Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

She was showing off, trying to bait me. I was on the point of saying, "Funnily enough, I picked up my wife in a bar," when her husband began boasting about how India led the world in corporate takeovers in the global steel sector. I did not say, "Why hire market analysts in India when you can hire soothsayers and astrologers?"

Mumbai was India's boast, representing everything it wanted the world to admire. I could see the city was bigger. The limits of Mumbai had expanded for miles. They were around Mahim on my first visit; they were now at thirteen miles north of it, at Thana and Mahisa. But Mumbai the magnificent was also home to Asia's biggest slum. Commuters into Mumbai from the suburbs could spend hours on buses and trains. Both its airports had been swamped by this development, so their nearness to the center of Mumbai actually distorted the size of the city, sprawling north and east in immense low suburbs, which rose from the huts of the outskirts to the busy district at Colaba, with its tall buildings, its churches, and its municipal offices of the peculiar Indo-Saracenic architecture of the Raj, which was mocked as "disappointed Gothic."

"When I got back to Mumbai from New York last week I saw that a new building had gone up," an American businessman said to me. "It's not Shanghai, but it's growing fast. Basically a new building every week or so."

It is a shock to travel from the countryside, especially the desert provinces of the north, to the biggest city in India and one of the biggest in the world. Out of the yellow plains and through the dust and tiny villages to this enormous port, packed with people, its dark streets jammed with honking cars. The official population is seventeen million; unofficially it is in excess of twenty million, and still growing; and because it is hot and so much of its life is outdoors, entirely visible, Mumbai is like a city without walls.

"Foreigners come and all they talk about are the poor people," an Indian woman said to me. She was an executive with a large company. "I want to say, 'What about the poor people in your country? There's more to India than poor people. "

That's true, but there are quite a few poor people in India. Any way, Indian statistics, like Chinese numbers, are stupendous and ungraspable. When an Indian says, as one said to me, "There are two hundred and fifty million middle-class Indians, which is very nice, but four hundred million are living below the poverty line," how do you respond? Two hundred years ago, the French aphorist Chamfort described Paris as "a city of amusements, pleasures, etc., in which four-fifths of the inhabitants die of want." You could say the same of any city in India.

If you dropped your gaze from the new hotel or the new call center, India looked as poor as it ever had. I was reminded of V. S. Naipaul writing in An Area of Darkness

(1964): "India is the poorest country in the world. Therefore, to see its poverty is to make an observation of no value." But that's no longer true.

It would be truer to say that poverty in India now represents a perverse kind of wealth: the half billion people earning a dollar a day are producing India's food surplus; the sweatshop factory workers are the backbone of its textile industry; and low-paid employees are the workforce of its high-tech sector. The whole Indian economy is driven by the poor, by low salaries, and of course by a tremendous work ethic, which in India is a survival skill and an instinct. "The high standard of life we enjoy in England depends upon keeping a tight hold on the Empire," Orwell wrote. "In order that England may live in comfort, a hundred million Indians must live on the verge of starvation." The desperation of the slum dwellers can be shocking; when Naipaul visited a chawl, or slum tenement, for a later book—India: A Million Mutinies Now (1990)—he wrote, "I was so demoralized, so choked, driven so near to a stomach-heave, by the smell at the entrance, with wet mangled garbage and scavenging cats and kittens in a little patio, and then, in the sudden dark passage, by the thick warm smell, catching at my throat, of blocked drains..." And so on, making a meal of it. He is shocked, appalled, almost undone by what he sees, and seems to have changed his mind about discussing the Indian poor. But he is one of the few writer-travelers who in subsequent books on India retraced his own footsteps.