The Hope Factory A Novel

five





IT SEEMED INTRINSIC TO HIS RESTLESS nature to never be able to sleep comfortably through the night. For more aggressive cases of insomnia Anand liked to pace the study listening to a motley collection of seventies rock, a musical habit that dated from college. He had recently come across an old Doobie Brothers CD while browsing at a music store on Brigade Road, and pacing to it usually relaxed him to the point where he could pick up The Economist. This was a magazine he subscribed to because it seemed appropriate; he dutifully labored his way through the editorial pages and an occasional article on politics or business. He rarely bothered to read the rest of the magazine unless he found himself awake at night. Then, the arts and books section was the perfect curative: subjects he had little interest in, instantly sedating; he could get drowsy within the first paragraph. There was one in particular, on the recovery of presumed-destroyed Babylonian artwork, that was his favorite in this regard. So sleep-inducing, even the very words Bab-y-lon-ian-art-work repeated slowly heralded visions of happy insensibility. “Babble,” he liked to say, “babble-onion, art-wuk.” And such repetition had borne strange fruit one day when someone was boring on at a dinner about the importance of preserving art against the tides of time and human agency, and bang on cue, Anand’s mouth had opened, he’d said, “Babbleonion art-wuk,” and had his wife not choked on her wine, it would undoubtedly have been a bit of a feather in his cap.

But this was a night when neither The Economist nor the Doobie Brothers worked. He fiddled with his presentation for the following day, finally going to bed only to fight awkwardly with his pillow, plagued by specters of success and failure and fantastical what-ifs.

His body came awake before his mind did. He felt it, a high-tension humming in his blood, an electric glow, a moment of untrammeled, endless possibility—and then his mind snapped to alertness, propelling him out of bed, instantly reengaging with plans, schemes, and to-do lists. The warm shower waters rinsed away the vestiges of the night. Vidya lay undisturbed, swathed and blanketed in the icy freeze of the air-conditioned bedroom as he stole past and ran downstairs to his car.

In the early morning cool of an awakening world, through traffic as yet muted and desultory, the small sedan maneuvered its way toward the distant city outskirts. Forty-five minutes later, he appraised the approaching factory with a stern, clinical eye: the dust and distressed road yielding to a manicured strip of green grass; the glossy factory wall, freshly repainted the previous day, the large manufacturing sheds beyond.


RIGHT ON THE APPOINTED hour, two cars pulled into the compound. Six people emerged; at quick scan, they seemed to cover all the races: two Japanese, two Europeans, a man from England of African parentage.

Anand felt the usual awkwardness well up within him. He wished he could be at ease with foreigners; they were sometimes intimidating and frequently incomprehensible; he did not have the means within him to easily cross vast cultural divides. His management team stood behind him: Mrs. Padmavati’s oiled hair and silk saree glistening in the morning light; the HR man wearing a startlingly strong checked jacket for the occasion; Ananthamurthy’s tie looking narrow and uncomfortable, but all of them with smiles rich with expectation and nervous excitement. Anand dried his palms on a handkerchief, thankful that the gray jacket he wore covered the sweat that had soaked instantly through his shirt, and hastened forward to meet the visitors, pinning a warm smile of welcome to his face.


THE DAY PASSED SURPRISINGLY SMOOTHLY. The visitors toured the factory and seemed interested and impressed. Mrs. Padmavati had had the foresight to make copies of Anand’s presentation; he was gratified to see the visitors scratching notes as he talked. The projector did not fail; the computer’s hard drive did not die halfway through. Ananthamurthy did not bring up his antediluvian notions on caste, worship, and vegetarianism but instead led the tour through the plant with the calm competence that came from knowing the location of every nut and bolt on the manufacturing floor and answered all the questions posed to him thoughtfully and capably. The lunch had been organized from a five-star hotel; the visitors appeared to enjoy the food, though Anand was too nervous to eat.

In the late afternoon, the entire team collapsed in Anand’s office. They congratulated themselves. Everything had gone well, they agreed. They could not have planned anything better. They reviewed the questions that had been asked, trying to discern in them a measure of approval. As they talked, rehashing the various conversations of the day, Anand received an email from the liaison who had set up this visit.

Alas, the excitement it generated was soon laid to rest; it was just a routine email of thanks for the visit. Any real indication on whether Cauvery Auto had passed muster would have to wait while the visitors toured other factories in the country and then returned to their own home offices and talked things through. The discussions, negotiations, and due diligence might take days, weeks to resolve.

Ananthamurthy said he would redouble his prayers. Anand smiled automatically in response, already feeling the excitements of the day recede from his being, immediately replaced by everyday operational concerns.

As though on cue, his cellphone rang.

Anand hesitated before reluctantly touching his thumb to the screen of his iPhone.

“Hello? Hello? Can you hear me? I can’t hear you. Hello?” His father-in-law distrusted cellular technology and bellowed to compensate.

“Hello,” said Anand.

“It must be a bad line…. Right. You will be glad to know. I have organized it.” At Anand’s cautious silence, his father-in-law’s voice grew slightly more impatient. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

“Organized it?” said Anand.

“Yes. That is what I said…. The land you require for your factory…. I have set up some meetings. You come and meet me tomorrow—no, wait, I can’t tomorrow—fine, you meet me next week and I will brief you,” shouted his father-in-law before ringing off.

The second window in his office faced the factory campus, and Anand frowned at the view. This two acres—bought so very proudly just four years before, two acres for which Anand had mortgaged all he owned (which admittedly had not been very much) and taken an additional bank loan—was now too small. Orders had flooded in; Anand and Ananthamurthy had built factory sheds to the very edges of the lot; there was no further room to grow unless one counted the flower beds, the watchman’s room, and the realms that existed between the earth and the holes in the ozone layer.

“We are needing more land, sir,” Ananthamurthy had taken to saying on an almost daily basis, “especially if this Japan deal comes through and even,” he would say, “if not.”

Buying industrial land outside the city was fraught with complications, very different from the relatively straightforward process of buying property within the city through real estate agents. This, instead, was a murky business, with dubious titles and complicated family ownership histories, influenced by different mafias and forever enmeshed with inscrutable political machinery and zoning laws.

In the distance stood the neighboring property, with enormous warehouse walls, in disuse and covered with rusty metal sheets, built right up to the common compound wall, looming, entirely spoiling the vista. The factory gardener had planted an intervening hedge of bright pink bougainvillea, but this obscured only about three feet of the eyesore, which, if anything, seemed even uglier in contrast. Anand had approached his idiot neighbors, whose property stretched beyond the ugly warehouses for twenty acres, much of it in disuse and disrepair.

He had heard that they were in trouble; a pair of quarreling brothers, one prone to drink and the other to whores; they might be willing to sell. They were—and proved their reputations as business failures by quoting a price so ridiculously high and greedy, even for this city, where escalating land prices seemed a way of life, that Anand glared in disgust at the rust on their encroaching warehouse walls. May it grow, bastards, this rust, until it filters and covers all parts of your life, from your dick to your drinking glass. Behenchuths.

When Anand had bought his current two-acre site, the seller had been a friend of a friend, in financial trouble and eager to sell, with clear titles. That kind of serendipity couldn’t be counted upon—and this time, his requirements were larger. There were land brokers, of course, for this sort of purchase, but they did not advertise themselves or work without personal reference.

He had mentioned some of this, in passing, to Vidya. She had apparently conveyed it almost immediately to her father, who, naturally, had taken it upon himself to get involved in the matter.

His father-in-law’s phone call acted as a trigger. Anand mentally worked his way through a roster of friends and acquaintances who might be able to help him. His friend Vinayak claimed to know everything and everyone; he was the person to call. Anand fingered his way through the iPhone menu, forgiving its occasional telephonic inefficiency with the blind affection a parent reserves for a wayward but much-loved child.

“Vinayak?” he said. “Listen, buddy, I need your help.”





and, lest we forget …

matru devo bhava

mother is god

pitru devo bhava

father is god

athiti devo bhava

guest is god