The Hope Factory A Novel

seven





THE NEW HUMAN RESOURCES MAN had him cornered, pinning Anand to his desk with stratagems—“We should take, sir,” the HR man’s eyes were alight with mad sociological schemes that raised his hair in little black and gray tufts behind his ears, “the entire management to off-site. There is a place near Mysore which is having very good facilities for off-site. Rope climbing, coracle racing.” Anand regarded him doubtfully; he had hired the Human Resources manager to handle things like pay and perks and absenteeism; this man spent all his energies organizing picnics.

“Very good for bonding, sir,” said the HR man. “For teambuilding.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Anand.

“Oh, very good, sir.” The HR man seemed to take this for unabashed consent. “I will organize…. And there is a candidate here for that post of systems engineer. Mr. Ananthamurthy has seen him, and he requests you also to please interview. You are able to see him?”

Anand hesitated. He had a myriad list of things to do, but the expanding factory fattened steadily on a diet of new employees, and Anand gained a quiet pleasure from the quality of people who were beginning to seek employment with them. “Okay,” he said. “Quickly.”

He glanced at the day’s headlines. THE LOK AYUKTA ANTI-CORRUPTION RAID YIELDS TWO CRORES IN BRIBES.

STRAY DOGS ATTACK FOUR-YEAR-OLD CHILD, BUT STILL TOLERATED. “It is not in our Hindu culture to kill animals,” said a neighboring resident.

VIJAYAN—NEW HOPE FOR INDIAN POLITICS? with a photograph of the politician in question waving from a podium.

In the frivolous party pages, there was a photograph of his friend Vinayak, looking pleased and cool and prosperous at an art auction and, on the same page, Anand’s father-in-law, clutching a glass of gin and tonic with vulpine satisfaction. Harry Chinappa’s hooded eyes were ringed by dark dissipation; with his artificially blackened hair and his prominent hooked nose, he resembled a dissolute bird of prey.

Anand thrust the newspaper away when the interviewee entered the room. The young applicant was slender, bespectacled, and dressed in striped shirt and tie. His hair was parted on the side and neatly combed over, possibly with Brylcreem, for he introduced no odor of coconut oil into the room. According to the notes scribbled by Ananthamurthy, he belonged to a Gujarati bania caste and, therefore, was probably vegetarian, home-loving, and good with numbers. He perched nervously in front of Anand’s desk.

“Your good name?” The applicant, Anand noted, was about twenty-six years old, with the requisite four years of experience, and fluent in Kannada, as well as Hindi and Gujarati and English. “Born where? Oh, came to Bangalore as a child, is it? Father is doing what?”

For Ananthamurthy, caste and community were important hiring considerations, but Anand tried to guard against this. He himself had married out of caste—and that, in his mind, was a sign of progress, of stepping away from the rigid brahminical mind-set of his parents. Of course, there was still a tendency to hire the familiar, that was a natural impulse; if he analyzed his employee lists, he saw that most were Kannadiga or at least South Indian, some were brahmin—but, as leavening, there were three Muslims, two Kerala Christians, and several North Indians. In fact, if one considered the new machinery consultants, there were even two foreign—Korean—faces wandering around. As a welcoming gesture, special food was brought for them from the Korean restaurant in the city, and when Mr. Ananthamurthy, in a further gesture of first-day hospitality, decided to eat with them, he found the visitors unwrapping sea leaves, fish, and chicken, the unpalatable smells spreading across the table and staying the consumption of his own strictly vegetarian tiffin.

Mr. Ananthamurthy was conservative in his habits, consuming a large home-cooked meal in the morning and carrying to work a small steel tiffin box packed by his wife and daughters to shield him from the perils of oversalted canteen food. But, in truth, the factory canteen food was tasty; the same dishes were served to workers and managers alike (which Anand personally insisted upon): a good everyday menu of vegetables, dal, rice-sambar-saaru, chapattis, a mixed rice such as chitranna bhath or lemon rice, curds, and a sweet. Fully vegetarian, of course, for that was the preferred way. Indian manufactories might work to upgrade their production methods to international standards, but they were still populated by old-fashioned people with old-fashioned values; one could not argue with that. As Ananthamurthy had discovered, in the call centers and software development offices in the city, things were different. There they introduced American-style ways: fast food, casual attitudes, fun games, crazy decorations. This was apparently done to create environments that no employee would dream of leaving, but of course, that did not work either. Employee turnover continued unabated, like water swirling down an unplugged sink.

It took, on average, three months for new hires to lose their bewilderment, six months to find their feet, and one year to become fully reliable. And then, just as one could put them to work in a thorough fashion and turn one’s attention to other things, they came in blithely ready to quit—citing other job offers, or stress, or nonsense like that one giddy idiot who quit the accounts department to write a book. Employers, it seemed, had to make themselves attractive to potential employees in new and unprecedented ways, as though they were products stacked on supermarket shelves and seeking out buyers.

“You are married? Children?” The good employees usually were. Marriage and children forced a seriousness upon them, prevented them from scurrying from job to job, tempted by any passing incremental offer like a woman of easy virtue and no discrimination.

“Yes, sir. And with two children, sir,” said the applicant, adding considerably to his own worth. “But I am fully willing to travel, if necessary, sir.”

Unfortunately, the thoroughness with which the young man had prepared for the interview had also made him acutely aware of his own market worth. He was asking for 20 percent more than Anand had planned to pay.

In the abstract, Anand fully approved of such a thing. This was what happened when a society slowly moved out of poverty. Better pay, better lifestyles. It still had the power to astonish him, that he should bear witness to this transformation, striking him afresh every time he wandered into a hypermarket, the rows of products from around the world that were on sale; it moved him, even as his children obliviously shopped for the things they took so much for granted—so different from the small two-type-biscuit, three-type-sweet, one-type-pen kaka shops he had grown up with.

But practically, it made him cautious and thoughtful when he hired. This systems engineer, though, appeared to be worth it. Anand signed a note to the HR man approving his hire.


THAT AFTERNOON HE RECEIVED a call from his mother, telephoning to complain about the plumbing. The commode kept backing up, she said, and the plumber, in the nature of plumbers, was recalcitrant, inefficient, and mystifying in his proposed solutions. What did Anand think she should do? Over the years, she had taken to calling him on such things, everyday matters, bypassing his father, who seemed content to spend his days in a banian vest and dhoti, discussing philosophy and the importance of not giving in to material desires while Anand solved his plumbing problems from a distance of a hundred miles. “Okay, Amma,” he said. “Okay. I’ll attend to it.”

Each month, without his father’s knowledge, he sent money to his mother, depositing it directly into her account; his father never checked account balances.

“How is he,” he said now.

“Same,” his mother said. “Prostate giving trouble, so maybe the doctor will advise surgery…. Are you eating well?” she said. “And sleeping? … Don’t work too hard.”

“Okay, Amma,” he said, knowing that this standard maternal exhortation hid a complete ignorance of what he did for a living.

Anand’s father could never comprehend or approve of his son’s choice of profession, which he felt sacrificed learning for profit. Years before, visiting Anand’s first factory unit, he could not hide his shock and disgust. He had never returned for a repeat visit; his son’s work became a topic he refused to discuss.

Anand had never forgotten, never forgiven his father’s shame. When his new factory was scheduled to open, he nevertheless dutifully called to invite him to the opening ceremony.

“You should come,” he said.

“Is it?” his father replied. “But isn’t that the week of Guruprasad’s daughter’s wedding in Hubli …” Anand did not argue with this stated conflict with a function of a distant cousin his father had always despised. Instead of pressing his parent as was expected, he said:

“Is it? Then you should go for that.”

His father had not attended the factory inauguration; the resultant distance between Mysore and Bangalore had stretched from a hundred miles to four years. Naturally Anand’s mother could not visit her son’s factory without being disloyal to her husband, and if the increased amounts Anand was depositing in her account indicated his growing financial stability, she made no mention of it, functioning between the two men like a secret agent, marked by guile, covert phone calls, and essays of great diplomacy.


“I’M GOING OUT FOR half an hour,” Anand said casually. The trick lay in making it sound uninteresting; an outing that would not register on his wife’s sensitive social radar. “With Vinayak …”

“Vinayak Agarwal?” she asked, looking up from her magazine. “Will his wife be there?”

“No … he wants my help …”—he aimed for vague and boring—“on some engineering matter.”

As he hoped, she immediately lost interest.

Unfortunately, Vinayak, like Vidya, had his own set of socializing concerns; he wanted to meet at the new pub that was the latest in latest things. It would be noisy and crowded, not conducive to the kind of discussion Anand had in mind, but he did want Vinayak’s help and could not quibble.

The Latest Latest Bar was located in the ELIPT Mall—its name was supposedly an acronym for the names of the four brothers who built the mall, but a local wag had immediately expanded it to Extremely Luxurious but In Poor Taste, an opinion that Anand found difficult to disagree with. Shiny escalators swooped upward in a space seemingly imported from shrieking Dubai; an amazement of gilt and a fresco-covered ceiling in a mock-up of the Sistine Chapel: Man reaching upward, milky-eyed with greed, the Creator’s hand holding out not the promise of life at the tip of a finger but, Santa Claus–like, a gift wrapped in paper and ribbons, the angels clustered behind him carrying the urgent promise of more: handbags, perfume bottles, designer-labeled shopping bags. Let there be Lights—and an explosion of spending.

Anand was the first to reach the bar, submitting to the lazy security check and fighting his way to a corner of the bar counter. He ordered his beer and sorrowfully contemplated the bowl of olives that accompanied it. What, ultimately, was the magic of the olive that allowed it to flourish at the expense of other condiments; that took it from being a local fruit in a regional cuisine—probably once plucked and eaten by sweat-streaked, tree-climbing schoolboys in Italy before angry farmers could chase them away, much as he had raided nellikayi gooseberry trees in Mysore, dipping the spoils in salt and chili powder for a stolen after-school treat—and raised it to the status of an internationally hallowed bar food? He ate one: salty, squashy, cold, and green.

“Want to order some snacks, sir?” The bartender was dressed, like the other bar employees, in a white shirt, black pants, and red Converse shoes. SELVADURAI, his name badge said. Anand shook his head and noticed with relief the large figure lumbering in.

Vinayak levered his bulk with effort onto the barstool next to Anand. “Shit! These things are damn uncomfortable.” He placed an olive in his mouth and looked around, but all the tables were occupied. “Whiskey please, yes, that Aberlour is fine, and some paneer tikkas and masala nuts … What do you mean, no masala nuts. No tikkas also? Let me see that menu…. Okay, fine, bruschetta and, yeah, grilled mushrooms. Okay with you, Anand?” Anand nodded; he didn’t actually care. Vinayak was a strict vegetarian, having apparently attained his size on ghee and dal-bhatti alone. Food and drink ordered, Vinayak relaxed and inspected the other people in the bar. He waved at someone at a distant table. “See that guy? He got that large government order apparently by providing whores to the minister involved. What a pimp job, yaar …” Like his namesake, Ganesha, Vinayak was gifted with a potbelly, a penchant for prosperity, the cunning to market a stroll around his parents into a world odyssey, and a long, trunk-like nose perfect for poking into everyone else’s affairs. “Are we seeing you at Chetty’s party this weekend?”

“Yeah,” said Anand. “I suppose so.”

“Lucky bastard, Chetty, he sleeps around and his wife celebrates by throwing parties.”

“Ey, regarding that land broker you were mentioning,” said Anand, refusing to be sidetracked by Vinayak’s bits of heated gossip.

“Right,” said Vinayak, agreeably. “So you are planning some expansion, is it?”

Anand explained briefly, glossing quickly over his expansion ideas and just speaking of the land he required.

“So, about ten, fifteen acres, right? … And in that area? … Who did you deal with last time? Your father-in-law?”

“No, no,” said Anand, explaining.

“Great man, your father-in-law.” Vinayak spoke in tones that were entirely reverential. “Met him over the weekend, at that art thing … He knows everybody, no? Politicians, industrialists, everyone … even in Bombay-Delhi.”

“Yes, he certainly knows everyone.” Anand saw that Vinayak was looking at him quizzically. “And of course, my first thought was to talk to him, but the thing is, he deals with these high-profile types. And someone was saying that it’s better to keep these land transactions low-key until everything comes through … What do you think?”

“Oh, absolutely.” Vinayak was gratified to have his opinion solicited. “Yeah, best to keep it low-key … And I know the perfect guy for you. I’ll ask him to call you,” he said. “He is very good. Very low-key.”

“Great,” said Anand. “And listen, nothing too expensive, okay? We’re a small company; making those damn monthly debt obligations is still a struggle …”

“Arrey, don’t worry,” said Vinayak. “He’ll get the job done for you.”

Anand nodded and then stifled a groan when he saw who approached their table. He should have anticipated this, for where Vinayak roamed, could the rat he rode on be far behind?

“Vinayak,” he said urgently. “Don’t discuss any of this with anyone. Not my expansion, and not the land thing. Anyone.”

Vinayak’s eyes gleamed with the wet pleasure of secrecy. “Of course not, yaar,” he said. “I don’t believe in gossip. Hey, Sameer!”

“Bastard,” said the new arrival, placing a sweaty hand on Vinayak, “what’s all this ghaas-poos veg shit, yaar? Where’s my chicken? Hi, Anand.”

Sameer Reddy was the dumb son of a smart father, whose growing mining empire and political contacts were sufficient cause for Vinayak—who never did things without an implicit calculation—to claim a friendship with him and act as his social sponsor. “Cute chicks here tonight,” Sameer said. “Damn hot babes.”

The pale granite glitter of the bar was ice-cold, yet the heat and noise rushed at Anand; he was submerged, drowning, the sound of music so loud he could feel the drum beat in his chest, crowding his heart. Faces passed flushed with a strange, pulsing fervor, the men inexplicably abandoning their calm morning demeanors for spangled shirts and gel-spiked hair and restless, roving eyes; the women in tight skirts and painful shoes and bright, exclaiming smiles. A cocktail of races, European, African, East Asian, percolated and distilled into this lounge bar by the virulent forces of international mercantilism.

“Hey, buddy, how are ya?” A blond man emerged from the crowd, red-faced, an arm draped around a pretty girl.

“Hi, Brian,” Vinayak said: “He’s with Cisco …” he explained to Anand and Sameer. “A good guy. From California, I think. But did you see who he was with? Dilip Bannerjee’s daughter. I wonder if the parents know she’s hanging out with phirangs. But they are quite liberal themselves, her parents, so they probably won’t mind.”

“She’s hot.” Sameer Reddy eyed the young woman’s elegant legs, accentuated by her short dress and high heels.

“I have to go,” said Anand.

“No, no,” said Vinayak. “Stay, bugger. Have another beer.”

Anand acquiesced reluctantly. Vinayak was doing him a favor; he would stay.

Sameer Reddy was nodding his head at a trio of Japanese businessmen. “They are going to kick our arses. Those guys.”

“What?” said Anand. “Who? The Japanese?”

“The Chinese. They are going to kick our arses to Mongolia and back. There’s no way we can compete with them. In manufacturing or anything else.”

“I hope you are wrong,” said Anand.

“I am not wrong, yaar. This is what my father thinks. And do you know why they will succeed? I’ll tell you. No democracy. They can do whatever they want. They don’t have to worry about elections and how to win votes. If they have to defend the country, they do it. If they have to build a new road, they just do it, without running around asking each and every villager what to do before they take a single decision.”

“That’s a good point,” said Vinayak. “Though, I have to say, your father, Sameer, is an expert at getting around this system.”

“Yeah, he keeps those government guys happy. They look after us well. And they should. I mean, we taxpayers are the true unprotected minority in this country. Right, guys, right?” Sameer Reddy laughed heavily.

Anand struggled for diplomacy and failed. “A really privileged minority,” he said, pushing his glasses up. “And, secondly, of course we can manufacture things as well as the Chinese do. And as cheaply. We’re doing it already. And we’ll get better. We have no choice. And, thirdly, bugger, if there was no democracy in India, you know where we’d all be sitting?”

“Where?”

“At the gates of the American Embassy, squealing to get in.”

He said good night abruptly, too annoyed to stay longer.

Sameer Reddy was an idiot, an incompetent behenchuth who couldn’t f*ck his own sister without assistance. Like so many people, he tended to confuse democracy with the problems of bad governance—that endemic, virulent disease that made working in India akin to racing a car in low gear: a sense of strain and impending doom.

His mind went to the foreign team who had visited the factory…. What must they have thought? Would they confuse the apathy of poor governance with the quality of Indian people themselves? Or were they able to see through the noise and the dust to the will of the people and their desire for better circumstance? Why did it have to be like this? Why couldn’t government be a support? To build what they build well, to maintain it, to work hard, to think sensibly. To ask of themselves, in short, what the citizens asked of each other. Inviting visitors to the country was like bringing friends to a home where alcoholic parents rampaged out of control. One could apologize once or twice for the inconvenience rendered, but, beyond that, simply bury one’s face in one’s hands in embarrassment.


THE PHONE ON HIS table buzzed the following day.

One landbroker, Kamath said, had arrived. Did Anand want to see him? The austerity in Kamath’s voice suggested otherwise.

The Landbroker walked in, and Anand could immediately comprehend Mr. Kamath’s disapproval. A bright red polyester shirt molded his lean torso, gold chains rested on a hairy, partially exposed chest, sunglasses (tinted gold) sat on his hair, a luxuriant mustache above his mouth. The Landbroker was like a peacock amidst the sober plumage of the factory employees. Through the open door, Anand could see others stopped in their tracks, staring curiously after this apparition, Mrs. Padmavati craning her neck for a better look.

Without even stepping outside, Anand knew that the Landbroker’s car would be big and expensive and flashy.

“Namaskara,” said Anand, after a pause. “Bani, bani.”

“Aanh,” said the Landbroker. “Namaskara.”

He did not sit down when Anand offered him a chair. He spent a few moments wandering around the office, inspecting the furnishings, staring at the files on the table, coming to a halt before the production bay window. He leaned one hand against the glass, staring intently at the workers, at the lines of machinery, absorbed in an intense process of internal computation and evaluation, as a callused, yellow-nailed toe in a black Bata sandal scratched the back of his calf through the shiny gray material of his pant. The Landbroker radiated a restlessness that carried the scent of him over to Anand, a musk of sweat and sun and some deep, fervent desire.

Within moments, all sense of amusement had vanished from Anand.

The Landbroker looked like a first-rate thug; Anand felt annoyed at his blatant, unshadowed assessment of the factory. He should have refused to see him; he should have met him outside; he should have thought of some other alternative; Vinayak was a buggered-up idiot and Anand a bigger one for listening to him. This man was startlingly different from normal real estate agents, who inhabited nice offices and accompanied their sales of city properties with a line of upbeat, cheerful patter. The Landbroker did not spring from such a pleasant-faced, well-regulated mercantile landscape. He seemed the embodiment of a more primitive commercial force, like a tiger in the wild, rare and thrilling to encounter but admittedly not without its risks.

Anand felt like a cow left tethered in the middle of the jungle.

He cleared his throat. The Landbroker turned away from the window and eased himself into a chair. He placed an ankle on the opposite knee and then proceeded to scratch it absentmindedly with the nail of his left little finger, which, unlike his other bitten-to-the-quick nails, was long and luxuriant and painted a bright red. As he talked, the red nail moved to his ear, to explore the interiors and extricate what wax it could.

“Aanh, saar,” the Landbroker said. “So you need land, it seems.” His Kannada bore the rough edges of street-speak.

“For the factory,” said Anand. “We have fully expanded here.”

“Yes, I saw, I saw.” The Landbroker’s assessment was now concentrated on Anand. “So how is it you know Mr. Vinayak? Joint business with him?”

“No,” said Anand, wrenching his gaze away from the long red fingernail. “He is a friend. You have done work for him, isn’t it?”

“Yes, a little,” said the Landbroker. “Some twenty acres in Bangalore and then again some land in Hubli. I have contacts there as well. He has told you about that?”

Vinayak hadn’t, but Anand nodded anyway. “He is a good person, a good businessperson,” said the Landbroker, “so when he mentioned about you, I knew it would be no problem. In my line of work, it is very important to work only with people who are of good quality, who will deal straight. No tricks, no games, no crooks.”

“Yes,” said Anand.

“So, how much land are you looking for, saar? And how soon?”

“About ten acres would be perfect. As close to this factory as possible. And the need is urgent.”

The Landbroker sank into brief thought. “I will show you two plots this morning,” he said. “Come, saar.”

They took the Landbroker’s car; contrary to Anand’s expectations, it was small and nondescript.

“What are the payment terms as such?” asked Anand.

“We will discuss everything, saar, the rates, the payment terms,” said the Landbroker. “But first we will find something that you like. Then we will discuss everything else.”

He drove quickly and efficiently, speaking brusquely into his cellphone, the car juddering over ill-finished roads that led into the interiors of the land. A few minutes’ drive brought them to the first plot.

It was surrounded by a high concrete wall, with power cables running into the property and a bore well sunk in one corner. “This is about four acres. It is officially converted to industrial land—therefore more expensive.”

Anand stood at the entrance for not more than a minute; the convenience of such a plot was rendered irrelevant by its size—four acres was too small.

The second plot was larger. It was unfenced; Anand tracked the land visually from the side of the road to the distant tree and again to the hillock and back to the road.

“This is about six acres. This is farmland, so it is slightly cheaper. But you will have to pay to get government sanction to convert it to industrial land…. It is very good soil, saar.” The Landbroker could not seem to help saying this even though he knew Anand’s interests were not agricultural, “and the water table is not too deep.”

It emerged that he was a son of the soil, this very soil, having his roots in a village of the area and, if the condition of his feet was any indication, not even one generation removed from the farmers he was now seeking to do business with.

“How large, you said?” Anand asked, “Six acres, no?” and he turned away, shaking his head, dissatisfied. A waste of time.

In the car, the Landbroker spoke airily of other deals he had put together and the other investors he had worked with. He kept his left hand on the gear stick, his little finger extended, the long red nail almost scratching at Anand’s leg, such an affront, Anand was tempted to reach over and break it off.

If Anand spent the drive back to the factory sunk in annoyance, the Landbroker seemed to spend it arriving at some conclusions of his own.

“Saar,” he said. “Maybe I can find you a slightly larger spread…. It will take a few days. You let me work it out.”

“Larger?” said Anand. “How much larger?”

“About twelve acres,” said the Landbroker.

“That would also work,” said Anand. “Is it possible?”

“Possible, saar,” said the Landbroker. “It is little more complicated. But you leave it to me. It will happen.”

“Complicated how?” said Anand.

“You leave it to me,” said the Landbroker. He gave Anand a sudden, startling smile. “Not to worry, sir. When I am making a promise, I am keeping it.”

Anand got out at the entrance to the factory and waited until the Landbroker bumped away in his little, nondescript car. He called Vinayak. “Nice shirt he wears, your Landbroker.”

“Come on, yaar, what are you, the f*cking fashion police? He’s really good.”

“Yeah? He took me to two useless plots and then said that he would find what I required.”

“Congratulations. That means he has decided to work with you.”

Anand went silent, digesting this. “By the way, what does he mean when he says something is ‘complicated’?”

“You leave it to him. He has to put together these deals. It’s not like there is just one seller and one buyer. Each two-, three-acre plot of farmland will be owned by several people, usually many members of a family. He has to contact all the individual owners of each plot and convince them to sell and put the deal together. Like creating a land bank. It’s not easy or straightforward.”

“He keeps talking about work he has done with that politician … that film actor…. I don’t want any political goondas or land-mafia types getting involved in this …”

“Are you crazy?” said Vinayak. “Who does? No, bugger, don’t worry. He’ll steer clear of all of that. He’s very good. Very discreet. Not one to talk. Very low-key.”

He then proceeded to contradict himself by describing a progression of prominent politicians and film stars and businessmen who had bought properties through this Landbroker. Sensing Anand’s growing dismay, he laughed. “Don’t worry, bugger. He’s very discreet. He’ll do your job for you. And he’s an expert at handling those corrupt bastards at the land registrar’s office. He has them eating out of his hand. But don’t worry, he’ll see that they don’t overcharge you on the bribes. He’s very pragmatic.”

Anand was used to thinking of himself as pragmatic—which, for him, translated into doing what one can with what is in front of one. To Vinayak, however, being pragmatic seemed to mean living easily and comfortably in a world of official corruption, wasting no energy on the matter beyond recognizing how to survive it. Anand wondered, uncomfortably, if their respective positions were separated by nothing more than a slippery slope.

“And his prices?”

“Are reasonable…. I would still negotiate, but if he holds firm, pay him what he asks. And he will ask for cash up front—that’s okay. He will need that money to put the deal together. To make advance payments and keep everyone happy.”

“What happens if he can’t?”

“Don’t worry—he hasn’t failed yet.”