knew everyone who lived there – but he didn’t know this boy. The boy was grazing his buffaloes so he couldn’t have come from far. It was natural to assume that he was a Yadav from the hamlet next door.
‘What’s your name?’ Nazru shouted.
‘Pappu.’
The young man’s name, in fact, was Darvesh Yadav. He was sharp-nosed with a shock of very black hair. People called him Pappu because he was small, like a boy. Pappu wore an oversized shirt and trousers, a hoop in his ear and rubber slippers on his feet.
Although his face was imprinted with apprehension, Pappu’s life was more secure than most in the hamlet of Jati. His father was a watermelon farmer who had accumulated enough savings to build one of the few brick houses in a settlement of shacks. Pappu’s mother doted on him, her youngest child. Although his parents’ lives revolved around the sandy riverbank home of their crop, they didn’t stop their children from finding work elsewhere during the off season – picking through garbage for recyclables or hefting bricks on construction sites, even as far away as Delhi.
And because of this, Pappu had seen a world outside the one his parents were rooted to: a world in which roads were crammed with cars, and not farm animals, where there were soaring buildings and ambitious men and women doing more than just the one thing in the one way it had always been done – a modern India where the burdens and entrapments that had kept generations of his family collecting cow dung could be swept away and forgotten. And although Pappu didn’t know anyone who had left the village for good, this new world was full of promise. Freedom was close.
But Pappu, although he was nearly twenty, could only write his name. And he was expected to help support his family. They had a deal, father and son – as long as Pappu contributed financially, he could do as he pleased in his free time.
Nazru wasn’t having it.
‘If your animals eat all my grass,’ he shouted, ‘what will my animals eat? Don’t you come here again!’
2 forbade unmarried women from using phones: indiatoday.in/india/north/story/up-panchayat-bans-love-marriages-bars-women-from-using-mobile-phones-109131-2012-07-12
3 married within their caste: thehindu.com/data/just-5-per-cent-of-indian-marriages-are-intercaste/article6591502.ece
4 Twenty-eight cases were reported in the country: pib.gov.in/PressReleaseIframePage.aspx?PRID=1540824; hindustantimes.com/india-news/792-spike-in-honour-killing-cases-up-tops-the-list-govt-in-parliament/story-x0IfcFpfAljYi15yQtP0YP.html
5 accused of killing his daughter: Jim Yardley, ‘In India, Castes, Honour and Killings Intertwine’, New York Times, 10 July 2010, nytimes.com/2010/07/10/world/asia/10honor.html
Lalli’s Father Buys a Phone
Cousin Manju was twelve and skinny, with the radiant smile and point-blank manner of all the Shakya women. She lived with her family in Noida, a heavily polluted industrial city some hours away from Katra village, in an overcrowded tenement with shared bathrooms. The walls of the building shook when trucks rumbled past.
When Lalli’s father, Sohan Lal, phoned to invite her for the school holidays she was thrilled. It was mango season. And she’d get to see her first cousin, whom she fondly called ‘meri wali didi’ – my sister. Her uncle said he’d be away with his wife and youngest son on a pilgrimage. ‘Lalli will be alone.’
It was understood that Manju, although she was younger than Lalli, would look out for the older girl.
Before leaving, Sohan Lal went to buy a new phone from Keshav Communications, which was located in the bazaar, down the road from the cycle puncture repairman and opposite a snack shop that served Coca-Cola out of an icebox. Waiting at the door, sweat beading on his face, was Yogendra Singh, Sohan Lal’s cousin. He was a plain-speaking young man with a rough beard, dressed – like all the village men – in a collared shirt and sturdy trousers made from a pale fabric, which better endured the heat.
All day long customers streamed into Keshav’s. They browsed his affordable range of Made in China phones, some of which had features that weren’t readily available even in name-brand handsets. Then, because they didn’t have Internet access, they asked Keshav to download the latest Bollywood songs by sideloading them from his desktop computer to their phones via USB. Most didn’t have power either, so they also paid a few rupees to charge their phones.
As they waited, customers enjoyed the cool breeze from the whirring fan, gazing at the neatly ordered shelves stacked with boxes of cellophane-wrapped products. Keshav was a modern entrepreneur and the village boys admired him.
This afternoon there weren’t very many clients vying for his attention – but even if there had been, Keshav would have served the newcomers first. Sohan Lal’s cousin was Keshav’s landlord’s son – and according to the social hierarchies of the village, this made him the equivalent of Keshav’s boss’s son.
Sohan Lal wanted a handset with a long battery life. He was going on a pilgrimage, he said. It was time to get his youngest boy’s hair tonsured and to pay respect to the mother goddess.
Keshav brought out a handful of phones from under the glass counter. Sohan Lal browsed them carefully, but it was his cousin who did most of the talking, asking about this feature and that. They settled on a shiny black phone with a gold and black keypad. Then Sohan Lal asked to buy a SIM card. But when told to provide proof of identity, which was the law, he said he wasn’t carrying any. His cousin looked on enquiringly.
Twenty-year-old Keshav made a quick set of calculations in his head. It was only here in Katra that he could afford to run his own business. He paid 500 rupees a month in rent, a good deal. He was in debt to his uncle who had helped set him up and he owed it to his widowed mother to keep things going.
It didn’t matter, Keshav assured the men. He pulled out a copy of another customer’s identity card and entered the details in Sohan Lal’s bill of sale. Then, because Sohan Lal couldn’t write, he forged a signature on his behalf. What was more likely, he thought, the police appearing at his doorstep or his landlord’s son getting angry with him for refusing to do as he was told?
Keshav knew the villagers had identity cards which they used to purchase subsidised food grains and to vote, but he also knew that these precious items were kept securely at home. He often did such favours and had never yet been caught. He had no reason to believe this time would be any different.
Sohan Lal didn’t take his new phone on pilgrimage. Instead, he gave it to his niece Padma. Although it’s unlikely she knew it at the time, the device had a feature that made it especially
