‘I am not bound by my past,’ the voice tells her, ‘I make me’

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/apr/24/the-end-of-karma-somini-sengupta-india-young-people

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Extract 1: Varsha, Gurgaon

Saturday night, suburban Gurgaon. The sky turns from blue to black, the burnt-toast smell of fireworks blows across the ravine, and tall, broad-shouldered Varsha hauls a hot coal-iron over the shimmering finery of others.

Quietly, quickly, she presses the wrinkles out of a brushed pink chiffon salwar kameez, another the colour of nimbu-pani [lemonade], followed by three button-down white dress shirts. Her cellphone trills. “Yes, Didi. It’s almost ready. Send your driver in 10 minutes.”

Didi is a customer with a wedding to attend, perhaps several, since it is wedding season, and many Didis around town have many weddings to attend. Firecrackers begin to boom-snap in the distance. They will go on past midnight. It is Varsha’s job to make sure Didis don’t show up to their parties all rumpled.

And so she presses their clothes, places them on hangers, one after the other, futt-a-futt, racing against the clock. Left hand on cloth, right hand on iron, she removes every crease, every wrinkle. If only she could press away her worries this way, I think.

Varsha is 17, every bit the dreamer.

Varsha regards her papa as her ally, but he is also her obstacle. He loves her but he also sabotages her

She aspires to go to college and to one day be financially independent. She dreams of being a cop, gold stars on her shoulders, capable of protecting herself from the louts out there who harass and abuse girls. This conviction becomes all the more urgent after her country is roiled by the gang rape of a young woman in late 2012.

Varsha finds beauty in Kathak [Indian classical dance]. For a while, she fantasises about learning to play guitar. In her head, day and night, she hears a hot, impatient voice: I am not bound by my past. I make me.

She is one among many.

Varsha’s ambitions alternately bemuse her father and make him sick with worry. There is no question of her becoming a cop, as far as he is concerned. By the time she is 20, he intends to find her a husband from a good family, of course from the same caste, with a capacity to earn and protect his child. If the in-laws allow, she can work. Kathak lessons are out of the question. Likewise, guitar. It will not improve her marriage prospects.

Varsha regards her papa as her ally, but he is also her obstacle. He loves her but he also sabotages her. He too wants her to break free of her past – but not too much. She keeps pushing the bounds, and he has to figure out how far to let her go.

Varsha is born to a community of dhobis, whose ritual occupation is to clean other people’s dirty clothes. The advent of washing machines has tweaked the caste norms. Dhobis have become press-wallahs. They take rumpled piles of machine-washed clothes, press them, fold them, and return them to their owners.

Varsha’s father, Madan Mohan, is a pioneer in Gurgaon. He moves to the new city in 1998. Varsha is a baby then, and Gurgaon is too. The very first suburban villas come up. A smattering of gated communities are under construction.

In the pressing business, location is everything. And being first in this emerging suburb gives Madan Mohan a chance to corner the market early. He establishes a press stand, which is no more than a flat piece of tin held up by four sturdy bamboo trunks. Under the tin roof stands a cement platform with a smooth piece of marble on top, courtesy of Varsha’s uncle, who has moved up the ladder from the dhobi line and into construction. The family erects their press stand at the intersection of two dead-end streets, on the edge of a ravine of neem and acacia. In those early days, you can see straight across the valley all the way to sunset. Antelopes slink out of the bush to explore. Varsha is just learning to walk.

Soon, all around the press stand, villas and high-rises spring up – and with them come customers with piles of cottons and silks to be pressed.

Varsha’s parents work the press stand in the early days. As soon as she can find her way around the neighbourhood, Varsha starts going house to house to pick up and deliver. When her sisters learn to walk, she takes them along on her rounds. The girls become a fixture on these blocks.

They march up and down the streets with bundles on their heads – tidy, warm stacks, neatly contained in old bedsheets: button-down shirts, linen trousers, salwars, saris. Sometimes, men even send old chaddis to be pressed. Varsha giggles at the thought that a man would want hot, pressed underwear.

Madan Mohan is sure of one thing about the dhobi business. He wants none of his children to inherit it. Nor does he want his daughters to marry into it. A dhobi’s wife must work all day, standing over a hot iron, which means that by the time she gets home, she is too tired to do much housework.

A woman is better off staying in the house, in his view, looking after the children. And anyway, a dhobi’s work is neither easy nor valued. You work outside all day – in the heat, in the rain, in the cold. And at the end of it, he says, a greedy developer can come and toss you out.

When Varsha is six, he finds a school for her. It is ideal for his purposes.

It is nearby. It costs nothing. And classes are held in afternoons, which means Varsha can help her mother in the mornings and then go to school.

What a boon it turns out to be for Varsha. The school is run by a charity. And the reason it holds classes in the afternoons is that it borrows space from one of the posh private schools serving Gurgaon’s privileged – or what Varsha will one day call “the elite sections of society”. In the morning come the children of bankers and ad executives. In the afternoon stream in the children of dhobis and drivers. The school is blessed with all the things that the neighbourhood government-run school lacks: tables and chairs, educational posters on the walls, teachers who show up. Classes are conducted in English.

Varsha loves it.

She absorbs everything the school offers: maths, songs, history. And then she runs back to the press stand to help Mummy.

Shubha, one of the first homeowners on the block, remembers seeing Varsha march up and down these streets, one hand balancing a bundle of clothes on her head, the other gripping her little sister’s wrist. She must have been seven at the time.

Shubha observes her closely. The girl is unusual. No wallflower, this one. Quite the opposite. She is inquisitive and impatient, even pushy at times. When Varsha brings her stacks of pressed clothes, Shubha lets her linger in her house and read books from her own library. Soon, Varsha is barging through her gates and demanding help with homework. Eventually, she is allowed to settle herself in front of the family computer. By the time Varsha is in Class 9, she has enlisted Shubha’s entire family into service. The daughter helps with English, the son tutors her in physics.

I am just getting to know Varsha around this time, and Shubha warns me: Varsha can be in your face, she says, not impolite exactly, just unrestrained.

Shubha is struck by her intensity.

“My own children,” Shubha says, “don’t have the aspiration that she has.”

Papa agrees to let her finish high school, but mainly to improve her marriage prospects. He knows only louts will marry a girl without a high-school degree nowadays.

Varsha’s father takes his responsibilities seriously. He tries to protect her from harm. At the same time, he is the chief enforcer of the very traditions that circumscribe her dreams. He keeps putting up fences around her. He keeps stopping her from becoming who she can be.

“I have been pressing clothes all my life,” he says once. “The main thing I want for my children is that they do something better.”

It is a bland answer to a bland question about his hopes for Varsha, but it fills Varsha’s eyes with tears to hear her father speak this way. She turns around and buries her head on his shoulder, which catches him by surprise. He awkwardly pats her on the back.

Varsha pushes the limits, finds herself pushed back, pushes some more. She is a child in an impossible situation. She has gulped the Kool-Aid of aspirational India. Deep inside, she believes she can make something of herself. She is convinced school is her best exit strategy. And so she has risen to all its demands: studied, scored well on the critical exams, become captain of the girls’ volleyball team. She has risen to the demands of family too: hung towels to dry, helped with dinner, made sure her siblings do their homework and smoothed out crease after crease after crease. Not a child and still a child.

I get Varsha. She is like so many girls I have known. Obedient and dutiful, we keep our heads down and do as we’re told. We mostly follow the rules, but we dream of escape. Despair catches us when we least expect it, and we wonder why.

Extract 2: Anupam, Patna

Anupam grows up in a three-room house made of naked bricks and tin, along an unpaved alley popular with stray pigs, in an ancient city that has come to be known as India’s most disorderly, called Patna.

His papa is Srikrishna Jaiswal, a small man of few words who, for as long as Anupam can recall, has plied an auto-rickshaw through the streets of Patna 12 hours a day, seven days a week, inhaling exhaust fumes, dodging careening buses, sometimes getting a whack from the pistol butt of a local cop.

Also for as long as he can remember, Anupam has wished not to be his auto-rickshaw-driving father’s auto-rickshaw-driving son. Since childhood, his single-minded goal has been to outrun that destiny. Mummy has been his chief co-conspirator.

Naturally, because he is a boy, she never orders him to sweep the floors or roll chapatis

At 17, his escape plan involves getting into what is possibly the most competitive university in the world and studying the possibilities of life on other planets – Earth having become too dirty, in his view, and too crowded. Look around, he says in the spring of 2005, when he is preparing for the college entrance exam at home. His narrow unpaved lane is bordered by a shiny, black ribbon of raw sewage. The air reeks of piling rot. By monsoon all will melt to muck. The brick-and-tin houses are pressed so hard against one another you can practically hear the drunks burping nearby.

What makes his escape plan all the more audacious is that Anupam is a Class 4 dropout. He is nine years old when he comes home and tells mummy that his teacher cannot read a textbook properly. So he teaches himself, hunching over books morning, noon, and night, usually by the light of a kerosene lamp, since the electricity supply in Patna is even shoddier than its schools. His mother pounds the pavement for private tutors. She hushes the younger children so Anupam can study. She never, ever rolls her eyes when he tells her about his dreams, like wanting to explore life in outer space. She never clucks her tongue when he says he would like to conduct research, even though she’s never heard of the word “research”. Naturally, because he is a boy, she never orders him to sweep the floors or roll chapatis. When he tells her he’d rather study than attend a family function, she makes excuses for him. He’ll go mad, her relatives say, he’ll go blind.

She knows Anupam is her golden child. And a golden child is different.

Also, a golden child needs someone to watch his back. And so, during the hottest mosquito-ridden afternoons, she sits behind him on their hard wooden bed while he studies, keeping him cool with a handheld bamboo fan.

She doesn’t have to tell him how she feels. He can see it in her eyes.

Mummy looks to him to outrun his destiny – and take them all with him.

“I feel a lot of pressure,” Anupam says the summer of the college entrance exam. “It’s from inside.”

Coiled, anxious Anupam.

At 17, his hair has flecks of grey.

Both extracts from The End of Karma: Hope and Fury Among India’s Young by Somini Sengupta, published by WW Norton & Co on 13 May (£17.99)