The Hope Factory A Novel - By Lavanya Sankaran Page 0,101
the conversation, “we were just discussing … Those government blighters seem to be making no progress on the power situation. What do you feel?”
“Your father tells me,” said the visitor, “that you are in business now. But that you are very successful! Very good, very good.”
“It is now the fashion,” said his father. “Changing times! These brahmin boys are no longer interested in academics or medicine or law, they all want to make money. And they are succeeding! You know why? I will tell you. It is because of their heritage: strong academics, especially science and mathematics, strong discipline, clean personal habits. It is the mantra of success in this new software world! … With our traditions, it is only natural that our children will succeed. It is a question,” he said, “of cultural habits. Like the Gujarati, the Marwadi, and the Jew, who all have the culture of understanding money, and so they rule the financial world, is it not?”
“Yes,” said his father’s friend. “Very true. Of course, my son is a lawyer and my daughter is a cardiologist, but I have heard. Your software company,” he suggested, “must be doing a lot of work with America to be so successful.”
Anand glanced at his glass of water. Empty. “I am not in the software industry,” he said. “Manufacturing,” he said. “Engineering.”
“Technology,” his father clarified. “It is all technology.”
“Of course,” said the friend. “So good that you are doing well.”
*
THE DOSA RESTAURANT WAS next to the golf course and one street away from the state ministries of Vidhana Soudha. When he first moved to Bangalore, Anand had learned to love the dosas here along with his college friends, partly for the taste, and partly because they added a strong dose of garlic to the potato palya, a rabid unorthodoxy his parents naturally frowned upon. Shortly thereafter, his comfort levels with garlic had risen and he had upgraded the breaking of parental strictures to cigarettes, alcohol, and sex. Garlic, in effect, had been his gateway drug to defiance, the potato palya in this hotel an early pusher.
Anand was visiting the restaurant after a gap of several years, the slight apprehension within him echoing the excited defiance that had marked his early visits. The small hotel attached to the restaurant was rumored to rely, for profit margins, on hidden operations as a whoretel, but the restaurant itself sported an air of vegetarian innocence, serving a standard South Indian breakfast in the mornings and switching to large thaali-meals and gobi-manchurian for lunch and dinner. But true renown was saved for the dosas, which, on a Sunday morning, attracted herds of families, clustered at long tables of eight or more: complaining grandfathers, mothers-in-law in best sarees flashing ruthless smiles, aging uncles with special dietary requirements, budding girls with beribboned braids sweetly looped upward and tied under their ears, teenage boys in desperately bright polyester shirts, mothers-outside-kitchens at their ease, and harassed fathers collating the menu selections for them all. And among them, scattered and clumped like so much driftwood in the tides, lured by golden dosas and proximity, gatherings of golfers, college students, and legislative assembly members.
This was not a Sunday, yet there was a fair crowd of people from the surrounding law courts and ministry offices. Anand pushed his glasses up his nose and glanced around the Formica-topped tables in the central hall. There was another dining hall upstairs, air-conditioned, quieter, more suitable for families, but not so good for a private conversation. Here, human chatter competed with the clatter of plates and the barely hidden noise of the kitchen; one could discuss anything and not be overheard. Somewhere in here was the Landbroker and the man he was bringing with him. A man who referred to himself as Mr. Gowda and by others as Gowdaru-saar.
Before coming to this meeting, Anand had made a few phone calls and had learned, from Vinayak, that, if he wanted to see either his money returned or the land deal completed, he would have to meet this man and pay, and, from Amir, that Gowdaru-saar was a well-known political functionary, whose job it was to strong-arm financial support for his party from that particular taluk. Anand was not dealing with a two-bit criminal he could threaten in turn; he was dealing with someone far more consequential.
He quickly spotted Gowdaru-saar against a far wall. If the Landbroker was a cinematic hero, then Gowdaru-saar looked indistinguishable from a Kannada movie villain: large to the point of obese; his pockmarked