustomed to domestic help of all kinds. Perhaps this is one of the most glaring elisions of the American feminist movement. Instead of making men shoulder the day-to-day drudgery of domestic work, or even forcing our government to offer child-care benefits to working parents, privileged American women like me have dumped that work onto other women, poorer women, whose families are sometimes elsewhere.21

  I notice this sharply when I move to New York City at the end of 2013. Nannies take babies to the playground, and quite routinely, mothers report to other mothers on what they see a nanny doing to a child on the neighborhood parents’ Listserv. Housekeepers come to vacuum and dust. The neighborhood laundromat sends men to pick up dirty laundry. Other men deliver takeout Chinese, Thai, Mexican, and Indian. Even in the worst New York blizzards, they ride their bikes through snow and slush, ring the bell, and wordlessly hand you a receipt, faces frozen. You don’t even have to know their names. You don’t ever have to wonder what happens in their villages, whether there is a drought this year or if a niece has been kidnapped. You tip them, you thank them, you shut the door. Technology fuels this impersonalized boom. As one mobile app specializing in food delivery orders boasts, it is “seamless.”

  Inequality—a term once considered unseemly, even unpatriotic—haunts the zeitgeist. New York City, the ultimate beacon of reinvention, becomes the most unequal city in America, so much so that the 2013 mayoral race becomes a referendum over its yawning wealth gap. A clever New York City subway ad reads, “Address inequality. Teach Math.”

  In fact, social mobility was never actually as great as the myth of Horatio Alger had made it out to be. Ancestry always mattered. Neither modernity nor capitalism had truly dissolved its powerful effects. Your lineage determined not just how much money you could make, but even how long you would live.22