Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN TO MUMBAI: THE "SUPERFAST" EXPRESS

THE LOVELY HEART of Jaipur is what the tourist sees, a pink princely city of temples and palaces — painted elephants, the marvelous fort, all of it dusty but beautiful, like Rajasthani women in their gorgeous silks and gold-trimmed veils. But the train traveler sees a different Jaipur and begins to understand the city's true size. It sprawls to the horizon, a city of three million, mostly living in one- and two-story houses. Thirty minutes after leaving the station, and way past the airport, we were still passing the outer suburb of distant Sanganer — decrepit, but even so, a town full of temples that was entered through a triple gateway. A few hours later, the train moved through a yellow plain, flat and dry as far as I could see, with a scattering of trees. Some of it was plowed, awaiting planting, and flocks of goats browsed in the grass. But really it was a great expanse of wide-open country. In this nation of more than a billion people — utter emptiness.

"Superfast" might have been a misnomer for this train — eighteen hours of travel, a two o clock departure from Jaipur, arriving in Mumbai at eight the next morning — but the euphemism was consoling. I had to catch up on note taking, and I was becoming absorbed in The Great Mutiny. It was a trip of 720 miles.

Mr. Gupta, my compartment mate, was being transferred by his employer, a telecom company, to Mumbai.

"The transfer was unexpected and very stressful. I m taking the train because I need a rest," Mr. Gupta said. "Planes are a problem. You hurry and then you wait. Sometimes the plane is circling for half an hour. Ridiculous."

"You have a place to stay in Mumbai?"

"I will stay in a hotel for one month. Then I'll find a place and my wife and children will follow." He was making a call to his wife as he spoke, and when he hung up he said, "So how do you find India? Mostly friendly?"

"Oh, yes. No problems."

"This is Sawai Madhopur. There's a tiger sanctuary near here, at Ranthambore."

"Sanctuary" might have been stretching it, I found out later: only about twenty tigers, a dwindling number because of persistent poaching. The area had once been the private game reserve of the Jaipur royals, and many of the animals had ended up stuffed and peering from the ornate walls of the Rambagh Palace and the Amber Fort.

We plunged into a landscape of long lumpy hills, brown and dry and treeless, at the edge of farmed valleys. Women in beautiful yellow and orange saris hacked at gardens with heavy hoes and carried water jars on their heads, as in the old aquatints, walking with stately grace down narrow paths, past goats and chickens.

Later in the afternoon groups of people were gathered in wheat fields for harvesting, some bent double to slash at the stalks, others tying them into bundles — not a single sign of mechanized intervention. It all looked ancient. And that was only a matter of miles from Kota Junction, for though the surrounding villages were among the simplest I d seen in India, Kota itself was an industrial city, with an atomic plant not far away, and so modern as to be intensely polluted (guidebook: in 1992 "levels of radioactivity were way above 'safe' levels"). That was part of the panorama: a long hot afternoon in rural India that included ancient plowshares, wheat harvested by hand, water jars carried from the village well, and nearby an atomic energy plant leaking radioactivity.

We were soon among the plowshares and the harvesters, and in the twilight a group of laborers in puja postures, an Indian version of Millet's The Angelus.

Mr. Gupta said, "People work very hard here."

We passed a man plowing. I said, "They're looking ahead. 'No man, having put his hand to the plow, and looking back, is fit for the kingdom of God."

"Who said that?"

"Jesus. It's in the Bible"

"Very nice."

Night fell in the wide valleys, and here and there I could see candle flames in the little huts. A food seller came to the compartment and offered me the vegetarian special for 45 rupees — a dollar. So Mr. Gupta and I each bought a tray. While we ate and talked, another traveler joined us and took a top berth. He was a shawl seller, on his way to Mumbai to take orders.

Mr. Gupta's phone kept ringing. "You will excuse me? Sorry for the disturbance, but my little girl, who is four, misses me greatly. I need to reassure her."

He spoke to his little girl three more times before he turned in. He was another young man from the provinces joining the twenty million in Mumbai.

By the small light over my berth, I read The Great Mutiny, then fell asleep and thrashed in mutiny-inspired dreams of bloody mayhem, religious fanaticism, revenge, and anarchy.

In the morning, Mr. Gupta and the shawl seller were up and packed. They were getting off at Santa Cruz, while I continued the whole way, into the heart of the city.

***

THE FRENZIED CAREERISTS of Mumbai seldom stopped talking about how the place was booming, as though having rid it of its old name, Bombay, they had founded a new city. Their obtuse pride was odd in a country infatuated with its past, obsessed with its own complexity, where nostalgia was a ruling passion. But the Indian craving to belong to the wider world is more than a billion strong — and not just to belong, but to have the world's good opinion of them, to impress with their history, their moralizing and disquisitional nature, their unembarrassed pleasure in speechifying, their love of the orotund and the sententious, and the enduring quaintness of their customs: how they avoided killing a flea, how they worshiped lingams ("It is penis, sar"), how they drank the river water from Mother Ganga, how they propitiated the goddess Lakshmi in order to acquire wealth, how they approved of the widow-burning practice of suttee and arranged marriages, while at the same time describing their progress in hedge funds, computer software, nuclear reactors, or astrophysics.

"This is my husband, Arun," an Indian woman said to me later in Mumbai, her eyes flashing with defiance. "It was not a love match. Our parents arranged it. We hardly knew each other. We have been very happy. We have three children. We will arrange their marriages, after — of course — we have consulted astrologers."

She was showing off, trying to bait me. I was on the point of saying, "Funnily enough, I picked up my wife in a bar," when her husband began boasting about how India led the world in corporate takeovers in the global steel sector. I did not say, "Why hire market analysts in India when you can hire soothsayers and astrologers?"

Mumbai was India's boast, representing everything it wanted the world to admire. I could see the city was bigger. The limits of Mumbai had expanded for miles. They were around Mahim on my first visit; they were now at thirteen miles north of it, at Thana and Mahisa. But Mumbai the magnificent was also home to Asia's biggest slum. Commuters into Mumbai from the suburbs could spend hours on buses and trains. Both its airports had been swamped by this development, so their nearness to the center of Mumbai actually distorted the size of the city, sprawling north and east in immense low suburbs, which rose from the huts of the outskirts to the busy district at Colaba, with its tall buildings, its churches, and its municipal offices of the peculiar Indo-Saracenic architecture of the Raj, which was mocked as "disappointed Gothic."

"When I got back to Mumbai from New York last week I saw that a new building had gone up," an American businessman said to me. "It's not Shanghai, but it's growing fast. Basically a new building every week or so."

It is a shock to travel from the countryside, especially the desert provinces of the north, to the biggest city in India and one of the biggest in the world. Out of the yellow plains and through the dust and tiny villages to this enormous port, packed with people, its dark streets jammed with honking cars. The official population is seventeen million; unofficially it is in excess of twenty million, and still growing; and because it is hot and so much of its life is outdoors, entirely visible, Mumbai is like a city without walls.

"Foreigners come and all they talk about are the poor people," an Indian woman said to me. She was an executive with a large company. "I want to say, 'What about the poor people in your country? There's more to India than poor people. "

That's true, but there are quite a few poor people in India. Any way, Indian statistics, like Chinese numbers, are stupendous and ungraspable. When an Indian says, as one said to me, "There are two hundred and fifty million middle-class Indians, which is very nice, but four hundred million are living below the poverty line," how do you respond? Two hundred years ago, the French aphorist Chamfort described Paris as "a city of amusements, pleasures, etc., in which four-fifths of the inhabitants die of want." You could say the same of any city in India.

If you dropped your gaze from the new hotel or the new call center, India looked as poor as it ever had. I was reminded of V. S. Naipaul writing in An Area of Darkness (1964): "India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value." But that's no longer true.

It would be truer to say that poverty in India now represents a perverse kind of wealth: the half billion people earning a dollar a day are producing India's food surplus; the sweatshop factory workers are the backbone of its textile industry; and low-paid employees are the workforce of its high-tech sector. The whole Indian economy is driven by the poor, by low salaries, and of course by a tremendous work ethic, which in India is a survival skill and an instinct. "The high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire," Orwell wrote. "In order that England may live in comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation." The desperation of the slum dwellers can be shocking; when Naipaul visited a chawl, or slum tenement, for a later book—India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990) — he wrote, "I was so demoralized, so choked, driven so near to a stomach-heave, by the smell at the entrance, with wet mangled garbage and scavenging cats and kittens in a little patio, and then, in the sudden dark passage, by the thick warm smell, catching at my throat, of blocked drains…" And so on, making a meal of it. He is shocked, appalled, almost undone by what he sees, and seems to have changed his mind about discussing the Indian poor. But he is one of the few writer-travelers who in subsequent books on India retraced his own footsteps.

Unlike the poor in Europe or America or even China, the poor in India are a constant presence. Where else do people put up plastic huts on the sidewalk of a main road — not one or two but an entire subdivision of humpies and pup tents? They inhabit train stations, sleep in doorways, crouch under bridges and railway trestles. They do it for safety and also convenience, since they are not parasites or lazy louts but underpaid workers, many of these squatters actually doing jobs in Mumbai. Among the poorest are the Koli people, descendants of the original inhabitants (the city takes its name from their patron goddess, Mumbai-Devi). Most of the Koli are fisher folk who live at the edge of the sea in black and battered shacks, near one of Mumbai's most expensive districts.

With poverty so obvious and unmissable, the foreigner sometimes bursts into tears, until he or she learns the Indian trick of looking only at the background, where all those new buildings are rising. While I was in Mumbai the municipal council launched "a drive to clear hutments and shanties from the roads and footpaths." On the first day one thousand such shelters were pulled down and the occupants scattered. In one morning, more than six thousand people were made homeless.

"Where will we go? The BMC has razed our houses," one of the victims said.

"Our houses" was an interesting phrase. The structures were made of twigs, branches, waste lumber, bits of string, plastic sheeting with taped seams, cotton cloth, blankets, cardboard, splintered plywood, threadbare canvas; each one with a flickering lantern and a cooking fire.

Squatters are so firmly established in every Indian city their seemingly makeshift camps are as deceptive as birds' nests, as well camouflaged, as tightly woven, and just as complex; and these people have counterparts in every city in the world. As the Indian woman said to me, "What about the poor people in your country?" Well, yes. New Orleans is a vivid example of a place where the poor were either hidden or unapproachable. It seemed that until they were flushed out by the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina no one knew they existed, nor knew what to do with them.

There is a depressing travel book to be written about the poor in America. The problem is, how to penetrate this world? The book is almost unwritable, except by someone who actually lives in such a place — though living in one slum does not license a person to live in or even visit another slum. The poor in America live in dangerous places; out of paranoia, or for protection, or because of neglect by the police or harassment by gangs, they have themselves mostly contrived this danger, to seal themselves off from authority, or from outsiders, anyone inquisitorial who would be regarded (with reason) as an enemy. I have never seen any community in India so hopeless or, in its way, so hermetic in its poverty, so blatant in its look of menace, so sad and unwelcoming, as East St. Louis, Illinois, the decaying town that lies across the Mississippi from flourishing St. Louis, Missouri. Yet I can imagine that many people from St. Louis proper would weep at the sight of Indian poverty. They dare not cross their own river to see the complacent decrepitude and misery on the other bank.

The Indian poor are accessible, conversational, often congenial and friendly, and generally unthreatening. No one can travel among the American poor the way I could travel among the Indian poor, asking intrusive questions. What's your name? How long have you lived here? Where do you work? How much money do you make? — the usual visitor's questions. I got answers, and even hospitality. In the same sort of area in the United States — the decaying sections of Jackson, Mississippi, the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston, the Anacostia district in Washington, D.C., and many other places — I would be threatened or robbed or sent away for daring to ask such things. What do you want here? It is an understandable response. But in India I was unexpectedly welcome in such places — the slums, the squatter camps, the stinking chawls, the reeking bustees.

"This is the biggest slum in Asia — it said so in the paper," a young man named Kartik said to me in the area of Mumbai called Dharavi. The name is practically a synonym for desperation: 520 acres in the depths of the city, 600,000 inhabitants and grim statistics, though the celebrated Dharavi factoid of "one public toilet for 800 people" — the vision of a very long line of people hopping with impatience — is misleading, since it was malodorously clear to me on my visit that many people in Dharavi regarded a public toilet as a superfluous novelty.

Dharavi was in the news, because with Mumbai's new prosperity the slum land had become valuable. Mumbai is essentially the gigantic island of Salsette, and most of it had been claimed. There was a move afoot to tear down Dharavi and put up expensive houses for the rising class in the new Mumbai. The idea of demolishing Dharavi was an example of the cunning greed of property speculators, because "slum" did not really describe it. Far from being a fetid precinct of despair, it was a self-sufficient part of the inner city, indeed a city itself, and parts of it did not look much different from any other part of Mumbai. The Chor bazaar district, for example, was just as ramshackle and grim, yet just as packed with thriving businesses and hectic households and the Indian mob. The Indian mob, here as elsewhere, was made up of shrieky young men and boys who seemed driven by a frenzy of sexual repression and high spirits — but sexual repression most of all, seeking release, with the grabby hands, squiffy eyes, and damp eager faces of scolds and onanists.

Kartik's family history was typical. His father had come from the southern state of Tamil Nadu when he was fifteen years old. Some relatives lived in Dharavi. He shared a small room with five other boys and worked at a hotel, cleaning tables for the equivalent of $2 a month — this was, interestingly enough, at about the time I was on my Railway Bazaar trip, in 1973. After a year or so, Kartik's father got a casual job on Indian Railways, cleaning carriages and earning $4 a month. This led to a proper job and some training as a plumber and fitter, dealing with water tanks on the railway. He had started out earning 900 rupees a month (about $20) and now earned about 7,000 rupees ($150). In that time, over thirty years, he had married and raised a family, yet he had never moved from Dharavi slum.

"He is happy. He is getting food. He is not begging," Kartik said. "But we were poor, and we are still poor. My brother is unemployed. I got a job because I managed to pass my driver's license when I was sixteen. There is plenty of work in Mumbai for a driver who is reliable and honest."

We were sitting on stools in front of the shack his father had built against another shack. Kartik didn't want to show me the inside. He said he was waiting for some men to come and fix it, but I took this to mean that he was self-conscious about its size, just a hen coop really, with squalor all around it and an unbelievable racket that made its flimsy planking chatter and throb.

"But software engineers also live here in Dharavi slum," he said. "They work for IBM and earn forty thousand rupees a month" — $900. "My friend is marrying a girl who is in the U.S. He is a Tamil, named Shekhar. She is from a wealthy family. Her dowry is one kilo of gold and two lakhs of rupees" — $4,500—"and a motorbike."

"What about your marriage prospects?"

"None. I would like to meet such a girl."

There are other consequences of living at such close quarters. According to the Hindustan Times, a recent study of 3,600 girls in Delhi concluded that one in eight had been raped by a family member, and three quarters of them feared being raped by someone in the family.

I left Kartik and walked towards the more salubrious part of Mumbai, keeping to back streets because of the crush of people and the traffic on the main roads. When I reached the Church Gate area, and was cutting through a wide lane that was closed to cars, an old woman in a blue sari walked quickly to keep pace with me and asked where I was from. When I told her, she said, "Welcome."

Three children walked along with her: a small girl of about ten, a boy of about fourteen, and an older skinny girl, perhaps sixteen. They all looked undernourished; it was hard to tell their ages. The older girl caught my eye because she was graceful and was dressed in the thick gauzy skirts of a Gypsy. Most noticeable was the fact that her left forearm was missing.

"Maybe we can help you," the old woman said. "What is your name?"

"I'm Paul. Are these your children?"

"I am their auntie."

I had a pretty good idea what that meant. It was early evening, a coolness and a darkness descending, and I wanted to know what she was offering. If there is a difference between being a tourist and a traveler, this was it. A tourist would have been at a temple or a museum; I had been in a slum, and out of curiosity was strolling along with the soliciting Mistress Overdone, the bawd, and her three depraved-looking youths.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Just talk, sir"

"Go ahead, talk."

"Better we talk in there" — she indicated a teashop.

So she led the way to the shop, where I sat in a booth next to the skinny one-armed girl, with the old woman and the other two children on the opposite side of the table.

"Chai, chai," she said to the waiter.

"Do you want anything else?"

The small girl wanted ice cream, the boy wanted a samosa, the one-armed girl said she was happy with tea, and she sipped it shyly, snuggling next to me.

"We live just near," the old woman said and pointed out the window of the teashop. "Five minutes."

I glanced at the one-armed girl, who was smiling anxiously at me. Her sunken eyes were strangely yellow, like those of a nocturnal animal, and the skin of her good arm, pressed against mine, was very dry and hairy, suggesting malnutrition.

It was perfect, this secluded place, with the insinuating old woman who was, I was pretty sure, pimping these children. It was one of the pleasanter districts in Mumbai, and she must have had luck buttonholing foreigners like me or else she would not have been so confident. I wanted her to tell me what she had in mind — what activity, what price, what length of time, what sort of promises she'd make.

She had told me how near she lived; now she began telling me how clean it was, how private. "So quiet, sir. Very good building."

I had many questions. But what kept me from asking them was the flow of people into the teashop. The shop was a kind of snack bar, with plates of food in glass cases — buns and samosas and sandwiches. We were sitting near the entrance, and every person that entered — mostly men — stared hard at me. It was about six-thirty in the evening. I was the only foreigner in the place, and here I was, in a booth with a procuress and two sallow and debauched-looking children and a teenage whore.

I wanted to ask, How much? And, What's the story?

I started to ask them their names, but I realized that if I did that, the people around me would hear and instantly know what was up. I tried to pretend we were old friends.

"He's really hungry!" I said. "Want another ice cream?"

Three tough-featured young men walked past, then chose to sit in the booth opposite, where they could hear and see everything.

I cringed, thinking how I looked there. I wanted to say: I'm a traveler. I'm writing a book. I'm just asking questions. I have no designs on these young children!

"Let we go," the old woman said, perhaps realizing how awkward I felt.

I said, "Look, I'm going to be around for a week or so. I'm pretty busy right now. We can meet again."

"When?" the old woman said. "Where?"

"Anywhere," I said evasively.

"Tomorrow," she said. "What time?"

"Anytime. I'll find you — here," and I put down 200 rupees. "That's for the food." And I whispered, "I have to go."

"Mr. Paul!" the woman called out as I slipped past the booths. Now everyone was staring at me, thinking, He's a perv! And I hurried through the door, murmuring, "Get me out of here."

But for days afterwards, I kept thinking of the small children, the one-armed girl, how hungry they'd been, how they'd sucked at the tea and eaten with their heads down, in a concentrated and famished way, with animal delight. I did not see them again — I had looked. They'd probably found another foreigner.

***

KILLING TIME IN THE CHOR BAZAAR, the Thieves' Market, looking for reverse-glass paintings along Mutton Street, with its mainly Muslim dealers in glass and porcelain, silverware and lamps, I strayed into a narrow lane to look at some old coins and found a man who said he admired George Bush. Lingering and chatting, putting an antique dealer at ease, often had the effect of causing him to open drawers and cupboards and show me objects, not to sell them, but just for the interest, their curiosity value — an ancient piece of pottery, a glazed tile, a moonstone, a lime pot in the shape of a yoni, a monkey skull pendant from Nagaland, a human skull from Tibet.

"Look at this, from Persia," Rajendra, the dealer, said, taking the lid off a narrow box.

He showed me a foot-long dagger, silver inlaid with gold, inscribed with a Farsi poem and elaborately engraved, with a thick ivory handle. Uncapping the handle, Rajendra withdrew a smaller knife — an ivory-handled shiv, also traced with gold.

"Damascus blade. Very old. Very rare. Very costly."

One of the gorier bits of trivia regarding damascene blades was that after they were heated and worked they were quenched by being plunged into a living human, a man who died giving strength to the blade. I mentioned this to Rajendra.

"I know nothing about that, but…"He allowed the sunlight to dance on the details of the blade and the gold of the haft and the veins of ivory. "Pure gold. Ivory from whale."

"How much?"

"Crores! Crores! But not for sale," he said, and leaned closer, sounding angry. "I want to present it to the U.S. ambassador in Delhi. He can put it into a museum, or give it to President Bush, or sell it and give the money to the families of the American soldiers who died in Iraq."

"You want to give this dagger to Bush?"

"Bush is a great man." He wielded the dagger. "Bush was right! History will prove him right."

"Right about what?"

"Islam! The brutalness of it!" He pointed outside, where the Chor bazaar was thronged with Muslim shops and secondhand dealers and car repairers and watch menders. "Bush had to do that. Look at history. Aurangzeb killed his father."

He also killed his brothers. He was a notorious bigot, a mosque builder, a warrior king. "That was, what, about four hundred years ago?"

"They kill animals. They eat them. Have you seen them kill a goat? It is horrible."

"Hindus in Jodhpur kill goats during religious festivals. They did it a few weeks ago at Navratri."

"But Muslims bleed it while it is still alive!" Rajendra said. "We have always had problems with Muslims. Look at Indian history! Twenty years ago a maharajah came to me to buy some things. I said to him, 'Never mind these few things. You can have them. But I want to say to you that Islam will be the main problem in the world. The main cause of the world's troubles.'"

"What did the maharajah say?"

"He didn't listen. But Bush knows better. People say — even my friends say — Bush is wrong. But no, Bush is pukka right. Without Bush the world would be finished!" He now held the dagger in both hands, as though offering it. "I want to give this to those who have died. Maybe you can talk to someone."

"There's an American consul general in Mumbai. Just call him and tell him what you want to do."

Rajendra put the dagger back into its silk-lined box. He said, "People will be angry with me if I do this, so I am hesitating. They will say, 'Who is he? Just a bunniah [trader],' but I know I am right. I know that Bush is right."

On my trip of twenty-eight thousand miles and hundreds of encounters, I met two people who supported the American president: the man in Baku who wanted the United States to invade Iran, and Rajendra. No one else.

***

EVERYBODY IN INDIA — and in the States too — talked about outsourcing. India was making shirts and shoes and electronics, and the growth area was IT (information technology), BPO (business process outsourcing), and KPO (knowledge process outsourcing). These were labor-intensive businesses that had helped swell Mumbai to its present size of twenty million, overfilled its trains with commuters, packed its hotels and restaurants, and impelled developers to look at Dharavi slum as a real-estate opportunity. Hundreds of millions of Indians lived below the poverty line — the suicide rate in rural areas was unusually high — but hundreds of millions were also making money.

"The Indian miracle, I tell you," Indians said to me as we drove through the streets of Mumbai, past the slums, the sidewalk sleepers, the lame and the halt. Was the miracle, I wondered, just an illusion?

I badgered friends to connect me with some moneymakers. The biggest IT company in India was Tata Consultancy Services. In the month I visited the TCS office in Mumbai, the company was worth $4 billion. It had more than eighty thousand employees in seventy-four cities worldwide, but this place in Mumbai was one of the largest, and since the Tata family is from Mumbai, this office was perhaps the firm's hub and headquarters.

Instead of taking the train, I allowed myself to be persuaded that a car would be quicker. But the car took twice as long — one and a half hours to get to Vikhroli, on Mumbai's sprawling outskirts. The company lay behind a high wall, traffic-choked and desperate on the outside, serene on the inside, tree-shaded and orderly, like a college campus. This was the Godrej and Boyce Industrial Garden, and though the Godrej Group manufactured soap, detergent, hair dye, hair oil, diapers, "stylish wedding napkins," machine tools, and furniture, its large tracts of available land also made it an outsourcing heaven. Dozens of American companies were also located behind the walls of this shady compound.

"Welcome, sir," said Mr. Burjor Randeria, the CEO of this branch of TCS. He was sixty-one, a Parsi, very hospitable and helpful. He was a Zoroastrian — a flame flickered on a dish on his desk, where there was an image I took to be Ahura Mazda. "We know him as Asho Farohar," Mr. Randeria said. Next to this bearded guardian was a portrait of the frizzy-haired guru Sathya Sai Baba, a small statue of the elephant god Ganesh, and a Ganesh mantra box, about the size of a large matchbox, which cleverly buzzed with intoned mantras day and night.

"It creates vibrations of Ganesha," Mr. Randeria said. "I have it on all the time."

"But you're a Parsi."

"I find this soothing"

We talked about the Parsis. The Tatas were a Parsi family, noted for their philanthropy, having founded hospitals, schools, training colleges, and orphanages. There were, Mr. Randeria said, only seventy-three thousand Parsis in the world, most of them in Mumbai. They were a dying breed.

"We marry late. We seldom have more than one or two children. And Zoroastrians don't convert others. You have to be born a Parsi."

He had been born in Sanjan, Gujarat. This was where the first Parsis landed after Muslim persecution in various jihads from the eighth to the tenth centuries, which ultimately drove almost all of them from Persia. "Parsi" means Persian.

After Mr. Randeria worked for Swissair for a number of years, looking for places to outsource Swissair's revenue accounting — labor costs were much too high in Switzerland — in 1995 he founded a company that provided financial support services for airlines. Tata had a stake in this company, but then Tata has a stake or part ownership in many companies. The name Tata was stamped on the back of most Indian buses and trucks and cars. Tata owned Tetley Tea and many retail stores. Taj Hotels was owned by Tata, and its hotels included the Pierre in New York and what had been the Ritz-Carlton in Boston. Telecom, steel, software, utilities, Internet, and insurance companies were all Tata enterprises.

One of the curiosities of the company, founded by Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (1839–1904), was that a sizable portion of the immense Tata profits went to charitable groups. This was the case from the beginning, the company endowing research institutes and hospitals. Ratan Tata, the current CEO of the whole business, is a single man in his mid-sixties about whom very little is known, other than the fact that he lives rather modestly. He continues to build up his company, buying steel mills and telecommunication giants and, recently, producing affordable family cars — and, as always, looking for constructive ways to give most of his money away. In 2006, the year I poked my nose into Tata Consultancy Services, sales in the conglomerate brought in $24 billion.

Walking through the marble halls of the huge building, I asked Mr. Randeria who his competitors were.

"Microsoft, Infosys, many others," he said. "But our motto is 'Top Ten by 2010.' We will get there by various ways. Growth both organic and inorganic. Code of conduct. Culture. Ethics. Expansion. Also acquisition — we recently acquired Pearl Insurance and the banking and financial giant Chile Comicron. We are very serious. We have an office in Budapest that caters to European languages."

"I passed through Budapest. I had the idea that a lot of Hungarians were looking for jobs."

"If they are willing to work and have skills, we will hire them."

"Funny to hear that from an Indian company," I said.

"But consider our advantages. English language, a legacy from British rule," Mr. Randeria said. "And education. We are on the whole a very well-educated country."

"So everything's rosy."

He knew I was baiting him, but he took it well. "No. I toe the line, but everyone knows there's corruption in India and that you can buy a degree. And there's our population. It's growing at a hectic pace."

It was six hundred million in 1973. It was now more than twice that. I said, "What can you do about it?"

"You can only bring it down by education," Mr. Randeria said. "Adult literacy. You see, if you have an education, you have many sources of pleasure and intellectual stimulation. Ways of using your time. Without education, it's only sex in the rural areas."

"Do you remember what Mumbai was like before this population explosion?"

"Oh, very well indeed." He smiled at the memory. "When I was a boy in Jogeshwar, streets used to be deserted by seven or eight in the evening. It was dark. My parents wanted me home. We saw foxes and hyenas, and so many snakes. Now it's a very crowded place."

Jogeshwar, once a remote area of Salsette and the site of a famous cave, was a large and congested population center about ten miles from central Mumbai. Mr. Randeria said that four hundred families a day — an average of four people per family — migrated to Mumbai.

Swiping his security card from door to door, leading me into the call center, he said, "We are the call center for" — he named an American retailer he made me swear I would not reveal—"at levels one to four. If you have a problem with your electric drill, we will sort it out."

He showed me the rooms where advanced classes in English language were taught (including American intonation), and the technical rooms where employees learned the inner workings of the products, so they could answer a flummoxed buyer's question or offer advice.

Please remove the chuck key from the pouch, insert it in the chuck of the drill, and turn clockwise to tighten the teeth against the bit…

That sort of sentence was practiced and rehearsed in the classrooms and then recited over the phone by Indian employees, who gave themselves American names ("Rick," "Andrea") and spoke in American accents.

Through soundproof windows, I could see the cubicles — sixty or eighty to a room — where Indian employees wearing headphones were speaking to American callers who had problems with their products. A large banner at the front of one room read, What can I do to resolve your issue today?

These were voice-based technical supporters, whose accents and manner needed to be reassuring.

Just rotate the prahduct until the bahdum is verdigal, and look for the ten-digit serial number. It should start with B. B for Bahb.

In other departments, accents were less important. One room was staffed entirely by medical technicians and doctors, fielding medical questions from a Danish HMO. They were speaking to Danes in Esbjerg and Aalborg and Copenhagen, brainstorming problems pertaining to diabetes.

Another zone at TCS was devoted to number crunching: several thousand cubicles of clerks at computers helping to redeem frequent-flier miles, or deal with pricing, or explain other ticket matters for international airlines.

"You see this man," Mr. Randeria said. "He is speaking to a ticket agent in — it could be New York, it could be Dallas — who has a problem with a ticket."

The employees in this room didn't need American accents or names; they were providing backup, emergency service, and tech support. The room was a racket of undifferentiated voices, like a cage of macaws.

"Airlines are some of our best customers. For them to get the maximum benefit from a flight, they need advice on space control and yield management."

From ticketing to pricing to seating logistics (which is what I took "space control" to mean), all this was managed by these techies in Vikhroli, who worked every day and every night of the year.

"It's stressful work," Mr. Randeria said. Because of that, TCS provided a gym, a cafeteria, and a resident doctor. And all employees commuted to work by the company shuttle service, which stopped at various hubs in the city.

"Suppose there's a power cut?" I asked. Such things were common, and barely concealed under the euphemisms "brownout," "rolling blackout," or "load shedding." "What happens then?"

"Last July we had power cuts. Ninety-three centimeters of rain in sixteen hours." That was more than three feet of rain in a little more than half a day! But Mr. Randeria was smiling. "We had two hundred percent redundancy backup. I'll show you."

He took me to a towering building at the rear of the complex. "This is the UPS — uninterrupted power supply. But we also have additional backup generators. In India these are essential."

"This seems a success story," I said.

"If IT and BPO hadn't happened, India would be twenty years behind. Look at China. China is already the leader in hardware and is attempting to be the leader in software. But we have the advantage of language."

"Can China learn English fast enough to be competitive with India?"

"Time will tell," he said. "We put a big emphasis on training."

It was obvious that such an enterprise succeeded because there was a large workforce of intelligent, polite English-speakers with a good education and a need for money; people who could not leave India; who, at an earlier time — as when I was here last — would have sought jobs as schoolteachers, civil servants, accountants, pen pushers, and paper chewers; who filled the traditional Indian occupations for the educated, as pundits and bunniahs and box wallahs.

This was the cleanest and most orderly building I had so far seen in India, and even as I was leaving I was asking Mr. Randeria questions about training and expansion and salaries.

"Mr. Paul," he said gently, "what you should do is see our operation in Bangalore. Just Bangalore itself — you will be awestruck."