Invisible Armies

Chapter 6

"Endanger how?"

"They might burn every building. With the families inside."

"That's crazy," Danielle says, shocked. "There has to be – can't the government do something?"

"There is no government here. Delhi and Bangalore are too far away. Government officials don't go where there are no roads. Think of this as a different planet. The state authorities are bribed by Kishkinda, the local authorities are Kishkinda, and even if someone was willing to believe illiterate farmers, they don't dare testify in court, they know their families would not survive. As Jayalitha showed. And even if the government did get involved, this isn't as simple as 'evil Western company exploiting the poor'. The Indian government owns a one-third share in the mine. And there are rifts among the local people, mostly caste but also money, the landowners support the mine. You understand, these people around us, these are the lucky ones. This is a village of free men. Most people in this district are slaves."

"Slaves?"

"They call it debt bondage, but it's slavery. Most lower-caste men and women here, nine in ten, spend all their lives farming their masters' fields, in exchange for a single kilogram of wheat per family per day, and a single acre to grow enough vegetables to feed their family with, if they have any strength left over after twelve hours in the fields. If they flee they are killed, but the sad truth is, the idea never even occurs to most of them. Their debts constantly increase, and then the debt, meaning the slavery, is inherited from parent to child. Some of the families here have been slaves for a hundred generations. The federal government tries to buy their freedom and give them money to live on, but of course the program is thoroughly corrupt, especially here, all that money goes straight into the landowners' pockets. Don't misunderstand. It's not unique to Kishkinda. There are millions upon millions of slaves in India. The men and women you saw working the fields on the way here? Slaves, all of them."

"Slaves." Danielle shakes her head. It seems insane, that thousands of people could live in feudal slavery amid these barren, windswept ridges, only a short train journey from Bangalore, city of tomorrow. But then this is India, a nation torn between medieval and ultramodern, where physics researchers in Mumbai study string theory a few miles from the largest and most awful slums in Asia, a country where hundreds of thousands of computer programmers graduate every year, but hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers live on less than a dollar a day.

Danielle closes her eyes. Then tiny fingers tug at her shoulder. When her eyes fly open, she is lying on the grass, she fell asleep without knowing it. A dozen children have clustered around herself and Laurent, their eyes bright with wonder, chattering incomprehensibly. Most poor Indian children have learned to ask white strangers for 'one pen' or 'one rupee', or at least to say 'hello', but these ones know no English, they only want Danielle's attention. Three of them, two boys and a girl, have faces so deformed Danielle has to fight instinctive repulsion. One girl is missing a leg; another has a grotesque tennis-ball-sized growth on her throat. A boy with some kind of elephantiasis has to use his hands to drag his bloated legs and body along the ground. She is almost glad she cannot understand anything they are saying. That would be too heartbreaking. 

"God," Danielle says. "Is this all from the mine?"

"This?"

"Their...their faces."

"Yes. Tailings, dumped upstream. Toxic waste. Of course Kishkinda denies it. They produce sheafs of faked studies saying the water is safe and the land has not been poisoned. And people believe them. No, not really. People simply don't care. One billion people in India. Too many already." Laurent ruffles a boy's hair. "These children are expendable. Let them suffer. Let them die."