The immensity of India doesn’t strike you right away. A visitor landing in Delhi or Bombay might comment sourly on the congestion, waste entire days in cross-town transit, or wince at the startling cacophony of car horns and Bollywood dance music, but he is unlikely to conclude that these places are too big. They look like any other big city, with buzzing business centers and markets encased by endless suburbia. While they are dustier and have higher cow and ox populations than most, Delhi and Bombay do not look otherwise like places unique to India, at least not in scale. The received wisdom of India as a violent crush of humanity, one big stampede between ticket windows, train entrances, and taxi cabs, is true to a point. But while the hum of daily Indian life is noisier and more bacteria-laden than perhaps it ought to be, there are always quiet corners to tuck away into, especially so in the cities. Yes they are enormous—13.7 million and 13.3 million people—but their enormity is neither oppressive nor confounding. We expect big Indian cities to look this way.

India’s size reveals itself when one drifts out into the regions. A typical Indian bus ride between here and there will take five hours, and will pass any number of towns and settlements on the way. Some are proper towns, with all the cows, choking traffic, bazaars, beggars, and dogs that don’t look half as sickly as they should. Others are little more than collections of squat tin-roofed shops, leaning on each other for structural support. Usually a family lives inside. The placard is painted with English text, and a Coca-Cola or Airtel billboard looms overhead. Underneath, racks of Kurkure chips dangle from the wall, and rows of bottled water for sale sit on display. The men of the family toil around the dirt lot, fixing motorbikes, hosing things down, or just waiting for customers to show up. From the bus window, you can see the white eyes of the women inside, who sit cross-legged on the floor, immersed in some chore or another.

We make a rest stop at a bus transfer station called Pathankot. It is little more than a dirt parking lot. The driver takes a walk. Tens of vendors board the bus, shouting their wares: snacks and drinks, garam chai, lentils, chocolate, blessings from a sadhu. And stranger things: cricket bats, noise-maker toys, electric razors. One kid is selling steel zippers (?). And there are beggars, usually children, who perform some menial task like sweeping the floor under your feet, or they just tug on your pantleg until you give in. Outside, other buses at Pathankot are enduring a similar siege. Salesmen prowl between the buses and jeeps with stacks of folded Kashmiri shawls balanced on their heads, hoping to sell to people changing buses or going inside for a leak. It is startlingly well-organized.

At every bus station in the country, at bus stops outside Chennai and Ahmedabad and Mangalore, and even at our next three rest stops, there will be tens (if not hundreds) of these men, whose sole means of subsistence is by walking onto hundreds of buses trying to sell a cup of chai or a cricket bat. And that they will sell to the affluent and the destitute of India alike, to the entrepreneurs and university students, the farmhands and the little old ladies, for everyone takes the same cramped buses.

Everyone in India seems to have a job. The sight of Indians labouring is the definitive image of the country (Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, defined the true religion of India as “Businessism”, which is hard to argue with). No matter how mundane, how trivial, how gratuitous, or how vile the job, there is always an Indian to do it, or usually hundreds of Indians who will do it. The division of labour is divided and subdivided again, and most are left with one small task to do, for eleven hours a day, to win a few rupees. And this economic ladder starts with the lowest beggar, climbs over the labourer and peasant, the street vendor and rickshaw man, the chai-wallahs on the bus, and up it goes, to the call-centres and mechanical engineers and property speculators, all the way to the moguls of Infosys and Tata, all rungs of this vast ladder visible from anywhere in the country, omnipresent in India. And that’s when you realize how big this country is.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 1:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized.