The Beautiful and the Damned by Siddhartha Deb

Author:Siddhartha Deb [Deb, Siddhartha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-36805-8
Publisher: Doubleday Canada
Published: 2011-08-08T16:00:00+00:00

3

Soon after I arrived in Hyderabad, and before I knew anything about Armoor and red sorghum, I had met Vijay, a lecturer in economics at Hyderabad University. One Sunday, Vijay took me on a drive to a village called Qazipally. We travelled northwards out of Hyderabad, moving along a highway lined with restaurants and shops. Eventually, the urban sprawl gave way to a more ambiguous space where open stretches of land alternated with the walled and manicured complexes of pharmaceutical laboratories – segregated plots that consisted of little more than a brick wall, an iron gate and a security guard – and large construction sites where cement mixers and ashen-grey workers laboured to fill in the skeletal outlines of apartment buildings. Vijay’s small, battered Maruti car bounced furiously as we went uphill along a dirt track and then descended into a valley with clusters of huts lining the road, the land opening out behind the huts to rise towards a low hill.

The farmer Vijay was looking for was not at home, but Vijay knew his way around and led me behind the houses to a stretch of uneven, rocky land. He stopped when we came to a stream, a shallow strip of fluorescent green water. This had been a canal carrying fresh water, Vijay said, just as the land scattered with weeds and rocks had once been farming land. There was a shepherd grazing goats nearby, and he came closer when he heard Vijay. He had grown rice here, he said, until the land stopped being fertile and he had to resort to rearing goats. We walked parallel to the stream towards the hill I had seen earlier. The stench hit me when I climbed to the top. My nose and eyes started to burn. There was a lake of sorts below us, bubbling and brown, its surface indented with rocks, and although we were well away from the lake, the fumes coming from it were so strong that it was like standing over a vat of sulphuric acid. Vijay pointed to the horizon on the other side of the lake, where the factories releasing the effluents were located.

Afterwards, Vijay and I stood on the road talking to the villagers, who converged on foot and on motorcycles. They were very fond of Vijay because he had been with them from the beginning of their struggle, when they had tried to resist being encircled by the factories. The villagers had taken the polluting companies to court and had lost. They had held protests and been beaten up by hired thugs. They had seized trucks coming to the area to dump pollutants and had been arrested by the police while the truckers were released. They had asked the government to stop the pollution, but the state pollution control board had said that the land was clean. They had come together – across religion, caste and varying levels of affluence – to present a united front, but their village chief had been bought off by the companies and subsequently murdered by a rival.

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