Lightning People (27 page)

There were no minor problems. And there was no trust. Spohr raged for an hour through a litany of dilemmas hitting Bangalore, all of which she had known for some time, known them so intimately she could have supplied the details to back them up.

Bangalore was on the brink of collapse; the city had ground to a halt, choking on its own successes. Spohr named erratic power supplies, the narrow roads studded with potholes, the inadequate water systems and faulty sewers that were blocked and seeping over. Bangalore, beautiful exotic Bangalore, with its lush toppling gardens and mild springtime climate, had experienced a population explosion unprecedented in the nation's history. The rapid boom of the information-technology industry had created an urban hub out of dust, and now that industry was paralyzing the very city that had flowered it. The money that flowed into the streets jammed traffic, all the new-model SUVs, all the French boutiques and shipments of imported computers and young college graduates migrating in waves, demanding New York–style loft apartments. Yet foreign companies like Eval-ution were opening new service centers each week, expanding their prospects, overstaffing, bringing in more workers, making new billionaires who bought motorcycles and opened nightclubs and extended the congestion into the late-night hours. The infrastructure of the Karnataka town was breaking under the weight.

Calmly, Madi nodded her head through Spohr's list of antagonisms. Spohr did not need to school her on the growing pains of capitalism, and she resented how he dogged her replies—had dogged them in e-mails and phone messages and now flew for an entire day to dog her in person. She softly explained that they had expected oversaturation in the city center and that they needed to put pressure on the local government for support—a government, she noted, whose coffers had been filled by Eval-ution's growth.

But the three men balked at her response as if they'd said they were starving and Madi had merely described the menu of an expensive restaurant. “Easy for you to say,” Spohr stammered. “You aren't being vilified in your own home.” They informed her that the government had already turned against them. The chief minister believed too much had been given to the elites of the city and was now actively taking measures to check the progress. Farmers in the rural sector had been struck by failed monsoons and had taken to killing themselves in the Bangalore streets while all around them Chanel boutiques and minimalist Western lounges popped up by the dozen. “It all looks too indulgent,” Spohr huffed miserably. “The local government has not appreciated the foreign market's disinterest in the city's politics and now its sitting back and watching us sink.”

“Then they are idiots,” Madi said abruptly. She found three faces staring at her with their jaws locked and their eyes open in horror. Marcus braced his hand over her own as if to tell her to be quiet. “Well, it's true,” she yelled. “The job growth in technology is unlimited. What India cannot return to is cheap labor.”

Spohr wrenched his head back like he was on the worst roller coaster of his life.

“You don't know India, Ms. Singh,” he snapped. “You are an American woman who says what's good and bad for us? You know nothing. We live in dust and you grow fat? Is that the idea? India needs to be given more than jobs answering phones. It needs the respect you bestow so easily on your workforce in America. We must to protect the people of Bangalore. You can dress however you want, in your sari—”

“Mr. Spohr, there is no need for insults,” Marcus warned. “Ms. Singh
is your employer as much as I am. These problems are affecting all of us.”

“Here you are wrong,” he yelled. “You don't live in Bangalore. Maybe you own it. But it is not your home.”

“I am here to determine what this company needs to run efficiently,” Madi said in the softest voice her anger would allow. “And, since you asked, I do care what happens in India. Very,
very
much. My family is from India. I didn't pick out this sari to flatter you this morning, Mr. Spohr. I have as much claim as anyone to it as a homeland—”

“I will not work with her,” he shouted as his fist pounded against the table. “We come to tell you we need help, and all you ask us to do is expand. We cannot grow just because you sit in an office in New York and will it. Who told you that you were one of us, Ms. Singh? I'd like to know the name of this man.”

“I am—” she said and stopped.

“You
are
a greedy, ignorant American. You are a tourist to us, that is all.”

At first she thought Spohr's voice had caused the water in the glasses to ripple, but slowly the sound of chanting protestors funneled through the open windows. They screamed a child's rhyme about money, greed, and thieves—
colonize, monopolize, despotize
—and no one in the conference room spoke as the chant grew louder. Spohr folded his arms over his stomach and nodded to Narayanan and Hinduja, as if some truth had finally slipped into their ears this morning from the refrains of the street. Something happened as Madi sat there waiting for the parade to pass. She knew she had spoken too broadly about India, had written the colonels off as narrow-minded complainers who couldn't grasp the larger picture, one she had worked so hard for so many years to shade in. She felt her lips go cold and her eyes sting, a tremor of doubt slipping up into her brain like a splinter. What was the larger picture? What was this money doing for the people of Bangalore? Who did she think she had been helping? What is a remote outsource service doing in India in the first place?

“We are not politicians,” she said to break the silence, her voice shaking at the truth of her own words. “We are not responsible for
the burdens of the poor. We have to look at the numbers. That's what our investors ask of us.”

“Gentlemen,” Marcus interceded. “I will be in Bangalore next week. Madi will remain here to work on the problems from this end. The temperature is rising fast, but we can keep it from boiling over on all of us.” Madi nodded her head compliantly, as she realized that Marcus had just cut her from partaking in the larger picture, her trip to meet the prime minister, the glorious moment she had envisioned as a crowning achievement for a lifetime of brilliant work.

 

THE MEETING ENDED ten minutes later, and Madi did not speak another word. As Marcus shook hands with the three colonels, she fled to her office. Marcus followed her a minute later, his head shaking in reproach.

“You were out of line,” he said coldly, and she forced herself to stare at him because she knew if she were being watched she wouldn't cry. “Emotions don't help the situation. While I'm gone on this trip, I want you to think about your role in this company. It shouldn't be personal. If it's personal, then you're going to be of no future assistance in keeping this project grounded.” He turned and walked out, slamming the door behind him.

Standing alone in the hush of her office, she avoided the photograph of her father.
Project
and
company
and
situation
. What empty distant words these were to describe a whole country of people whom she thought she had been helping by delivering jobs from overseas. Of course it was personal, just as the hate letters she received daily on her desk from angry Americans were filled with personal slurs. Madi stood frozen at the side of her desk, unable to sit down in her chair. What was she then, dressed half in a sari, half in trousers, not here and not there?

She looked around her office as if inspecting it for the first time. The walls, the carpet, even the files arranged neatly in a rack, were all beige.
The color of nothing
, she thought.
Of nowhere
. The yellow tulips Marcus had sent her were dead and withered on the windowsill. She fought a shiver and tried to breathe, but there was only beige air in a beige room that floated like an obscenely bland bubble twelve
flights above the ground. She suddenly felt like her fingers had been touching nothing for the last six years: not a billion people, not even a single one. Impulsively she grabbed the vase of dead flowers and carried it with her as she careened through the lobby, desperate for the wet, fresh air of the street. She took the elevator down and exited through the revolving doors, thankful for the last drops of rain that fell on her face and hands.

The protest march had vanished as quickly as it had materialized. The sunlight guttered through the nearby construction sites and filled her face and eyes. Madi searched through her purse for her sunglasses while holding the vase at her hip. Maybe she wasn't one of them. Maybe she was just what they said, an American getting rich while farmers killed themselves in front of nightclubs in some country she had only imagined she could call her own.

She tried to think where Raj might be at this hour on a Friday. Raj would talk sense to her. Her older brother would remind her of a place she inhabited beyond the terminal beige of an office tacked in foreign investment strategies. “Do I have to remind you that we're from Florida and we're Sikh not Hindu and you used to swim for a high school team called the Bald Eagles?” Raj had once asked her.
Yes
, she should have answered. Yes, she needed to be reminded of that. She pictured the long docks in the Keys with her father standing on the wood planks drinking a Budweiser with his powder-blue turban wrapped across his forehead.

Madi took tired steps toward the street corner. Maybe next week she would fly back home for a day or two and force Raj to come, because he would have to go with her, she would need him with her to see their family.

She breathed deeply, as she watched the crosswalk light change.

Yes, she wanted Florida, the yellow palms and the morning surf that brought in the reef air and her father in his tiny apartment praying the Guru Granth Sahib and maybe even her mom, sucking on Newports in the house they had grown up in. Raj would come. They could stop fighting for a weekend. They would be good kids again. India could be fixed when she got back.

She stepped into the street, slipping the sunglasses over her nose,
and heard tires gunning over the cobblestones. One look, a dirty sparkling windshield framed in blue, going the wrong way. Madi only had time to straighten her back, her hands dropping the glass vase and reaching out as if to pull someone back who was walking away.

The car struck her, tossing her out of her shoes and slamming her against its hood. Her limp body slid over the left bumper as the car lurched to a stop. She was dead two minutes after she landed on the wet cement of the street.

THIS IS HOW William was supposed to go: flying across the map of America, one blue cell traveling the arteries of the Eisenhower Interstate System, first south and then west. He was supposed to be a man living one page of the atlas at a time, gunning the motor, memorizing the number of the next off-ramp. He accelerates, stays in the far left lane, and sets the cruise control to seventy. At fill-up stations, he chooses self-service, grabs a bathroom key attached to a piece of particle board from the attendant, and, in a buzzing Dairy Farmers outside of Farragut, Tennessee, buys a discount cassette tape of Princess Stephanie singing “Live Your Life.”

He was supposed to follow the West Express to I-78 and then merge onto I-40 South, passing Knoxville rodeos and strip mall water parks. He flows down I-75, the Mississippi of highways, and threads through Chattanooga on the straight shot to Birmingham. From there, it's a slingshot right, fighting the western sun until darkness races past the blue Cressida. Baton Rouge foams in the distance like a fallen meteor. The gulf sparkles. Dust halos ragweed. The moon glows the exit signs all the way through the suburbs of Houston.

He was supposed to be building a rhythm, becoming a loose blur, burning fuel without leaving tracks. The flat pink boom of Texas skies. The Cressida devours the blacktop as he sings “Live Your Life” until he knows it by heart and tosses the cassette into a trashcan near the Salado Junction. He creeps through a surprise border check on the outskirts of El Paso and disappears into Tucson. Phoenix is a mirage of locked liquor stores and hitchhikers who have given up on their thumbs. He shoots through the desert at dawn, blasts the radio into coyote country, does eighty through Twentynine Palms, catches I-10 for a few more miles, before he steers the car into the baked, stalled traffic of Los Angeles and, just beyond it, the sea. Four days on the road, and he would have been out there. He would be crashing in Laurel Canyon with friends who went out years ago to rent pool houses with sofa beds that open up for him. He would have been guilty of nothing worse than car theft, for which he knew in his heart Quinn would never file charges. Four days flashed through his mind in four minutes.

William never got out of New Jersey.

He checked into a motel off the West Express, parking the Cressida in the back lot between two dumpsters. He tried not to look at the damage as he struggled out of the driver's seat, but he could see the fat dent in the hood, the broken blinker, a warp in the front bumper with pieces of red fabric caught in its splintered plastic. His hands shook as he signed the motel registry under the name Joseph Guiteau.

“Do you have ID?” the scrawny teenage girl asked, her mouth gumming a piece of banana, her eyes freezing on him. In the room behind her, a television flashed the five o'clock news.

“What? No,” he groused. “I don't. I'm only staying a night or two.”

She managed a hard swallow and gave a flirtatious grin.

“That's fine. I trust you. Just pay up front. We got a fun '80s night at the bar next door. You should come if you got nothing else to do.”

He tried to smile as he took the key, but he just made it out into the parking lot before he vomited, twisting down on one knee with a hand pressed against the cement as his stomach unloaded yellow
acid. William didn't wait for more convulsions. He sprinted down the walkway to room six, unlocked the door, bolted it behind him, shut the curtains, and collapsed across the bed.