To Hellholes and Back Read online

  “My rickshaw,” Vinod says.

  A collection of discarded motorcycle parts that looks like it’s been put together with a hammer and nails leans at half-mast in an oily gutter. After exchanging the kind of looks you share just before clasping hands and jumping off a cliff, Joyce and I pile our bags into the tiny autorickshaw and shove in beside them. Vinod yanks the engine to life with a single pull of the hand-lever starter and speeds away from the scene with the night’s top prize. Nearby drivers salute our escape with shouts that do not sound like invitations to dinner parties.

  Jodhpur at night, the parts we can see at least, is never going to land on a tourist brochure. On the road out of town, we pass not one but two knockdown fistfights. The first isn’t so much a fight as it is a beat down by a large man holding a teenage boy by the wrist, forcing him to his knees and repeatedly pummeling his head while two women sit silently by. The second is a shoving match between two men that devolves into a horrifying gang assault when three other men join the larger of the combatants and wrestle the smaller man to the ground. As we pull away from the glare of streetlights, the outnumbered man curls up in a protective egg as the fearsome foursome wind up and kick him like a football.

  As the edge of town dissolves into darkness, Vinod turns and says, “Rohet Garh is long journey. I pick up my friend. He go with us.”

  “Wait, who, what friend?”

  Along with our practical options, Vinod’s friendly expression has vanished. We veer off the main road onto a dirt track and begin puttering through a neighborhood maze of one-room residences. I strain to keep track of the turns but it’s useless. It’s dark, the web is intricate, and all at once I’m struck with the realization that Vinod is a professional thug taking routine precautions to disorient us before stealing our money, hacking off our heads, and discarding our bodies in the desert, where they’ll be stripped to the bone by Jerusalem crickets before dawn. Just as I’m deciding exactly what to do about all of this, we arrive at a two-story concrete blockhouse with no lights.

  “One minute,” Vinod mumbles.

  He rushes inside the dark house, leaving us alone in the deserted street. Dogs bark in the distance. Never in my life have I felt more like part of a setup. Getting in this rickshaw is suddenly looking like a worse career move than Philip Bailey joining Phil Collins on “Easy Lover.”13

  “We should have just gone to one of the hotels in town,” I mutter. “Why does he need a friend to come along? Did you ever see a cab driver stop to pick up a buddy?”

  “I have no idea what’s going on,” Joyce croaks.

  Her face is a death mask. We could get out and start walking, but I have no idea where we are and we haven’t seen a cab for miles.

  A squeaky door opens. Footsteps crunch on the dirt and rock. From the darkness, Vinod reappears with a large, virile man beside him.

  “My friend,” Vinod says, introducing the highly unwanted interloper. “He know the way to Rohet Garh.”

  The friend is a foot taller than Vinod, with bulging muscles and a walk like those pro athletes who dick-swagger onto the field as though they’ve got ten inches stuffed uncomfortably into their cups. He tilts his head at us, then says something fast and low in Hindi. Vinod nods with grave appreciation. The two men jam into the front of the autorickshaw. Each hangs half an ass cheek off the driver’s seat, and we spin off once more in a flurry of dust.

  International travel requires an occasional willingness to cut the deck and place an immense trust in strangers. I’m generally a confident traveler who accepts the minimal tradeoff between adventure and security. But no matter how much faith I have in the universal decency of mankind, the statistical improbability of accidents, or even comforting game theory assurances of communal cooperation, on the road I always carry a nagging concern that my luck is inevitably going to bottom out somewhere along the way.

  Rohet Garh is supposed to be forty-five minutes out of town, but even accounting for the sluggish speed of the autorickshaw, the trip is taking way too long. After bouncing through a series of potholes, we bank hard left onto what can almost be considered a main road. There are few other cars. No lights. No buildings. But there’s asphalt with a painted line in the middle and once in a while a semitruck races by, nearly blowing our tiny craft off the road. We travel this way for more than an hour.

  In my head I begin turning over the impromptu self-defense lesson from D. B., suddenly thankful for that strange encounter in the Congolese jungle. The Yoda-like instruction of the old bodyguard (“Apply leverage to the joint”) floats into my head from the faraway mists of an African night I never imagined I’d miss.

  If it was just me in this situation I’d be anxious; not, as I am now, on the edge of panic. You never like your chances in a two-on-one struggle, but Vinod isn’t exactly a prime physical specimen and I’m six-three and unapologetically blew past two hundred years ago. In a crazed fluster I could take him out of action, then maybe outrun the larger dude. And even if I didn’t manage to elude a homicidal Indian tag team, at least after being raped and skull fucked, I could die with the dignifying knowledge that I hadn’t dragged anyone else along to such a completely pointless demise in the Indian desert.

  Joyce’s presence changes things. I’ve seen the Rob Zombie movies, and believe me, you don’t have to be a fan of torture porn to entertain castration fantasies after midnight in Rajasthan with a pair of accomplices talking low in the front seat and packing Ganesha only knows how many Gurkha knives and homemade detonators. But just after I whisper to Joyce, “If they take us into the desert, go for the eyes, knees, and nuts, then take off running for the road,” an oasis of electricity appears in the distance. Moments later, we rumble past a banged-up metal sign emblazoned with the two most optimistic words since “I do”: Rohet Garh.

  If Hindus had saints, Vinod would be one. When we find the resort locked down for the evening, he begins banging on the heavy front gate and imploring the night staff to wake up. A groggy clerk surfaces. Vinod dresses him down like a drill sergeant. What is the meaning of leaving two foreign cows stranded at the Jodhpur train station, he wants to know. The clerk produces a registry. Vinod demands to personally inspect our rooms before allowing our luggage to be taken away by a sheepish bellboy.

  “OK, I think you are home now,” Vinod declares as he hands us the key to the room. Then he clambers into the backseat of the autorickshaw and stretches out. His friend slides into the driver’s seat.

  “I have been driving since five o’clock this morning,” Vinod says, his easy smile returning. “Now you and I can both sleep.”

  I proclaim Vinod and his buddy heroes and drop generous tips on them. Busybody expats in impoverished places are constantly scolding Western rookies for tipping too heavily or overpaying the working class, on the theory that a large, artificial influx of foreign currency will screw up the local economy. But local economies in these places always look pretty screwed up as it is, and I doubt a pair of twenty-dollar bills will wreak that much more havoc on the Jodhpur cabbie clusterfuck. I don’t deny being the clod American overpaying once again. But this time, not getting fucked never felt so good. And, anyway, an ignorant traveler can always use some good karma.

  7

  Sex, Rain, and 100 Percent Cotton

  Though wide swaths of rural India remain enveloped in what native writer Aravind Adiga calls “the Darkness,” an alternate universe of educated, highly motivated tech laborers willing to work for little more than tap water and bread crusts have turned the country into the “world’s back office.” Not long ago India was a place where Red Cross donations, polio vaccinations, and the occasional Bible were dropped off by benevolent Westerners, but now at least part of the country has become infamous as an outsourcing trove for multinational companies, and thus a festering source of paranoia for American workers. As Thomas Friedman notes: “When I was growing up, my parents would tell me, ‘Finish your food; people in China and India are starving.’ I tell my kids, ‘Finish
your homework; people in China and India are starving for your job.’”

  Notwithstanding the fact that when I was growing up my parents were more worried about me picking up the dog piles in the backyard after dinner than with what kids in China and India were up to, Friedman’s point is an important one for both blue- and white-collar Americans. Barack Obama won the presidency in part by promising to stop the flow of American jobs to countries like India. Though his bootlicking disaster of an opponent also helped clinch the deal; in the words of my buddy Shanghai Bob, “Had John McCain not been shot down by the North Vietnamese, he would have spent his life as a high school gym teacher in Flagstaff.”

  Regardless of the Obama hope train, the economic tide may have already turned against the West. International companies continue flocking to India to build and staff R & D labs. The country is bolstering its position as a world leader in drug discoveries. Its dynamic steel industry is expected to produce a steel surplus by 2012. The government plans to construct forty-three brand-new “IT cities” in the next ten years. That’s forty-three cities, out of nowhere, conceived to thwart the hard-charging efforts of financial and technological rivals, all of which are Asian, none of which is American.

  The economic news might as well be splattered in blood on the wall, and the U.S. diplomatic corps has assumed an appropriate posture of defense. One Indian handout offering practical advice for U.S.-bound college students offers a heads-up that interviews between Indian visa applicants and American consular officers “are conducted across a bulletproof glass wall.” How unlike America the United States has become. One presumes that the German shepherds are kept muzzled, at least for the graduate students.

  The most spectacular example of India’s audacious rise through the ranks of world economic titans is Mumbai. With fourteen million people, Mumbai is not simply one of the world’s largest and most densely populated cities; according to Pulitzer Prize finalist Suketu Mehta, yet another superb Indian writer, it’s “the future of urban civilization on the planet. God help us.”

  One of the first things you notice about Mumbai is that while it is indeed an intestinal collage of organized pandemonium, things somehow manage to function. Traffic moves along. People appear to have business afoot, or at least somewhere to go. You don’t see aimless thousands squatting on broken sidewalks. (When Indians squat, something you do see a lot of, it’s usually for a common-enough purpose.)

  By the time we reach the city, Joyce’s employer is as tired of her being in India as she is. As planned, we part ways in the Mumbai airport, Joyce for a few days of hard-earned R & R at home with Oprah and a box of Bon Bons before her triumphant return to the cube farm, me to continue my inspection of the threats posed by a country whose people have yet to surreptitiously remove my appendix, contact my family for ransom money, or force me into a midnight desert-highway Dirty Sanchez.

  It’s lamentable that so many American tech and service jobs have moved overseas, but to me economic strength is still a product of manufacturing. Because I’ll need help to get a close-in look at the real motor of Indian financial might, one of the first people I contact in Mumbai is Anurag Chaturvedi, a mustachioed, fifty-five-year-old muckraking journalist—not quite an Indian Geraldo, but it’s a reasonable visual image.

  After tea at his home with his U.S.-college-bound son—Javed hasn’t experienced the bulletproof interview yet, but he’s looking forward to it—Anurag drives us to Bhiwandi, a textile city of six hundred thousand just northeast of Mumbai. In the dirt streets and fly-infested alleys of a place known as the “Manchester of India,” Anurag and I can barely hear each other speak over the racket of hundreds of old-fashioned power looms churning away inside open warehouses. Massive machines with intricate gears and long, jointed levers that work like the jaws of mechanical dinosaurs, some of the looms were brought to India nearly a century ago by the British. They still spool out bolts of cloth as long as there’s electricity in Bhiwandi, which is usually eight to ten hours a day. Walking the streets here is like taking a stroll through the Industrial Revolution.

  We have identical chats with several loom workers. They work, they struggle to feed their families, they attach no geopolitical implication to this endeavor. Bored with these repetitive interactions, Anurag directs my attention to rows of dank, earthen-floor shanties crammed amid the factories. Inside these crude shelters, a sizable community of prostitutes spend their afternoons and evenings waiting to service the loom workers and truck drivers who constantly come and go, delivering raw materials and hauling out finished product.

  Anurag greets an old woman sitting on a stoop, and we enter a room where five women sit in the dark watching a soap opera on TV. The teenagers are painted like French tarts, but the effect is more like little girls who’ve gotten into their mothers’ makeup bags. The older ones have gone to considerably less effort to gussy up. The house smells like a locker room. There isn’t the slightest pretense of Pretty Woman “working girl” glamour here.

  “Success in India only begets more prostitution,” Anurag says grimly. “Very few are sharing in the prosperity of this new economy.”

  The price for services ranges from one hundred to one thousand rupees (between two and twenty dollars). Girls turn over 20 to 50 percent of this take to a “ladylord” who owns the dismal rooms where they have sex with customers. “Beds” made of soiled rugs or sheets over small concrete platforms sit inside closet-sized rooms. While truckers and yarn spinners get blown for five bucks by nineteen-year-olds, power looms clank and crash away next door, bringing India’s economic miracle to Old Navy and Banana Republic shoppers who appreciate the value of affordable clothing. This is how India’s industrial boom looks to Anurag, and when you’re standing in the middle of it trying to pry two words of conversation out of a lifeless twenty-five-year-old prostitute who looks fifty-five, it’s a hard vision to dispute.

  Sordid as Bhiwandi is, it’s nothing compared to a workers’ district we visit in central Mumbai, where donated clothes from around the world arrive by the truckload to be cleaned, pressed, tagged, shoved in plastic bags, and re-sold in Asian markets. Like other Mumbai ghettos, this one is alive from sunup to sundown with food hawkers, street stalls, kids walking to school, and tens of thousands of others going about their business. During daylight hours you’d never suspect that the neighborhood is also home to four thousand prostitutes and that “specialty” blocks filled with transgender whores, S&M practitioners, and Sri Lankan and Nepalese women are accessible any time of day.

  “Men pay on a ‘per shot’ system,” one completely gray forty-year-old ladylord informs me. She sits on a plastic stool in front of a crumbling concrete apartment. The gutter in front of her is backed up with garbage and human shit. Hundreds of flies hover around the woman’s head.

  The business arrangement is the same as in Bhiwandi, she explains. A girl picks up a customer, brings him back to the “brothel,” pays the ladylord her cut, and gets down to business as soon as possible. A typical girl will bring in four or five customers a night. Ten or fifteen girls regularly use her rooms. The ladylord is a former prostitute herself, and I ask if she feels any guilt or hesitation about her work.

  “My only obligation is to give the girls a condom when they come in,” she says. “Whether they use them or not, it’s no concern of mine.”

  I ask to look inside. The ladylord asks me to take off my shoes, then calls for a young girl in the back of the house. Without looking at me, the girl leads me through a short dark passageway, past a series of tiny spaces partitioned by cardboard or scrap wood into miniature fuck chambers. I can only pray that the liquid on the floor that’s soaking through my socks is water.

  At the end of the hallway the girl shifts a large piece of cardboard away from the concrete, revealing a literal hole in the wall. A suffocating cloud of mildew and spunk hits me in the face. It’s about 105 degrees—after spending a summer month in a place where guys get sweat stains on their ties, you get pretty good at fe
eling the difference between 105 and 108. I gasp for air, which feels like it’s passing into my lungs through wet cotton balls.

  I crouch down and creep through the hole. The room has just enough space for an ancient cot. The mattress on top is black with mold. Not spotted—black. The walls are an evil shade of congealed brown and black. I couldn’t get a hard-on in this sex dungeon if Beyoncé was fluffing me with 1986 Susanna Hoffs’s tongue.

  “Do any of the men have trouble performing in here?” I ask the girl.

  “It’s OK,” she says noncommittally.

  Between the pauses in our sizable language barrier, I realize that my netherworld escort assumes I’ve got more in mind than an academic investigation of the sexual habits of Indian wage workers. This is understandable under the circumstances—serious journalism often doesn’t look much different from opportunistic scumbaggery. Just flip through some of Robert Novak’s old columns. Or ask Glenn Beck.

  With night approaching, I shake hands with Anurag in front of a soup kitchen established for prostitutes and their children. Although he works as a journalist, Anurag is on the board of Apne Aap, a Calcutta-based nonprofit dedicated to rescuing prostitutes and bringing an end to human trafficking. According to Apne Aap and at least one other organization, fifty million girls and women are missing from India’s population as a result of systematic sex-based violence.

  “Our only requirement for leading you on this tour is to publicize our Web site,” Anurag tells me. After a day like this, he hardly needs to ask: apneaap.org.

  Despite the horrors of the Indian slum economy, I find little reason in Mumbai to fear India. Touring the filth, misery, poverty, and decay makes you worry more about where Indians will get their next drink of clean water than tech support jobs disappearing in Winston-Salem and Albuquerque.

  Of course it isn’t Indian workers that Americans should fear. The idea of resenting “Indians” for snarfing jobs from “Americans” strikes me as a drastic misinterpretation of reality in an age when corporations have gone global and workers the world over have become interchangeable. The ruling international corporatocracy has already burned its flags, erased its borders, and laid to rest all nation-state loyalties. I put “Indian” and “American” in quotations because corporations no longer recognize allegiance to any nationality, so it makes little sense to apply those labels to their workers and customers.