India gets richer

The apartment building in which I live is at the very end of Marine Drive. At that point this most magnificent of Mumbai’s streets disappears into the sea in an ugly clutter of concrete tetrapods. In my building live some of the richest people in India, and it was when my association with the city’s poorest citizens began that I realized how much they hate being reminded of India’s poverty. The building became for me an interesting and accurate barometer of India’s growing prosperity. It became evident in different ways that some Indians were getting richer every day. Richer residents, some who had become NRIs to escape taxes, started buying more than one apartment and linking them together, sometimes interfering dangerously with load-bearing pillars and walls. They barely came to Mumbai once a year from their main homes in Dubai and Oman but felt the need anyway to live in big apartments.

Then there was the basement car park. When we first moved to the NCPA Apartments at the beginning of Vajpayee’s first term as prime minister, the car park was filled mostly with Japanese cars. These came to be slowly replaced by more expensive German cars. BMWs, Mercedes, Porsches and Bentleys began to fill spaces where humbler Lexuses and Toyota Innovas once stood. And in the place of Pajeros came Range Rovers and Audi SUVS.

Then there was the way in which the women of the building changed their accoutrements and accessories. In the gym on the twenty-second floor, I liked watching how the wives of India’s millionaires and billionaires started abandoning Indian jewellery for that made by Cartier and Bulgari. Louis Vuitton luggage became ubiquitous. When Hermes set up shop in an old-fashioned heritage building in Horniman Circle, every woman I knew seemed to have a Birkin bag or two. Poverty was a long way away from this world of new global Indians who spent summer holidays in European resorts, autumn in New York and who could always be spotted on the promenade in Davos at the time of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting.

After I started living with Ajit, I started going myself on this annual trip to Davos and used my skills as a journalist to spot signs of change and prosperity. When I first went to Davos in 1995, there were no more than a handful of Indian businessmen at the forum. The men included some of the richest industrialists in India, dressed in ill-fitting suits that seemed to have been made for them by backstreet tailors in Delhi and Mumbai. Their wives made it such a point to dress in Indian clothes that an economist friend, who used his own barometer to gauge the prosperity of countries, said as a bevy of Indian women stumbled through the snow in saris, ‘When they stop wearing costume abroad India will have arrived.’ I saw the point of what he said. After two attempts at staggering through snow in moonboots and a sari I gave up, but the wives of Indian tycoons continued to keep the tricolour flying high sartorially much longer.

Then one day, at almost exactly the time that the world began to stop seeing India as an economic basket case, there was a revolution in Davos. Suddenly, Indian women were wearing Chanel suits and Gucci boots under coats of sable and mink and their husbands were dressed in Brioni and Zegna. Almost exactly the same thing happened in the NCPA Apartments at almost exactly the same time.

A consequence of this was that Indian poverty became something that newly rich Indians were increasingly ashamed of. It became a thing of such deep shame that it needed to be ignored or hidden away somewhere. Perhaps the contrast between their lives and those of Mumbai’s street people, incidentally residents of the same neighbourhood, embarrassed them so much they could not bear to see them around.

The street people I knew did not help matters by being drunk and disorderly late at night on the pavement outside our building. So it was that one morning I got a call from a lady in my building who sounded very upset.

‘You have to stop encouraging these people,’ she said angrily.

‘Which people ’

‘Those poor people who live in the street I have seen you talking to them.’

‘Why What happened ’

‘Did you hear the noise last night Do you know that woman I have seen you talking to was so drunk that she was shouting and making so much of a ruckus that we could not sleep ’

‘Which woman ’

‘That woman with the two little girls I’ve seen you talking to her. You must stop encouraging them to hang around the building.’

‘Where should I tell them to go ’

‘Wherever they came from I don’t care. What I care about is that they shouldn’t be making a noise outside my window at night or I shall call the police and have them arrested.’

‘Please don’t do that,’ I implored. ‘Lakshmi has a tendency to drink too much and I will speak to her about this, but if you have her arrested what will happen to her children Her son is less than a year old.’

‘Well, she shouldn’t have had so many children in any case she has to go away from here.’

‘She cannot,’ I said, ‘because she and her husband Hamid were born on the pavement and have been living here long before the building came up.’

‘Ah, so now you are trying to tell me he is a Muslim so that because I am a Muslim you might get my sympathy. Well, you won’t. You will have to tell them to go away.’

‘They have nowhere to go,’ I repeated and put the phone down.

I never heard from this lady again and I never met her. But I soon discovered that most people who lived in my building felt the same way about poor people and poverty. They affected refinements of all kinds. They organized ghazal evenings and concerts and spent huge amounts inviting famous people to come and give talks in the NCPA theatre and if there was a literary festival they patronized it passionately, but their servants were treated as if they were sub-human. They were not given even basic amenities like a room, a bed or a toilet.

Excerpted from India’s Broken Tryst by Tavleen Singh