Life is Calling

One of the house-proud was Leo Fernandes, my old teacher at St. Aloysius. The last time I had visited him, 15 years ago, he had been staying in a house that he rented from the school; now he invited me to a bright, clean apartment he had recently purchased in one of the city's high-rises. Over candy and pink lemonade, he spoke excitedly about the transformation he had witnessed in Mangalore how the town had become bigger, almost like Bombay in parts, and how the school had shared in this improvement. For a start, it had opened a massive new computer block. Life had changed in other ways, too, as Mangaloreans grew wealthier, more modern and more hurried. "All the other teachers have bikes. Some even have cars," said Leo. "Only I still walk."

Noticing that I wasn't wearing a watch, he suddenly recalled: "You never wore a watch even in school. I always wondered about that. You were a doctor's son, yet you never wore a watch, like other rich boys would."

"My father didn't let me buy a watch," I told him. "He thought it was an extravagance for a schoolboy."

We both smiled at the innocence of those days.

"Boys now have everything," Leo said. "Computers, bikes, everything. But they don't study as hard as your generation did. Already the old days are a distant memory. You used to talk to your neighbors they were your family. The people who live around me now, I have no idea who they are. I went to talk to them once, and they didn't have time. After that I gave up."

Others spoke in a similar way of an older, simpler life that was disappearing. I met neighbors, relatives and classmates, and each had done well in some way we couldn't have imagined in the 1980s one owned his own house, one had a car of his own. But each also had some sorrow we could hardly have imagined. A Catholic friend's daughter had married a Hindu and her family no longer spoke to her. One Hindu friend's daughter had been divorced by her husband. Divorce, extramarital affairs, inter-religious marriages, homosexual flings the doors of experience had swung open in Mangalore. The small town had grown up.

It had become more complicated and conflicted in other ways, too. At the Nehru Maidan, an open space in the center of town, I watched kids playing cricket. Among the spectators was a group of drifters and homeless men, some of them carrying rolled-up mattresses. Growing up, I had not seen many beggars around Mangalore, which had largely avoided the crushing poverty and inequality of larger cities. Yet it now had a slum that had not existed back then. Most Mangaloreans I spoke with shrugged off the arrival of so many poor people; they were said to be immigrant workers, drawn by the construction boom, and they were expected to go away again in the future. Nobody, it seemed, was ready to acknowledge the possibility that the city might now have a permanent underclass that the boom has left behind.

For better or worse, Mangalore's fate is now in the hands of outsiders. "Tier-two cities" like Mangalore, Cochin, Mysore and Trivandrum are believed to hold the key to the future of the Indian outsourcing industry. With wages rising in big cities like Bangalore and Bombay, tech companies must expand fast in these lower-cost cities. But Mangalore faces the same problem as other small cities with aspirations of becoming outsourcing hubs: It's not an exciting place to live. "Lifestyle is a challenge when you're trying to get people from outside to stay here," Sudhir Albuquerque told me. Albuquerque, an Infosys executive, was taking me around the Mangalore campus, which has 1,800 employees and is the city's most significant tech presence.

"But things are changing," he said. "There is a night life now in Mangalore. There are bars and lounges." He had hopes, too, that the multiplex cinema would make outsiders more willing to live there. Albuquerque added: "There are things you can do here that you can't dream of doing in a big city like Bangalore. For instance, you can still go home for lunch, which I do on most days." But even that may become a thing of the past. Infosys is planning to move to a new, larger campus soon; from there, Albuquerque said sadly, he wouldn't be able to pop home at lunchtime.

The new Infosys project is just one of a flood of investments that may be heading to Mangalore, including a proposed special economic zone. In anticipation, the airport is already being expanded and may soon be upgraded to international status. I asked Mohandas Pai, a senior executive at Infosys, what he thought Mangalore would look like in a decade. "It will grow. It will be a city of maybe two million people ... an international city," he said. But these dazzling prospects could still be derailed, Pai added. "The key to Mangalore is infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. The roads have got to get better; the airport too. If connectivity gets better, then companies will come here, and then there will be jobs here, at last. Bright people have always left Mangalore. But once the jobs are created, then the prodigal sons of Mangalore will come home, one by one, and the city will really take off."

Before leaving Mangalore again, I decided to visit Court Road once more. This small, steep, winding road which connects my old primary school at St. Aloysius to the high school up the hill is a physical embodiment, for me, of a rite of passage. I had gone up this road as a 13-year-old on my first day at high school. Now, as I remembered that day, I stopped to stare at the junglelike vegetation on the hillside, pausing to admire a giant banyan tree with its thick aerial branches wrapped in serpentlike creepers. A hawk flew overhead; there was the smell of raw neem all around. This must have been what Mangalore looked like in 1880 when the Jesuit priests came to this hill to build their school.

I got to the top of the hill, and from there I had a fine view of the city. Two decades ago, when you stood at a high point like this and looked down on Mangalore, the city's puny buildings all vanished, submerged beneath a canopy of coconut palms. That was when you felt a sense of contempt for Mangalore and dreamed of going somewhere big. But now, smashing through the coconut trees, were things unimaginable in my boyhood: enormous white- and pink-colored towers, either apartments or office blocks. Next to them were new towers, still under construction unpainted concrete structures with dozens of metal rods sticking out of their sides, as if they were ripping a path for themselves through the trees. You cannot feel contempt for Mangalore now. You have to feel a sense of amazement and awe at how profoundly it has changed. But if you look a bit longer at the scene, you cannot avoid a faint inkling, either, of something like fear.