IRA MATHUR
Almost everything I knew had been lost; I complained to my Trinidadian husband on arrival to every city in India and repeated it like a refrain across Delhi, Chandigarh, Shimla, Jaipur, and Bombay.
Trinidadians often have an ancient, almost village idea of India of people praying and wearing colourful clothes and bright jewels. Nothing is further from the truth. Despite my regular visits, I didn’t recognise those miles of gleaming airport floors with pricey global upmarket brands Prada and Chanel; the flyways, bi-ways, causeways built over the ocean and underground; the five and six-lane highways, the spotless streets, the lack of people living on the streets as I’d seen in London’s West End. Women whizz by on bikes, fancy cars, scooters, and motorcycles as if they were flying, checking their phones, so their food drop arrives before they do. An average three-star hotel is like a five-star hotel in the West, and a five-star hotel is like living in a palace. I have to ask how the gym equipment works. There are no old people in sight. Some 900 million people of its 1.4 billion population are under 35, the majority under 25.
India didn’t need the world. London feels like a village compared to this.
A middle-aged woman and her mother whip out their laptops in the bank, and smartphones handle Everything from births to cremations. Indian youth, especially if they are part of the 400 million-strong middle class (the largest in the world ), could tell you more about muted, understated dressing, cocktails, bars, cuisines and travel, brands, and global living. The music has leapt beyond Bollywood tropes to Everything, the rabid beats of rebellion, the soul of Sufi, rock, and soul. It’s experimental and exciting, moving like a rapid river between Indian and foreign languages and rhythms.
In Delhi, the lovely young hotel staffer in a saree who greeted us with a blessing of rose petals and a rose-infused drink reminiscent of its Mughal past revealed privately she was nervous as this was the first time she had tied her own sari. Beneath it, she had worn sensible boots that allowed her to fly around looking after the hotel guests. A saree requires looking after six yards of pleats, dragging material, and the danger of tripping over heels. No more.
Technology, science, education. The young drive amazing India’s economic growth (40 per cent in the past five years).
And the young are driven. The culture of excellence in education and careers with an eye to material success is embedded in the young to the point of brutality. What will people say is the refrain of all parents while comparing their offspring to others. Young women have moved out from their homes and cities to pursue jobs, couples are living together, and nuclear forms are the norm rather than the exception.
It’s true my heart sank on the drive from Chandigarh to Shimla, where entire slabs of mountains were being cut away, the snow-covered pine trees I remembered, even the narrow winding roads up snowy streets had been replaced by the construction of highways, that were more Vancouver than the Himalayas. The caps of snow on the Himilayas appeared to have disappeared.
But as we approached Simla, India’s winter capital, the landscape is recognisable, the roads narrow, the old colonial buildings still intact on the edge of steep slopes. My father’s army former headquarters, officers mess the same, my old school, the rosy chill stung faces of school girls and boys, the skating rink, monkeys clambering on the stone walls and mountainsides, my old school, Jesus and Mary Convent still nestled amongst fir trees. The former viceregal lodge (now Rashtrapati Niwas) was built like Scottish castle viceroys of India (the last being Lord Mountbatten), a permanent reminder of India’s violent colonial history.
Here, pre-independence talks were held by the first PM of India, Jawāharlāl Nehru, and here Indira Gandhi, his daughter, signed an agreement of Bilateral Relations between India and Pakistan after the the1971 India-Pakistan War and the creation of Bangladesh. The lodge was overrun by schoolchildren and university students eagerly absorbing the past. India does that.
I was hovering between the past and present, memory and the present. I didn’t expect to feel the jolt of the past of what was lost as sharply as I did when looking out of my hotel window; I saw my former home, the Cecil Hotel, built by the British and rented by the army for its officers. The balcony was the same, overlooking the mountains where, at age six, I saw my first snowfall, and my parents presented me with a blue coat.
And in the courtyard beneath, now owned by a hotel, was where soldiers practised playing the bagpipes, and now Sufi singers were whirling near a fire.
My old India returned with every interaction with hotel staff, security guards, army men, drivers, shopkeepers, and women in Himachal costumes from small alleyways. A nod of the head, a salute, a namaste, a salaam. Someone said Indians don’t bow our heads in false humility but to receive blessings. Stories abound on ways of reducing pride and ego to allow spiritual and emotional growth.
Everything is given with open palms, palms of prayer. People still connect intuitively noting if you are cold or a shadow of an old sorrow crosses your face. That open heart, a porous people who look you in the eye, smile, make a familial gesture, call you brother, sister, mother, see you and want to see you, unlike the West where eyes are averted at strangers. In Chandigarh, a young security official noticed before we did that we would miss our flight and rushed us through like VIPs, taking us to one barrier after another, carrying my bags, and running with me until we barely caught the aircraft. We won’t see him again.
Poverty is not apparent. In the last five years, some 135 million people (ten per cent of India’s population) have been pulled out of poverty, and Modi’s goal is to bring this to less than one per cent.
There is ample evidence that India is reducing its carbon footprint. Plastics have disappeared, and electric cars are on the horizon.
It’s not all roses. What may feel like service is excellence created by desperation. Every service provider employed by big companies, from drivers and hairdressers, asks you to fill out a feedback form and produce a bar code on which their salary depends.
The feverish movement for profit has the benefit of creating excellence with the feedback form, which you can access through a barcode, but it also signals the absolute control of employees.
A 2022 report by Oxfam shows that India’s top one per cent owns more than 40.5 per cent of its total wealth with over 160 billionaires, including the world’s wealthiest men, Mukesh Ambani and Gautam Adani. At one time, that spot belonged to the Nizam of Hyderabad. It belongs to Modi’s India, where increasingly corporations have aligned themselves with the Hindu national government.
When one taxi driver in Rajasthan told me India’s politicians are catering only to the wealthy, he lived this.
India’s poor are still at about 21 per cent. That’s over 200 million people.
With the rise in nationalism and the disenfranchisement of Muslims, Sikhs, and Dalits, amongst others, there is the danger of corporate India aligning itself with the image of PM Modi himself plastered on every billboard in every city and airport across India.
India’s rich history is being rewritten, with Mughal sites razed down, or left in ruins.
India’s story remains as complex as its sprawling nation. The Jaipur Lit Fest gave me a burst of images of hundreds of stories, speakers, books, writers, conversations, and music that took you fifteen minutes from the durbar and court of 17th-century Mughal emperors, the babble of many languages and many emotions that this is what India is, a nation of 1.4 billion people not unlike our islands of 1.2 million, each with their own story.
At the Jaipur Lit Fest, the bookshops were crammed with Indian titles with stories of people, the displaced, dispossessed, hurt, damaged, the diaspora and migrants. The music is dynamic, a fusion of world music to ancient Sufi and Urdu ghazals.
On the gentlest landing to Heathrow, I learned a woman, Geetanjali Khadria, is our pilot.
At baggage collection, a young Indian man asks me for directions in Hindi at Heathrow, and I gladly oblige and feel the warmth beneath the transactions of service in India, of the gentle landing and think of the aphorism attributed to the writer Franz Kafka, “Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will come back in another way.”
Ira Mathur is a Trinidad Guardian writer and the winner of the 2023 Non-Fiction Bocas Prize for Literature
