The Beautiful and the Damned (25 page)

Mahipal smiled and said, ‘It makes them fat, makes them produce more milk, more eggs, more meat, so that people in the cities can eat them and get bigger.’ He asked one of the attendants to see if there was any red sorghum left in the warehouse. The man returned with a handful that he poured on to my palm – hard, small grains that were reddish in colour, opaque objects that seemed so static and yet whose value went up and down on the market.

I had been leaning close to Mahipal to hear him better, and I suddenly smelled the alcohol on his breath. It hadn’t been much past four when we came in, so he must have started his drinking early.

‘My business is fine in spite of all the trouble,’ Mahipal said. ‘Look at all this work going on around me. I’m going to be expanding even more next year. Look at how busy I am!’

He had two mobile phones on his lap which rang incessantly, one of them playing a pop version of the song ‘Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone’. On his left, there was an anxious-looking man with whom Mahipal began to discuss transporting seeds. The man had a creased plastic shopping bag from which he pulled out wads of money.

‘This is one lakh,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you two lakhs tomorrow.’

‘That’s fine,’ Mahipal said, looking unconcerned.

The man tied the bag up with a piece of string and handed it to one of the attendants, and after looking at Mahipal with an air of expectation and receiving no response, he left.

Dusk was setting over Mahipal’s warehouse, although the sun seemed to hold its light steady for the men sitting in the circle. The engines of trucks roared behind us as they were backed up, one by one, to the loading ramp of the warehouse, while to our left the electric lights came on in the two-storey concrete building where Mahipal lived when he wasn’t in Hyderabad. The mood of the gathering seemed to have eased now that the red sorghum story was over, and Mahipal became friendly. Saveen and I got up to leave. I was planning to take a bus from Armoor to Nizamabad, where I was supposed to have dinner with Prabhakar and his family at nine.

‘You can’t go now,’ Mahipal said. ‘You must have a drink with us. What do you drink? Whisky?’

I was anxious to go, exhausted now after closing the circle of the red sorghum episode. I knew I could keep pursuing the story, perhaps chasing down the villain’s villain, the man in Hyderabad whom Mahipal had spoken of as the biggest dealer in the area. But I also felt done, and I was tired of Armoor and the surrounding landscape. But Mahipal was so insistent that I agreed to have a drink.

An attendant was dispatched to Armoor to buy whisky and beer.
The circle around Mahipal grew smaller and more intimate, and as darkness consumed the yard where we had been sitting, we moved to the house. There were five of us – Rajkumar, Saveen, a man with very small eyes, Mahipal and me – and we sat in a bedroom on the upper floor. There was a television, a bed and a coffee table on which a servant had put plates of pakoras and potato chips mixed with chopped onions and green chillies. The bottles were opened – Kingfisher beer for Saveen and me, Blender’s Pride whisky for the others – and the television was switched on to a news channel.

There had been a series of bomb blasts in Bangalore, and the men wanted to hear news of this. But the anchor of the Telugu channel, a woman dressed in a Western suit, hadn’t got to the blasts yet, so the attention of the drinkers drifted away from the television. The sleek air conditioner hummed away in the background, the conversation grew louder, while Saveen became ever quieter, uncomfortable in this gathering of men who made money with such ease. The conversation stopped when there was a news clip about a Bollywood starlet called Shilpa Shetty. There was a slight grin on the male reporter’s face as he displayed a pin-up of Shetty, the lower half of the picture blanked out by a black square. Somebody made a joke and everybody apart from Saveen laughed.

Mahipal’s phone rang. He began speaking rapidly into it in Hindi. I was sitting next to him and I followed the conversation with ease, drawn in by Mahipal’s pleading tone. He was begging with the man who had called him, asking him for a loan of 5 lakh rupees. I was surprised by how small an amount Mahipal was asking for, especially given the scale of his business and the tens of crores we had been speaking of earlier. But as Mahipal kept talking, unaware or unheeding that I could understand him, I began to get a sense that things were precarious for him.

‘I’m in a bad shape,’ he said. ‘My jowar seeds are still lying in the godown and I need at least thirty-five to forty lakhs. I’ve sold off the land in Hyderabad and that’ll give me some money, but if you can give me at least ten now, I can then hold out till I get the money from selling the land. That cunt Pappi, he doesn’t answer his phone even though I’ve called him so many times.’

When he hung up, he seemed as relaxed as ever, perhaps even more boisterous. He was going to Delhi next week, along with Rajkumar and the man with the small eyes.

‘We’ll fly there and then we’ll hire a Tata Sumo to go and visit our buyers in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana and Punjab.’ When Mahipal heard that I was going to be in Delhi too, he became insistent that I meet them there. ‘We’ll have a nice hotel room, yaar. We can drink as much as we like.’

Since the beer had gone to my head, I spoke as loudly as the rest of them and said that of course we would meet up.

‘If we can’t meet in Delhi, we’ll meet you in America,’ the man with the small eyes said. Mahipal and he would be going to Texas, where the latter’s son was an engineer with Motorola. Then they would go to Illinois. Then, where should they go after that? they asked me. Las Vegas? Niagara Falls? Atlantic City? New York? Where and how would they be able to spend all the money that they made?

Saveen suddenly leaned over the table towards me. ‘You should call and cancel the dinner,’ he said, speaking softly but with emphasis.

‘No, I can’t do that,’ I said.

‘It would not be good for you to leave at present,’ he said. ‘I know them for many years. Just cancel the dinner. This is not the right time to leave.’

I was taken aback and looked around the room. Was Saveen saying that these men would get violent if I tried to leave now? They didn’t strike me as particularly menacing, apart from Rajkumar, and the way they were speaking, shouting loudly, was nothing more than the slightly sentimental drunkenness Indian men are prone to after a few pegs.

Saveen leaned towards me again and said, somewhat desperately, ‘They will smell the liquor on your breath and they will be unhappy.’

I realized that he wasn’t worried about me leaving Mahipal’s gang, as much as about me going to Prabhakar’s house for dinner. The comrades were all anti-alcohol and would be upset with me. ‘Okay,’ I told Saveen. But I also wanted to get out, and so I finished my beer and stood up. I thought I would walk to the Ankapur market and
wait there for a bus to Nizamabad, but Mahipal insisted that his driver would drop me off.

Another white Toyota Innova van was requisitioned. I climbed in next to the liveried driver, feeling slightly drunk. The driver fiddled with the air conditioner to get the temperature just right, put some Telugu music on and drove smoothly along National Highway 16 towards Nizamabad. Before heading off, he assured me that he was a very good driver and that prior to working for Mahipal, he had driven a minister in the state cabinet.

It started raining – not the confetti being sprinkled earlier in the evening, but monsoon gusts that cascaded down the windscreen. Two thin farmers ran down the highway on our right, covering their heads with plastic sheets, one of them holding a torch. Another man wheeled his scooter in the same direction as us, completely soaked in the rain. We kept moving, our big van equal to the challenge of the rain and the darkness, more powerful than our surroundings. A truck suddenly came at us out of the night, and for a second I thought it was going to smash into us. In the blaze of headlights, I saw the name the driver had chosen for his truck and that was painted above the windscreen. It said ‘Kranti’, or ‘Revolution’. Then the trucker adjusted his course and flashed past us, heading towards Armoor.

The highway out of Hyderabad towards Kothur village was still being worked on, with new overpasses and exits being constructed next to the lanes that were open to traffic. Vijay and I were halfway to our destination when we saw the man appear, standing in the middle of the road and waving us down. We were travelling fast, moving much too quickly to understand immediately what the man’s appearance meant. A few days earlier, on this same road, we had been stopped by two police constables. Assigned to guard duty at another point on the highway and left to fend for their own transportation, all the men had wanted was a lift. But the figure in front of us now was not in uniform, and his objective was far less clear, although I had the impression that he was part of the knotted confusion of people and cars that had sprung up suddenly on the smooth thread of the highway.

Vijay brought his tiny car to a halt, and the man loomed up in front of the windscreen, a dark, stocky figure dressed in a T-shirt and jeans. He put his right hand down on the bonnet of our car. In his left hand, he held an automatic pistol, its barrel pointing up at an acute angle. His gaze, as it swept over our faces, was intense, scrutinizing us carefully, meeting our eyes for a few seconds. Then he abruptly lost interest in us and switched his attention to a motorcycle coming up from behind, on our right. He advanced swiftly towards the bike, pointing his pistol at the riders. A policeman in uniform appeared on our left, tapped on our window, and asked us to move on.

Vijay drove away slowly, his eyes and mine fixed on the rear-view mirror to get a better sense of the composition of the scene. There was the gunman in front of the motorcycle. Off to the side, next to the uniformed policeman, was a red Maruti car, a modest, everyday model of the kind that might belong to a minor civil servant or a doctor. There was a policeman sitting at the wheel, an officer in a peaked cap, his window rolled down. There was also a man in the back seat, but he was invisible, just a silhouette behind the tinted black window. The gunman had now moved on from the motorcycle towards an approaching bus, which he flagged down, waiting as the passengers slowly piled out on to the road.

From all this, it was possible to come to the following conclusions. The men were hunting for someone. The gunman did not know what this person looked like; it was the invisible man in the back of the car, an informer, who knew that. They expected their target to be coming this way, but they had no information as to how he or she was travelling, which is why they had stopped a car, a motorcycle and a bus. The mix of uniformed men and the armed man in plain clothes, the unmarked civilian car being used by the policemen, and the pistol – rather than rifle – in the hand of the gunman meant that this was not a legal operation. We had just run into one of the encounter squads operated by the police, what Devaram had talked about when he pointed his imaginary pistol at me. If the target had the misfortune of running into the encounter squad, he would probably be gunned down in cold blood, with a report released later to the media to say that the person had been killed in an active encounter and that he had shot first at the police.

Later, I would find out from news accounts that the police had indeed been looking for a Maoist who, fortunately, did not show up that day. At the time, though, the scene felt unreal as soon as we had left it behind, taking on the shape of a dream. And in a way, the encounter squad was a dream, surfacing from the deep regions of the national subconscious where farmer suicides, Maoists and impoverished workers swirled together to form the collateral damage of progress. In a few weeks, the prime minister would announce the dispatching of tens of thousands of paramilitary troops to encircle
the Maoists in the ‘red corridor’ they had carved out in the forests of central India, but although this was one more reminder of the ways in which India was at war with its own people, it would elicit little comment from the big cities.

The truth was that India was being remade forcefully, and some aspects of that remaking were more visible than others. Once the encounter squad had been left behind, it seemed almost impossible not to give in to the pleasure of the new, smoothly tarred highway with its carefully demarcated lanes. It lifted us off the surrounding landscape like an aircraft, and as I looked down at the uneven patchwork of agricultural fields where people toiled ceaselessly in the summer heat, I could not help but think of them as marooned at a lower plane of existence. The highway was the transcendent future, with its straight shoulders and central reservations cradling flowers and topiary bushes, its green signs and electronic boards copied from advanced civilizations in the West. The signs told us that we were driving southwards, in the direction of Bangalore, and that if we wanted to, we could loop across all of India on this highway. It was part of the Golden Quadrilateral project, a six-lane band of modernity embracing the country, with only the occasional glitch of an encounter squad to remind us of those being left behind.

I had last been in Andhra Pradesh a year before, in 2008, when I spent most of my time with the farmers around Armoor. This time, Vijay was taking me to a village called Kothur in the district of Mahabubnagar. It was close to Hyderabad, about thirty kilometres from the city, and change was visible all the way up to the village. We stopped for lunch just before we got to Kothur, driving past a security guard into a walled complex. The area had once been a vineyard producing table grapes, but the land had since been acquired by a property developer. The vineyards had been destroyed and two pyramids put up in their place. They were part of Papyrus Port, which was, as the brochure put it, ‘India’s First Egyptian Resort’.