India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation by Oliver Balch Read Free Book Online Page B

toddler’s tricycle.
    He has his eye on a 150cc Honda Unicorn. His wife, Jyoti, is needling him to buy one. ‘She tells me, “I said nothing about acar. Just a good bike. That’s enough for me. To take the kids and go for chapatti.”’ Babu doesn’t know where he’ll get the money. The thought keeps him awake at night. ‘I tell her, “Don’t break my heart and my mind.”’
    We cross the road towards Ganesh Murty Nagar colony, the crowded slum where Babu lives with Jyoti, his two children – Nabi, aged six, and Sameer, aged four (also known as Ashu, meaning ‘fast’) – and around ten thousand other people. The community clings to the rocks at the very southern tip of Mumbai, a populous barnacle lapped by the Indian Ocean and encrusted in sea salt and poverty.
    Babu suddenly grabs my elbow. I halt mid-stride. As I do so, full laundry bags of dirty linen swoosh by, inches from my face. The bulging bundles are riding pillion on a speeding moped. A blast of hot air fragranced with sodium bicarbonate knocks me back on my heels.
    ‘They used to deliver on bicycles,’ Babu says, half-heartedly cursing the laundry man as his rattling dragonfly of a bike drones off down the road. ‘Now all is change. Now they have good money.’
    The near-miss brings the motorbike dilemma back to Babu’s mind. He turns to me once we’ve safely navigated the road. ‘What exactly is a Unicorn, actually?’
    I tell him what I know: that it’s a mythical creature, like a horse but with a horn protruding from its forehead. I imagine them to be white, but – presumably like the Honda – they could come in other colours too. ‘If I’m not mistaken, the ancient Greeks used to believe they originated in the plains of India.’
    ‘Really? In India?’ replies Babu, his scepticism alerted by this last point.
    He is an avid fan of Animal Planet . (‘It’s true, I heard it on Animal Planet ’ is, I would later learn, one of his stock phrases.) He takes a special enjoyment from watching big cats hunt, ‘but they’re mostly in Africa only’. India has tigers, but ‘we Indians kill them in large numbers and export them. So now no tigers are left.’ The revelation is delivered with no sense of regret or remorse.
    Babu’s evaluation of Mumbai’s animal life is equally matter-of-fact. Dogs, cats and cows basically comprise his list, a four-legged fraternity of three. And maybe some pigs (something his secular Muslim nose still turns at). Oh, and an elephant or two as well. ‘They come to beg.’ But as for unicorns? He thinks he would have heard about unicorns if they really came from India.
    Meantime, he has another question: ‘What do you mean by “mythical”?’
    ‘Like stories,’ I suggest hesitantly.
    The explanation seems to please Babu, who nods vigorously. ‘Oh, so like cartoons then.’
    I had grown used to Babu’s questions over the weeks. We first met at Mumbai International Airport. His boss, a friend of a friend, had sent him to pick me up. For the young Englishman on a princely salary, Babu forms part of the expat package, along with a live-in maid and a small militia of sentries at the gate.
    New India shows one notable similarity to Old India: it is swarming with foreign officialdom, most of them white and privileged and overburdened with staff. Their allegiances have ostensibly changed. Today, they answer to suits in the City rather than in Whitehall. British India was always a commercial project first, and a political concern second.
    Still, I often wonder what it must be like for these modern-day vassals of Empire when their assignments finish. There will be no Babus waiting for them at home, just the jam-packed District Line chugging slowly in from Putney every morning. Will they miss their ‘ridiculously over-wrought baroque’ lives, to use the words of India’s chief foreign writer-in-residence, William Dalrymple?
    Babu’s life, at least, contains no such dualities. His reality is stark and his life