TRIVANDRUM

Officially Thiruvananthapuram, but no one wants to say all that. Most cities have two or three names, each with a handful of different spellings. We fly in on a tiny propeller jet and B is green by the time we land. We don't like this city much at all. We stay at a YMCA that is large and spacious and very nice, but once outside the city is a filthy sauna. We take a rickshaw to the temple mentioned in the book, but it is small and unremarkable and covered in dirt and not worth a second look. The main road, named Mahatma Gandhi (like all the main roads) is a nightmare, a free-for-all of traffic and honking and potholes and shimmering heat. At the edges of the road there are no sidewalks, only crumbled and cracked ditches and pits, so anyone walking is forced out into the road. But what makes it all so incongruous is that in-between the usual shack-like shops and wallahs rise gleaming glass buildings, banks and businesses. A glass showroom of new Tata cars but there's a fetid ditch filled with trash that you must cross to reach the front door.

This is where I first start to think about what the modernization of India means. Because India is capitalism run amok, a laissez-faire capitalist's wet dream. Everyone is free to do as he pleases. A man on a carpet is selling what seemed to be his only ware, a bathroom scale. Well, everyone is selling something: the man up at dawn making chains of flowers for the truck drivers to hang from their fenders, the boy selling the maps you can have for free from the tourist office, the ragpicker with his towering cart, the people who refill bottled water and try to pass it off as pure, the man who tries to charge you to watch your shoes outside the temple, the ancient man and his ancient cycle rickshaw, hoping someone will pay his old legs for another spin. And we admire all this pluck and patience and hope--there's more "American spirit" here than America.

But no sidewalks. No lines. Whoever can shove his way on the bus get the seat. Piles of feces and trash as high as cars. Open sewers. Build where you like. Sell what you can. It's a dog-eat-dog world literally. We hear them fighting in the street at night. We see their bodies in the street.