Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

NIGHT TRAIN TO BANGALORE: THE UDYAN EXPRESS

EARLY MORNING MUMBAI was sunlit and damp and somewhat slimy from a night of condensation on the old dark paving stones, a city of empty streets, before workers and traffic hit town and the sun was at its worst. But now, at six or so, as I was hurrying to Victoria Station, the slime helped me remember the city I had seen long ago, a city of squatters and sweepers and rickshaws, with a ripe and reeking smell — of money and death.

Victoria had a new name. The grandiose, cathedral-like building (more "disappointed Gothic"), commemorating the queen's 1887 jubilee and one of the grandest railway stations in the world, was now called Chatrapathi Sivaji Terminus, after the wily warrior king of the Marathas, who unified Maharashtra and battled the Mughals in the seventeenth century.

Because of my last-minute ticket, I was able to get only second class AC: stalls in an ancient coach, berths with curtains instead of doors, like a troop train in an old movie, or the one in Some Like It Hot, with flapping drapes. Passengers peered out of them like nomads peeping out of tents. On the outside of the next coach, running its entire length, was a piece of denunciatory graffiti in tall and graceful white letters: The most corrupt person on the railway is Shyam Prakash. An aside in Hibbert's book on the 1857 mutiny was the line "One of those arcane statements, beloved by the wall defacer, whose meaning is usually known only to the cognoscenti."

I was going to Bangalore because everyone talked about it as the site of the high-tech economic engine that was driving India's economy. And Bangalore was a stop on the way to Madras, where I had been before and wished to go again.

I was sleepy from the early start, and drowsed in my berth. When I woke up an hour or so later, we were in a landscape of blunt brown hills and deep ravines, tiny villages in the empty India of struggling farmers. Away from the sea of people, this bulked like the mainland. The news about this agricultural part of Maharashtra was that deeply indebted and drought-stricken farmers were drinking rat poison, committing suicide in record numbers (almost two thousand in the previous six years, and eight hundred of those in the year I passed through, the deaths accelerating in the first three months of 2006 to "a suicide every eight hours").

We were headed southeast in a region of rock temples and deep, elaborate caves, dating from the first and second centuries B.C., near the station at Lonavale and Malavli — a little under a hundred miles from Mumbai but a world apart, with a narrow muddy river farther on, trailing through the small villages and offering a chance for women to do laundry in its opaque water. Fifty to eighty women at a time were thrashing clothes against rocks while their husbands labored in the wheat fields, and their kneeling children formed cow shit into Frisbee-sized disks and dried them for fuel. This was not the Indian miracle. Less than three hours from Mumbai and its plutocrats and boasters, this was the India of the hut, the cow-dung fire, the bean field, the buffalo, the ox cart, and the bicycle — of debt and drought and death.

Past Pune, in the early afternoon we came to Daund Junction, where a gathering of aged but highly ornamented women—"tribals" — were waiting for a later train. Mirrors the size of silver dollars were sewn or woven onto their embroidered bodices, and each woman had a small filigreed ornament in the shape of a chandelier depending from her left nostril. They wore russet or yellow shawls, and veils and bangles, and the huddle of them, all in finery, about twenty altogether, could have been Gypsies. India is full of them; indeed, India is the origin of the Gypsy nation. It is a thrill to see people wearing traditional clothes, especially in a place where so many had become assertively Western in their dress. I always have a sense that where people wear traditional clothes they are keeping their folklore and the subtleties of their language alive as well.

So, the slow way to Bangalore ("like Silicon Valley!") revealed the eternal and stubborn and in some places desperate India. Crushed-looking villages where women squatted in fields of onions and stunted corn, planting or weeding. Nothing had changed for these people. I wrote in my notebook: Flying over this I would have missed the splendor and the misery. When someone says "India" I don't see one thing or even a hundred, but rather ten thousand images, and many stay in the mind. I keep noticing small children working at hard jobs, loading donkeys with sacks of gravel, or cleaning and mopping; or here at Daund boys hardly more than 9, scurrying around with big sacks, emptying trash bins.

Indians in cities often wail, "Too many people!" But these people in rural Maharashtra were growing their own food and drawing their own water and building their own houses and making their own fuel.

Their land had the flat and parched appearance of the African bush: low trees too thin to give any shade, dead grass, dusty paths. Even something African in the villages of stucco huts with verandas and tin roofs, the farm buildings with thatch roofs and walls of woven branches.

Hours passed, but the landscape of plains and plowed fields did not change. A familiar melancholy descended on me, the effect of a long hot afternoon on a train rolling through a landscape of sparse trees and stricken fields. Near a halt in the middle of nowhere, a man was squatting on his haunches at a level crossing on a country road, and two men on bikes and an old red bus waited for the train to pass by. As the train continued across the great abdomen of India, I thought that if you didn't see this — the immensity, the destitution, the emptiness, the ageless solitude — you would know nothing of India.

The huts could not have been simpler: made of piled-up boulders, the roofs formed of bundles of straw. The crude plow was pulled by a bullock, a man guiding the animal and whipping it with a switch. To say "Mumbai is in Maharashtra" is meaningless, because nothing could be less like Mumbai than this vast plain and its fields of lentils, a herdsman watching from an embankment as his twenty or so buffaloes bathed in a river. They rolled and wallowed, dipping their heads. Their horns were painted red.

The day was very hot, over 100 degrees, but the heat did not slow down the hawkers at Sholapur.

"Jews — fruity-fruity jews!"

"Mag-zeens, mag-zeens!"

"Pani, pani, pani, pani—vohta!"

"Biscuits, cheeps! Biscuits, cheeps!"

Seeing me, a man said, "Luntz?"

"What have you got?"

He was dispensing dahl in cups. I bought some, and a bag of pistachios and a bottle of water, and ate and watched India pass. After eleven hours the landscape had hardly changed, flat to the horizon, fields plowed by oxen, a gathering of women with brass jars at a well among grazing sheep, like a lithograph plate from the Old Testament — and even now, in the state of Karnataka, the villages seemed as remote and ruinous as any I had ever seen on earth, and many of them clearly visible to anyone traveling to the much-hyped city of Bangalore.

Towards the end of the afternoon, two young men joined me in my compartment. They were information technology employees, working in Bangalore. They spoke in what I took to be their own language — anyway, incomprehensible to me — for about fifteen minutes before I realized they were speaking English.

Rahul, the older of the two, complained that some IT workers in Bangalore were making the almost unheard-of sum of $30,000 a year, raising real estate prices.

The other young man, Suresh, talked about his travels, training IT people in places such as Singapore and Bangkok. He claimed that Indians were tormented by the police in both of those cities.

Just at dusk, at a stop in Dudhan, in the last light of day, a man with a withered foot and foreshortened leg limped with a stick, poling himself down the platform. Then the sun buried itself in the dust beyond the shacks. A woman approached the train, pleading for money, holding a skinny naked child, obviously ill, flies on its face and flies crawling between its lips.

The sight of these desperate wraiths stayed with me in the darkness. I slept. I woke to sunlight, the train gliding through palm groves, all the windows open, the fragrance of the countryside filling the coach.

***

SMALL, SLEEPY, TREE-SHADED, and bungaloidal Bangalore was so inconsequential at the time I crossed India on the Railway Bazaar that I didn't stop on my way to Madras. It was a town of retired people, many of them British, Indian army officers, fading God-botherers, with all that implied: gardening, bowling, cricket-watching, churchgoing, running Women's Institute jumble sales, among the clubbable and the soon-to-be-decrepit in the limbo of Staying On, the Indian equivalent of Cheltenham or Bognor Regis or Palm Beach. They could sit on the veranda, sipping cups of tea or chota pegs of locally distilled brain damage and moan how India was going to hell.

"It was pensioners' paradise, you can say," an Indian told me soon after I arrived. His name was Vishad Gupta, and he laughed as he said it.

He was laughing because, about four or five years ago, a dramatic thing happened: Bangalore exploded, becoming the center of India's high-tech industry. The placid city of fewer than a million inhabitants became a boomtown of seven million.

"It happened for three reasons," Vishad said, putting up one finger to indicate the first reason. Vishad's title was Director of Strategies and Business Initiatives for one of Tata's subsidiaries, in a new Bangalore business-only suburb called Electronics City Phase 2. Phase 1 was full. It was a short distance from the center of Bangalore, but a long car ride because of the nightmarish traffic, which included bikes, scooter rickshaws, ox carts, sacred cows, and hurrying pedestrians, all of them in the road — the broken, dusty road under construction.

"First reason, weather and climate. Nine months of moderate temperatures," Vishad said, and put up another finger. "Two, lots of educational institutions — lots of graduates, lots of talent. And lastly" — finger three—"people are quiet and calmer, more relaxed. It is safer here. Delhi is aggressive. Mumbai is crowded and hot. This is the right place."

And the government of Karnataka, where Bangalore is situated, introduced tax incentives in the mid-1990s; this gave benefits to start-up companies and attracted foreign companies, too. Language was another factor. Because there is no single dominant language in a babel of contending tongues (Coorg, Konkan, Tulu, Kanada, Hindi, and others), English was widely spoken. The two men in my compartment said they spoke English at home, though theirs was almost an idiolect, or at least a variety of English that I did not find easy to understand, with the usual archaisms, of which "thrice" and "mountebank" and "redoubtable" were just a few.

I took the very large number of Christian churches in Bangalore (I counted nine without going out of my way) to be a reflection of the culture of the British residents, whose retiring here was the penultimate stop on their way to salvation. Some quiet streets survived, with many old trees at their margins — unusual in India, where road-widening is a government policy. So some of old Bangalore remained, but it was overwhelmed by new buildings and construction sites: gated communities, new hotels, a real estate boom, speculation in land and housing, and the sort of eternal work in progress that I saw in every Indian city I visited.

"This will be our new flyover…"

I saw the thing everywhere. It was always under construction — people sleeping under it, cows congregating near it for shade, slogans painted on it. And I had the feeling that when at last the flyover was finished, it would be inadequate.

On my way to International Tech Park at Whitefield, at one corner of Bangalore, my driver said, "You know Sai Baba? That is his ashram."

So instead of going to Tech Park, I went to the ashram.

Bhagwan Sri Sathya Sai Baba was born not far away, at Puttaparthy, on the train line to Chennai; and he set up his ashram here for the same reason all the rest of the companies did — the agreeable weather, the shady streets, the gentle nature of old Bangalore.

The ashram sat behind a big wall, but the security guards welcomed me with namastes. Love in Action was printed in big letters on the ashram's inner wall. A huge open-sided hall with a high roof housed the fresh-air platform where Swami held his daily darshan, or spiritual meeting, with his followers. To comprehend the Swami's teachings you had only to look at his symbol, which was a circle containing the emblems of the world's great faiths: a cross representing Christianity, a crescent for Muslims, the Zoroastrian flame, and so on for Judaism, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Conflating all these faiths, Sai Baba had created a belief system that included almost everyone. But he seemed to reject the idea that he was leading a religion.

"'No religion, no prayer,' Swami says." This homily was from a volunteer caretaker wearing a badge with a Swami saying: Work is worship.

"Just follow your own religion. Love yourself."

The unmistakable image of the Swami I had seen in many taxis, many homes, on many desks and office walls: the kindly smile, the frizz of hair.

The caretaker was Narayan. "Swami says, 'Heart to heart. No preaching. Only serve humanity with true heart.'"

This sounded agreeable to me, so I decided to dismiss my taxi and look around the ashram. The Swami was not in residence. His art deco villa sat empty, in lovely gardens, behind a high fence.

I chatted with some devotees, but they were oblique and wouldn't lin ger or tell me their names ("Don't use my name, use Swami's"). They were emphatic in saying that Sai Baba had had no guru as a youth, though he did have a previous incarnation. And a new incarnation would appear in the near future — probably the year 2030.

Swami in recent pictures was smaller, slighter, older than his celebrated photographs suggested, the hair a less symmetrical frizz-ball, his smile more fatigued than impish. But he was eighty. His direct confrontation, his practical advice, his refusal to preach — the essential Swami appealed to these people.

"He will leave his body at ninety-six," one devotee said. "And after some eight years, the third and last incarnation will be born. Named Prema Sai. I wish to observe this."

The non-Indian devotees had the least patience with my questions, but one of the Indian ashramites explained some of the subtleties of Sai Baba's thought. "Swami teaches that there are four types of people. Artha type. Poor in all senses, scarred on the inside. Arthathee type. They want things. They seek to have things. Jidnyasu type. They only have questions. They need answers. And the Jnani type, who are enlightened. They know everything. They see a cloud and they know it will rain."

I said, "I think I'm a Jidnyasu. Just questions."

"Yes. I can see." I was taking notes — these were hard words to spell.

"Swami says, 'I'm not here to preach new thoughts.'"

That was a good approach.

"Don't search for God out there — search within yourself. Attain happiness. Search for ananda" — bliss or serenity.

I said, "I've been trying."

"'What is God?' Swami asks. And he answers, 'It is experience.'"

"I like that."

"Believe in yourself."

With that, the devotee left me to find my own path. I sat near the twice-life-size statue of the tuneful goddess Saraswati, who was depicted playing her sitar. I remembered someone had told me that Sai Baba could work miracles, but lovable ones, such as producing chocolates in his hand for children.

"Yes, he does miracles," another devotee said. "But only to attract illiterates. Chamatkara, they are called. They are meant to astonish you."

There were hundreds, perhaps thousands of accounts of Sai Baba's miracles, claiming they were proof of his divinity. These included mak ing objects such as crucifixes and Bibles appear, multiple healings, miraculous messages, instances of translocation — the transfer of humans, some of them dead — and a celebrated manifestation of the Koh-i-Noor diamond when Sai Baba criticized an audience for being dazzled by the gem: "Did any one of you even glance at me who created it, as you clamored for a look at that piece of creation?" Many former adherents had come forward to denounce Sai Baba for faking his miracles.

But the basic philosophy emphasizes the inner light that people can find in their own hearts, and the power of practical work. Hands that help are better than lips that pray—one of the Swami's sayings would not have sounded strange if spoken by Lenin, Mao, Jesus, or Jimmy Carter.

"People come here from all over," the guard at the front gate said. "Some imams from Iraq. And Ravi Shankar. Hillary Clinton wanted to come, but security was a problem, so she didn't come."

Near this quiet compound of spiritual renewal — down the noisy congested road — was more of booming Bangalore. I walked outside the gate and took a taxi to International Tech Park. Its new buildings loomed in the distance, rising from watermelon stands, clusters of rickshaws, fix-it shops, juice stands, and food stalls.

Behind the walls of Tech Park, among the towering glass-and-steel buildings with glittering signs — Infosys, Oracle, Disa, Think Inc., and others — was one for Perot Systems. I recalled the diminutive, quack-voiced, jug-eared Texan, Ross Perot, running for president of the United States on a platform called United We Stand America, which included the pledge to prevent jobs from being outsourced to places like India. Perot spoke of how we would hear "a giant sucking sound" as American jobs were lost. Now, having failed in his bid for the presidency, the quacking tycoon had found that Indians in Bangalore would work for a fraction of what an American would earn.

Many of the jobs being done in the Bangalore call centers had once been performed in the United States by college students and housewives. All were part-timers. The work was tedious and poorly paid.

But around 2001, American companies — and there were now thousands of them in this city alone — discovered that young Indian graduates with good degrees, fluent in English, well-mannered, patient, and persistent, would do the same jobs, full time, for very little money. The city had become so widely recognized as a business alternative that in an April 2006 episode of The Simpsons, the town of Springfield outsourced the operation of its nuclear plant, and Homer Simpson went to Bangalore to find Indian employees for the plant. Bangalore was perhaps the best-known center of cheap, trainable labor in the world. I wondered why, until I went there and found that at the time I visited the call centers, the entry-level employees (most of them university graduates) were earning less than $2,500 a year. Bangalore's prosperity rests on these people — their need for work, their high educational attainments, their skills, their good character, their prudent austerity, their punctuality, their humble status, and most of all their willingness to work for low pay.

"Cannot proceed," the security man at the gate in Tech Park said to my taxi driver. So I made some inquiries and got permission to visit another call center, this one in yet another gated compound of big company offices, Electronics City Phase 2. This phase was only two years old but was already filled with flourishing businesses — that is, foreign businesses with Indian employees.

I went in the evening, because that was when the callers would be dealing with the western United States, California specifically. I was led through another gateway, another security fence, into a modern building with a few Indian touches — a shrine to the elephant god, Ganesh, god of new endeavors, and an artificial waterfall. I was given an ID badge for security purposes, I was signed in, and I was shown through the labyrinthine headquarters.

"Bangalore used to be quiet and sleepy," Hardeep, the night manager, told me. "It is now working day and night. It's cosmopolitan, people from everywhere. Less than thirty percent of the people in Bangalore are local, because of IT growth."

I said, "The IT people in Mumbai said they were worried about Chinese competition."

"Yes, the Chinese are trying to compete, but they have a different mind-set. Ask a Chinese worker to tighten a screw, he will make three turns. The Indian will give an extra turn."

"I'll try to remember that. What about money?"

"Our cost of business is going up, but we are still forty to fifty percent more cost-effective. Now the IT industry in India is sixteen to eighteen billion dollars. By 2008 it will be sixty to eighty billion."

"I meant what does a call center worker earn?"

Hardeep hemmed and hawed, but I found out by nosing around that the answer was from $50 to $60 a week, often a fifty-hour week, and that might include a night shift that ended at three or four in the morning.

"We don't think about China — China is already playing a role. We think, What is the next India?"

"What's the answer?"

"Maybe Philippines. But political instability is there. Attempts have been made in Africa. Ghana was looked at, but no good results were found."

I was impatient to see and hear Indians on the phone. I hadn't managed much of this in Mumbai. Hardeep said that he could show me those rooms but that I could not divulge the names of the companies involved. I said okay, though I recognized some of them — banking and mortgage groups, and the names of some airlines.

"This wing is tech support," and he named a large airline. "Let's say someone is processing a boarding pass anywhere in the world, doing a check-in, and they have a problem with anything. They call, and the call is answered by one of these tech people."

"Can I listen?"

I cocked my head to the earphones and heard an American voice at the other end, perhaps in Los Angeles, saying, "So do I just put that ten-digit code in?"

The tech person was a friendly-looking man, about thirty, studying a computer screen as he helped the airline employee in an airport far, far away.

"This is internal organization support," Hardeep said, "not an end customer."

"What's the difference?"

"End-customer support is voice-based, requires accent — U.S. or U.K. You are identified with a particular country. 'Hello, I'm John…'"

"But it's really Mohun, isn't it?"

"For our purposes, it's John."

We were passing down a corridor and into a new room with about a hundred cubicles and workstations. At each one sat a young Indian man or woman. They looked like students working late at the library, except that they were on the phone and the room was humming with their voices. The call center employees worked from scripts, and all calls were recorded so they could be reviewed for effectiveness.

"The brand image from a consumer perspective should not change, or else the person on the phone in the U.S. will think you're taking a job away."

Which was exactly what was happening: an Indian helping an American to solve a problem with a computer or an appliance or an insurance form.

This fascinated me: Indians mimicking Americans, not just in the way they were dressed (short-sleeved shirts, blue jeans, sneakers), but in the American jobs they were doing, using broad American accents. All had American first and last names.

I met "Lynn Hayes," who was born Hasina, in Kerala, on the coast. She was twenty-two, unmarried, and worked from 5:30 P.M. until 2:30 A.M. at the call center — the best time to call California. She was cold-calling contractors in the San Francisco area, to sign them up for a home warranty company that wanted its own fix-it men.

Listening in, I heard a blunt "Who's this?"

"Lynn Hayes," Hasina said in a neutral, regionless American accent. "May I please speak to the manager?"

"He's out."

"When is he expected in the office, please?"

The accent was American, this politeness wasn't.

"I dunno," the woman at the other end said.

"May I call you back?"

"Up to you. He's pretty busy."

Lynn Hayes persisted until she was able to find a time when the manager of this firm of contractors might be in.

"We have to sign up two hundred and twenty-five American contractors a month for this company," Hardeep said. "They have to be involved in plumbing, electrical, building, and so forth. It's almost impossible to find them in some states. New York is tough. Arizona is better. California is hard."

"How does she know who to call?"

"We purchase telephone numbers."

These were the leads — I thought of them as the Glengarry leads, and I imagined this room of callers fitting neatly into the plot of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, the definitive drama on cold-calling and rejection. The workers in Bangalore were not vying for bonuses or a set of steak knives, but every time one of them snagged a contractor, he or she got a gold star on the leader board.

"David Lewis" (Nitish Chandra) said, "I make about one hundred and thirty calls a day. It's really hard. Every twenty calls we get to speak to a contractor. Out of, say, six interested, we sign up one."

"Hello, this is Tina," said Aisha, in an accent that was nicely nasal, and after a brief exchange, "Can I leave my number?"

She dictated a number that was in the 212 area code — New York City — and when the person phoned back, from somewhere in the USA, the call would be routed to Bangalore.

As I was writing this down, someone called out, "Chris just got another star on the board!"

"Chris Carter," who was Subramaniam to his parents and friends, had been working in the call center for over a year and had a pleasant and persuasive manner. He also had mastered a forced but fairly convincing American accent — all of them had been drilled intensively.

"Do you say route or rowt?" I asked. "Roof or ruff?"

Rowt and ruff, they said. And in-surance. And ree-peat. And minny for many, peenless for painless. All the pronunciations that I found annoying.

"This is Sean Harris," Ramesh was saying, tapping his pencil on a scribble pad. "We require a contractor in the Santa Rosa area. We have minny jobs. May I kindly speak to the manager?"

This would go on until two or three in the morning, the whole room cold-calling California, doing the impossible, looking for willing plumbers. There were a hundred callers in this room, a thousand employed by this firm, ten thousand callers in Bangalore — a figure that was expected to triple in the next few years.

It was difficult for me to get accurate salary figures from any of the managers — every one shrank at my question; it was a sensitive issue. Twenty-five hundred dollars a year was the lowest amount I heard for a newcomer; some earned $4,000. Someone at the top of the pay scale could expect to earn $30,000 or $40,000, which was a very high salary in India, and few achieved it. Most stayed at the bottom, averaging about $50 a week, but because of the stressful nature of the job, and the unsocial hours, there was a high dropout rate. Some techies and software support men I met at the company gym said they earned $6,000 or $7,000 a year, and some software designers earned $10,000—more than enough to tempt them to stay, but a pittance to the American client. There was never a shortage of applicants: Hardeep said he was besieged by new graduates looking for work. Again I recognized the paradox, that India's poor were its wealth.

Since the time of the East India Company, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian labor had been exploited for its cheapness. Coolie labor was the basis of the British Raj, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, whether it was growing cotton for the textile mills, or jute for rope, or tea to satisfy the imperial thirst, or (as in the 1850s) Indian opium for the purpose of weakening China, turning it into a nation of addicts, and enriching the British. Indians were still being exploited, but grunt labor and muscle power had ceased to be of much use; the workers now were intelligent, educated, mostly young, a whole workforce of cultivated coolies.

One of the older municipal buildings in Bangalore was Mayo Hall. A two-story ecclesiastical-looking structure built at the end of the nineteenth century, it was dedicated to the memory of India's fourth British viceroy, Lord Mayo. Lord Mayo's pomposities led him to make a ceremonial visit to a penal colony in the Andaman Islands, some distance from India's eastern coast, and there he met his end, a crazed convict knifing him to death. This same Lord Mayo once said, "We are all British gentlemen engaged in the magnificent work of governing an inferior race."

In my succeeding days in Bangalore, I met some of the dropouts. Vidiadhar and Vincent had managed one of the earliest call centers, processing mortgages for an Australian company, providing tech support, and selling software.

"It was fun for a while, but the hours were awful," Vidiadhar said.

"The big problem was the perverts," Vincent said. "Aussies! They'd hear a woman's voice on the line and say, 'Go out with me on a date and I'll buy everything you're selling.'"

"Some would say, 'What are you wearing?'"

"That was only the beginning!" Vincent said. "It could get pretty rough. I'd rather not repeat it."

Vidiadhar said, "For the U.S. customers we said, 'We're in California'—well, the headquarters of the company was in California, so it wasn't really a lie. If we'd told them we're in India, they would have said, 'How can an Indian understand the problems I'm having with my product?'"

They too said that they'd bought telephone numbers and customer profiles, which was reminiscent of the Glengarry leads.

"We had hot leads and cold leads. We paid a lot of money for some of them, but we knew so much about the people — their age, their address, if they'd refinanced their mortgage, what sort of credit rating and financial history."

But the stress had got to them after a few years, and the women objected to the heavy breathers. So Vidiadhar and Vincent entered that other growth area in Bangalore, making deals in the American clothing market.

"Any labels I'd recognize?"

"Are you familiar with Kenneth Cole, Banana Republic, and Tommy Hilfiger?" Vincent said.

The usual routine was that one of these companies would give them a specific pattern. The cloth, cotton or silk, was generally from India; the buttons and waistbands were from the United States. They would run up a sample, get it approved, and sign a contract for a certain number of units.

I said, "Banana Republic sells a type of pajama bottom that I usually wear on the train. Drawstring type with pockets. They cost about forty dollars."

"We make them for seven."

Vidiadhar said, "Any U.S. clothing company could sell their clothes for fifty percent off and still make a good profit."

The men and women who cut and stitched these clothes, the low-level tailors, earned $1,000 a year.

"That polo shirt you're wearing," Vincent said. "It looks familiar. I'm pretty sure it was made here."

***

I FOUND SOME GLASS PAINTINGS in Bangalore and got acquainted with the man who sold them to me, Mr. V. K. Reddy, who said he dabbled in antiques. He was blimpish and backward-looking, opinionated and very funny in his conceits, with a big mustache, as outlandish as an actor's comic prop, that he continually twirled with his big blunt finger. He was stout, with a dyspeptic scowl, and his manner, his booming voice especially, was that of a former Indian army officer, which he might have been.

"What a lot of bosh!" he said when I told him that Bangalore was regarded as an example of the Indian miracle.

"What do you think it is?"

"This town was nothing, I tell you! Just little retired ladies and gents living out their days as pensioners. And now this! For the past three years!"

"Nightmarish traffic," I suggested.

"You are naïve, my friend! Worse than nightmarish."

"Noisy," I said.

"Noisy is not the word, sir!" Mr. V. K. Reddy said and worked on his mustache, tweaking its sticky tips. "It is hellish din."

"But you have your antique shop."

"No more than a hobby." He leaned forward and said, "It so happens that I have in my possession Mother Teresa's personal rosary, with a letter in her own inimitable handwriting, testifying to its authenticity. I can offer this for your perusal, and should you purchase it, you would not regret it."

"Must be unique," I said.

"Of unparalleled interest," he said, still plucking at his mustache. "And don't forget spiritual value."

If I should return to Bangalore, Mr. Reddy said he would take me to lunch at the Bangalore Club. "There you will see the old Bangalore. The old India."

He meant the Raj, and the genteel and dusty Anglo-Indian aftermath of tiger shoots and high tea and polo matches and dented tureens of mulligatawny. But a day or so later, near where I sat, at breakfast in my hotel, a cup of coffee in one hand, the Times of India in the other, I read that four members of a family at a local court had just been given life sentences "for abetting self-immolation." Two were the sons of the victim; that is, to help in the ancient (and outlawed) practice of suttee, they had thrown their sixty-year-old mother on the funeral pyre of her husband, joining his burning corpse in death. Everyone talked about the new India, but the old India was never very far away.