The Hope Factory (2 page)

Neat flower beds lined the outside walls of the factory buildings; the gardeners were scouring them for weeds. Anand felt the knot in his back ease, an involuntary welling of pleasure within, a shy disbelief that his efforts had yielded this campus, this precision, this grace.

He paused outside one of the warehouses, whose freshly painted sign said:
GOWDON 2
.

“That is a wrong spelling, no?” he said. “That is not how you spell godown.”

“I’ll check, sir,” said the painting supervisor and made a note.

The watchmen saluted as he walked past. Their uniforms were in the corporate colors—orange shirts and indigo pants, chosen in line with his mother-in-law’s suggestion, in the days when her opinion mattered. “So pretty, these colors,” she had said. “Like bird-of-paradise, my favorite flower.” Anand had blindly agreed—and was aghast to learn that in her youth she had once been referred to as a bird-of-paradise herself, a compliment never forgotten. She now spent her time telling acquaintances of her son-in-law’s delicate tribute. He in turn ignored her arch references to the subject, which, in his mind, made the best of an awkward situation.

The clock ran faster than Anand; he didn’t pause for lunch, satisfying his hunger with passing cups of coffee and glucose biscuits grabbed off the plates Kamath supplied for every meeting in his office. They were without end, everyone nervous, running plans and presentations by him relentlessly.

After the initial faux pas with the bird-of-paradise colors, his wife had recommended the anonymous safety of an interior designer who could create for Anand an office as it ought to be: well carpeted and tastefully furnished. Anand had ignored her suggestion. His office was just as he liked it: simple, uncluttered, a large desk, some chairs to one side that could be dragged up for a conference, and best of all, the soundproofed scenic factory window.

At 6:00
P.M.
, Ananthamurthy, Mrs. Padmavati, the HR person, and Kamath assembled in his office, a collective air of exhaustion about them. They had done all that they could; tomorrow was in the hands of the gods. Ananthamurthy, on the principle of leaving no stone unturned, was detailing the
early morning prayers he would conduct on the morrow to ensure divine favors. For Anand, divinity consisted of preparing meticulously and leaving nothing to chance. He did not know quite how to articulate his next concern; he said: “I will be wearing a jacket, I think. And a tie.”

“You will be very hot, sir,” said Ananthamurthy, with mild surprise at this suggested deviation from the customary dress code of polyester pants and cotton shirts.

It was Mrs. Padmavati who grasped the underlying point Anand was trying to make. “
Everyone
should wear ties, sir, is it not? Or, in my case, a silk saree. For smart appearance.”

“Yes,” said Anand in relief. “Yes. I think so.”

ANANTHAMURTHY STOOD NEXT TO HIM
, gazing down at the large, high-ceilinged bay, the machinery gleaming, the room flooded with light, so clean, so sterile; the very air seemed subdued and devoid of the dust particles that circulated outside the factory. The others had filed out, leaving the two of them alone.

Anand was normally the one to energize, to reassure, but now he gave way to sudden doubt. “We are ready, no?”

“I think we’re ready, sir,” said Ananthamurthy.

“A great success if it comes through,” said Anand. “A great success for us, Ananthamurthy.”

“If it comes through,” said Ananthamurthy, prosaically, “we will be in urgent need of more land, sir. At least ten acres. Without it, we will not be able to proceed. As it is …”

Anand sighed. “Yes, yes.” Land outside the city for industrial development was notoriously difficult to organize. “I’ll get on to it right away, Ananthamurthy.”

•  •  •

ON THE WAY HOME
, on a sudden impulse, Anand took a small, unplanned detour into a low-grade industrial area. It was just a few kilometers from his factory, but it was an entry into a different, desperate world. The roads were hasty-made, unplanned, unpaved, and ravined by the rains. There were no large, graceful factory compounds here, no high-roofed shop floors, no landscaping. These factory sheds were little more than utilitarian shop floors built in desperate confinement, cheek by jowl, not wasting space, aesthetic-free, populated by workers who wore no uniforms and belonged to no unions. Anand’s low-bottomed car was out of place here; this was an area frequented by scooters and hardy transportation vans.

He parked on a muddy side slope, setting his hand brake, ignoring the few curious glances he received, and made his way to a shed in the distance. It was indistinguishable from its peers, tin-roofed, coated with grime and soot, the dark enfolded within barely alleviated with a few tube lights. He ignored the somnolent watchman who sat on a stool below a board bearing the name of the current proprietor and peeped in.

The hot-oil odor of the place, the clangorous noise of overworked secondhand machines remained unchanged. He didn’t know the present owners, whoever they were, but this shed held the history of his first years as an independent businessman. He could not afford a car then and had driven to work through mud and rain on a sky-blue scooter, license number KA O4 R 618, which, by the end of its days, had sported dents and a long rip on the backseat.

Anand had recently watched, mesmerized, a National Geographic television program about early American pioneers
pressing into the hostile western regions of their country—and had thoroughly identified with them. Like those pioneers, he had survived an unimaginably hostile world. A world where everything had to be fought for, every detail planned. Things that could go wrong, would. Things that shouldn’t go wrong, did. Add to that the Indian government, a strange, cavernous beast that lay hidden in grottoes and leapt out, tentacles flailing, suckers greedy for bribes. When things broke down, one kept moving, for to stop was to signal the end. To complain was to waste breath. To fuss was a luxury. And the next time around, one planned even more cautiously, as best as one could, creating backup at every level, for untrained workers that the law did not easily allow to fire, for insufficient power, for no water, for no sewerage, for telephones-on-the-blink, pot-holed roads, disintegrating ports, for whimsical suppliers, careless of quality, who had to be chased and cornered to deliver on their promises—yes, sir, of course, sir, I am delivering today, sir. Oh, sir, don’t say that, of course I am delivering today. God promise, sir. Problem is, sir, my sister’s husband’s niece’s wedding.

There were times, in the early years, when the battle fatigue hit Anand so hard he would almost stop, dreading the next phone call, harbinger of trouble, of something gone wrong, of chaos unanticipated. But something in him had clung on, blindly, and he had managed to pull himself out of the primordial slime and say, very simply, yes, we can do it. We can produce things of world-class quality, and we can deliver them on time. And in him lay the strength that comes from such alchemical magic, the power discovered within himself to take environmental dross and turn it into pure gold.

He walked back to his car and reversed slowly out of the area. He would mention this visit to Ananthamurthy, who had
toiled in this old, greasy shed by his side. Or perhaps not. Neither of them was particularly given to romanticizing their past; Ananthamurthy would probably stare at him in surprise and wonder why Anand was telling him things he already knew.

ON THE DRIVE HOME
, Anand found himself rehearsing parts of the speech that he would be making the following day. “Welcome,” he said, to the steering wheel. “
Wel
come.” He fell prey to his usual insecurities for a fleeting moment and wished that he had certain natural advantages: of height, a better speaking voice, the ability to size up people at a glance and the charisma to instantly win them over. “Wel
come
,” he tried. The highway bestrode a gentle ridge, covered by the rising tide of the endless city, colored cinder-block houses topped with black plastic water tanks racing up the slope in a wave. His car nudged past stained city walls layered with cinema and political advertisements, the film actors posed with an engaging artfulness not quite mastered by the politicians: plug-ugly, with odd hair and shifty smiles like wanted crime posters gone coy and desperate to please. “Welcome,” he said, in passing. Not. Motherfuckers.

THE SHINY LITTLE HATCHBACK CAR
appeared in exquisite contrast to its surroundings, the metal glossy, the padded interior cool with air-conditioned comfort. The road it traversed was composed of tar and dirt and fetid garbage and flooded with a wash of pedestrian traffic that spilled into the path of the car in careless, dusty profusion. There was little room to maneuver within the press of human habitation: shops, dwellings, tiffin rooms, all crammed together, higgledy-piggledy, dangerously one-atop-the-other, falling right off, a miracle of wishful architecture and denuded finances.

From where she stood, next to the onion seller’s cart, Kamala studied the passage of the vehicle with something akin to pride. She did not own the car, it was true. She had never been inside this or any other car. But she had watched the owner grow into his current eminence from a dusty schoolboy (not too different from her own) playing cricket in the
gully outside her home and being scolded by his mother, who, like her, cleaned houses for a living.

The car stopped next to a new building painted a cheerful pink. He was here to visit to his parents after a break of several months; Kamala, along with the rest of the neighborhood, knew all the details. Who could have anticipated it? That he would win a scholarship, that he would study engineering, that he would find employment with a company in Pune, and flourish so well that his parents could give up their jobs cleaning houses and tending gardens and live, like royalty, in bright pink homes and have him visit, driving all the way from Pune in his bright new car.

She would pay them a visit later, Kamala decided, carrying some fruit with her. That would be perfectly acceptable. To visit, and to congratulate them on their success—and find out how such success was to be achieved.

She turned her attention back to the onion in her hand, testing the weight of it on her palm. It was still warm, trapping within itself the dregs of the day’s heat and of the various human hands that had handled it. Unlike with other vegetables, there was no real art to the purchase of an onion. For tomatoes in season, for instance, one might bide one’s time through the day—wait for the morning rush of customers to subside, for the remaining tomatoes to ripen further in the noonday sun, turning lush and red and plump with juice, until evening time, when the vendors were eager to get rid of them at any price; the tomatoes would not survive the damp of the night. That was the judicious time to buy. But onions were different; hardy, unromantic vegetables, their price did not change with the passage of the day but with seasonal supply. At times, a kilo of onions cost five rupees and, frugally husbanded,
could last a week, but in the low season, the prices went up by so much that one usually did without.

“Sister, are you going to purchase it or not? What is so special about that one onion?”

Kamala started. “Forgive me, brother, I’ll take these,” she said and picked out two more, handing them to the onion seller for weighing.

The paper-wrapped onions joined the other vegetables inside her woven plastic bag. In addition to onions, she had bought a quarter kilo of green beans, some potatoes, carrots, and two tomatoes. She would cook them into a rich kurma, she decided, the stew thickened with coconut and spices and oil, and serve it on steaming hot rice to her son for dinner.

She walked homeward, passing the parked car on her way, and could not resist peeping in through the glass window, touching the metal door handle for good luck.

THE GULLY SHE LIVED IN
was off the main alley and narrow enough that she could span the gap between the houses by stretching out her hand. “Stop, stop,” she called to the young boys hitting at a cricket ball. “Rest your game a moment till I pass.” Until recently, her son would have been one of their number, playing cricket in the gully and getting scolded when the ball bounced and crashed against the walls of the houses that ran down each side, but, as he grew, he discovered new pursuits that took him farther afield. Right now, he was nowhere to be seen, but he would come home as soon as dinner was ready, as though summoned magically by the scent of fresh-cooked food.

She entered a small, narrow courtyard with several singlestory dwellings clustered around it. The largest comprised
four rooms and was the home of the landlord. The smallest, a single room, belonged to Kamala.

She put her bag of vegetables down and went to the bathing area to wash her hands and feet. By the time Kamala was seated on the stoop outside her door, the pile of vegetables washed, a plate and a knife laid ready on the ground, the landlord’s mother had emerged from her own house, as she usually did, with some of her own dinner preparations in hand. The chopping of vegetables and the cleaning of rice gave them an opportunity to inspect each other’s menus, proffer suggestions, and enjoy a gentle gossip.

“Oho!” the landlord’s mother said. “You are planning a feast of vegetables.”

“I got a little greedy, yes, amma,” said Kamala. “It’s been a time since I prepared a nice vegetable kurma for my boy.”

“Kamala-daughter, he is at the age when he could eat all the vegetables in the world and still be hungry for more,” said the landlord’s mother. “His schoolwork, it’s going well?”

Kamala grimaced; a boy as clever as her son should not find it so difficult to sit quietly at his studies. “His studies would go well,” she said, “if he paid them a little more attention.”

“He is very smart,” the landlord’s mother said placatingly. “He is sure to do well, do not worry. He is smart and full of ambition.”

Kamala was unable to explain why it was her son’s sense of ambition that made her so uneasy.