SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2007 Edition

 

 

RETURNING to India after a trip abroad, I always tell myself that there's no place like home, thank God. For if foreign were like home,where the hell would I go when I wanted to get away from home for a spell? While here, we're too close to notice it. It's like trying toread this with the paper stuck an inch from your face, the print a fuzzy blur. But when we return from foreign parts, we get a differentperspective, and can read the message only too loud and clear. The first thing that strikes you is the sheer, overwhelming mass of people. People reduced to basic biological functions: Hawking, spitting, peeing, crapping, digging their noses, hanging about without goal or intent. People not as human projects but as primal anatomy. Buildings in a state of pro-active decrepitude, in terminal decay before they are complete. Roads and pavements forever dug up, like a perpetual grave the city excavates for itself. Nothing works: Traffic lights, bijli, water, transport, public toilets. There is an air of unredeemable squalor, an entrenched inertia, as unremovable as the paanthook that stains every conceivable surface like selfgenerative stigmata.

Don't I know we are a poor country, people retort accusingly when I point out all this. India's been a poor country ever since anyone can remember, I reply. So then, what do I expect? How dare I moan and bitch when I'm lucky enough to belong to a minuscule elite, a pampered privilegentsia, living in the showcase capital, able to afford the unthinkable luxury of an occasional foreign trip. I ought to be ashamed of myself. Don't I know that in rural India women have to walk for miles just to get a pot of water, which probably isn't safe todrink, anyway? That they've got no schools to send their children to, no hospitals to go to when they're sick? Yes, I do know these things. And yes, I am ashamed. But not because I feel particularly pampered and privileged, but because 60 years after independence we still have to wear our poverty like a martyr's hairshirt. Finish all the food on your plate; don't you care about the starving millions, we are told as children. I never quite understood that. I did care for the starving millions. But how was my cramming myself with food I did not need or want, and quite possibly making myself ill in the bargain, going to help? It was not as though through an unspecified process of distribution the surplus food – had I not helped myself to it or had it heaped on my plate by adult intervention – would have found its way to those anonymous millions who were being used to emotionally blackmail me.

We are taught to carry these hobgoblins of guilt into adulthood. Power cut? Don't grumble. Do you know how many thousands of villages have no electricity at all? Roof leaking because a crooked building contractor ripped you off? Don't kvetch. Do you know how many millions are homeless? Borrowed poverty as a blunt instrument to bludgeon you into acquiescence in the scheme of things. The paper shoved back in your face so that the print becomes an illegible blur again. And if you still persist in quibbling – that as a disgruntled member of the privileged class, far from finding solace in the thought that so many are so much worse off than you, you despair all the more because if life is pretty grim for you, how much more godawful and hopeless must it be for the truly disadvantaged– you are given the final, knockout punch: If you don't like it here, what stops you from going elsewhere? And the answer to that, in my case at least, is not the fear that elsewhere won't have me. The fear is that elsewhere might well let me in, and by the same token let in enough of my compatriots to turn elsewhere into here. And then where the hell would we all be?

 

 

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