SIX

Freedom

The Shatabdi Express from Delhi to Ludhiana was not like other Indian trains. The seats all faced forward, as in the West; they were not arranged in the usual forward-backward family clusters. The breakfast of croissants and chai was served on individual trays and eaten individually. There was none of the communal eating and singing and “what village are you from” encountered on other journeys. There were no vendors or beggars or eunuch dancers angling for money at every stop. This was a new train designed to entice business travelers away from low-cost airlines, and it seemed to bring not only a new standard of service but also new ideas about order and space and the very nature of human relations.

We arrived presently in Ludhiana, deep in the Punjab. On the road into town from the station, idle clothes vendors reclined below a bridge fanning themselves in the June heat; one of them was beating his clothes with a broom to release the trapped dust. Tea sellers boiled their supply on hot coals. A boy with a Nike “Just Do It” T-shirt punched his fist over and over into a ball of dough, which was to be kneaded and pulled into smaller balls and baked into chapatis.

But in Ludhiana, as in every prosperous part of India, these images were like postcards from the past. Commerce was moving indoors now, shielding itself behind walls of glass, bathing itself in air-conditioning, for those who could afford it. Unlike the citizens of Bombay and Delhi, who could feel sadness at the remaking of their history-laden cities, there was little in the physical landscape of Ludhiana that would inspire preservation, little that spoke of a great old civilization. And so the city was being made over by a florescence of jeans stores and car dealerships and shopping malls.

Ludhiana was well known in India for having fallen in love with consumption. McDonald’s on its own was said to account for 10 to 15 percent of all restaurant sales in the city. Ludhiana was also reported to have the highest per capita ownership of Mercedes sedans in India. A local businessman had made headlines by paying more than $30,000 for the easily memorized vanity cell phone number 97800-00000. (“I am happy to get a number like this,” he said after the auction, according to a local press account. “I borrowed money from friends and relatives to buy this number. I will repay them later.”) The streets were lined with the brands and slogans repeated at every mall around the world. Only the signs affixed as afterthoughts to every stall door in the toilet of one of the malls spoke of how new this all felt to a place that was, until lately, a farmers’ settlement: “Used toilet paper should be flushed”; “Do not mess the toilet seat”; “Remember you are not the only person using the Facility.”

Ludhiana, an overgrown town that longed to become a big city, was making every effort to groom itself for the dizzying new world.

*   *   *

I was traveling with a friend, Neha, who had invited me to meet her father’s brothers in Ludhiana. We had stopped in a mall to buy them gifts. I had been advised to refer to the Dubey brothers, with whom we’d be staying, as Upstairs Chacha and Downstairs Chacha. “Chacha” was a term for uncle, simply enough; the Upstairs and Downstairs thing was more complicated. All I knew was that the two brothers lived with their respective families on different floors of the same house. Downstairs Chacha belonged to the old world of Punjab, an aimless and loving man, occupied with the chaotic goings-on of his own home. Upstairs Chacha was, fittingly, a man on his way up, ambitious and determined, the kind of man to whom the businesslike Shatabdi train might appeal; he had built an oasis of order and quiet and selfhood on the second floor, buffered by a staircase from that other notion of home.

It was Upstairs Chacha who came to get us from the mall. As we drove, I explained my interest in understanding the story of his family. As our eyes met in the rearview mirror, he seemed gruff and gangsterlike, his dangling gold watch loose enough to admit a second wrist. He asked Neha, who lived in Delhi, perfunctory questions about her parents, who lived in London, and then resumed his silence. Before long, we had entered a sprawling neighborhood of narrow streets and, in the middle of one of them, protected by a white gate that was never locked, the Dubey household stood.

The house, like so many houses in Ludhiana, was constructed to resemble a village dwelling. Most of its square footage was given to an open courtyard—the kind that in the village would host a cow. The low white walls were village walls, incapable of keeping people out and designed instead to keep animals in: an intruder who scaled the wall would come upon several unlocked screen doors. In the courtyard, managed by Downstairs Chacha’s family, two motorcycles served as racks for drying laundry. The vinyl was peeling from two chairs and the golden upholstery on a sofa was turning a chocolate brown. A plastic patio chair, missing one arm, was still in service. The paint on the wall was cracking and, as the layers of white wore away, the green of an earlier era was reasserting itself. Two trays with uneaten food had been placed in a corner for a stray dog that the family tended but didn’t own. The dog was absent when I came, and the food had attracted a swarm of bulbous, black flies.

Ever since the two brothers had separated to pursue their different lifestyles, Upstairs-Downstairs diplomacy had become complicated: visitors had to carefully divide their time and attention with each side. We had driven over with Upstairs Chacha. Now we spent a few minutes in the Downstairs sitting room making polite conversation. Neha offered tidbits of family news; I spoke to Downstairs Chacha’s son Rohan, who was built like a rugby player, with hair parted down the middle, macho and suspicious and full of questions for me. He began to offer his own thesis about the transformations afoot in India today. My original lens in India had focused on scenes of liberation, of opening; it was only with time that I had come to appreciate the strains involved in that evolution. Rohan went straight to the strains. Respect is declining, he said. More and more families are breaking; more and more children are deserting their parents (as he had not done). The rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. He even suggested, in what had begun as a polite little chat, that a revolution was coming, referring to the Maoists.

“India will become America,” he said. Thinking of the new malls we had seen and the crowds of enthusiastic Ludhianans, I asked if that was a good or bad thing. “Kharab cheez hain,” he said—a rotten thing.

At this moment Neha, with an awkwardness that would emerge every time we had to switch floors of the house, asked if I wanted to go Upstairs. I attempted to say “yes” without seeming enthusiastic about it; I would improve with practice. And then we climbed the stairs.

A firm wooden door, wide and unbreachable, guarded Upstairs, where a more aspirational form of living flourished. In the living room was a comfortable sofa facing a television, which, unlike Downstairs, where the box droned on all day, was turned on only for particular programs. There was a big dining table at which the Upstairs family ate, instead of removing their shoes and piling onto the bed, as they did Downstairs. To the right, behind glass walls, was a second living room with its own air conditioner (as the master bedroom also possessed), for special occasions. Each of the three bedrooms was decorated in its own style, with vaguely African-seeming prints hung on the walls. Behind a glass display case in the living room, over the television, was exhibited the business card of an important man the family had once met.

The defining sound Upstairs was of servant summonses. Every few minutes someone would scream “Prakash!” or “Reena!” and then a meek voice would cry “Yes, Aunty!” and the servant in question would come running. Prakash, twelve years old, wearing soiled orange shorts, scampered around the house at high speed; when called upon to fetch some vessel from the kitchen cabinets, he would kick off his shoes, hoist himself onto the countertop, grab the item, and drop just as swiftly back down. Reena was fourteen and somewhat less servile, used more for cooking than for menial labors, poised halfway between a servant and a daughter, which in any case were not always distinct roles in India.

With our arrival, the servants received a new task: Neha had bought the board game Monopoly as a gift for Upstairs (its acquisitive theme being more in line with the ethos of that floor), and Gunjan, Upstairs Chacha’s school-age daughter, seeing a shortage of players, asked the servants to join us. We sat on a bed, all of us, and after a short time Downstairs Chacha walked in. (The Downstairs people sometimes came up, but the Upstairs people rarely went down.) We were introduced, and he joined in the game. He had no idea how to play, and Prakash, a novice himself but quick and shrewd, became his adviser.

At a certain point in the game, Downstairs Chacha realized that he was going down in flames and he began to lose interest. He looked like the full-blooded Punjabi that he was, with his strong Pashtun nose that projected forward from the bridge before remembering to drop downward, his thick mustache, and the long white tunic that he always wore unbuttoned. He was the kind of man who could not let a joke of his pass without, by a round of eye contacts, gathering the room’s approval. He leaned over to me and tried to whisper, at a volume far louder than a whisper, a long word that I did not understand. I couldn’t decipher whether he was speaking Hindi or Punjabi or English. He repeated the word several times, and then I realized that it was really three English words compacted into one: “whiskeychickenmutton,” he said, over and over. It took me a further minute to realize that this was a proposition, and a proposition of a rather delicate nature.

The Dubeys were Brahmins and proud of it. Like many Brahmins today, they maintained a public squeamishness toward meat and alcohol. I had thought of bringing them a bottle of whiskey as a gift, but Neha had testily warned me against doing so. But now I was having the word “whiskeychickenmutton” loudly whispered in my ear, and, looking uneasily at Neha across the Monopoly board, I meekly nodded my interest in such things. Downstairs Chacha made the gesture of drinking a shot in one swig. Glancing nervously around the Upstairs home, he asked if I engaged in the deed he had just demonstrated. I nodded again, not realizing the small conflagration that would follow.

Although my purpose was to understand the family’s two branches, I was considered by the Upstairs household to be primarily its guest. I had come from the big city; I would have high tastes and elaborate requirements; it was assumed that the Downstairs branch couldn’t handle me, with their one-armed chairs and cracking paint and sagging sofas. And so Upstairs Chacha, without asking anyone, had taken ownership of my schedule and made our dinner plans. The Upstairs family, along with Neha and me, was going to eat at the home of Upstairs Chacha’s sister, known to all as Bua. The Downstairs family was not invited. But a few minutes before we left, Downstairs Chacha came Upstairs again, wearing a white kurta and pajama. He mentioned quietly to Upstairs Chacha something about whiskeychickenmutton. Upstairs Chacha replied that we were going to Bua’s for dinner. Downstairs Chacha was upset. He had bought and prepared meat. He proposed that I be allowed to stay behind and the rest of them go. This was flatly refused, and with no say I was hustled out of the door.

There had been a misunderstanding with Bua. She thought that we were coming for a drink (for a soft drink, that is), not for dinner. And so, on top of the absurdity of Downstairs Chacha’s making an illicit meal for us that we could not eat, Bua now summoned her driver from the street to come in and become, temporarily, her cook. We sat in a sofa-ringed sitting room under fluorescent tube lights and listened to Punjabi folk music on a stereo as we waited for a meal to be generated. When the food came after an hour or so, I ate lightly, keeping space for a possible second meal. But this was taken as an insult. “Was my food too spicy?” Bua asked. “Next time I can make it less spicy. You know, it’s not my regular cook.” My insistence that, no, the food was delicious led inevitably to forced seconds and stomach cramps.

We returned home at 10:30. A paralyzing fatigue had crept into me after our early morning train, and I was fading quickly, with barely enough energy to ascend the stairs. There was no question of eating another meal, I told Neha, who agreed.

And now Downstairs Chacha, by this time drunk, stumbled into the courtyard, his right foot crossing over his left, then his left foot over his right, babbling. He welcomed me with special effusiveness and asked if I was ready to eat. I told him apologetically that I was tired. Neha, whispering urgently to me in English, told me to run. This seemed a most impertinent thing to do in the middle of a conversation. I brushed her advice aside and said that I would graciously explain the situation and then go.

Big mistake. Downstairs Chacha could not understand why I didn’t want his whiskeychickenmutton. He tried giving me a handshake and then used that grasp to seek, in vain, to pull me into his son’s bedroom. I resisted, which intensified his resolve. He grabbed my right arm, digging his nails into my bicep rather painfully and dragging me, this time successfully, into the room. Sitting there were Rohan, Rohan’s wife, Purnima, who was playing with their infant son, and Downstairs Chacha’s wife. The television was on but no one was really watching.

I was made to sit next to Downstairs Chacha, who began what seemed to be an attempt to explain the culture of Punjab to me. He explained that Punjabi wives were thin when young and gigantic when old. “She was like this when we got married,” he said of his wife, holding up his index finger. “Now she’s like this,” he said, puffing out his cheeks and spreading his arms sideways. I avoided the temptation to look for her reaction. Then he began to explain something called izzat, honor, which would be the most important word I learned in Punjab, with its connotations of honor and respect and dignity; it was the word that explained so much in northern India—the hospitality, the repression of women, the endemic violence, all of which could be defended by invoking one’s honor. “In Punjab, we serve guests like God,” Downstairs Chacha said. “In Punjab, we get meat and whiskey for our guests.” And so, to preserve his honor, he began to press food on me. Eat something. I can’t. That’s OK, but at least please eat something. I really can’t. No, no, that is OK, but you must at least eat something. And so forth, until I had no idea where to run.

It was now that I saw the wisdom in Neha’s initial advice, which she was continuing to repeat. So I got up in the middle of the conversation and left, denying my own urge to apologize and explain, knowing that any opening I gave them would be interpreted as a false signal of hunger. And as I climbed the stairs into that gentler world, I began to understand what had prompted Upstairs Chacha all those years before to build a second story and a new life above the only life he had known.

*   *   *

The Dubeys’ property began with what was Downstairs, a single-story horseshoe of rooms arrayed around a courtyard. It had been constructed when the brothers’ parents, who were prosperous and important people in the northern city where they lived, saw the city go to Pakistan at independence. They moved to Amritsar and then again to Ludhiana, and there built a house. Their sons married and brought their wives into the home, remaining with their parents in the Indian way.

They lived with the traditional Indian family dynamics, in a noisy household filled with compromises, meddling, and unspoken, overwhelming love. A brother might live for some years in one bedroom, then switch rooms when his brother had a baby, then move again to another room when a cousin came to stay for a year. The brothers worked in their father’s business, selling hosiery in a local shop, and their wives shared a kitchen. There is a lovely word in Hindi for families like these: behisaab, without accounts. They pooled their money and shared their expenses, and no one took note of who earned what, who worked when, who purchased what food, whose liabilities were whose. It was family Marxism: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

The bed was the locus of life in those single-story days. There was no dining table in the house. To be with people, you sat on a bed, with the television on, sort of watching it, sort of making conversation, but mostly just being around one another. On the bed dinner was eaten, children were conceived, newspapers were read, letters were written, rituals were performed, arguments were waged, marriages were arranged. And a kind of love flourished on these beds that was unlike the family love I had grown up with. It was ambient love, love that was not about your feelings and thoughts and psychology. It was love that hung gently in the air, a simple awareness of the presence of those around you, a love that felt no need to proclaim itself.

You, the individual, were not important as an individual but rather as an organ in a greater organism. Children were raised in common, each child receiving a little love from everyone and a lot of love from no one in particular. An excess of personal attention was thought to corrode character. Every daily transaction—the way food was slapped onto your plate; the way you were told to sit here, sit there, slide forward, move back, drink water, don’t drink water; the way no one asked a child’s opinion of major family decisions—would have reinforced the sense of one’s own smallness in the larger tribe.

No one could say with precision when relations in the Dubey family soured or why. Downstairs Chacha claimed that it was because his wife, raised in a village, tended to entertain often, showering guests with food and attention; he said that Upstairs Chachi (“Chachi” being the word for aunt), born in a city and thus less generous, did not like her house functioning like a hotel. But the truth was that the Dubeys’ separation was really Upstairs Chacha’s decision. It was partly that Downstairs Chacha broke the Brahmin ways every night with his tumbler of whiskey, which Upstairs Chacha didn’t want his young daughter to see. It was partly that Upstairs Chacha’s wife craved freedom and didn’t want to consult her sister-in-law and mother-in-law, who lived with the brothers, every time she went to the market to buy vegetables. Upstairs Chacha began to feel that living behisaab subsidized his brother’s sloth, as the Family Court judge had suggested to me about his own family. Upstairs Chacha noticed that his brother did not work as hard as he did, did not have his burning ambition. He began to want more for his daughter than his brother wanted for his children. He began to think of the future, of progress, of where India was headed and how he might secure a place in the new order. He began to dream of things—a car, a television, short-sleeved shirts from Van Heusen, a gold watch to dangle loosely from his wrist, a cell phone with loud, status-enhancing ringtones.

And as he relayed to me in a series of conversations, he began to see in his own family what he had not seen before, and what an Indian was not supposed to see or acknowledge: the resentment and backbiting and petty inwardness that sometimes lurked beneath the calm surface of that ambient love. He began to sense that real love was impossible when spread so thin. He felt that silent prompting for release that so many Indians were now feeling and pursuing in their own ways.

Upstairs Chacha decided on a separation. He would leave the family business and set out on his own as a contractor, building roads and parks and such; he would eventually seek to become part of the state-level Congress Party political organization. And—much as Ravindra did when he came into money, much as Mukesh Ambani did when he separated from his brother—Upstairs Chacha resolved to carve out a physical space for himself in the world, a home of his own. Families across India were fragmenting in this way, in the villages and cities alike. But in India, where the old always has the upper hand and the new always stands on the defensive, Upstairs Chacha also decided that he wanted to keep just enough of the old ways. Like Mallika, he wanted to split the difference with modernity.

Without announcing his intentions to the whole family, he asked some of the laborers who worked for him to do a project in his own house. He had them build three stand-alone bedrooms on the roof. His daughter, Gunjan, had just been born, and he was able to explain it to his brother in terms of needing space for the new infant. The three of them began to sleep Upstairs, but they had no kitchen or bathroom of their own, and so the basic rhythms of communal living continued. It would have been possible for the Downstairs branch to tell themselves at this point that it was only a question of space, that life’s essential patterns would remain unchanged.

Then, in 2001, Upstairs Chacha built his own kitchen and bathroom above his brother’s. A rupture had been torn. The two families began to move in separate orbits in daily life, although they came together for important events—weddings, funerals, visits to the ancestral village. A few years later, he added the living room Upstairs, which was followed by the second, glass-encased one, which was followed in turn by a veranda where the family could sit in the evenings, overlooking Ludhiana’s lanes.

I asked Upstairs Chacha one day if he considered the household he had cleaved to be a “joint family” in the Indian sense or two nuclear families.

“It’s not full joint,” he said after ruminating for a moment, “but semi-joint.”

Over time, the Dubey household began to seem like a body debilitated by a stroke, the skin sagging and movements slowing and expressions dulling on one half, with the vitality of the other half thrown into stark relief. The Upstairs world began to fill with stuff: a color television, air conditioners in two rooms, a washing machine, a car down below in the garage, a computer, an Internet connection. Downstairs, the walls were decaying, the ceiling was erupting in welts from moisture, and there were so many flies that it was actually difficult to have thoughts about anything other than the flies when you were there. Upstairs, there were no flies because the floor was scrubbed afresh every morning, with the servant boy slipping and sliding across it after the cleaning as a kind of quality control.

A certain decorative fatalism reigned Downstairs, such that whatever happened to the house became accepted as a divine intention. In the toilet Downstairs, a bad flush tank left remnants of earlier defecations floating in the bowl. On the floor beside Downstairs Chacha’s bed, dozens of used matches from his smoking were scattered, waiting to become populous enough to reach the cleaning quorum. An old bottle of ginseng and an old can of shaving cream stood in the windowsill. Upstairs, by contrast, a new attentiveness ruled. Every detail of the house was considered and tended. The toothbrushes were arrayed in a toothbrush holder. The beds were made every morning. There was even gray tubing, installed by Upstairs Chacha, around the power lines that ran along the street, inches from the veranda. It was the only such tubing on the street, and it suggested a protectiveness and sensitivity to risk, an insistence on living in spite of the gods, that had come with the new aspirations Upstairs.

But theirs was more than a physical divergence. The greater drift was in the two households’ senses of time and of their place in its flow. Among the deepest differences between industrial and agrarian societies was in perceptions of time. In agrarian society, time was cyclical. It was to be endured, not extracted for profit. Time was the seat of life; one lived through it and didn’t expect much from it. Conversations involved the trading of banalities and gossip; they helped the time to pass. Your relatives fulfilled a role that in the linear modern world would be taken over by antidepressants and insurance policies and alcohol: they palliated, protected, and occasionally intoxicated you. With the advent of modern industrial societies, time began to be felt as a linear thing. The idea of progress dawned. A man was supposed to be today where he had not reached yesterday, and tomorrow where he had not reached today. There came the idea of conquest and perpetual forward motion. Time was to be consumed, not endured, to be seized and not suffered.

Upstairs, this linearity prevailed. You slept in your bed, of course, but then you got out of it and dressed yourself and moved on with your life; a bed was not for lingering. Time was to be managed wisely and schedules to be packed. Gunjan was constantly running—from school to a tutoring session to the temple to a roller-skating competition. Downstairs, the family took things day by day. They, too, had work to get done, but I never got the sense that they had committed to be in any particular place at any particular time. Upstairs, the future was methodically planned and built: just as Upstairs Chacha had constructed the three bedrooms, then the bathroom and kitchen, then the living rooms, so, too, had he planned his political career: he determined that he would remain in his current role as a local Congress Party secretary for four years, then run to be a municipal councillor, and then five years later run for a seat in Punjab’s state legislature. Downstairs, the family didn’t save for the future, didn’t strategize about the crockery business they now ran, and were blissfully unaware of their plans for tomorrow, let alone for twenty years from now.

Upstairs Chacha had once told me, seeking to distill his philosophy, “Money makes a man perfect. If a man has money, all his relatives give him izzat. If he has no money, he gets no izzat. Before, you didn’t need money to have izzat. Before, it used to come from love.”

“Today, there is no bhai-bhai, behen-behen,” he added, no brotherly or sisterly love.

*   *   *

The morning after the whiskeychickenmutton affair, there were reparations to be made.

After a cup of tea Upstairs, I went down with Neha, wondering about the fallout from our episode the night before. We found Downstairs Chacha in his bed, half-watching a singing-contest show on television. He lit up at seeing us and motioned for us to cast away our shoes and join him in bed. He called me “Mr. Nund” in his thick Punjabi accent and shook my hand heartily, as he would every time he saw me thereafter, including sometimes upon returning to his company after a two-minute bathroom break. His greeting suggested an unspoken truce.

Yet the talk turned at once to the night before. Now sober, Downstairs Chacha wanted to articulate in words what earlier only his firm hands could express. To treat guests well in Punjab required a man to serve them, he said, and, if at all possible, to serve them whiskeychickenmutton. Nothing spoke more eloquently of love and respect for one’s guests. He hadn’t meant to upset me. He was trying to show me love. I expressed my gratitude and protested my helplessness and apologized for the confusion.

We ate fried parathas Downstairs, evening out the balance of Upstairs-Downstairs ingestion, and then Downstairs Chacha took me on the back of his motorcycle to see his shop. It was called Sai Crockery House, recently renamed to reflect the family’s new enthusiasm for Sai Baba, the bearded guru they had taken to following. Chacha proudly handed me a business card, which described the shop’s offerings this way: “Deals In: All types of Crokery. Spl in: Cello, Bluplast, Treo, Acarylic, Mellamine.”

He sat at his desk, with Ramu—who was a house servant when Downstairs Chacha was in the house and a shop assistant when he was in the shop—at his side. He began to speak of the family history: the Dubeys’ origins in what was now Pakistan, their time in Amritsar and Ludhiana, the building of their house. He said that he was proud of his two younger brothers, who had studied to earn master’s degrees. This was quickly followed by the assertion that he had not had the chance to study himself because it had been his duty, as the eldest brother, to fund their studies by entering the workforce. He spoke of his marriage to a woman from the villages. Some years into their marriage, she had returned to her village to see her family. She had fallen ill quite suddenly and been unable to reach a hospital in time, and she had died. According to the village custom, he married her younger sister as a kind of replacement. His first two children were from the first wife and his youngest son from her sister.

These were Indian family stories of the traditional kind: stories of sacrifice and duty and of human interchangeability: if I can’t have my wife, at least I can have her sister; if I can’t study myself, then at least my brothers can study. But they were, in Downstairs Chacha’s telling, stories that came from a beautiful, vanishing past.

“The world has changed,” he said. “The love that once existed between brothers, between parents and children, doesn’t exist anymore. Before, when an elder brother said something, a younger brother listened. Today, brothers barely even acknowledge each other. This world that’s coming, it’s not a world for men without money. A man with money has brothers, a wife, parents. A man without money has no one. No money, no family.”

“If you go to a rich man’s home,” he said, “he won’t speak to you like I am. He won’t give you much time, the way I am sitting with you and telling you so many things. He will tell his servant to make you food, and then he’ll go to work. But a middle-class man will give you full izzat. In Punjab we serve our guests ten different vegetables until they cannot eat anymore. We give them meat and whiskey, and they say, ‘My, how well you have taken care of us!’ ”

It was difficult not to see this as a criticism of his own brother, who was usually at work while Downstairs Chacha lingered at home, who did have his servants do things for guests that Downstairs Chacha did himself, and who, almost like a Westerner, did not insist on stuffing me with food, offering just once. I asked Downstairs Chacha if he was referring to his own family in disparaging the new mores.

“Our own family? No,” he said firmly. “I see it in other people’s houses; I see it in the world. In Ludhiana there are families where one brother is a millionaire and the other doesn’t even have bread. I’ve seen it in our own neighborhood.” This, again, seemed to describe his own situation with his brother, but Downstairs Chacha’s idea of izzat perhaps kept him from seeing or admitting the feelings that were in plain view: his brother may have been dishonorable to him, but his own honor required him not to say so.

As our conversation continued, Downstairs Chacha’s talk of loss and his nostalgia for a receding way of life spread into other domains. It was not just the family that was coming apart but so many of his old certainties.

Children were not listening to their parents anymore, he complained. And arranged marriage was giving way to the love kind, in which couples dwelled on each other and neglected their wider duties. And women were ceasing to wear their baggy Patiala pants and all-covering kurtas. And children were increasingly raised only by their own parents, not by the entire tribe.

Perhaps most ominously for a graying Brahmin, the hierarchy of masters and servants was dissolving, he said. In the old days, a servant, usually from the lower castes, could not walk into the master’s bedroom. He could not eat from the same dishes. He couldn’t touch the master. Now, Downstairs Chacha said, with palpable frustration in his voice, the serving classes were becoming rich. Low-caste people in the villages had moved overseas, remitted money back home, and built houses bigger than his own house. India was now full of upstart Ravindras. “There is no longer any difference between big and small men,” Downstairs Chacha said. He turned to his servant at this point to solicit his opinion, and the servant obediently agreed.

The Dubeys were Brahmins, and he was proud of that. But even being Brahmin was not what it used to be. Nothing in the village used to happen without a Brahmin’s involvement, he said. Today the Brahmin stands on the sidelines. And it was perhaps the Brahmin’s own fault, he was willing to admit. He offered his own meat eating and drinking as an example of Brahminical unraveling. He said that he had no choice. This was how the society worked now, and because he needed friends and contacts in the society, he had to play by their rules. “Without connections, none of your work gets done,” he said. “In Ludhiana, if you need something done by a powerful man, it won’t happen without meat eating and drinking.”

He seemed aware of his own hypocrisy in saying this, and he pivoted to a funny, distracting story. There was a Hindu priest who kept pressuring his son to give up meat and alcohol. The son made him a deal: you have whiskey and chicken with me tonight, and I will give them up tomorrow. So they ate, and they drank, and the next day the priest went to his son with a 500-rupee note and said, “Go get a bottle and a chicken and let’s enjoy!”

He insisted that the story was true, and in the story, as in all that he had said, was a vision of the world fully the opposite of his brother’s: the world as seen from Downstairs looking up. The loss of his brother to the cult of ambition; the rebellious, self-consumed young; the skin-baring women; the withering of filial piety; the precariousness of his position as a master; the hypocrisy of his Brahminism. When I had first sensed these movements in India, they had struck me as signs of rebirth and renewal, of a thaw in the millennial freeze. They were all part of the coming of modernity to India, of a future that was urban, youthful, atomized, free. But the stories of the Maoists, of Mallika, of the couples seeking divorce gave quiet reminders of how much had to be lost in India for anything to be gained.

And now it was possible to understand the gentle, familiar humiliation that my refusal of Downstairs Chacha’s meat and drink had caused. It was to him just another sign of the passing of a world premised on his idea of izzat and of the coming of a world that seemed to make space and make time for everyone but him.

*   *   *

Later that day, I was to meet Neha’s cousin Karan, the son of Bua, from dinner the night before. Like so many Punjabis, he had migrated overseas for work: he was a security screener at the airport in Melbourne, Australia. He happened to be in town on a visit, and Neha had insisted that I meet him. He was, despite his mere twenty-some years, an important man in the Dubey clan, and so there was only one space suitable for our meeting: Upstairs, of course, and in the air-conditioned special sitting room. Everyone spoke reverentially about Karan as we waited for him to come over: “He is very smart, that boy. Very wise, that boy. He will tell you all things. Whatever you want to know, you ask to him only.”

He walked in presently, with an air of detached cool that instantly set him apart from the others. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans. He had the appearance of a rebel whom his relatives had learned to love, a rebel whom they might have scorned if they did not envy him so much.

We sat on the sectional sofa, and he began by telling me about Australia. He had gone there for money, having memorized five thousand English idiomatic expressions from a book before he left, in order to ingratiate himself with the locals. He had worked as a taxi driver and then in security to make a living. But he had regrets about leaving India, he said: “If you want to earn some money, it is OK if you go to foreign country. But the thing is, if you have capacity, you can also earn in India. India is now on fire. I don’t think that for the sake of some money we should pledge our soul and mind to those people.”

He found the Australians very alien to him, with very different ideas about life. “Foreigners, they live for themselves, and Indians, they live for everybody,” he said. “Foreigners know that their childhood is going to be spent in a crèche, and their old age is going to be spent in an old-age home. But this doesn’t happen in India. Here the childhood is spent in the lap of the mother, and the old age is spent in the house.”

I began to steel myself for another paean to the old culture. He disparaged how “Australian people go to nightclubs, they fetch liquor, they smoke, they move in with their girlfriends.” He said everything there was “too open.” He claimed never to have committed any of these sins himself, despite his ultra-cool demeanor.

“I have not been grown up in that way,” he said. “I have been grown up in a very conservative way, in a very myopic way. I am not too myopic like the Muslim people of Saudi Arabia. Even in America or in Australia, you will find Muslim people wearing burqas. I am not so much conservative, but I am still conservative.”

Here I was sitting with yet another eulogizer of the old ways, but this time it was a man in jeans and a T-shirt who had moved away from India, had ceased to live with his widowed mother, as tradition demanded, had seemingly abandoned these old ways he described. I put it to him: wasn’t he proof that in India it was now possible for the young to break with the past and chart their own way? And now his instinctive flexing of Indian pride, having been accomplished, dissolved into an honest and surprising airing of views.

He began to describe the India of his childhood, whose remnants remained, as a place where the young could not dream. “Only in India can you still force your kids,” he said, speaking of the survivalism that dominated the choice of professions in small towns. “The major problem is that in India the people who are doctors or officers or engineers, they are respected the most, and they only want their kids to be doctor or engineer because these positions are well-respected by society. Why don’t these people allow their kids to be political science lecturers or English lecturers or Hindi lecturers or Sanskrit lecturers? Because they are not earning good money. But in foreign countries you can’t force anybody. If someone has the potential to be a doctor, but he says no and he wants to be a lecturer, the government there or the parents can’t force them. But here you can force.”

This forcing was achieved by guilt-tripping so intense that Karan referred to it as abuse. “They say, ‘I did this thing for you, I did that thing for you, I did this thing for you, I did that thing for you.’ They start chanting everything they have given over the last twenty years, and after that the kid emotionally starts listening to them, and once the kid starts listening to them, he starts following them.”

“It’s guilt,” he went on. “Kids are not allowed to do anything. In India, the parents never allow their kids to think differently. We can’t live independently in India.”

He was reminding me of an idea that a former Indian politician had suggested to me some time earlier: you can only understand India’s ills, the politician had said, by going beyond corruption and deprivation and overpopulation and investigating what is done to the minds of Indian children in their first years: the way they are barked at to shut up, to stop asking questions, to accept and adjust, and, as they age, the way that guilt-tripping moves into the center of the parent-child relationship.

Karan now made a peculiar distinction that explained his own earlier defense of India and subsequent criticism of it, and explained his own reason for emigrating: India was the best country, but foreigners were the best people. “They are matchless,” he said of foreigners, using the word more than once.

“The most beautiful thing which I like about the foreigners,” he said, “is there is no hypocrisy or stereotype imagination in those countries. For example, no one needs to be married at a particular age. If you see this girl,” he said, gesturing toward Neha, “at this age, if she would have been in India, she would have been forced to marry, with gunpowder. But she was born in Britain, so nobody can force her. This is the most important, most beautiful thing I love about them. You can’t force anybody. Why these idiot people are forcing us, I never understand.”

“Basically, the thing is that in India there is no law and order,” he continued. “So everybody wants to live collectively. They have five or six sons, and they feel that, if any nasty thing happens to me, my family will help me. But in foreign countries, you depend only on the government.” In India, he said, “the family is the state.”

There seemed to be a contradiction in his vision of how children should be raised: for his own children, did he favor the freedom that made foreigners “matchless,” or did he fear his children becoming too open like the Australians?

He said he wanted freedom for his children. “It doesn’t mean that I will supply them with drugs; it doesn’t mean that I will give them some extra money to become womanizers,” he said. “But I will allow them to find themselves on their own, find their own educational path. I was forced to do so many things: don’t do this, do this. I will never let my children go through that.”

I asked Karan to make his ideas more concrete, to apply his philosophies to the Dubeys themselves.

He swatted away the question with a look of boredom on his face. “For me, only one person lives in this house, and that is my grandmother, and after that I don’t have any interest,” he said, with a strange tartness. “I am an independent man,” he explained. “I have got my own norms of working, my own style of working. You are a writer; you write and you think in different ways. You play with the words. And I am also, I suppose, a writer. I think in a different way. At one point you clash with your relatives and then you find that, instead of fighting or arguing with each other, it is easier just to say hello, have a cup of tea, and move on.”

He tried to keep his distance from all of his relatives, he said, “because Indians are too much nosy. Here people have too much time. They look around, they poke into each other’s lives. I am an independent man in the way I want to live, the way I want to dress up, the way I want to think, the way I want to do business. It doesn’t mean that I want to become a womanizer or drink wine or go to nightclubs—going against the norms of society. I am completely following the norms of Indian society.”

And then he offered a theory of the Indian family that was perhaps the only thing that he and Downstairs Chacha would agree on. “Basically, we love too much,” he said of Indians. “This is our problem. We have too much of affection, and because of that our love becomes binding love.”

After talking for a while, Karan said that he wanted to show me a bit of Ludhiana. We went down and into his car. He turned the music on loud and drove to a shopping market a short distance away. On the way we passed the signage of a land newly enthralled with “personality development” and “skill upgradation” and other forms of self-perfection: Dr. Goyal’s Orthodontic Clinic, a weight-reduction center offering “unlimited weight loss” for 2,999 rupees, a middle-class finishing school called the Siddhartha Academy of Competitions.

The shopping market was packed with cars. It felt like an island of Westernness in the Punjabi ocean: a new pharmacy, a step up from the “chemists” of old, with orderly aisles and bright lights and air-conditioning; a music store blasting loud beats; a Barista espresso bar. And it occurred to me, after speaking to Karan, that it was becoming possible to emigrate from India for a few hours at a time without having to leave it, by coming to spaces like these, with a watered-down version of the openness and choice and freedom that Karan had discovered so far away.

We walked into the espresso bar. I asked Karan what he wanted. He opened the menu and was overwhelmed by the terminology of iced lattes and hazelnut mochas and Brrrista Frappes. Perhaps his life in Australia was simpler than I had imagined. He looked up at the server and, smiling, switched to Hindi: “You’re an Indian and I’m an Indian. I just want an Indian cold coffee, so give me whatever that is.” The server smiled and said that he knew just what Karan wanted, not to worry. And in that moment Karan, the Dubeys’ proud rebel, the foreigner returned, the man who didn’t need his family anymore, seemed relieved to be back home.

*   *   *

The Dubeys were every Indian family, and they were certainly mine. The conflicts between love and freedom from the constraints of love, between communality and the longing for space, that tore them apart could seem like just another instance of tradition battling modernity in the convulsive present. But there was an eternal quality to these different longings.

Whenever my parents visited India, something in my mother always came alive and something in my father always died. Love would gush around them. They were asked at every meal what they most desired. They were hugged, kissed, argued with, guilt-tripped, coddled, nagged.

The older she grew, the more my mother basked in it all. With my sister and me living far from home, she felt America to be colder and lonelier than it had felt to her before. Everything was orderly and proper and scheduled. No one popped in unannounced to have tea with you, she would often say, as if that single fact said it all. There were, of course, things that she didn’t like in India: the enduring male chauvinism, the dearth of privacy that came with the love and attention she relished, what she called the perpetually “dug-up” streets. But none of that mattered in the end. When she landed once a year in Delhi, she awakened. She had all the freedom and space for self that she needed in America. When she returned to India, she most craved not azadi but pyaar, not freedom but love, the concepts that divided the Upstairs-Downstairs Dubey family.

My father favored freedom. He was an eternally patient man, almost incapable of anger with his children, no matter the crime. Only when he visited India, where he was born, did his patience dry away. When it was taking ten people ten times longer than necessary to make a decision that could be made by one person, exasperation filled his eyes. When no one was straightforward about what they actually wanted to eat or where they actually wanted to go, all trying to please the others, with the result of a suboptimal outcome for everyone, he became frustrated. When we had to meet relatives whom we did not like but had to meet because it would “look bad” if we didn’t, I could sense him saying to himself, “Look bad to whom?”

I came to India built in the mold of my father. I was an American kid, used to my space and freedom of action, and I remember the strange sensation of stepping into my Indian relatives’ world in my childhood visits. It was a visceral, physical feeling. I knew at once that there was no chance of being alone, of reading quietly in a corner somewhere, of having a heart-to-heart discussion with my sister or one of my parents. I felt possessive of my parents on those trips: when I had something to tell them, my own parents, I could not get a few moments alone. I didn’t like being asked in front of half a dozen people whether I still had diarrhea. I didn’t like public debate on whether my latest haircut was too short. I didn’t like that everyone talked and no one listened during dinnertime arguments, and that the only way to get into the conversation was to interrupt.

And yet I grew up with the idea that it was our relatives back in the motherland who genuinely understood family and sacrifice and love. Some of our Indian relatives implied in whatever ways they could that we in America were self-absorbed and materialistic. Americans let aging parents die alone in nursing homes! They call their parents by their first names! They take money for helping with chores! And it did not matter if these claims were true. Their repetition created a hierarchy of filial piety in my mind in which the big, noisy Indian family was the real kind of family, and our own kind of family in America, intensely loving in its own way, but smaller and less sacrificial, a confederation of strong individuals, was somehow a dilution.

Coming to India as an adult had, in many ways, allowed me to peel away the misperceptions of my youth. But, when it came to family, I now saw a certain wisdom in my childhood discomfort with the Indian family. Family was always put forward as India’s great strength. But what I saw on my travels was that family was also the beginning of the Indian tragedy, the force that had, perhaps more than any other, prevented so many Indians from becoming the fullest possible expressions of themselves. What had most frustrated me as a child was, I now realized, the inwardness of the family. There was little interest in the neighborhood, the community, the country, the world. What consumed its members hour after hour was one another. Why are you wearing this? Why are you eating that? Why didn’t she invite her? What will she think if he doesn’t do that? The Indian family could be a cesspool of its own petty resentments. It was obsessed with itself. It wasted so much energy on itself. It stewed in its own juices. It struggled to think of what could be more important than what this one would think if you didn’t go to that one’s wedding.

It was no accident that a new generation consumed with things to do—with courses to take, businesses to found, cars to acquire, homes to build—was turning away from these preoccupations. There was a new conception of life available to them, a conception focused on the vital self and its fulfillment and cultivation. There was a geographic diffusion of family networks as people attempted to profit from the new economy. The complex debt transaction underpinning Indian family life—that you forget yourself and sacrifice everything for me now, until my debt to you compels me to forget myself and sacrifice everything for you—began to feel inefficient to Indians. It seemed easier simply to seek what you desired.

And yet my years in India began to change me in turn. Every time I stepped into my grandparents’ home, with its glasses of chilled nimbu paani and homemade food and curious questions, my stress and anxieties would melt away. It was not that the stresses had been cured or their underlying causes addressed. It was simply the vibration and madness that numbed one’s sensitivity to oneself, just as painkillers pushed a headache to the background of consciousness without actually curing it. It was a different kind of family love. It was an attentiveness to ten people’s needs, without a focus on any one person. It required what the psychoanalyst Alan Roland has called a “radar conscience,” a perpetual mental sweeping of one’s clan to detect opportunities for aid and sacrifice and intervention. I began to realize that I belonged to history, that I was the product of generations of dreams and illusions and successes and failures, and that to know that past more fully was to know more fully the person within. I began to understand pyaar and not just azadi.

And now, in a humble two-story house in Ludhiana that began its life as a single story, I had found an Indian family moving in the very opposite way.

*   *   *

On the second evening, I had no choice. As dusk cloaked Ludhiana, Downstairs Chacha reminded me that it was whiskeychickenmutton night. Shortly after eight, Neha, Downstairs Chacha, and I sat on his bed. (Neha, who as a woman was not invited to any gathering involving alcohol, was allowed in this case because she was my friend.)

Downstairs Chacha brought in a tray with metal bowls of chicken in a thick brown gravy and mutton in a thick brown gravy, along with a salad of raw cucumbers, tomatoes, and onions thinly sliced. A bottle of whiskey emerged from a metal cabinet: I drank it with soda, Downstairs Chacha with water and ice.

The talk turned, as it so often did with him, especially when he was drinking, to love. He boasted for many minutes that, of all the relatives in the family, people loved him the most. Neha’s mother disliked his drinking and meat eating, for example, but she loved him anyway because he was honest and straight. Neha’s father refused to drink but made an exception when he was with Downstairs Chacha.

The talk of love led him to marriage. True love between husband and wife blossomed only in one’s fifties, he said. Until then, a couple was focused on the children, on the preservation of the race. You fought over their clothes, their education, the food, the household finances. And then in your fifties, as the children began to lead their own lives, you realized that it was only the two of you for the remainder of your lives, and you reached a new level of marital intimacy. But this story was immediately counterbalanced by another that suggested the limits of such intimacy. It was a story about another kind of love, his love for his brother. Once, early in Downstairs Chacha’s first marriage, Upstairs Chacha had come home in the middle of the night and requested that his sister-in-law make him some food. She refused, citing the hour. Downstairs Chacha claimed to have grabbed his wife by her hair and spun her around and around in circles to force her to accede to his brother’s request. He made the motions now as if swinging a bag of groceries rather than a human body.

I could not keep up with Downstairs Chacha’s eating and drinking. When I resisted his offers of more whiskey and more meat, he insisted. This, too, was about love. So I made up a story about having a serious ailment that forbade the eating of these very things. He asked what the ailment was. I invented a heart condition, which was a bit much but, I imagined, would end the pressure. And I was in luck: for heart trouble, Downstairs Chacha informed me, whiskey was said to be the perfect cure.

I kept drinking.

When the session ended, we spilled out into the courtyard. Downstairs Chacha’s son, Rohan, was stumbling around drunk, looking on as his wife and baby played together. He tried to intervene in the play every now and then, but his drunken motions seemed to scare his wife. She had the tired look of a woman who knows that she will have to brave this alone. Downstairs Chacha was also stumbling. He went to the freezer to get Popsicles and was now shoving them into everyone’s mouth. He gave one to his aging mother, who was acutely diabetic and definitely not supposed to eat Popsicles. Someone noted this doctor’s instruction as she began to bite toothlessly into the orange ice. Downstairs Chacha retorted, with great confidence, that Punjabis had been eating ice cream for centuries and that nothing had ever befallen them as a result.

As I walked toward the staircase, Rohan looked at me with a drunken glaze over his eyes and muttered without further explanation, “Upstairs, they sleep with the doors shut. Downstairs, we sleep with the doors open.”

*   *   *

Neha was supposed to return to Delhi early the following morning, and I was to remain in Ludhiana. But the night before Rohan had pressured her to stay, by offering this incentive: first thing in the morning, he would drive her and me two hours out of Ludhiana to his mother’s “native place”—her pind, as it was called in Punjab—and we could see the Punjabi rural life for ourselves. It was a Monday, and Neha had obligations at work in Delhi, but she had always wanted to see the village and so agreed to postpone her journey.

And then some combination of miscommunication, laziness, poor planning, deception, a funeral, politics, and honor culture got in the way.

Rohan had told Neha to be ready to go at eight a.m. She set an alarm and in the morning went Downstairs to rouse Rohan. He waved her off. He had no memory of promising to take her to any village. He intended to continue sleeping.

We let some hours pass. Both levels of the household gradually arose, bathed, sipped tea, breakfasted. We kept asking Rohan and the others when we could leave for the village, what was keeping us, what was the problem, our urban impatience simmering. At first, the problem was said to be this: the car was gone. Upstairs Chacha, who had left the house on some business, had taken it with him. We discussed and analyzed this fact for a while. Then it was discovered to be untrue, because the car was, in fact, right outside the house. Now the problem was said to be the absence of the keys. We had the car, but we had no keys, and Upstairs Chacha, who owned the car and usually kept the keys, was gone. The keys’ absence, too, was soon revealed to be false; Upstairs Chacha had left the keys at home. At this point, with the car in front of the house and the keys in our possession, a much deeper problem presented itself: the car belonged to the Upstairses, not the Downstairses, and if Rohan, a son of Downstairs, wanted to take it to the village, he had to do more than just inform Upstairs Chacha or seek his permission; he had to give him a first right of refusal on the voyage; he had to ask him if he wanted to come along. Only when he said “no” to the invitation, as Rohan expected him to say, would it be appropriate for the three of us to proceed.

This was, at least, what I gathered from my observations. Neha and I now began a new strategy of individual conversations with family members, trying to address the root problem. In these one-to-one exchanges, every man of the house and aspiring man of the house, his chest puffed out with Punjabi machismo, pledged that he would take us right away, done deal, no problem at all. Rohan said that he would take us shortly. Downstairs Chacha, who was not yet intoxicated at this hour, claimed that he, too, could drive. Upstairs Chacha returned from his work and said that it would be only a short while longer. And yet each man, individually determined, became collectively paralyzed, lost in a flurry of petty arguments and telephone calls and logistical obstructions. There was a consensus on departure in principle, but a mysterious force that kept anyone from actually going. Those who have spent time in a big Indian household will know this force. It was the force that defined how Indian marriages traditionally operated, how Indian children were traditionally raised, how Indian choices were traditionally made. Where so many were in charge, no one was truly in charge. Where power was so diffused, no one needed—or was able—to take responsibility for the whole situation.

In those hours I began to realize that izzat, honor, was an aesthetic idea more than a moral idea. It was a way of carrying yourself, the bluster of claiming to go to any length for your relatives, to serve guests as much food and whiskey as they could consume, to love and be loved more than others loved and were loved. But while it purported to be fundamentally about others, it was really about oneself: about one’s own marvelous virtue and the elaborate public demonstration of it. The same person who honored you by preparing meat, or inviting you to sleep in his house, had little conception of what it meant to make a promise to you, to keep his word, to empathize. Neha had forgone a train ticket and angered her boss in order to visit the pind. Amid all the talk of honor, this seemed to bother no one.

At this point, Upstairs Chacha was our roadblock. He had returned to the house, but still there had been no movement toward leaving, and now we learned why. He had decided, when presented with the idea of a village expedition, that he wanted to drive us himself instead of letting Rohan do so, but he had one more thing to do before he could leave. A young man in the neighborhood, in his twenties, had died some days earlier of what was euphemistically described to friends as a “heart attack,” and Upstairs Chacha had to attend the funeral. Of course, everyone knew that the boy had died of an overdose of heroin, which the Dubeys casually called “smack.” (The word had become an important part of the Punjabi-English lexicon as the old family values dissolved and more and more young people turned to the consolation of drugs.)

Upstairs Chacha left the house again. We waited. He returned an hour or so later, and we were warned not to touch him because he had been to a funeral. He bathed and put on his gold watch. Parathas were fried. (You will notice that, just when you think the mysterious family force has abated and everyone is ready to go, a meal will invariably be served.) As we gathered to eat, Upstairs on this occasion, it was revealed that there had been a change of plans. Now every single member of the household, except Purnima and the baby, wanted to go to the village. We would need a second car. There was talk of hiring a taxi. But this, too, was problematic, because it would cut the family in two and diminish the large-group road-trip gaiety that was half the motivation for going.

It would require a conversation the following day with Upstairs Chachi to deconstruct why it had taken so much effort to leave. It had to do with the special idiosyncrasies of the semi-joint family, she said. Such a family was two families when it came to small, quotidian affairs, and it was one family for the big and sad and ceremonial things in life. Neha and I had made the error of treating a visit to the family village as a small event, part of everyday life; that was our urban tick-the-box mentality. We found someone who would take us, we fixed a time with him, and we were ready to go at the appointed hour. What we did not understand was that going to the village could be interpreted, at least by some, as a big event. The native place, as I had learned in my early days in India, was the place to which any Indian, no matter where she lived, traced her identity. When we went to the village, food would be made for us, cheeks would be pinched, gifts would be given. Izzat would be performed in every imaginable way.

So the confusion had been over whether this was a small event, to be dealt with at the level of the small group, or a big event, requiring a consensus and a ceremonious group expedition. As time wore on, the latter vision had won out. I gathered that handling situations of precisely this kind was an essential art of living in a semi-joint family: to understand just how much self-direction, invention, initiative—how much freedom—you could get away with, while making sure never to offend the tribe, making sure to preserve the illusion that everyone sinks or swims together, that no one will be left behind.

We debated and debated, and we waited. Morning had by now bled into midafternoon. In the end, we did not use Upstairs Chacha’s car at all. Although the Dubeys had chosen to live on two different floors, to pursue two different visions of the good life, something about driving in two different vehicles offended their sense of family unity. They rented a cavernous Toyota Innova van. We piled in, eight of us and a driver. Neha, Gunjan, and I were in the far back. The two couples, the Upstairses and Downstairses, sat on the bench seat in front of us, which was really designed for three. But they were Indian, and residents of a semi-joint family, and they knew what to do. The two Chachas slid back deep into the seat. The two Chachis slid their bottoms forward in the Indian way, to create space for the more important male bottoms. Normally, the extent of one’s bottom-sliding obligation correlates inversely with age. But, perhaps because money was coming to outrank age as a marker of status, Upstairs Chachi pushed her younger bottom only slightly forward and Downstairs Chachi kept her older bottom so far ahead as to be almost off the seat.

We drove dozens of miles out of Ludhiana, through acres of lush paddy, until we reached the pind. We entered a tiny village home and sat in a circle while parathas were fried for us. A cow hovered a few feet behind me. Silent, smiling nods and stories were exchanged: in the Indian way, people were asked more about others not present than about themselves. Then it was decided that we should have a tour. We strolled through the fields, visited a local shrine, saw gaunt Bihari farmhands traveling across the plains. We came upon a new-age farmer whose tractor had a stereo, and some spontaneous bhangra dancing ensued. Then, as we prepared to leave, a battle erupted over whether village relatives should be allowed to send Gunjan home with a cash gift: it was customary for family elders to give to the young, but it was strange for villagers to send money to the city. At dusk we drove home, returned the van, and split again into our Upstairs and Downstairs worlds.

*   *   *

On my last day in Ludhiana, Sunil, Downstairs Chacha’s youngest child, agreed to take me to his temple.

I had not been able to figure him out. He was twenty-two, tall, scrawny, handsome, with gel-spiked hair and a perpetual slouch that kept his shoulders ahead of his stomach. He wore tight short-sleeved T-shirts over baggy cargo pants. He was more modish than the rest of the family but also had a shyness and piety to him. On the night of our whiskeychickenmutton session, he had declined to join us. He kept to himself in the sitting room next door, arranging things in a cabinet where he housed his religious paraphernalia—candles, incense, framed pictures of Sai Baba.

Sunil, like so many in Ludhiana, was a Sai Baba fanatic. Shirdi Sai Baba, as he was formally known, was an influential Indian guru and ascetic who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—not to be confused with the less ascetic latter-day Sai Baba, Afro-topped and with a professed ability to conjure watches and rings out of thin air. Shirdi Sai Baba had drawn on Hindu and Islamic tenets, combining the former’s stress on renunciation and self-actualization with the latter’s emphasis on the universality of a single God. In recent years there had been a massive Sai Baba revival in Punjab. The entire Dubey clan had jumped on the bandwagon, though, like most devotees, without abandoning their Hindu commitments. They were, in this as in all matters, “semi-.” But no one in the family was more devoted than Sunil, who had taken to spending much of his time on a construction site outside Ludhiana where a vast temple complex in Sai Baba’s honor was rising. I asked him if he would take me there, curious as I was about the source of his new piety.

As soon as we got into Upstairs Chacha’s Hyundai hatchback, Sunil queued up his Sai Baba CD. Sweet, ghazal-like songs streamed out of the speakers at full volume, lilting music with heavy Punjabi drums, cyclical and emotive. The lyrics praised Sai Baba’s ecumenical nature, his equal embrace of Hindus and Muslims and Sikhs, his command to love all beings. I noticed, meanwhile, that Sunil’s driving style and his spiritual inclination were in high tension. He drove, for all his gentle piety, like any other combustible Punjabi man, weaving in and out of the lanes, constantly veering into the oncoming flow of cars to circumvent a slowpoke, swerving and jerking this way and that, accelerating to within two inches of the car in front to make a point, then braking just before a collision. Inner peace seemed perhaps to be a longing more than a present-day condition for Sunil.

We arrived at the complex, which was a vast construction site in the middle of open fields. We walked into a tiny temporary shrine where Sai Baba worship was to be performed until the real temple was completed. Then we sat under a tent, with a thick haze of flies hovering above us, and Sunil told me of his journey into belief.

He had been, contrary to his appearance (but consistent with his driving style), a typically testosterone-charged Punjabi boy. He spent his evenings outside the home, eating meat with abandon, in contravention of Brahmin ways, roaming the streets with his friends and getting into fights anytime he could find one. Whenever a friend got into a dispute, Sunil could reliably be enlisted as backup. He showed me the dozen or so scars on his arm from fights, which, by the scars’ appearance, were more than neighborhood tussles.

“The fights that were happening—the end would have been terrible,” he said. “I thought this is how my name will get known.”

Then, two years earlier, Sunil was sitting at a friend’s house one day when his eyes drifted up to a photograph of Sai Baba on the wall. He claimed to have been transfixed at once. He could feel Sai Baba speaking to him through the photo, summoning him into the fold. He behaved from that moment on like a man possessed. A few days later, he arranged to have a large photograph of Sai Baba sent from Jammu and Kashmir, where this particular style of poster was printed. He started conducting a twenty-five-minute prayer session every evening. He deserted his friends from the neighborhood, changing his cell phone number to deflect their calls.

He was drawn to the fact that Sai Baba was a real fakir, an ascetic who walked barefoot, and not one of the new-age gurus who was driven around in a car, he said. This distinction between the barefooted and chauffeured guru was important to him, and he repeated it several times. It was part of his rebellion against Ludhiana, which was now obsessed with cars.

He had never thought highly of his own Hindu religion, which he considered weak and effete. He told me a story about going to get a haircut some years ago. The barber was Muslim, and when Sunil went to his shop one day, the barber turned down his business. It was prayer time, he said, and prayers came first. The moment stayed with him. He remembered admiring the vigor of the barber’s faith, how it shut out other competing duties, how it rendered a complex world simple. “A Hindu would have put money first,” he said. Muslims, he concluded, were strong in their faith and devoted to a larger cause, while in Hindus a dormancy and passivity had set in over centuries of foreign conquest and domination: a retreat into a private piety that left the outer world to others.

And that story explained his attraction to the strangely evangelical nature of the Sai Baba faith. It could seem, with the saffron-clad guru and the cluttered, idol-filled temple, to be merely an offshoot of Hindu tradition. But it was, in fact, a more energetic, zealous movement, adamant about bringing others around to its universal truth, much in the way of the Abrahamic faiths, and in direct contrast with the Hindu tradition, which did not promote evangelism. Sunil actively worked to spread Sai Baba devotion, going door-to-door in his neighborhood to speak to people about the guru. He bought posters with his own money, embellished them with glitter and framed them, and then gave them to people whom he was particularly eager to convert. It struck me as a strangely un-Hindu thing to do, with its focus on bringing change to a world believed by Hindus to be illusory, rather than on refining the self from within.

“He has surrendered to Baba,” said an old man sitting next to us, listening to Sunil’s narration. He fanned away the flies with a straw fan.

“For us, this is everything,” added the old man’s grandson, sitting beside him. He was one of the new friends that Sunil had made.

“Without Sai Baba, it is impossible to be happy,” Sunil joined in. “There will come a time when the whole world will worship him.”

I asked if they genuinely believed, as Hindus did not, that there was only one path to truth—their path. And the answer was one that I did not associate with Hindus. Yes, they agreed, and the old man looked at me and told me that I, too, would believe one day. He couldn’t make me, but I wouldn’t be able to resist Sai Baba himself, he said, pointing to the nearby shrine.

Sunil said that he had stopped listening to all forms of music besides his Sai Baba songs. He believed that Hindus had been pulled in too many different directions before. He craved purity and completeness in his faith. He reminded me of fundamentalist Christians and Muslims I’ve known, with a practice very unlike the traditional Hindu’s. He and his friends came every Sunday to offer seva, service. They washed dishes and served food to guests, which a traditional Brahmin might well dismiss as degrading and unclean.

It seemed that this was another kind of rebellion against Downstairs Chacha’s world. It was a rebellion against the nothingness that Sunil saw all around him: the drifting father with beautiful but fading notions of honor and pride; the drunk, potbellied brother fated to turn into their father; the silent, depressive sister-in-law. It was not Upstairs Chacha’s rebellion, with the dream of a house and a car and two air conditioners, and it was in many ways a rebellion against such materialism, too. But it was possible to see how the work of Sai Baba, the construction of this new temple, the door-to-door spiritual sales, the task of ordering posters and glittering them and framing them and giving them away—how all this motion and activity would have created a sense of linearity and purpose that was, in its own small way, a path out.

As the sun went down, Sunil drove me home. But when we arrived, he told me to go in without him. He said he wanted to sit alone in the car for a time longer, listening to his Sai Baba songs.

*   *   *

Some months passed before I returned to Ludhiana to see the Dubeys. Neha was going to pay her relatives another visit, and she asked if I would like to join her. The occasion was that a favorite cousin of hers, Deepti, Downstairs Chacha’s daughter, was visiting from England.

When I entered the house, saying my hellos Downstairs first, then migrating Upstairs, where my bags inevitably had to go, they treated me like a long-lost son. There were hugs, inquiries about my fortunes since we had last met, some guilt-tripping about my failure to keep in contact. We were family now, it seemed.

Upstairs, Neha and Deepti were in the early stages of cooking pasta for the family. Deepti was slightly plump, with puffy cheeks and a pretty, unmistakably Punjabi face. Her accent, I noticed, was almost Italian in its vain attempt to average out Punjabi cadences with her new British ones. We greeted each other, and I joined in the cooking. We worked diligently, blending tomatoes, eggplants, mushrooms, and bell peppers into a sauce, and throwing in several Indian spices. But even this pandering did not distract the Upstairses from the foreignness of the resulting meal. They sat around chewing their way through our creation, but with none of the praise that Punjabis normally gave when something special has been made.

I was informed shortly after arriving that the family’s focus right then was on a party being thrown the next night. It was in Deepti’s honor, to celebrate her return from Ing-Land, as they pronounced it in the Punjab. Invitations had been issued, food was being ordered, and, most important, Deepti was in need of a new outfit. That evening we went shopping in the bazaar, where Deepti’s taste was gradually revealed to be a fantasy of Western styles rather than a careful emulation of them: T-shirts worn under waistcoats, frills on cuffs, sequins everywhere.

I did not know at the time how contested such clothing could be. Deepti told me later that she had returned to India, for just the second time since leaving, on the condition that she be allowed to wear such things. She had even called before leaving to verify the promise. On her previous trip, she had been told to keep her loose English ways in England and had been forced to revert to Punjabi salwar kameezes. She seemed on our shopping trip to be exploiting her new freedom to the fullest, wearing a red T-shirt and an improbably tight vest that made her already large breasts even larger, even more prominent, even more a part of the conversation than they would otherwise have been.

It was a remarkable about-face for a woman who had grown up in the traditional way of a good Punjabi girl—in silence. Men spoke freely in Ludhiana, but I had had difficulty getting women, here as elsewhere in India, to tell an unfamiliar man their stories. I realized over time that this situation was beyond my power to rectify. Women were bred in this environment behind a virtual veil; so many were encouraged not to think, not to question, not to know themselves and certainly not to express what they knew. They were dispensers of silent smiles and of ceaseless inquiries into whether you had eaten. Anything more than that would have exceeded the permissible quantity of personhood. Some women could not even name a favorite television show, so blank had their minds become in a world with no use for their minds.

Deepti grew up in this world, playing by its rules. She was shy, barely able to put her thoughts into words. She was not allowed to leave home unsupervised—another facet of her father’s idea of izzat. As a child, she left Ludhiana only once. She agreed unquestioningly to an arranged marriage fixed by her parents. She was miserable from the beginning. But she had grown up and caught wind of the new ideas then spreading, and something inside her revolted—just as so many Indians were revolting in so many disparate ways. Deepti did what once seemed unthinkable: she divorced the man, and she announced to her family that she was moving to England to work and study and make a life of her own. She had wanted to leave Ludhiana since childhood.

She spoke no English when she moved to England, and she was innocent like a girl. She was lucky to be hired as a beauty therapist at a boutique in London within days of arriving. She enrolled, meanwhile, in a part-time MBA course. She lived at first with Neha’s family; when the stress of the crowd got to her again, she moved into her own place, a cheap and dingy room in a larger apartment whose other tenants were “druggists,” as she called them, meaning drug dealers. In England she learned to be hard, she said. At first, she used to cry for every little slight at work, every client poached from her by a rival stylist. She gradually began to stand up for herself and to fight back. She became less reverential of seniority and more capable of disagreement. “I always used to say ‘yes’ to people,” she said. “I have learned over there to say ‘no,’ too.”

She had not had a close male friend in Ludhiana. The only men she was allowed to socialize with were within her family. In England, she decided to venture as far away from that past as possible: she not only found a boyfriend and not only moved in with him, but also managed to find one who was a Pakistani Muslim. Her parents did not know, and it was assumed that they would go into simultaneous cardiac arrest if they ever found out. She liked Saif because he was honest with her. When their female flatmate came to him one day wrapped in a bath towel and sought to kiss him, he immediately called Deepti and told her. He was up front about having been intimate with women before Deepti. She didn’t love him, she said, but she liked him, and she was lonely and wanted someone to share her days with.

It felt strange to her to be home again. She had left this cloistered world and acquired new visions. But her parents and her brother Rohan saw her as they had always seen her. They kept trying to shove her back into her hole. Rohan was harassing her, telling her which male former classmates could come to the party and which couldn’t. Think about our reputation, he said; there was izzat to bear in mind.

“I always thought this world is not for me,” Deepti told me one day. “I cannot live here.”

The party for Deepti was to be in a private room on the second floor of a restaurant called Basant. The “pure veg” snacks and dinner and the nonalcoholic drinks for the two dozen guests, along with the DJ, had come to 2,700 rupees, less than $60. Deepti instructed the DJ to play only Punjabi songs; even Bollywood music, Indian but not of this particular region, would inspire no one, she feared. The songs throbbed with that gypsy sound, nostalgic and exuberant at the same time, major- and minor-toned, the folk music of farmers spruced up now with electronic hip-hop beats but with a certain lyrical grounding in the farms all the same.

The party was a segregated affair, with two circles of dancing, one of women and one of men. The men seemed more than shy; they appeared to be entirely incapable of contemplating what it would involve to dance with a woman who was not their mother. It seemed likely that they would follow the traditional pattern of having no contact with a woman until the day when they would gain the legal right to force themselves on one. As one often observed at large gatherings of Indian males, they tended to make lusty eyes at one another instead. A man named Hemant, not long after being introduced to me for the first time, dragged me across the room and into the male dancing circle. He stood before me and began to pump his hips and thrust his hands into the air, with every expectation that I do the same, which very, very tepidly I did.

Hemant would later reassure me about his intentions by sending Deepti this late-night text message: “U r so sweet. U look gorgeous. U should try Hollywood for modelling. U will be next generation superstar.”

In this way, too, Deepti was finding it hard to be home. These men were her age, had been her peers, but they now seemed to her to be boys. They had perfectly decent, perfectly boring small-town jobs—managing a supermarket, working in a bank. They wouldn’t dance with her, even when she tried on occasion to merge the circles. They didn’t drink. They were coy and maladroit. When one of these men liked a woman but was rejected, he would invariably invent rumors about her purity, so that no one else would want to have her.

In some ways, they seemed to her to be regressing. The boys she grew up with, like the men in her family, were finding more and more solace in religion. One of them tied a woman’s scarf on the headrest of the front passenger seat of his car, to pay tribute to the goddess Mata Rani. When driving with others, he would insist on keeping the seat empty for the goddess, asking friends to sit in the back. The ringtones on her friends’ cell phones were often devotional songs now. They were weak and fearful and dull. It was Deepti who had left them behind, but she was so far outnumbered by the stagnant that she felt left behind in her own way, with no one from her former world able to understand her new one.

Her first trip home a few years earlier had unfolded differently. She had jumped right back into her old life. When someone needed tea, her radar picked up the need immediately, and she dashed into the kitchen. When male school friends called, she told them that she could not meet. She still knew how to be the good Punjabi daughter, and she was happy to play the role. This time, she had set a new tone by wearing whatever she liked, and the rest had followed from there. No one asked her to make tea anymore. She met her friends at will. She had thrown a party and danced and let herself go.

Downstairs, they seemed to feel Deepti slipping out of their hands. Rohan was unable to bear the idea of a woman less docile and dutiful than his own silent wife, and Deepti’s return had made him tense and resentful. Downstairs Chacha, who was especially fond of his daughter, found that he was getting less and less time with her. Feeling that she was pulling away, he pulled away, too. He kept to himself during most of her visit, spending many evenings drinking whiskey alone on his bed and sobbing.

Late one night, as I prepared to go to bed, a blaring female scream ripped through the house. Several people rushed Downstairs to the site of the scream to see what had happened. Rohan and Sunil had gotten into an argument, which was not typical of Sunil but very typical of Rohan. Things had escalated, and Rohan had smashed his fist into a mirror and shattered it. He was drunk, and it was his wife, clutching their baby, who had screamed in fear, then pulled her husband away from the violence that she feared was looming.

After some minutes, the crisis was over, and everyone started to return to their beds. Upstairs Chacha and Neha made their way toward the stairs. And with them was Deepti, the daughter of Downstairs Chacha. She had slept Downstairs on her first visit, but this time around she had wordlessly changed her allegiance. She slept Upstairs now, ate Upstairs, treated Upstairs Chacha and his wife like her own parents. It was as if she had sensed which way history was moving and had wanted to place herself on the right side.

Deepti climbed the stairs and tucked herself into bed and left the world Downstairs to drift as best it could into the new country being made.