In this way, in the summer of her renewal, Grandma broke.
Fiercely competitive TV channels covered the story of the breaking city as “Breaking News.” Nobody pointed out the irony. They unleashed their untrained, but excellent-looking, young reporters, who spread across the city like a rash, asking urgent, empty questions; they asked the poor what it was like to be poor, the hungry what it was like to be hungry, the homeless what it was like to be homeless. “Bhai Sahib, yeh bataaiye, aap ko kaisa lag raha hai…?” Tell me, brother, how does it feel to be…? The TV channels never ran out of sponsorship for their live telecasts of despair. They never ran out of despair.
Experts aired their expert opinions for a fee: Somebody has to pay the price for Progress, they said expertly.
Begging was banned. Thousands of beggars were rounded up and held in stockades before being shipped out of the city in batches. Their contractors had to pay good money to ship them back in.
Father John-for-the-Weak sent out a letter saying that, according to police records, almost three thousand unidentified dead bodies (human) had been found on the city’s streets last year. Nobody replied.
But the food shops were bursting with food. The bookshops were bursting with books. The shoe shops were bursting with shoes. And people (who counted as people) said to one another, “You don’t have to go abroad for shopping any more. Imported things are available here now. See, like Bombay is our New York, Delhi is our Washington and Kashmir is our Switzerland. It’s like really like saala fantastic yaar.”
All day long the roads were choked with traffic. The newly dispossessed, who lived in the cracks and fissures of the city, emerged and swarmed around the sleek, climate-controlled cars, selling cloth dusters, mobile phone chargers, model jumbo jets, business magazines, pirated management books (How to Make Your First Million, What Young India Really Wants), gourmet guides, interior design magazines with color photographs of country houses in Provence, and quick-fix spiritual manuals (You Are Responsible for Your Own Happiness…or How to Be Your Own Best Friend…). On Independence Day they sold toy machine guns and tiny national flags mounted on stands that said Mera Bharat Mahan, My India Is Great. The passengers looked out of their car windows and saw only the new apartment they planned to buy, the Jacuzzi they had just installed and the ink that was still wet on the sweetheart deal they had just closed. They were calm from their meditation classes and glowing from yoga practice.
On the city’s industrial outskirts, in the miles of bright swamp tightly compacted with refuse and colorful plastic bags, where the evicted had been “resettled,” the air was chemical and the water poisonous. Clouds of mosquitoes rose from thick green ponds. Surplus mothers perched like sparrows on the debris of what used to be their homes and sang their surplus children to sleep.
Sooti rahu baua, bhakol abaiya
Naani gaam se angaa, siyait abaiya
Maama sange maami, nachait abaiya
Kara sange chara, labait abaiya
Sleep, my darling, sleep, before the demon comes
Your newly tailored shirt from mother’s village comes
Your uncle and auntie, a-dancing they will comes
Your anklets and bracelets, a-bringing they will comes
The surplus children slept, dreaming of yellow ’dozers.
Above the smog and the mechanical hum of the city, the night was vast and beautiful. The sky was a forest of stars. Jet aircraft darted about like slow, whining comets. Some hovered, stacked ten deep over the smog-obscured Indira Gandhi International Airport, waiting to land.
DOWN BELOW, on the pavement, on the edge of Jantar Mantar, the old observatory where our baby made her appearance, it was fairly busy even at that time of the morning. Communists, seditionists, secessionists, revolutionaries, dreamers, idlers, crackheads, crackpots, all manner of freelancers, and wise men who couldn’t afford gifts for newborns, milled around. Over the last ten days they had all been sidelined and driven off what had once been their territory—the only place in the city where they were allowed to gather—by the newest show in town. More than twenty TV crews, their cameras mounted on yellow cranes, kept a round-the-clock vigil over their bright new star: a tubby old Gandhian, former-soldier-turned-village-social-worker, who had announced a fast to the death to realize his dream of a corruption-free India. He lay fatly on his back with the air of an ailing saint, against a backdrop of a portrait of Mother India—a many-armed goddess with a map-of-India-shaped body. (Undivided British India, of course, which included Pakistan and Bangladesh.) Each sigh, each whispered instruction to the people around him, was being broadcast live through the night.
The old man was on to something. The summer of the city’s resurrection had also been the summer of scams—coal scams, iron-ore scams, housing scams, insurance scams, stamp-paper scams, phone-license scams, land scams, dam scams, irrigation scams, arms and ammunition scams, petrol-pump scams, polio-vaccine scams, electricity-bill scams, school-book scams, God Men scams, drought-relief scams, car-number-plate scams, voter-list scams, identity-card scams—in which politicians, businessmen, businessmen-politicians and politician-businessmen had made off with unimaginable quantities of public money.