From Chapter 1

No one along the highway could tell us where Biharipur was, not the paan shop men or the bidi wallahs or the horse-cart drivers. We tried the hospital, the police stand, the local pharmacy. “Biharipur?” Each person looked equally confused, as if the village of seven hundred people had vanished from the earth. And maybe it had.

My Indian colleague Rama and I looked at each. Neither of us had a suggestion. We had travelled more than three hundred kilometres southeast from New Delhi to find a little hamlet called Biharipur that had been recommended to us by a social activist, Suman Sahai, as a quintessential north Indian village. Suman had been there once and was struck by the poverty and its permanence.

I had been living in India less than a year and hardly knew my way around New Delhi, let alone the countryside. Rama, who worked as a researcher-reporter for The Washington Post, wasn’t much help with directions either. An ethnic Tamil, Brahmin and graduate in English literature from Delhi University, she was as out of place here as I was. She was also drugged silly to prevent car sickness. But Rama did have a passion for the poor and an uncanny ear for the dialects of north India, where Hindi is more a framework than a language. She finally thought to rephrase the question, asking a chai wallah, “What about Rajinder Singh Yadav? He is a lambardar.”

“Ohhhh. He is a lambardar, is he?” the chai wallah replied. The tea-seller’s sarcasm suggested he doubted that such an important man could be found in such an obscure place. No one knew Biharipur. The lambardar, the chief, that was something else.

Out on the Gangetic plains, where three hundred million people base their existence on fertile soils, abundant rains and ancient traditions, a lambardar is king of the locality and master of all he surveys. He is a man of prestige and influence. Little happens without his approval. Nothing proceeds unless he benefits. And his name is known at tea shops.

I knew nothing of this tradition, or that it determined the success of all development efforts in northern India, as social customs and political behaviours do just about everywhere. All I knew was that Rajinder Singh Yadav was a farmer whose approval we needed in order to stay in his village.

“You go straight,” the chai wallah said. “At the culvert, there is a big tree. You turn left.”

We left the chai wallah to his vat of buffalo’s milk boiling on a clay stove, over some sticks and straw, a scene so rustic it was hard to believe this was the beginning of the nineties, a decade that would create more wealth than any other in history. Bill Clinton was in the White House, Boris Yeltsin was almost in the Kremlin, North America’s tough recession was over and a new decade of liberal reforms, of free markets and free speech, was underway in dozens of developing countries. The World Bank and imf promises in Bangkok were starting to pay off, it seemed, despite those nasty riots. For most of the world’s poor, this was at last a time when the rise of individual rights and opportunities would overcome the ages of dictatorship, monopolies and state control, a season of victories for students, entrepreneurs and subsistence farmers who for generations were the serfs of the developing world. Biharipur, I hoped, would be one of the new liberation zones.

But Suman Sahai was more ambivalent about the village’s prospects. “Biharipur is five kilometres from Tilhar town,” she had told us before we set off. “Five kilometres is not such a distance. One would think that if the nucleus is strong and developed, the benefits would filter down to the peripheral villages. But that has not happened there. Biharipur is isolated and untouched.” She spoke with the remorse of her heritage. Suman’s ancestors included the royal princes who once ruled the countryside around Tilhar. They were gone, but a new class of lambardars had taken their place–and so little else had changed.

We found the big tree described by the chai wallah, and turned on to a narrow tarred road, which followed a lazy path of broad curves, unannounced bumps, potholes filled with broken bricks and sudden turns around barren rice paddies that were so whimsical they seemed to be the design of a mad engineer, or a contractor trying to unload a lot of asphalt. We passed a fishing pond, a small hamlet of mud huts and more rice fields, and soon the national highway was well behind us. Still no one had heard of Biharipur, but more and more people knew of Rajinder Singh Yadav. “Over the railway tracks, and straight,” a young man on a bicycle told us. “You follow a dirt track to another dirt track and turn left at the next dirt track. He is living there.”

Sleepy, the driver who came with our rental car, balked. He had barely said two words since we’d left New Delhi the previous day, covering one of the world’s most dangerous highways with little comment and his eyes half-shut. But now Sleepy looked ready to argue. It was not so much the railway tracks that threatened the undercarriage of his low-riding V-8 Contessa Classic, the car favoured by north Indian gangsters, but the road beyond the tracks, which looked as if it had been bombed recently by the Pakistani air force. Sleepy told us to walk.

With our backpacks, water bottles and Suman’s letter of introduction, Rama and I set off by foot, down the bumpy dirt road, on to a narrow footpath and across the glorious golden wheat fields of a north Indian winter. It was still early. The mist had not yet risen from the small forests, while a thick dew covered the wheat. As we walked, a gentle winter breeze rustled through the fields, shaking the young wheat stalks as though it was shuffling paper. Hawks soared high above us, looking for snakes and field mice. In the distance, on a small hillock where someone had built a little one-room temple, kingfishers darted from tree to tree. We were in the heart of civilization, and there was not a person in sight or a human sound in the air.

We continued along the narrow embankment, trying to spot Biharipur on the horizon, but I was too concerned with staying on the footpath, away from the snake-infested fields, to keep an eye out for anything. I probably would have missed the boy across the field had he not yelled to us. He called again and ran along the embankment, barefoot, as nimble as a squirrel on a tree branch. The boy wanted to know where we were going, but Rama, the cautious one, wanted to know first who he was.

“Dhanvir,” the boy said. “A Dalit. From the next village.”

The Dalits are the people once known as “untouchables” in the pernicious Hindu caste hierarchy. Dhanvir said he was in the fields watching water pumps for the higher-caste landlords. Rather than getting an education, he spent his time watching water gush from the ground through a machine of nineteenth-century design. Rama asked Dhanvir if he knew the way to Biharipur, which he did. It was his village. Rajinder probably was his landlord, I thought. The boy pointed across the fields to a clump of mango trees, and beyond it, beneath the mist that was melting in the winter sun, to something resembling a medieval compound, a cluster of mud buildings packed tightly together.

We thanked Dhanvir and continued to walk to the village, which seemed more like an outgrowth of the mango grove than a planned settlement. There were no signposts, electrical wires, telephone poles, sewers, ditches or pavement to interrupt the natural landscape. At first glance, the only evidence of modern development was a cement culvert that connected the rice fields with a buffalo pond.

A few boys, enjoying the graceful recess between planting and harvest, splashed about in the pond with their water buffalo submerged to their snouts. On the other side of the culvert, a small boy squatted to shit in the same place where many others had apparently done the same recently. Above him, on the culvert wall, two men basked in the morning sun and smoked bidis, oblivious to all around them, until they noticed Rama and stared curiously at this Indian woman in a baseball cap, jeans and short-sleeved shirt.

“What is your caste?” one of them asked.

It was an odd greeting, but one I learned was the basis for most introductions in northern India. Other castes were to be distrusted. Lower castes were to be shunned. But Rama was a Brahmin. More than that, she was a Brahmin from New Delhi, the capital of all India. The men, who were probably no more than halfway up the caste ladder and had never been to the capital, nodded respectfully.

When they turned to me, I said I had no caste because I came from a country called Canada. They looked perplexed.

“How far is it to Canada?” one man asked.

I said it was on the other side of the world, next to America.

“Is that beyond Bombay?”

Well beyond Bombay, I said. Maybe a month by ship.

They stared at me blankly, and I realized we were no longer in the global village.

“Did the British rule you?” the other man asked.

When I said yes, both men smiled. A common heritage. We were almost brothers. But when we asked for directions to Rajinder’s house, saying we were friends of the lambardar’s friends, the men looked at us again with suspicion. Not only were we from different castes, we had just declared our loyalties.

One of the men pointed to a mud lane that led into Biharipur. He told us to follow it, and turn at the second left. Though we thanked them, there were no more smiles.