It was early on a summer day, the sun was still soft, and traffic was thick on the East Coast Road, in the South Indian village of Kadapakkam. In the center of the village, trucks and auto-rickshaws and taxis coalesced into a mess of diesel fumes and honking horns. Two buses met at a right angle at an intersection; each refused to yield, vehicles piled up, and for a moment this agricultural and fishing hamlet of some three thousand people was witness to the unlikely spectacle of a traffic jam.
K. Ganesh, a twenty-seven-year-old photographer from the village, stood outside his studio and grimaced. Ganesh was born and reared in Kadapakkam. He could remember when a motor vehicle was a rare sight in these parts. It wasn’t so long ago that he got around on a bicycle; now he owned a motorcycle.
“When the East Coast Road was first built, people didn’t know what to make of all the traffic,” Ganesh told me. They were annoyed by the pollution, kept awake by the noise, and terrified of the accidents. Ganesh recalled at least a hundred deaths in the area during the past decade or so, since the building of the road, a seven-hundred-kilometre-long highway that runs through the state of Tamil Nadu. Sometimes he was called by the police to take pictures of the mutilated bodies.
“Little by little, we got used to it,” Ganesh said. Now, when people in the village thought of the highway, they mostly focussed on the way it had cut travel times on the coast, how it had increased land values and created new business opportunities. Ganesh’s photography practice was thriving; he credited the upsurge in marriages and engagements and puberty ceremonies along the road.
Across the highway, a line of tea shops catered to travellers who broke their journey in Kadapakkam. Ganesh and I crossed over for breakfast. I was mindful of the accidents he’d just been telling me about. But Ganesh had a smooth, confident manner, and he was fearless. He led the way to his regular breakfast spot. We had a dosa, and the owner of the tea shop talked about all the changes he’d seen. The tea shop had been in his family for fifty-eight years. Business was better now than ever before; he, too, credited the road.
A red car stopped in front of the tea shop. Three men got out. One was dressed in jeans; they all wore sunglasses and tightly tucked shirts. They were clearly from the city. The man in jeans lit a cigarette. He checked his messages on a smartphone.
“Before, people like this never stopped in Kadapakkam,” Ganesh said. “They would just drive through without even noticing.”
Kadapakkam is just up the road from my home town of Auroville. I was familiar with the transformation Ganesh described. For decades, I have been driving through the village. When I was a teen-ager, my friends and I would ride our motorcycles down the country road that tracked the shoreline. The road was potholed, but the sea breeze was bracing, and the views were exhilarating. Back then, Kadapakkam was little more than a sleepy muddle of thatched huts, agricultural fields, and, down by the water, catamarans and sailboats.
Everything changed when the country road was broadened and turned into the East Coast Road (or State Highway 49, as it is officially known). The new highway was smooth, two-laned, and outfitted with reflector lights and wide shoulders. It functioned as an artery, carrying the prosperity of the cities—at that time just beginning to feel the impact of India’s economic liberalization—to a neglected, underdeveloped corner of the countryside. The couple of thatched tea shops that used to border the country road mushroomed into a thicket of restaurants and stores. Kadapakkam began spreading into the surrounding fields, its new wealth manifesting in a sprawl of brightly painted homes, commercial complexes, and schools.
Ganesh was one of the many beneficiaries of this boom. Before the highway, he lived in a thatched hut that had no running water. His mother had been widowed when he was a year old. His prospects were dismal. By the time I met him, though, Ganesh was a modern Indian success story—a self-made man, an accomplished professional who owned two Nikon cameras and lived in a new concrete home equipped with a washing machine, an air-conditioner, and a refrigerator.
“I consider this road a blessing,” Ganesh told me one morning as we sat in his studio. The studio was in a newly constructed building set directly on the highway. Ganesh said that when he was a boy his mother had struggled to make ends meet by selling bangles along the old country road. There were few buses in those days; she walked up and down the road, a basket on her head, and she could never go more than a few miles beyond the village. Now more than fifty buses passed through the village every day, and Ganesh told me how easy it was to travel for work. Sometimes, he said, he was called for jobs that were fifty or even a hundred miles away.
A customer walked in. He combed his hair in front of a mirror; he powdered his face. Ganesh sat him under a couple of spotlights and took a portrait. When the man had left, Ganesh told me that he was from another village.
“Everyone knows me in the area,” he said. “This road has made me famous.”
One night, I went to a wedding where Ganesh was working, at the southern edge of Kadapakkam. The wedding took place in one of the many kalyana mandapams, or “marriage halls,” that line the East Coast Road. It was an auspicious evening; I drove past at least a dozen celebrations. All along the road, the mandapams were lit up and decked out in mango leaves and flowers. Loudspeakers blared devotional music, and the occasional film song. Inside the mandapams, waiters arranged plastic chairs and fidgeted in anticipation of their guests.
I found Ganesh with a video camera in hand, sweating profusely. He was clearly very busy, so I milled around the entrance to Kadapakkam’s mandapam on my own, counting the number of guests who came in cars, admiring the men in their silk dhotis and the women in their gold-bordered saris.
Someone called my name. It was a man I had met a couple of times around the village. His name was S. Manavalan. He was sixty-two, and he had been the village postman since his twenties. He came from a family of postmen: his father and grandfather were postmen, and so were a brother and an uncle. Now one of his daughters was planning to enter the profession.
Manavalan was a short, stocky man with what seemed to be a permanent expression of good-humored astonishment on his face. He took my hand and led me toward a quiet corner. We talked about weddings. In the old days, Manavalan said, weddings were very different. There were almost no mandapams; people were too poor to rent a space. They just set up a thatched roof at home, and ate sitting on the ground. He told me about his own marriage, which took place in the village, in 1986. There were no decorations, no music, no photographers. A few years ago, though, one of his daughters was married in the same mandapam outside of which we were now standing. Manavalan had felt the need to prove his status; he spent more than twenty-five thousand rupees, on a monthly salary of around five thousand rupees. “I did an extravagant wedding because my children wanted it,” he explained. “With this road, times have become extravagant. I always thought of myself as a simple man; we should be simple. But what choice do we have?”
As the evening wore on, Manavalan’s mood turned darker. He started talking about traffic accidents, and about the decline of agriculture as fields were replaced by real estate. He complained that the road had changed the village’s culture. People had become more “money-minded.” Before, he said, a bride’s family would give the bridegroom whatever it could afford as dowry; it was seen as a gift. Now people regularly demanded ten sovereigns of gold. Everyone expected a motorcycle or a moped. “A motor vehicle has become the price of marriage,” Manavalan said, pointing to the lines of motorcycles outside the mandapam.
Things had changed at work, too. A postman used to command a certain respect. Everyone knew who he was; people called him by his name, and they would invite him in for tea or snacks when he delivered the mail. Now young people in particular rarely invited Manavalan into their houses. Instead, they asked lots of questions—“Why is my mail late?” “Why hasn’t my money order shown up yet?”—and they just called him “postman,” or sometimes Mudaliar, his caste name.
He complained, too, about the way people built fences and compound walls. Kadapakkam used to feel like an extended family. Manavalan said that he would get up in the mornings and go to the toilet anywhere he pleased. He felt free, as if he were a part of nature. Now he was restricted to the bushes outside his house. His daughters were pressing him to add on a toilet to the home. “They are modern, and today a latrine is necessary,” he said, shrugging. “I suppose eventually I will have to build one.”
In recent years, it has become common to hear laments about the state of India’s infrastructure. As the nation’s economy has stalled, policymakers and economists have pointed accusingly at its dilapidated roads, unreliable telephone networks, and inefficient power plants. At the same time, India has witnessed sometimes violent protests over large infrastructure projects. Activists and environmentalists question the price of economic development—they decry the social disruption, cultural erosion, and ecological depredation that often accompany such projects.
In the past decade or so, as I’ve watched the East Coast Road transform the rural landscape around where I live, I’ve come to believe that the situation is more complicated than either side lets on. Villages like Kadapakkam (and thousands of similar villages across the country) are both beneficiaries and victims of development. The process of change unleashed by infrastructure is unpredictable, simultaneously wrenching and inspiring.
Every time I drove through Kadapakkam, I saw something new: a school or a shop that hadn’t been there before, a sign for an upcoming housing project, a real-estate development where once there had been farms or plantations. On the outskirts of the village, between two English-medium private schools that catered to the region’s élite, I watched, over the months, as a shopping complex emerged.
First, a stand of palmyra and acacia trees came down. Then a concrete shell went up. The shell was painted, fitted with doors and windows, and new types of establishments set up shop inside. A clothing store sold bluejeans and pirated T-shirts printed with the logos of companies like Adidas and Armani. A beauty parlor sold costume jewelry. One day, a coffee shop opened in the building. It was part of a national franchise, and had bright lights, printed menus, air-conditioning, and a flat-screen television with surround-sound speakers. It was like a modern, urbanized version of the tea shops up the road.
In the cities, people spoke of a new “coffee culture”; the coffee shops that had emerged in the past decades, as Indians ate out more and spent more freely, had revolutionized social life. Like bars in the West, they offered safe, sanitary spaces for people, especially young men and women, to interact. Now coffee culture was coming to the villages, and there were mixed feelings about it in Kadapakkam. Owners of the more traditional tea shops were understandably nervous about the competition. A few people grumbled about men and women mixing so freely. Manavalan told me that he refused to set foot in the coffee shop. “I am against that kind of thing,” he said. “These coffee shops are not part of my culture.”
Ganesh was friendly with the owner of the coffee shop, a young man named D. Gopinathan, or Gopi. He took me there one afternoon, and Gopi greeted us and led us to a round table in the corner. The table had a top of polished marble; it was clean and shiny, like the rest of the place. The walls of the coffee shop were painted a cheerful yellow. By the door, a brass bell hung next to a sign that read, in English, “Had a Good Time? Ring This Bell.”
Gopi was a small, wiry man, with big plans. He had spent time in the cities, and his ambitions had been fuelled by what he saw there. He told Ganesh and me that he was thinking of opening several new businesses on the East Coast Road—a cell-phone store, or maybe an ice-cream parlor. His goal, he said, was to “make a lot of money.”
He acknowledged that some people in Kadapakkam remained skeptical about his coffee shop. Older people, especially, were reluctant to enter. They complained about the prices, and they were confused by the menu, which featured only Western items, like chicken burgers, milkshakes, brownies, and pizza. Pizza was a new thing in the village. Many people had never even tasted cheese before. Often, Gopi said, when they first tasted the pizza they made a face. But then the taste would grow on them, and many came back. Pizza with spicy chicken was his top-selling dish.
Ganesh ordered an iced coffee; this was something you couldn’t get elsewhere in the village. Gopi went behind the counter, and while he fiddled with an espresso machine Ganesh updated me on his life. His family was searching for a bride for him. He was a little tense, because several prospects had fallen through. They all had a problem: some were ugly, some weren’t educated enough, and others were too unsophisticated—he said that they dressed and spoke like village girls.
Ganesh praised the coffee. The milk was thicker than the milk in village tea shops; it had a bit of a “royal taste.” The only problem was the price. “Here a coffee costs at least fifty rupees,” Ganesh said. “In the tea shops outside, it costs seven or eight.”
“Eight,” Gopi interjected.
Ganesh added that the main reason people came to places like this was for the social experience. For example, if he had to take a prospective bride out he’d much rather come to this “nice atmosphere” than to a tea shop. Gopi nodded and said that the coffee shop had acquired a certain cachet. People liked to brag that they’d been there; if they had guests from the city, they brought them by to show how sophisticated Kadapakkam had become.
Gopi stepped out, and Ganesh said, “The problem is that this kind of place doesn’t suit the village life style at all. We all want Gopi to succeed. But I worry that if I come here people will think I’m putting on fancy airs, as if I’m too good for the village.”
Gopi came back, and Ganesh continued, “For people who like to show off, this is a good place. They come with their fancy new cell phones, their branded clothes, and their low-hanging pants. Many of them have bleached hair or even an earring. They come here as a status symbol. But many of these people are just passing through. I wonder how many are really from Kadapakkam.”
“The village is changing,” Gopi insisted. He told me that, when he first opened, one man predicted that he’d go broke within ten days. That had kept him up at night. Sometimes, he admitted, he still worried that he was ahead of his time.
Ganesh sipped his coffee in silence. He was looking out at the East Coast Road, through the expansive glass windows. It was early afternoon, a slow time of the day. The highway was almost empty. A crow sat on a chair outside; it glistened in the heat, and I thought that even the birds were sweating. It felt good to be inside, cooled by Gopi’s air-conditioning.
“Yes, the village is changing,” Ganesh said. He seemed pensive, even a bit gloomy. He said that everyone was always in a hurry now; life was more hectic. Before, you hardly needed any money in the village; there was nothing to spend it on. Now, he said, Kadapakkam was becoming like the city: people were working harder and harder just to keep up. They spent money on washing machines and refrigerators, on air-conditioners and televisions.
He had to take on a few extra jobs in order to meet his expenses. Sometimes he worked as a driver, and sometimes he helped his carpenter and his electrician friends. He worried that he was starting to live what he called a “machine life”—a regimented, money-oriented, work-driven existence that he considered to be a disease of the city. “It’s true I’ve done well,” Ganesh said. “But, inside, I feel a lot of tension.”
Ganesh drained his glass, and we rose to leave. “Even if I get rich, I’ll still go for my regular coffee to the tea shops,” he said. He went twice a day; he’d been going to the same place for years.
Gopi admitted that he, too, was a regular at the tea shops. “When I go there, people ask me, ‘What the hell are you doing here? You have your own coffee shop.’ They laugh at me. I say, ‘It’s true I have my own place, and the coffee tastes better there. But this is the coffee I’ve been drinking since I was a child. It’s hard to break old memories.’ ”
One morning, Ganesh took me to the top of the building that housed his studio. It was the tallest in the village; the view from the rooftop terrace was panoramic. From there, the road was a thin, almost delicate presence that wound its way in tight curves along the coast, its surface a staccato of bright sunlight and shadows cast by overhanging trees. What struck me most was the belt of development that extended along the road: the cell-phone towers that jutted from the earth, the plotted real-estate projects that cut like a gash through the green, and the shopping centers and marriage halls that stood above the tree line, testament to the region’s new confidence and ambition.
Ganesh stood at the edge of the terrace and pointed to a local government office. The building used to be a humble, tile-roofed structure; now it was a hulking concrete box. He showed me a new lighthouse; rumor had it that a port would soon be built. In front of the lighthouse stood a cell-phone tower. Beneath where the tower now stood, he said, he and his friends had sometimes played after school. Back then, the land had been covered with cashew and jamun trees. Once, Ganesh climbed the trees with his friends, and a boy fell. The boy died; it was Ganesh’s first experience of death.
“In those days, there was no way to get him to a hospital in time,” Ganesh said. “Now we have so many cars, and also so many new medical centers have come up. That boy had no chance. Today, we could probably save his life.”
The road saved lives: nearly everyone I met talked about better access to medical care and hospitals. But it was also responsible for an unprecedented amount of death and injury in the area. It was marked by sharp and often blind curves, without lights or medians to divide its lanes. On weekends, it was traversed by drunk drivers escaping the city. The dangers were part of a larger pattern: India has the second-highest number of road fatalities in the world. The World Bank warns that the country’s highways are becoming “killing fields.”
Nearly everyone had a story. Gopi told me about a cousin who crashed his motorcycle into a metal pillar by the side of the road and died on the spot. Manavalan talked about the time he was hit by an auto-rickshaw and broke his hand. Ganesh, who lived directly on the East Coast Road, had some of the most dramatic stories. He talked about cars and buses that had slipped off the road and careered into his yard. One night, a motorcycle crashed into a bus in front of his house. He ran out and tried to revive the two motorcyclists, but they were both dead.
Ganesh himself had a close call not long ago. In 2006, he was supposed to join his cousin and four others in a jeep. Ganesh dropped out at the last minute. At six-thirty in the morning, the jeep was hit by a bus; three people in the jeep, including Ganesh’s cousin, died. Ganesh said that his cousin’s parents—his aunt and uncle—had never recovered. To this day, they blamed the road.
One cloudy November afternoon, Ganesh took me to his aunt and uncle’s place. It was right by Ganesh’s house, and it, too, abutted the highway. When I arrived, his uncle was asleep in an undershirt on the veranda, and his aunt was sleeping inside, on the floor. Bleary-eyed, they set up a couple of chairs and offered us a cool drink.
Ganesh’s uncle, N. Thulasi, was forty-seven years old. He worked as a travelling cook, helping to prepare food for festivities along the East Coast Road. He had worked hard all his life, and had benefitted from the growth along the highway; three years ago, he’d saved enough to move out of his thatched hut and into the concrete home where we were sitting. “Like a sparrow, slowly, slowly I saved to build this house,” he told me that afternoon. Now, he said, government surveyors had come by and told him that they were going to be acquiring some of his property for a planned widening of the highway. “One day, this road will eat everything,” he said.
Gradually, we circled around to his son’s death. His wife, T. Kala, told me about the day the accident happened—how people had raced to their home to inform them, how they said that their son was still alive, injured in a hospital, and then how she and her husband found him dead when they got to the hospital. “He was our only son,” Kala said. “What more is there to say? If I didn’t have a daughter, I would surely have killed myself.”
She brought out a framed photograph of her son. His name was T. Suganthan; he was eighteen when he died. His mother said that he was thinking of becoming a mechanic. He was good at fixing things—electrical problems at home, plumbing, motorcycles that broke down. Kala said, “For us, the road has been a very bad thing. It has destroyed so many lives.”
Thulasi said, “I wish we could have that old, narrow road back. I would be happier that way.”
“I don’t agree with that,” Kala said. “A highway is fine, but let it be a nice highway, with speed breakers and lights. Let it be a dual-carriageway road, so people don’t have to overtake and hit each other. Let the drivers be educated—these drivers drive like fools.”
She said that, when her son died, she cursed the driver. She was sure he’d been speeding; she felt terrible rage. Thulasi interrupted, quite abruptly. “I don’t curse the driver,” he said. “I curse the road. I curse this horrible highway that has come up here and eaten so many lives.” He went on, “People say they like the road because it speeds up travel. But what use is speed? It’s because of speed that so many have died. Why do we need all this speed?”
Kala shook her head. She had no interest in returning to the past. She said that it used to be like a forest around their house. It was wild, jackals howled at night, and now it was civilized. Her husband interrupted again and said that he rejected all this civilization. He’d be happier going back to the way it was, even if that meant living in a thatched hut.
“As civilization increases, it becomes more and more dangerous to man’s life,” Thulasi said. He talked about chemical fertilizers and pesticides, about an epidemic of young people who were dying of high blood pressure and diabetes. “Civilization only kills,” he said. “I was much happier before we became civilized.” He added, in an admonishing tone, “Old is gold, and you should never forget the past.”
Thulasi walked me out of his compound, onto the East Coast Road. “Don’t believe any of this talk about progress and development in the village,” he said. “Only a small number of people have benefitted. So many have died. People send their sons or daughters from the U.S.A. or Europe to visit potential in-laws, and they return as bodies. It can happen to anyone.”
A bus raced by, its horn piercing. Thulasi winced. “I’m sorry, I have to go back in,” he said. “I’m scared to stand here. My heart is pounding.”
When Ganesh and I were back in the center of the village, he turned to me and said, “You know, you ask about accidents—such a terrible thing happened yesterday.” He said that his three-month-old puppy ran into the road and was crushed by a car. Ganesh was out on a photo assignment; when he came home, his puppy’s head was split open.
“I was so sad last night, I couldn’t eat. I felt like someone was missing from the home,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and showed me pictures of his dog. He showed me scratches on the phone where the puppy had bitten and clawed away the paint. “I feel so terrible after bringing up a dog for just three months,” he said. “I can’t begin to imagine how my uncle feels after rearing his child for eighteen years, and then losing him to this road.”
On an afternoon in March, Manavalan, Ganesh, and I went to the coffee shop at the edge of Kadapakkam. During the previous few months, Manavalan had mentioned the coffee shop a few times. He was skeptical, sometimes contemptuous, but he also seemed a little curious. I asked him if he’d like to come to the coffee shop with Ganesh and me, and eventually he agreed.
A few weeks earlier, I had been standing with Manavalan outside the post office when another, younger postman told him that he should visit the coffee shop and try the pizza. “What’s this pizza thing?” Manavalan scoffed. “It sounds like something that belongs in Bombay.”
By the time we visited the coffee shop that afternoon, he was ready to try a pizza. That’s not exactly what we got. Gopi, the coffee-shop owner, explained that he was out of cheese. He was also out of vegetables. So he took a frozen crust from the refrigerator and topped it with mayonnaise, butter, ketchup, some chili flakes, and a sprinkling of dried herbs. He stuck this in an oven and served it to us on a green plastic plate.
Manavalan took a bite and frowned. “It’s sour,” he said. “I really don’t like it. I can’t stand it. Maybe it’s O.K. for you young people, Ganesh. You look over the shoulders of city people and imitate them. That’s why you like this, but I can’t eat it.”
Ganesh was good-humored; Manavalan had known him since he was a boy. “You’re right,” he said. “I started eating pizza even before I knew what it was called. I just copied city people. They have more education and exposure. They know what they’re doing.”
I asked Manavalan if he’d like a drink. He looked over the menu and asked how a coffee could possibly cost fifty rupees. I said that Gopi had expenses to cover; he used a lot of milk. “What’s he serving, camel milk?” Manavalan asked.
Manavalan ordered an iced coffee. While he drank it, complaining occasionally that it was too cold, Ganesh and I chatted. Ganesh had got married about a month earlier. When we’d last spoken, a few weeks before the wedding, he’d been excited and enthusiastic. Now he muttered a bit about domestic life. He said that it was difficult to go out in the evenings with his friends. There was already talk of children; he was feeling the pressure.
Two men walked outside the coffee shop. They were older, shirtless, weather-beaten, and, judging by their appearance, very poor. Another customer called out to Gopi; he said that Gopi could consider his coffee shop a success only when men like that started coming in. Manavalan laughed. “People like that won’t come even if you serve them for free,” he said.
“Sir, you’re wrong,” Gopi said, affronted. “One of those men is a regular. He is a watchman, and he comes often to drink an iced coffee.” Manavalan shook his head; he couldn’t believe that a watchman would spend fifty rupees on a coffee. He said that maybe the man had come once, just to give it a try, and then he’d probably gone home and realized that, at those prices, he could buy enough milk to drink coffee for three days.
“You’re wrong,” Gopi said again. “That man comes here, then he goes home and tells his wife and daughter, and they tell their friends. Word is getting around the village. That’s how I’m going to build this business.”
A few hours later, I stood with Ganesh in front of his studio, on the East Coast Road, and we laughed as we recalled that conversation. I said that I didn’t think the pizza had gone over very well with Manavalan, and Ganesh pointed out that he hadn’t tried a real pizza. He figured that even Manavalan would enjoy a real pizza; some things from the city were irresistible.
It was the end of a workday, and the highway was busy. Bus after bus raced through the village. Young men on motorcycles stopped outside the tea shops and caught up with friends. Two drunk fishermen argued with an auto-rickshaw driver over his price. Finally, they agreed, and the men piled into the back. Three women, two of them Muslim, covered from head to foot in black, piled in with them.
“Fifteen years ago, men and women wouldn’t even sit in the same auto-rickshaw,” Ganesh said. “Now a conservative Muslim woman will sit next to a drunk.”
“That’s progress of a kind,” I said, and Ganesh agreed. He said that, now that he was married, he had decided not to hold on to the past anymore. Kadapakkam was becoming a city; he had come around to the view that that was a good thing. The whole country was becoming a city, he said, and it was important for the village to adapt.
He spoke of the children he might one day have. He had grown up without a father; no one had taught him how to live in the real world. It was his responsibility to teach his children how to survive. They should grow up surrounded by city life, by the sort of things that the road had brought in.
“But what about machine life?” I asked him.
“That’s just the way things are going,” Ganesh said. An auto-rickshaw exhaled a puff of smoke; we stepped back. A motorcyclist narrowly avoided a cow that had wandered into the road, and cursed. “You know, life isn’t like a wedding video,” Ganesh went on. “Sometimes people think you can just press Rewind and go back to the way things were. But that’s not how the world works. You can’t rewind life.” ♦
