Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"No, this is very serious, sar," he said, snapping at me for my facetiousness. "You must tell me now."

I told him.

"You are lucky," he said, sounding resentful. "Very lucky today."

"Why would that be?"

"You qualify for Old Age Exception."

This meant 100 rupees off the 400-rupee fare to Delhi, $7.50 instead of $10, because I was over sixty. And a 25-rupee supplement for a seat, which required a large form to be filled out in triplicate—sticky blue copies and perforations. In the age of computers, which Indians excelled at—so I was told—many government forms were still filled out by hand in triplicate, on thick sewn-together pads, with flimsy sheets separated by carbon paper, using blunt pencils, following the printed direction Press Hard.

I searched for social changes. Joginder's greasy café and pastry shop was now Joginder's greasy Internet café and pastry shop and looked two hundred years old. And the brick prewar railway station, which I'd last seen in 1973, was seriously defaced by foot-high graffiti in Hindi and English. I recognized the word Zindabad—strike, a commonly heard term in India—and was told the entire building had been scribbled on during the strike that had taken place a month before, but painted so professionally the angry slogans looked like advertising—which they were, promoting a mass sit-down. That had passed.

"But they will repeat it. So the writing will stay."

***

IN A WORLD OF CHANGE, India is exceptional. Everyone talks about India's great leap, Indian modernity, Indian millionaires, and "You must see the transformation of Bangalore." "The Indian miracle" was a boasting rant in every Western newspaper and magazine, but on the evidence of Amritsar this assertion was a crock, not just a joke in bad taste but the cruelest satire. It seemed to me that little had changed except the size of the population, an unfeedable, unhousable, uncontainable 1.3 billion people, not many of them saying "We are modern now" because more than a third of them were working for a dollar a day. Indians boast of the miracle, but when I mentioned to entrepreneurs the 400 million people living below the poverty line, they just bobbled their heads and hummed or else went silent, darkening in resentment that I raised the question and refusing to tell me what they paid their employees.

Yet the country still ran, in its clunky fashion, all its mends and patches showing, and what looked like chaos in India was actually a kind of order, like furious atoms spinning. Surinder Singh merely appeared to be a tout and an opportunist. In fact he was part of the complex system of Indian ticket buying. As I was congratulating myself on having secured a $10 seat on the express to Delhi, he showed up again, demanding the equivalent of an additional $10.

"What's that for?"

"Baksheesh,

sar." A bribe.

But he had kept his word.

No one succeeds in India without exploiting someone else, defrauding him, sitting on his head, twisting his arm, getting him to work for 12 cents an hour. The news is all about the winners—big business, call centers, manufacturing, textiles, all the rest of it. But for there to be big winners in India, there have to be bigger losers. It is the system.

Who shares in the wealth? In the Punjab, I heard of a powerful Indian lawyer who earned $1.5 million a year and still paid his driver $20 a week and got his shoes shined for 25 cents. Later in my trip I met a lawyer, a woman, who had been offered, by an American firm, a guaranteed $1 million a year plus profits on contracts, but she held out for more and eventually joined a rival firm that offered her almost $2 million. Nothing wrong with that, Indians say; it is an example of market forces, and the conventional Indian response is to say how such tycoons are great philanthropists. It is the Indian paradox: driving hard bargains, underpaying people, becoming a corporate slave driver, and later these same desperate employees will qualify for handouts.

The losers in India have their revenge, always, as I saw all over Amritsar: not just the strikes and sit-downs and go-slows to torment employers, but the visible fact that the biggest, fastest limousine is forced to travel at a crawl behind the pony carts and the skinny men on their bicycle rickshaws. That is the other truth about India, that so much of it is a moral lesson, a set of simple visuals; so much of it is vivid symbolism, the cows and the rickshaws and men pulling wagons, slowing the progress of limos and delivery trucks. The truck might be delivering computers, God knows, but the computers won't get through any quicker than the man with ten sacks of beans in his wheelbarrow.

By chance I met Amar Singh. He owned a car. He had functioned for years as a go-between for journalists. He said, "We're a big power now."

"In what sense?" I asked.

"Better than before. Much stronger."

"Give me an example."

"We're like America now," he said.