To Hellholes and Back Read online

  You can’t blame Indians for taking work when it’s offered. Indian streets are filled with healthy, intelligent young men and women living in conditions that would shock a 1920s Mississippi sharecropper. Any American in their position would take the same call center or manufacturing job from a foreign employer and, in fact, many Americans do. Just ask an autoworker in Ohio or Texas who’s slapping together cars for Honda or Toyota.

  There are two Indias. One is wealthy, technologically fluent, and ferociously expansionist. The other is hopeless. Like the point and eraser of a pencil, the two are inextricably connected yet will never meet and are fated to fulfill utterly different destinies. Westerners are comfortable with the idea of a starving brown horde forever on the butt end of progress. As it’s become sharper, however, it’s the tip of the pencil we’ve been led to fear.

  The idea of a Third World rich/poor dichotomy isn’t an original one, but for those who haven’t seen it close up, it bears explaining that the two Indias often exist within inches of each other. Show me another place on earth where outside the door of a newly opened hotel bar that charges twenty-five dollars for a martini—you’d think you were in Manhattan, especially with the way they serve it a notch above lukewarm—six-year-old orphans beg in front of open sewer flues.

  I overpay at a number of these up-market bars in the company of a pair of local go-getters, Anjan Das, art director of Rolling Stone’s India edition, and his girlfriend, Laura Silverman, a New York magazine refugee working on several high-profile local launches. With its emerging class of fashion-conscious credit card holders, Mumbai has become a flourishing market for Western publishers—Vogue, OK!, People, GQ, InStyle, and many other familiar titles have appeared in recent years—hoping to make up for dead sales at home by scoring accounts with choice Indian advertisers.

  “Sales of Western magazines are already far better than expected,” Anjan tells me. “People don’t actually read the magazines. They just leave them in their apartments or cars so that other people can look at the pictures and say, ‘Oh, she’s into Vogue or InStyle.’” So, in addition to everything else, the publishing industry has exported the same art director mentality that’s been driving Western editors to apoplexy for centuries.

  For three nights, Anjan, Laura, and I hit clubs and restaurants where Indian businessmen power through two-hundred-dollar bottles of Scotch and try to get sexsational Bollywood “item girls” out of their three-hundred-dollar jeans. After the tour with Anurag, it’s a relief to find that all is not squalor, and I end up having a great time and many fantastic meals in Mumbai, though the most lasting impression comes on the way back out to the airport, when a handless boy staggers to my cab at a red light and begins pounding on the window inches from my face. I look up to see that the boy’s head has been completely burned, so hideously disfigured that it’s melted into a permanent Halloween mask. A few patches of skin hang off his face; spectral eyes bulge out of receding sockets; teeth and gums are clenched as though he’s already a cadaver—walking, breathing, but otherwise dead. The stumps where his hands should be are covered in a ghastly white secretion, like milk or heavy cream, which smears the window with long, wretched streaks as he bangs away for attention.

  I reach for my wallet, but the driver leans across the front seat, thumps on the window, and curses the boy with a violent Hindi threat. Ignoring the driver, the boy curls a flap of skin where his lip has once been, cocks his head, and appeals to me with phantom eyes. I roll down the window, but the light turns green. The driver smiles at me. “Forget him,” he says, oblivious to the fact that I never will. We speed away, leaving the handless boy to try his luck at the next red light.

  What Mumbai is to the überreality of Slumdog Millionaire, the coastal state of Kerala reportedly is to serenity, wildlife, and scenery. Home to the subcontinent’s largest mountains south of the Himalayas, Kerala is a wonderland of empty beaches, jagged peaks, and sandalwood forests (as well as those vein-straightening ayurvedic massages). Because no tour of India is complete without a visit to this advertised sanctuary of sanity, I catch a flight south for my final week in country.

  Though home to elephant, wild bison, and the occasional tiger, Kerala is most famous as the place where ferocious rains and winds first strike India each summer and the annual monsoon season is officially declared by government officials. This occurs with remarkable consistency around June 1, when the southwest monsoon rolls off the Arabian Sea and begins blowing through the country from south to north. By June 10, it has usually hit Mumbai. By mid-June, Calcutta. By July 15, all of India lies beneath a claustrophobic dome of pewter that settles over the country like the lid of a garbage can somebody keeps forgetting to empty. In September, the system begins its six-week retreat across the country and back out to sea. Up in Jaisalmer, Joshi will get a month of rain, but during its near half-year cycle, the monsoon will never completely leave the southwestern coast. When you think fog, you think San Francisco. When you think suicide, you think Ithaca. When you think monsoon, you think Kerala.

  Traditionally, the most important time of year for Indians, monsoon season evokes lyrical images of ceaseless showers that bring rebirth to the country. When my Jet Airways Boeing 737 touches down in the midsize port city of Cochin, however, the skies are about as threatening as a “time out” warning to an eight-year-old Ritalin addict. In fact, the rain gods in India operate a lot like annoying children playing with a light switch—on then off then on then off then on then off with maddening unpredictability. As one adage says, the rain falls on one horn of the buffalo but not the other.

  Because it’s such a historically integral part of Indian society, there are actually a number of adages covering monsoon activity, but nobody mentions a single one as I travel toward my sodden destiny in Kerala. Instead, every Indian I meet wants to know why the hell I’m going to Kerala in June.

  “It will rain every day.” “You will not be able to tolerate the heat.” “June is the absolute worst time of all in India, and a perfect hell in Kerala.”

  From pussyfied Americans accustomed to the precision deployment of elite local TV “stormtracker” weather teams every time it threatens to sprinkle, I might understand. But I thought Indians were supposed to love the monsoon. Ages-old music such as the “Raga Malhar” has woven the season into the national mythology. Rain-themed movies such as 1949’s Barsaat are classics, and extended rain dances are beloved Bollywood cliché.14 Bookies in Mumbai take bets on monthly rainfall. The country’s entire ecological and psychological cycle is said to revolve around a weather system that at its climax covers one-third of the planet and is widely regarded as one of the most important natural phenomena in the world.

  Varanasi and most of the rest of India had been a tree hugger’s nightmare, but in monsoon country I’d expected to find a more finely developed appreciation of the natural world. So where was the joy? Where was the love? Where was anyone in the entire country who had a good word to say about the importance of the rainy season? If I was going to find out, apparently I was going to be ignoring the advice of a lot of people in the process.

  Separate the meteorological reality from the rejuvinating-the-soul romance and the monsoon takes on a dramatically different form. Indian farmers may still await the annual deluge, but motorists hate it and it’s motorists who are driving India (literally, figuratively) in its manic aspirational push to keep up with China’s manic aspirational push to overtake the United States’ position of global economic primacy. In both emerging countries, cars are the most important way of keeping score, occupying a position alongside houses at the top of the consumer-status pyramid.

  Cars in India, however, are as much burden as blessing. The monsoon brings commutes to legendary standstills across the country.

  “And we come to the same story…which is repeated every year,” bitches a typical Times of India article. “The story of the monsoon showers playing havoc on the city roads, and the harried commuters praying for relief and cursing
the authorities all the while.” The conclusion is simple and sad: what was once poetry has become a monumental pain in the ass.

  Cars are important to this discussion because more than anything the country’s thriving auto industry illustrates the fundamental theme of contemporary India, one that bears an ominous message for the rest of the world: it is no longer a primarily rural nation. As Suketu Mehta writes in his quintessential Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found: “Fifty years ago, if you wanted to see where the action was in India, you went to the villages. They contributed 71 percent of the net domestic product in 1950. Today, you go to the cities, which now account for 60 percent of net domestic product.”

  Unlike old-time fishermen and farmers who rested and threw festivals when the rains came, the work of the modern state doesn’t stop for shitty weather. True, hundreds of millions of Indians live in rural areas, and from Darjeeling to Thiruvananthapuram, you’ll hear rhapsodic Indian cornpone about how the “cry of frogs and dribbling of water from the leaves” (per my favorite jizz-pumping tourist brochure) make the monsoon the delight of all.

  Most of the reasons the monsoon was crucial to Indian society in the first place, however, have become obsolete. Seasonal rains were once the foundation of survival in a country that still has comparatively little assured irrigation, but advances in food storage and preservation have all but eliminated starvation. With improved transportation and communications, remote villages are no longer isolated by annual flooding. The famed wet-sari dances—for years the only legitimate T & A repressed Indians were allowed to enjoy—have been rendered quaint by the high heels and micromini skirts of the “Bombabes” who are bringing skank fashion and hip-hop sexuality to every corner of the country.

  Even children, the most uninhibited and adoring celebrants of the season, are ignoring the monsoon. As one newspaper editorialized, “These days people stay indoors and play video-game consoles. The young are indeed at home, or within the plush environs of hotels and malls. No splashing around in puddles or romancing in the rain for them.”

  Given that no one likes an outsider who’s been in their country all of three weeks lecturing them about their culture, I assume that many locals won’t appreciate my notion that the modern state has for all intents and purposes blown past the monsoon. From train platforms to spice shops, I spring my monsoon-is-obsolete thesis on every Indian who will talk to me, yet, astonishingly, not one rejects the idea outright. Many offer waffling resistance—“Oh, you must be careful not to make generalities,” and so on—but nobody seems all that offended by my outlandish challenge to the national identity. After road testing it on an array of dumbfounded bystanders, I’m confident my monsoon theory is ready for the ultimate shakedown.

  The plan in Kerala is to head into the countryside and, not unlike Linus holding out for the arrival of the Great Pumpkin, find the most sincere place to await the rain. After some inconclusive research on the effects of global warming on the monsoon—disappointing, given that I’d really hoped to drive home my thesis with some shattering evidence rooted in the most fashionable of planetary anxieties—I choose Munnar, a pretty mountain town in the Western Ghats coastal range, four hours inland from Cochin. In addition to being impossibly beautiful, the slopes of the Western Ghats are some of the wettest in the world. The Keralan coast will receive a very respectable seventy-nine inches of monsoon rain, but in a good year the coastal hills will get more than two hundred.

  To get to Munnar I hire Baiju, a thirty-five-year-old nature guide who, after submitting to my now highly circumspect driver screening process, insists that his only real deficiency is height.

  “Too short for the Indian Army,” he says in a way that suggests a life of target practice and drilling at dawn would have been the one for him. “The Indian Army’s minimum height requirement for permanent commissions is 157.5 centimeters.”

  That’s about five-two. Baiju missed the cut by 2 centimeters.

  It’s taken nearly a month but I think I’ve finally pulled an honest man out of India’s bottomless roster of corner-cutting drivers. The barrel-chested, thickly bearded Baiju is exemplary, and not just for being a straightforward type who speaks good English. His 2004 Ambassador sedan is clean and in the kind of shape my engineer grandfather kept his Caprice Classic. Like Team Congo, Baiju knows the times to be quiet and let the scenery speak for itself. And as an amateur photographer, he’s savvy to light and angles and stopping points whenever I call out for passing photo ops.

  Shouldered by massive rock towers reaching seven and eight thousand feet, the jungle road from Cochin to Munnar is as scenic as any this side of the Hana Highway. The lower slopes of the Western Ghats are covered with tea plantations, manicured rectangles of fluorescent green tea hedges bonsai’d into tens of thousands of near-uniform plots. As we gain elevation, the fragrance of cinnamon, cardamom, coriander, cumin, vanilla, pepper, ginger, garlic, and clove pours through the open windows—Kerala grows half your spice caddy—along with smoke from small cooking fires.

  “What do you like to eat?” Baiju asks. “Turn your head anywhere in Kerala and you will find it growing.”

  At a photo viewpoint we get out of the car to expose ourselves to a light drizzle and assess a promising mass of dark clouds on the horizon. Across the parking lot, four guys in their late thirties leaning unsteadily on the hood of an SUV are roaring at one another and drinking like shipwreck survivors. Drunk is drunk in any culture, but this gang is rolling like a whiskey bottle down a set of stadium stairs.

  “Hello! What is your country?” The ballsiest of the crew lurches toward me with an insane grin and the apparent idea of planting a wet-bearded welcome on my lips. I turn my head just in time to receive a sandpaper slurp that starts on my cheek and slides down my neck.

  Baiju and I have stumbled onto an Indian version of the weekend roader. Buddies out to drink in the monsoon. Or just drink. I get the sense that the main event, like a trip to the AutoZone Liberty Bowl, is more or less an excuse to get out of town, and it turns out I’m right.

  “We are four from Cochin,” one of the more coherent guys tells me while thrusting a filthy glass into my hand. “This is our annual trip to the mountains. No wives and children. Now toast the monsoon.”

  Normally, I’m pretty sociable in these situations, but drunks on twisting mountain roads need no encouragement, especially when they’re passing around a bottle of something called White Mischief. This turns out to be a popular Indian vodka, and it must be the real deal because it’s not even happy hour and these guys are already acting like the Soviet Army at the Elbe River in 1945. I consent to a courtesy snort and make a note to confer the nickname “White Mischief” upon my mercurial nephew, Kyle, before Baiju and I manage to pry ourselves free and push on to Munnar without further social entanglement.

  Nothing lets you know it’s raining bulls and buffaloes like a sheet-metal roof outside your hotel window. The Indians say the monsoon is the best weather for sleeping, but like the rain on my second night in Munnar, I’m up and down all night. Mostly this is from excitement—the monsoon, finally—though spend a month on Indian mattresses and you’ll see why they had to invent yoga here.

  “It’s raining bulls and buffaloes!” Baiju greets me in the morning. “Now you are happy.”

  In Cochin, Baiju had been a rock of courtesy and professionalism—all “Yes, sir” and “Let me carry that, sir” and “Do not purchase tea in that shop; it is known to be operated by a criminal element, sir.” Now that he’s gotten comfortable around me, his more local tendencies have begun to flower.

  It turns out that Baiju is even more rabid for award-winning monsoon photos than I am. In the car approaching a street corner so flooded that it’s got its own whitecaps, he points to an old woman making her way up the side of the road with a sack of vegetables.

  “Get your camera ready!” Baiju punches the gas and rocks the steering wheel. “Watch the spray when we pass her!”

  Baiju downshifts the white Amba
ssador and veers for the woman like a cheetah closing on a gimpy zebra in open grassland.

  “No, hey, Baiju, that’s not necessary. I don’t think we should…”

  “You not like? It’s no problem! She won’t mind!”

  “No! I not like!”

  “Great picture!”

  We plow into the minilake and a wall of brown water—backed-up sewers are a big problem during the monsoon—explodes ten feet in the air. I click a few shots through the window. Who doesn’t love a sheet of water suspended in midair? The old lady disappears behind the wall. Baiju speeds on, blood in his throat, crazy for more prey.

  As the morning progresses and fat drops of rain pop like firecrackers across the hood of the car, we come upon some more serious monsoon casualties. Twenty feet below a two-lane mountain road, four guys are trying to push a Kawasaki motorcycle up a steep, muddy embankment. Moments earlier, a jeep barreling into a curve in the wrong lane—a move that’s apparently as common in Kerala as it is in Rajasthan—had forced a potential head-on collision.

  “I braked suddenly and the bike slid from under me,” the Kawasaki driver tells me, still half in shock. “I was saved by the bushes. My bike tumbled down the hill.”

  Kerala is known throughout India for the “trail of blood” unleashed by windy roads, slippery mastic asphalt, and what even the Transport Department ungraciously considers a breed of “inept motorists,” drivers so bad they make the ones in Washington State look like DMV instructors by comparison. (That’s a little regional dig, but trust me, it’s hilarious because it’s true.) Despite having roughly 3 percent of India’s population, Kerala racks up 10 percent of the nation’s traffic accidents. In 2008 it accounted for 3,862 deaths in 37,306 wrecks. That’s more than ten traffic fatalities a day in a state not much bigger in area than Maryland.