India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (8 page)

Anand’s bright eyes twinkle intelligence. He is courteous, the product of a mother who has him set for better things. He lives two doors down. As he has no hesitation in informing me, he would like to become an engineer when he grows up. ‘Why?’ I
enquire, expecting something along the lines of a good salary. His answer surprises me. ‘I want to build the cheapest money car that poor people can buy so they can go on a long drive.’ His expression reveals a steely determination.

I ask if he’s heard of the ‘Nano’. He says he hasn’t. I explain that it is a car designed by Indian automobile maker Tata Motors which costs only one lakh. I had visited the company’s headquarters in Pune a few months previously for a test drive. I tell him as much. He doesn’t seem impressed. ‘One lakh, eh?’ he says. I nod. He smiles and with the same resolute look assures me that his car will be cheaper still.

Leaving Jyoti and the boys, we make our way back through the slum’s labyrinthine tunnels. We walk in silence. Babu is brooding on something. As we near the corner store where I’d bought the fateful cheese balls, he reveals what’s on his mind.

‘It won’t work on the road, you know.’

‘What won’t?’ I ask.

‘The Nano and all. Whoever is buying actually is buying the cheapest car. They are not thinking about safety.’

Something about my conversation with Anand had obviously been eating away at him. I repeat what the Tata engineers had told me about successful crash simulations and side-impact reinforcements.

‘One crash and it will break into lots of pieces,’ he responds, his mind made up. ‘It’s unsafe actually. The door will go one way and the body will go another.’

We reach the store. An old man with a grisly beard is occupying the stool where Rochi had previously been sat. I wonder if it’s her father, the heart patient.

Babu draws my attention away. He hasn’t finished with the Nano. ‘They say it will cost one lakh. But they are fooling actually.’ He had seen an interview on television with Ratan Tata, the visionary behind India’s first low-cost car. ‘He himself says that such a cheap vehicle makes profit very difficult.’ Babu snorts, appalled that anyone could be gullible enough to be taken in by
the Poor Man’s Car. He can’t honestly see anyone buying a Nano when they can pick up a Santro from Hyundai for three lakhs.

‘Anyway,’ he says, almost as an aside, ‘it’s a tiny, stupid little car.’

Therein, I suspect, lies his real gripe. For Mumbai’s chauffeur fraternity, the car just isn’t big enough to cut it.

Rant over, Babu pulls the keys from his pocket and opens the door of the Maruti Swift. Contorting himself back into the driver’s seat, he ignites the engine and pulls out. He over-revs and we rejoin the traffic to the sound of screeching rubber and spitting gravel.

It feels good. Like we’re not in the lowest-status vehicle after all.

Babu’s boss generously invites me to make full use of his car. So over the succeeding weeks and months, whenever I’m in Mumbai, Babu, the Swift and I end up spending a considerable amount of time together. We make for a compact trio: criss-crossing the city, rushing for appointments, waiting at traffic lights.

Babu seems to enjoy the break from his usual routine. And I enjoy his company. He proves eager to help. As well as driver and tourist guide, he appoints himself my unofficial translator, fixer and general aide.

A trip to Film City provides him with the chance to mix all five roles together. I’d arranged an interview with the director Vipul Shah, via a contact in film production. He’d told me to meet him on set. Mr Shah is shooting a movie with action hero Akshay Kumar and doesn’t know when he’ll be free. Visibly excited, Babu spends much of the journey on the phone: half the time informing friends of his pending meeting with ‘Akshay’, and half the time checking (and rechecking with each successive wrong turn) the directions.

We arrive late to find a moody Vipul Shah sitting in the trailer park. His star actor had walked off in a sulk. Filming was cancelled for the day. Not one to be set back, Babu bowls up to my interviewee and shakes his hand energetically. ‘Sir, please for you to meet Mr Oliver from Lon-don. He is journalist, sir.’ I can see
the grim-faced director trying to fathom out exactly who Babu is. Describing him as my driver somehow doesn’t seem right. For starters, strictly he isn’t my driver. He is someone else’s. Secondly, as a general rule in India, drivers stay in their cars or keep out of sight. Babu, on the contrary, is already drawing up three seats so we could all sit together. ‘This is my . . . er . . . assistant,’ I mutter, gesturing towards Babu, who had already taken a seat and was waiting for the conversation to start. He beams.

The interview is not a great success, what with Babu’s nodding presence at my shoulder and his regular grunts of agreement. When we finish up, my new assistant launches into a short speech about what a pleasure it was to meet Mr Shah and how much he enjoyed his films. ‘My wife and I are watching
Waqt
many times,’ he says. ‘A very nice family movie actually, sir. We are laughing very much.’ More handshaking follows. I suspect Babu might be about to ask for his autograph and usher him quickly away before he does.

We then go in search of my contact, the production manager. A crew member directs us to the mess tent, where we find him eating. He is sitting alone and invites us to join him. Babu smiles and heads off to the steaming line of hotplates. He returns with the best of the buffet loaded high on his plate. Conversation is slow. Babu is torn between translating and eating. For the most part, the unexpected feast commands his attentions. Not that it matters too much. The little that does reach me seems centred on obtaining photographs of my wife and children. The producer films television adverts as a sideline. A few Europeans on his list could come in handy. He gets up to go. Babu waves him off, emits a satisfied belch and goes up for seconds of the sweet rice dessert.

The trip provides us with a turning point. Until then, I’d ridden on the back seat, just as Indian etiquette has it between the driven and their drivers. Heading back from Film City, I move up front.

It’s a simple gesture, but alters our relationship profoundly. No longer do we need to talk through the rear-view mirror. We can speak on a level. I take full advantage of the fact, peppering the
ever-loquacious Babu with a constant flow of questions. His answers slowly reveal the world as he sees it.

Life Babu-style, I learn, emerges predominantly in black and white. Neutral colours don’t occupy much space on his palette of opinions.

Take India and Pakistan, for example. The quarrelling neighbours are, as this proud Maharashtrian sees it, ‘blood and blood’. The friction between the two countries is due entirely to their respective governments. ‘Politicans’, I should know, ‘only care about lining their pockets.’ India’s northern cousin does have some ‘backward practices’, he concedes. Making women wear the burkha, keeping ‘the girl childrens’ uneducated, hanging models for wearing skimpy clothes – all these comprise ‘the bullshit’ in Babu’s view.

When it comes to geopolitics, the British come off little better. They gave India education and trains, but took everything else. It’s not a bad synopsis. As for the United States, their money is ‘big’. On the downside, ‘they always promise, but they do the falsehood behind the promise’. His prime examples are American incursions into Iraq and Afghanistan. Babu echoes the common sentiment in India that arresting Saddam was justifiable, but executing him probably wasn’t. ‘Everyone has the human rights actually,’ he opines. Pakistan’s women included.

As for India’s role on the world stage, he is ambivalent. He has heard the talk of India becoming the ‘next superpower and all’. He would like to believe it were true.

We are sitting over a cheap restaurant lunch of vegetarian kofta as we discuss the issue. A battered television, stained with grime from the street and oil from the kitchen, is running a daily news show. A headline runs along the bottom about a multi-billion-dollar nuclear energy deal with France. Babu points at the screen. ‘I am looking at the news.’ He has seen ‘the India scientists going ahead’ as well. Not to mention the troop of state leaders flocking to Delhi. ‘India has so many contacts with the foreign countries. Like Russia is supporting for such a long time.’ He places particular weight on India’s military stockpiles. ‘Nuclear
rockets, warships and fighter planes – India has so very many.’ His is a Ben 10 view of political supremacy: the bigger your Omnitrix, the more your clout.

‘And economically?’ I venture. ‘Could India become a global leader?’

‘Absolutely. India is growing. Economic is more.’ He talks about the soaring buildings downtown and all the new cars on the road.

But then his expression grows morose. Indians do not follow the rules, he contends. Nor do they plan anything. For these reasons, his homeland ‘may not become a superpower actually’.

I push him for some examples.

‘Like chewing the paan,’ he responds.

‘I’m not sure I follow.’

He draws his breath in a search for patience. An Indian will always spit his paan on the floor, he explains, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. He’ll never use a dustbin. ‘He doesn’t think people will see. Or he doesn’t care if they do. Everything in India is like this.’ Everything from minor traffic accidents to massive political corruption: it all comes down to a bending of the rules.

I sense he is on a roll. I order two teas.

India’s population growth represents another clear case of lack of planning, as far as Babu is concerned. He cites an acquaintance in the slum who has five daughters. ‘He keeps waiting for a son.’ Babu shakes his head, evidently appalled. ‘He is a stupid man actually.’ Two children, in his opinion, are quite enough. ‘With lots of children, you have a lot of problems. Already I scold. My wife scolds. Sometimes we give beatings.’ More follows about Ashu’s ‘stubbornness’. After two kids, all ‘good Indians’ should be sterilised, Babu believes. He means loyal Indian women, of course. The government covers all the costs, right down to the taxi to the hospital. He should know. He made Jyoti go.

A few weeks later, Babu and I stop in at Veg Wonder, a down-at-heel lunch spot along Worli Seaface Road. By now, long lunches have become a regular feature of our excursions. Between
one helping of rice and the next, Babu extends his thinking on lack of planning to the realm of personal finances.

‘In India, people want to get money. But all they do is work, go home, eat, do shit, and then get up and work again. They don’t think why. They don’t think about month’s salary and savings. People put money in stupid things. So they go and ask for loan, from friends and things.’

I think back to the way Babu had meticulously counted his income and calculated his outgoings. Bar the surround-sound music system, his habits seem frugal. He wears a plastic watch. His diamond ear-studs are transparently fake. Even his motorbike, as he openly confessed, could do with an upgrade.

Babu hasn’t always been so careful about money. A mischievous look comes over him as he pushes away his plate, signalling to the hovering waiter that he can eat no more. I sense a confession coming on. My lunch guest does not disappoint.

‘Now you are not to be telling Jyoti this, okay,’ he says as a preamble. I nod. When he was first married, he continues, he and his friends used to frequent the city’s dance bars. In Colaba, mostly. They were well-enough known to have tabs in some. ‘We were like owls. We never sleep. All the time to enjoy.’

The tea arrives. Babu doesn’t seem to notice. Arms flailing, he is caught up explaining how best to throw money at dance girls. It’s an amusing spectacle.

The key is for the notes to be ‘fresh’, he says, growing increasingly theatrical. That way, they fly straight. As for the best way to throw them, it’s all in the wrist. He mimics the action. I look confused. ‘You don’t get it?’ I don’t. ‘Then you should see gangster movie,
Vaastav
,’ he advises me. ‘In that movie, it shows how they are doing the throwing.’

I say I will and empty a sachet of sugar into my tea.

As I sip, Babu describes one night in particular. He’d gone with a friend from the slum to a dance bar called Crossroad, close to the meat wholesaler near Metro Cinema. His friend’s brother worked in the kitchen on a P&O cruise liner. He’d recently wired some money home. Four hundred UK pounds, ‘notes so huge they don’t
fit into an Indian wallet’. His friend blew the lot buying strangers drinks and throwing it gangster-style at the dancers. ‘“Stop for your goodness,” I am telling him. He’s telling me, like, “get lost”.’ Babu salvaged some loose notes and put them towards his gas bill. The rest disappeared.

Eventually, in the early hours, his friend gets thrown out onto the street. The bar closes and the girls drift home, while the punters head off to sober up on hot, sweet chai. His friend is slumped on the pavement, stamping his feet on the road and cursing himself. ‘“You are stupid,” I am telling him.’

Babu writes off the whole episode with a laugh and a flick of the wrist. ‘Anyway, he’s Bengali and a drunk.’

The story has a purpose. Babu wants me to know how he has changed. He no longer goes out late or gambles away his money. Not because Crossroads closed down, which it did. (‘The government said girls should not dance and not attach money to their bodies. But if girls not dancing, customers not going.’) Nor because Jyoti used to give him hell in the morning, which she did too.

He stopped because of what happened to his father.

On 24 September 2007, the water vendor Naruddin Nabi Shaikh was knocked off his bicycle by a speeding motorbike. He was thrown to the floor. The frail fifty-nine-year-old did not – or rather, could not – move a muscle.

A policeman witnessed the incident and instructed the driver of the Pulsar Bajaj motorbike to take the victim immediately to the hospital. Rajput Vir Singh, a muscled Popeye who worked as a bouncer at a Colaba nightclub, did as instructed.

Mr Shaikh arrived bloodied and unconscious. Tests showed that he was suffering from a brain haemorrhage. Soon after, he slipped into a coma. The white coats that examined him put his chances of survival at ‘minimal’. His family prepared for the worst. Amazingly, after a four-day vigil at his side, the head of the Shaikh household woke up.