The Beautiful and the Damned (29 page)

Karthik later filled out the story of how the Assamese men had come to be hired at the steel factory. There was a colleague of Karthik’s, called Chilli, who worked as a security supervisor at the Pelican Rubber factory, close to the new airport. Chilli was also from north-eastern India, from the state of Arunachal Pradesh, and the Assamese had found him through common acquaintances. ‘Chilli sent me seven of these Assam people,’ Karthik said. ‘Three we took in here, four we sent to another factory our security company has a contract for. We gave the three here the room to stay in and their uniforms. They’ll have to pay for their uniforms, but we’ll take that out of their first month’s salary.’

‘How much do people make as guards?’ I asked Karthik.

‘You can get anything from three thousand five hundred to six thousand rupees as a guard. And maybe up to nine thousand as a supervisor.’

The work was seven days a week, in alternating shifts of twelve hours. If people took a day off, they lost that day’s pay. It was apparent from talking to Karthik that there wasn’t much in the way of training and that the security company was used to people coming and going in these jobs. Mohan had complained that people took the Assamese to be Nepalis, but this had worked slightly to their advantage as far as getting jobs as guards was concerned. In a crude carry-over of colonial stereotypes, the security business tended to be dominated by men from Nepal and from Bihar who were perceived to be good at being guards, and the Assamese had slipped in as faux-Nepalese. The other guards at the factory were all from Bihar.

I asked Karthik what he thought of the Assamese guards. ‘They’re okay,’ he said. ‘A bit too
shaukhin,’
he added. He meant that they had a taste for the finer things in life. ‘Very careful about how they look, how they dress. If they have money, they’ll buy jeans and mobile phones. But the Biharis, they’ll save the money to buy land or start a small business. These Assamese fellows, they’ll go off home as soon as they’ve made some money.’

When I spoke to some of the Bihari guards about Karthik’s perception that they saved money, they laughed at the idea. The man with the gold earrings, slightly arrogant in his demeanour, said, ‘That’s what he thinks. He should visit me where I live and see it for himself.’

But there was certainly a difference between the Biharis and the Assamese, and that was in their reasons for working as security guards. The man with the earrings made it clear that he was a Rajput, an upper caste, and so were most of the other Bihari guards. They would not take a job at the loading shed or in the rolling mill, even if it paid more. They needed to preserve their position in the social hierarchy, and being guards allowed them to be a notch above the workers. The Assamese men, by contrast, were tribals, happily outside the caste system. They had chosen to be guards because they thought it was safer than working at the furnaces. Even though none of them had been employed in a steel factory before, they assumed that the smoke of the furnaces was bad for health and that accidents were very likely to happen with the fire and heavy machinery all around.

Mohan talked about his work as a security guard as straightforward and even dull, except when the men had to break up fights between the workers. That usually happened in the barracks, late at night, after people had been drinking. ‘There’s a lot of scrap metal lying here,’ he said, picking up an iron rod and demonstrating. ‘It’s easy for people to hurt each other if you don’t step in right away.’ Other than that, he found the night shifts difficult. Sometimes, he fell asleep, and a guard was fined if he was caught sleeping on the job. ‘It’s hardest to stay awake between twelve and two,’ he said, his eyes still reflecting the wonder of a village boy who had discovered this strange fact about the human body. ‘It’s odd how that’s the time when you start nodding on the chair. After it gets to be two, it’s easy to stay awake, but I don’t know why.’

Life in the barracks was unvarying, with sleep and work punctuated by activities like cooking and eating. The only change to the rhythm was when people left for their villages or when new workers arrived. Dibyajoti fell sick at one point, and his companions described to me in great detail – even as he listened in, looking embarrassed – that he had dysentery and had to shit every hour or so, running off from guard duty.

As I hung around with the Assamese, I became familiar with two other workers living in the cubicle across from them. Both were from Bihar. One was the muscled man called Pradip, taciturn, unfriendly and somehow different from the rest of the workers. He seemed more confident, perhaps because of his build, and he seemed to have an important job at the factory. I often saw him lying half-naked in bed with the door of his room open. Sometimes, a plump, bearded man who seemed to be a supervisor came running into the barracks, asking Pradip to come quickly. Pradip would grunt in response, put on some clothes and disappear for an hour. When he returned, he would go back to bed and lie in the dark of his cubicle.

Pradip’s companion was very young. He said that he was eighteen
years old, although, like Dibyajoti, he seemed more like fifteen or sixteen, with just the hint of facial hair. He was friendly until I asked him his name, when he became very agitated, unconvinced by the guards that it was okay to give me this information about himself. But apart from concealing this detail and lying about his age, he was happy to speak, talking in a voice that was high-pitched, just beginning to break.

His life as a migrant worker had started when he ran away from home at the age of twelve. No one had treated him badly, he said, looking surprised that I might think so. He was from a village near Jhajha in Bihar, with three brothers and three sisters. His father had died long ago and he felt that there was no work for him in the village. The land they cultivated was too small for all the brothers to make a living out of it, and he had received little schooling. When he ran away from home, he went north, to Delhi, and then landed up in Panipat, in Haryana, where he worked at a yarn factory. After two years, he left the job and went back to his village. He stayed there for a few months before going to Calcutta to find work. When he couldn’t get anything there, he came to Hyderabad and ended up at the steel factory.

‘You didn’t want to go back to the yarn factory?’ I said.

‘It’s not good to do that work for a long time,’ he said. ‘There’s dust in these factories. It’s bad for you. It gets inside you, and you start coughing. You fall sick, and people become old very quickly.’

Dhaniram and Dibyajoti nodded vigorously, recalling their own yarn factory experiences. Now the boy was without work again. He had been at the steel factory for only two months, doing loading work, but he had been laid off a few days earlier, apparently because there were too many men at the factory. He was staying on while he considered what to do and where to go next.

A few days after I spoke to the boy, I had my first conversation with Pradip. I was sitting with Mohan when Pradip came up to me, smiling. He was sorry that he’d been so rude when I approached him before. He had been having a terrible toothache and was unable to talk, but he’d finally been to a dentist and had the bothersome tooth pulled out. He opened his mouth and shoved his finger inside to
show me the spot in the back where the tooth had been extracted. Most of his teeth were in bad shape, yellow and decaying, providing a startling contrast with the rest of him, seemingly so healthy and strong. But as I talked to Pradip, I was surprised by how different he looked. Until then, he had seemed like a giant, almost menacing, but walking next to me as we made our way to the tea shack outside the factory, he barely came up to my chest. He was finely proportioned, with strong arms, but quite small, with a voice that was soft, almost feminine.

Pradip was what he called a ‘Tongsman’, a job that involved pushing iron ingots into the furnace at the rolling mill during the final stage in the production of TMT bars. He said he was twenty-five years old but, like most workers at the factory, he looked about ten years older. He was from Jamui district in Bihar, from a farming family that primarily grew sugar cane. The land wasn’t big enough to sustain everyone, so Pradip had left the farming to his elder brother and drifted around the country, spending much of his time in the western part of India.

He had begun by working as a welder on ships in the port city of Surat, in Gujarat, but he gave up that work after six months. He had been falling sick frequently, he said, suffering a great deal of pain in his back. Pradip wouldn’t elaborate on his ailments, even though I pressed him for details, wondering how he managed to do the hard labour of a tongsman if he suffered from back pain. Like most workers, and like most members of India’s underclass, he seemed to operate at a high level of abstraction when it came to certain things, especially those that had to do with the body. Just as Dibyajoti had said that his mother died of ‘fever’ and Pradip’s young room-mate had been afraid of the effects of ‘dust’, Pradip would only say that he suffered from ‘pain’.

In elite circles in India, this is a sign of the illiteracy of the lower classes, an indication of how they lack intellectual property as well as material property. But as I heard these simple words – ‘fever’, ‘dust’, ‘pain’ – taking the place of any complicated diagnosis or description of symptoms, it struck me that one of the characteristics of being higher up on the class ladder was the specificity with which a person
could speak of one’s ailments. But there was another way of understanding the use of such simple words. The workers didn’t have access to the kind of medical care that would let them receive complex formulations of their illness. So they suffered with a stoicism that was ingrained in their social status. Given the lives that migrant workers lived, someone like Pradip had no choice but to abandon the nuances of illness for a broad, catch-all word. The same was true when it came to telling the story of his life, which was often empty of descriptive detail and rendered in thick strokes.

After Pradip gave up being a welder on ships, he began to work in steel factories around the country, in Bombay, Goa and Bangalore. The place where he had stayed the longest was Goa, where he had been for six years. But he seemed indifferent to the attractions of most of the places he had lived in. He had not found ships and the sea glamorous, and his Goa did not contain the sun, sand and music that drew wealthy Indians and Western tourists to its beaches. Pradip’s life had been defined largely by the factories he worked in, and they had more or less been the same everywhere.

He had begun working at the Kothur factory just two months earlier. He had been called there by a labour contractor, a middleman who had worked with him before and thought of him as a dependable person. From these details, and from the way the bearded man had sometimes come looking for Pradip at the barracks, it seemed that a tongsman occupied a relatively high position in the hierarchy of workers at the steel factory.

He had been a tongsman before, Pradip explained, and that had helped him get the job at Vinayak steel. A tongsman’s work was dangerous and managers preferred to hire a man who was already used to the arduous conditions: the extreme heat, the speed of the line, the physical effort involved in shovelling iron ingots in, and the danger of the heavy machinery and molten steel. In all other ways, however, Pradip was a migrant labourer like most of the other men I had seen at the factory. There was no telling how long he would be there and where he would go once he was done with the work – or, as was more likely, once the work was done with him.

We were sitting outside the factory, drinking tea. The owner of
the stall, a man in his forties with grey hair, was a migrant too, from Rajasthan, and he listened to our conversation with interest. Pradip refused to let me pay, taking out a battered purse from the back pocket of his jeans. The jeans were knock-off, as was the T-shirt, which said ‘Dolce & Gabbana’ in a swirl of embroidered lettering. From the clothes, one could tell that Pradip was careful about his appearance. He was also measured in his habits. He didn’t smoke or drink, and was careful about what he ate. None of the workers could afford much more than rice, dal and vegetables, but Pradip tried to eat fish or meat once a week so that he could maintain his physical strength.

Although Pradip had been indifferent to Bombay or Goa, he said that he liked Calcutta, where he had been before coming to Kothur. ‘I have a cousin who’s a taxi driver there and spent some time with him. I wanted to find work there, but I couldn’t get anything.’

‘What did you like about Calcutta?’ I said.

‘It’s not so far from Jamui,’ he said. ‘The food is excellent and it’s cheap. I’d gone there during the time of Durga Puja, with idols of the goddess everywhere, and my cousin and I walked around all night, seeing one idol after another.’ He smiled as he remembered those nocturnal walks. ‘I could have stayed there for ever, doing that, eating the food, walking at night with so many people and music and lights everywhere.’

He stopped abruptly as a man came out of the factory on a motorcycle and rode towards us. It was the bearded man I had seen hurrying into the barracks every now and then, calling for Pradip to come to the rolling mill.

‘That’s the contractor who called me here,’ Pradip said.

The contractor parked his motorcycle and entered the shack. He had a slight swagger, a way of appearing larger than and different from the working-class men scattered around the tea shack. His face was intelligent and alert, and I remembered how I had seen him note my presence when he came into the barracks.

He came over to where we were sitting, listening carefully as I introduced myself. ‘Yes, I’ve been wondering who you are, hanging around the workers’ quarters,’ he said. ‘Well, now I know.’

Sarkar was a Bengali, from a village in the hills of North Bengal area. He was bigger than Pradip, but pudgy rather than muscular. That, plus his greying beard and his occasionally jocular manner of speaking, would have given him an avuncular manner had it not been for the sense he evoked of being a hard man, wary about my presence at the factory and unimpressed when I told him that I had the managing director’s permission to be there.