Middlemen

In which we visit a market and drive with purpose across the country

The full series of posts from my India trip can be read here.

The next morning, I woke before my watch could wake me and we got ready for Bala to pick us up and take us to the wholesale farmers market. He met us in a very old car, that looked like the white sedans they have in Cuba and his father-in-law opened the doors for us in the back, which was embarrassing, but we thanked him profusely, and later we talked about how strange all of this kindness and serving made us feel initially, why was this man feeling like he had to open the door for us every time we stopped somewhere. Was it because we were visitors, or white visitors, or from overseas, or Bala's friends? Like everything, there were endless possibilities and we could go on for days about something that had happened and why it had happened the way it had, and then use it as a conversation starter with someone else, like why had no one helped the man who fell on the platform at Madurai, we almost begged people to explain it, and they would wave it off, He was drunk wasn't he? They should have helped him, but he was drunk.

The wholesale market was packed with people and vegetables, all the sellers were middlemen, moving products from farmers to vendors. The main thing that we were, or rather Gusztáv was and therefore me by extension, trying to understand is how the supply chains worked and how people the farmers were compensated. The older man we talked to was both the head of the association of middlemen in the market and related to Bala in some way. He told us all about the processes and took out his ledger at one point to show us how he accounted for the things that people had given him and the money he was owed or owed, all while a man in a red shirt and a beard, much younger than him, would come and ask him questions and move back to the front of the shop with a woman who seemed annoyed with us.

Finally, we finished and as we were leaving, there was some dispute around a truck that was stopped. Some men were unloading the produce and another man was upset for some reason and pushing people and we walked away while it was still ongoing. Outside the market things were filthy like the rest of the city, a heap of vegetable scraps and a pig in the gutter wandering around looking for rubbish and we all had tea at a small vender and Gusztáv and I discussed whether this was safe to drink or not, before deciding that because it had been boiled, it probably was safe, particularly because the man had poured the boiling water over all the glasses as well.

Bala's father-in-law showed up again with the Cuban car and we went to a farmer's market and then a wholesale market selling things from the hills, and looked at bananas. There were people wearing ear warmers, something I had seen several times and I asked Bala what they were for and he said, It's because they are cold and it keeps their ears warm, and I felt stupid for asking, and not realising that in fact, in India, 27 could be quite cold. We wandered some more before we turned down a small side street and ended up at Bala's home, his real home, he said, the one he grew up in. inside we met his mother and saw pictures of his father, with an incredible moustache, over many years. Bala told us they owned the whole apartment block and his mother would come live with him eventually, but she had too many friends in her neighbourhood and she couldn't move away from them and the talk of the day and the gossip and everything else.

We came home and went to have breakfast, the breakfast at this hotel being different from the first one in Hyderabad with the numerous different kinds of foods and instead had the things I came to only want to eat, fried roti and sambar and chutney and madu vada which I could eat for days. I asked the lad, the boy who was serving, for black coffee and he didn't bring anything, a recurring problem I kept encountering asking people for things and feeling like they understood me, only to not get what I expected. In this case, the boy did finally appear with a cup but it was black tea and when I asked again for black coffee he again came with another cup of black tea, and finally Gusztáv tried again and a cup of coffee did appear with two cups of tea for Gusztáv to drink.

Bala said he planned to return at 12:30 so we sat and worked a bit and then packed and then headed out to the street for a bit to walk around in the street and see another market of crushed flowers and other things. I said to Gusztáv that I wanted to try to find a Pepsi Zero, but as I walked, it became apparent to me how ridiculous a Pepsi Zero must be in this place, in basically rural India where people needed to stay alive on calories and were not worried in the same way about losing or gaining weight, or rather where losing weight was a serious problem and it would be great to have a little extra weight. I found a kind of cola that had, as I reviewed the nutrition information like a fat white man, almost 50% more sugar than cola in the US and I ended up pouring most of it out. We got back to the hotel and Gusztáv called down to the front desk saying, Hi, this is Gusztáv Nemes, we are the two white guys, maybe in room seven? We need two strong black coffees, and hanging up said to me, We are getting two instant coffees I think.

In the hurry of getting everything into our bags once again, a ritual we had been getting better at with each day, we asked one of the men for a big bottle of cold water and he seemed confused, but left us and we went downstairs to the lobby to wait for Bala. This man appeared again with a bottle of water that seemed to have some sports drink in it and we tried again and he seemed quite annoyed, before leaving. Bala also appeared in the white cuban car with his father in law and an overnight bag and said the car had been delayed an hour, before disappearing into the office of the hotel. The man who had been looking for water for us then reappeared some 15 minutes later with water bottles that had been opened and had cold water in them, and we thanked him profusely to try to make up for our earlier apparent rudeness.

Bala came out of the office and we discussed the plans for the day and for lunch and finally another man appeared in a Hyundai, apparently having driven all the way up from Vembar where we were going and we briefly discussed, Gusztáv and me, what had happened to the other plans we had, to go shopping in Madurai, but it seemed that things had shifted. We said goodbye to the hotel staff and the man who had brought the water carried our bags to our car and Bala, we noticed, tipped him and getting into the car we realised that we probably should have been tipping for some of the things that had happened to us, although we didn't know which ones, or when we should have done it, or how much we should have tipped. We then debated whether or not our carers had just been doing this the whole time when we weren't paying attention. There was no way to tell: who can explain anything to these white people anyway.

Bala took over driving from the man who had come to pick us up, and Gusztáv and I sat in the back as he drove with the sort of confidence that the Uber driver James who had sped us from Varkala to the train station when we were late had, pulling in and out of traffic, honking the horn and going much faster and getting very close to the families and boys on motorbikes. After a few minutes, I relaxed as I'd found myself doing, giving into the experience, realising there was nothing to be gained from feeling unsafe. We had lunch and tried to pay and Bala shoo'd us off, and we promised that we would try to catch him out so we could pay and he said, You can try, laughing like he knew this was unlikely to happen and I gave up feeling badly about it.

Bala drove the whole way to Vembar — we tore through the countryside only to slow when we came over speed bumps that I couldn't manage to see, but Bala knew and although my body responded with fear, there was no reason to be afraid, really, in the same way you don't need to be afraid when someone is driving much faster on a motorway in the UK. There are rules, and whether you understand them or not, everyone is following them. The whole of the road was two lanes, and Bala would overtake people with a honk of the horn: people on motorbikes, or bicycles, or tractors, or other cars, or people walking, or dogs, or goats, or cows, a whole menagerie of Indian living things and machines. The fields that we passed were broken up by wind turbines, and we slowed as came up to the road barriers they put up to slow traffic, requiring you to go around them into the oncoming lane and making cars wait for each other.

We arrived at the NGO we were staying, People's Action for Development, I learned later, a charity doing a range of different activities, but mostly, doing work on educating young girls about their rights and their bodies and child marriage. There was a training going on as we arrived, and several members of the staff appeared, men and women who cooked and cleaned and showed us to a guest house where Gusztáv and I would share a room, and Bala would have another room. We came downstairs, and met the founders of the charity, Lucy and Rajen, who radiated positive energy and we were immediately joking about beards and Bala and the adventures we had been having. They too had known Chris, so we knew them the way we knew everyone who knew Chris.

Around 6:30, dinner was served in the guesthouse in which we were staying or rather, under it, on a table that was in the middle of an open air patio on the ground floor, with the guesthouse above us. We had dosa and the people from PAD served us in the attentive way that India seems to be filled with, a country of 1.4 billion people means there is always someone to serve you. Rajen and Lucy came and we talked about what we ate and didn't ate, what the work was like, what we were interested in, and we listened to Bala talk as well, with long answers to our questions. Gusztáv asked questions in a way that I was beginning to follow very well, his thinking pattern of trying to understand the whole of a system little by little, through asking people about the different steps of that process. Who did what and when did they do it and with whom. You could see his understanding of the processes grow and his questions always stop when they were no longer genuine questions.

They gave us our itinerary: Bala would be with us until tomorrow, Tuesday, and then go home and we could meet farmers and school girls in the village club where they were learning about child marriage and reproductive and sexual health. Then Bala would go and Rajen would take us on Wednesday, again to the village and to more clubs, and we all said it was a shame we were only staying two days, maybe we could stay longer if we wanted, but we didn't know yet.

Gusztáv wanted to walk out to the beach, and even though it was late, past nine already, we decided to walk out that way and we found ourselves weaving through little streets of houses and past people who looked at us with curiosity and then past an open square right on the edge of the beach where there were about 10-15 young men sitting, drinking tea and loudly asking us to come sit with them and we declined, saying we would be back.

The beach had fishing boats and rubbish on the shore and boats moored in the bay, bobbing gently in the waves, and we found shells and walked towards the light house to see a small Catholic shrine with an open air space in front of it where there were people sleeping and then boxes on stilts with lit ups dioramas of saints. A few people, young men on motorbikes, rode past us, one bike with two lads stopping to talk to us, but they didn't speak any English.

We got back and I couldn't sleep, tossing and turning, and by four o'clock there was a comically loud amount of noise coming from outside, dogs barking and roosters and birds, a call to prayer from two mosques apparently and then in response Hindu and Christian music blasting (the morning cacophony Chris called it), and, what turned out to be the sound of Bala snoring in the room one over. We had discussed in the evening the potential places I might run and Bala had suggested the road we came in on, he said it would be quieter, but Gustav pointed on the map on his phone to another road closer to the coast which was also straight and looked quieter and so I set out that way, weaving through the small village until I hit an almost perfectly straight road that took me down the coast past villages of people who stared, or a cart drawn by two cows and a man walking behind it who smiled and smiled at me and held up his arm to flex his bicep and said, 'Good, good.' In one village, the temple was pumping out loud Hindi music so loud that I drown out the audiobook I was listening to as I ran, and then there were goats and cows and stray dogs.

I got home and we had breakfast, again served by the staff and Bala was there dressed like he was going to an office job and working on a Macbook Pro: he had been up until 2, he said, working and needed to give talking points to someone in Chennai for a presentation about the court case they had just won and he needed to go back that night to be with the people in his office. We met another woman, Nimmy, who was Lucy's sister who had lived in Japan and we talked about life in Japan a bit and Rajen and Lucy came, and then some of the students who were on placement at the charity and doing training there. We had plans they said to go to the village to meet our first group of farmers, and Gusztáv and I went upstairs to get ready, and came back down to get in the car, and Bala said, Maybe put on pants, and we both looked down at our shorts and were embarrassed, Yes, right, right, sorry, of course. Bala was kind and waited for us and said when we came back down again, apologising, No problem.

Bala took us with a member of the PAD staff to a small village meeting centre where the farmers were to meet us. We sat in a circle on plastic chairs, with half of the men in lungis and all of them barefoot and Gusztáv started to ask them about their lives, about how they made a living, about the supply chain and how they sold their vegetables and what the cultivated and what was easy and not. This part of the country didn't have irrigation, so there was only one season a year — in Dindigul, they had three or four seasons to grow in, and we discussed the ways they worked together, how they had bought a tractor as a collective, and you could tell which one of them was the most business savvy in part because of how well he was dressed, but also how he behaved and talked, even in Tamil. They talked about the difficulties they had in getting support from the government, how payments could be delayed because the state government was a different party than the national government, but how they could redirect funds to people could get one particular benefit, support for 100 days of unemployment when they weren't able to work the land.

The systems, it seems from the outside, exploit them, particularly the middlemen who buy their product and move it to wholesalers, offering very little in return for this. They have to pay someone to take their product to the market and then someone to sell it and then it goes on to venders to be sold for sometimes ten times the cost they bought it for. They didn't, however, seem to be that concerned with the middlemen whom they trusted and who loaned them money when they needed it — they wanted only a fair price for their product. The middleman we interviewed in Dindigul, Bala's cousin, said that he needed to have 10,000,000 rupees, around £100,000 to be able to cover the various costs and make loans and support people when they needed it. Marriages, deaths, any event where they were expected to splash out more money than we could imagine to for something that would dissolve in a day.

After we finished, we went into the main street in the village and saw men loading chillis into huge bags, 19 kgs, the heap of chillis on a blue tarp, and the two men working together to fill them and keeping the heap of chillis together on the tarp by sweeping them into the centre with their feet. We then had tea with the man who had bought the tractor and Gusztáv talked to him about short supply chains and how it could be possible to sell the vegetables themselves, at least some of them, in a co-operative in town, something the man listened to politely, but didn't seem to accept as a possibility. We packed up into the car that appeared for us and waved at everyone who was left in the village and headed back.

We had lunch at the guesthouse, and then drove into the next village and I had to pee again, as we had been told to drink water and I had not stopped drinking water since we arrived. I asked Bala where the toilet was, and he gestured to the world, We have a long toilet here, laughing and I said, So I should just… find a place? And he said, Yes, so I went behind the temple and looked around to see if there was anyone there, or rather if there was anyone close enough that it would matter.

A few staff members from the charity were with us and set down some mats on a large concrete structure that was in the middle of a small public square, covered from the rain like a bandstand almost, and farmers began to arrive and sit on the mats. We started the interview, and it was decidedly more engaged than the morning, with real flashes of anger as the men talked about the ways they had been slighted or systematically taken advantage of and we deduced they only made a 10% cut of the final price of the goods they produced. They argued with Bala in Tamil several times about different things like insurance and government support. Two or three of them spoke the most, but there were 7 or 8 altogether and they ones that didn't speak watched and listened and nodded or bobbled their heads when they agreed with something.

At one particularly intense point, the guy next to me was telling a story about an enemy and gesturing to me as a stand in for this person, I gathered, and indeed it was, when Bala came through with what he was saying: if you were leasing a field and the crop failed, the money would be paid to the owner of the field, not the farmer leasing it. How was that fair. Then they were all laughing and Bala translated, reminding us that Gusztáv had said they, the farmers, were the experts not us, and the man had reminded everyone of that, telling them not to listen to experts like Gusztáv and I, who were like the men who came and sold them pesticides. Don't listen to them.

Finally, a man got up to stretch and that seemed like a sign to cut the interview and do the obligatory group photo. They started to leave with a few of them lingering to talk to Bala and continue to make their points, like we had anything we could do about any of it. As the farmers dispersed, a group of twenty-five or thirty young girls appeared, and began to sit in a semi-circle and Bala said that they'd brought the girls to meet with us, and I suddenly felt very concerned, We were meant to interview them, or… what were we meant to do. I had flashes of the world outside of India, where interviewing young people is an ethical minefield. Bala was completely unbothered and said not to worry, he would lead the session and we could work something out, and we were suddenly sat in front of the group as Bala effortlessly talked and had the girls hanging on every word he said.

He introduced us, I could tell, as he had told people I was from 'London' and interesting metonomy for the UK I kept thinking, and I talked very briefly about my kids and my life, and then Gusztáv introduced himself and did a much better job, prompting me to suddenly shift my frame from interview to English teaching in Japan: ah, I had done this same thing many, many times, introducing myself and my country or countries, and had asked children to introduce themselves with their ages and what they were interested in and what they did for fun and what their dream was. I had a bit of cash from the UK on me and passed that around and before we knew it, the time had ended and we were taking pictures and then like before, we were in the car again, speeding away, this time with two other people people, a teacher and a PAD staff member, stuffed into the back, and Bala asking if we wanted to go to Kovilpatti, and we said, Yes, what's there? and Bala said, It's where my train is going, we have to go there, so it's good you want to go and laughed and we headed back on the long highway west.