ROMANCE, PART ONE
Before he died, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, complained of back pain. A pain, he expressed, that began at the base of his spine and bloomed outwards, a pain ancient and vestigial. He held the interlocking bones in his back desperately, as if his hands were the last thing holding himself up. He expressed the pain to his valet, who went to call a doctor. No sooner than the doctor was summoned, the Architect of India collapsed. It was six thirty in the morning.
Nehru’s health had been declining for six months. He fell into a depression after India’s defeat in the Sino-Indian war. The rumor is that he died because of the knife in his back, so deeply betrayed by the neighboring country that his body crumpled in on itself. This may be a gross oversimplification of a very complicated socio-political border dispute. But maybe — if we allow ourselves to think it — he was simply an old, tired man with a broken heart.
The author Victor Anant describes his body on the day of his funeral. “No, the face was not waxen. No, the face was not sad. No, the face was not in pain. No, the face was not that of an old man. The face was frozen into a mold of bewildered determination.”
Oh, what it means to be a man who is also a mold.
HEAVY ELECTRICALS
In 1964, the year that he passed, Nehru’s India established a heavy electrical factory on the outskirts of Hyderabad, a massive animal of twisting metal parts pushing against the developing city. Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL, pronounced bee, etch, ell) is India’s leading manufacturer of power and electrical equipment.
The factory itself is a juggernaut: three large gleaming buildings, the trucks of product being shepherded out through a bright blue gate. The company, owned and operated by the Indian government, makes all sorts of nouns named after verbs: boilers, generators, compressors, exchangers, pulverizers.
The factory was the magnetic center of the small town surrounding it, aptly named BHEL colony. A town of swarming people. The town was built to be entirely self-sufficient. Its residents were the factory workers and their families and other administrative roles that aided in its smooth functioning (doctors, postal workers, teachers). It was divided into seven neighborhoods called “types,” for each of the seven income groups. Type one and type two had eight families in a home. Types three and four were four families to a home. Type five were two family homes, and type six were single family bungalows. There was only one house in type seven, a ten acre plot of land, with a mansion and a rose garden.
But the factory—that was the center of attention.
BHEL was part of Nehru’s project of industrialization. Assisted by Soviet technologies and inspired by their ideology, BHEL’s factory town was born. Nehru flirted with Soviet ideology his entire career. In 1928, he wrote a book, titled Soviet Russia: Some Random Sketches and Impressions. He believed in a kinship, a mirrored people, two concurrent struggles to create a whole out of a set of unforgiving parts. “No one can deny the fascination of this strange Eurasian country of the hammer and sickle, where workers and peasants sit on the thrones of the mighty and upset the best-laid schemes of mice and men,” he writes. “For us in India the fascination is even greater.”
In the sixty years since BHEL’s establishment, it is still unclear what “heavy electricals” is supposed to mean. How can we weigh the untouchable? Electric power came to India from the hands of the British. As a proponent of self-reliance, Nehru wanted to frontload industrialization onto the fledgling country. Nehru was obsessed with the impossible task: to make India so heavy, so insistent on its presence, that the country was untake-able. By making each breath of the country hulking and metallic, he hoped that it could never be stolen again.
He likens the steel and metal factory to a mother: “We must start with the production of the machine which makes the machine.”
THE COUPLE
It was a good place to live; they chose it because there was work. Her husband, a boy her father knew, just graduated from trade school. He was set to work in the factory as a steelworker. They were sixteen and nineteen: clean, smooth faces; high cheekbones; wrists that brushed against each other when they walked side-by-side.
A few hours before, they had sat together in front of the hardy, full-bodied foreman. He explained, in the exact number of words needed, the terms of her husband’s employment: he would work from nine am to five pm, he would be given half of an hour for lunch, and he should not overstay. This was fine, for the man at the factory gave them everything they needed: a steady wage, a newly built school for the children, one eighth of a sand-colored house.
As they walked away from the factory, she saw the rows of houses, each identical to the last. Everything was empty and clean and ready to be touched. This new place was different from the village where she grew up, where houses drunkenly fell on top of each other, where the land stretched lazily and extravagantly backwards. She touched her husband’s shoulder. A bird skipped a beat in its song.
ROMANCE, PART TWO
A completely unverified story: during Nehru’s first state visit to the Soviet Union in 1955, amidst the tours of Moscow’s greatest landmarks and monuments, he visited the public park. Waiting outside of the park was a long, twisting line of people. Curious, the prime minister asked if there was some sort of event going on. Khrushchev explained that public parks in the Soviet Union had entrance fees. They were waiting to get in. Nehru was shocked; he could not understand how a socialist nation, one that prided itself on equality, could have public parks that were closed to the public. “Khrushchev was profoundly embarrassed, and livid,” witnesses said. By the next morning, every public park was free to enter.
Young people, who were unable to afford restaurants, and who had few opportunities for recreation not under the watchful eye of their floor supervisors, flocked to the city parks. From morning until night, they danced and they fucked and they had many children. Khruschev and Nehru became the prophets of the new romantic age.
When Khrushchev visited India later that year, he said: “We are your friends in any weather, and if a breeze of draft should ever blow which is harmful to the health of the Indian people, remember us and we shall never forget you.”
The country swooned.
THE GARDEN
Her husband was a gardener. She didn’t find this out until a year into the marriage, when he brought plants home and buried their roots in the front yard. By the time their three children were born, one could not enter the house without being choked by the fragrance and flavor of the air, the tilted leaves of the jackfruit tree, the warm shade of the towering banana plant. They planted every kind of fruit so that they would never go hungry. There was never a barren year, nothing but the patient ritual of the white flowers opening their petals at night and then closing themselves off again in the morning. The garden had gooseberry bushes and two types of guava trees and the sweetest, juiciest mangoes you’ve ever tasted. The fruit was so delicious that the children would fight over the pit, gnawing at the last bits of stringy flesh, juice dripping down their chins and onto their shirts.
There was a thick piece of wire wrapped between tree trunks, taut and heavy with school uniforms, workman’s clothes, sarees, and undershirts. The outside of the house was pristine; the government repainted the exterior of the building every two years. It was their little paradise; walking to the Wednesday market, bag in tow, coming home to make food for the week. Every day, making her husband breakfast and lunch, and then dinner. The same shade of sand, the same market, the same dance year after year. Time, back then, felt like a very large sink that they kept pouring their life into, one that never quite filled. There was nothing around them but the pleasant simmer of a planned life. The garden in the front yard remained lush and evergiving.
TEMPLE
Every Dasara, she would take her children to the factory, and they would pray to the equipment that their father used. Someone had cleaned the room the night before, until every tool in the factory shined. Her children were similarly polished and steamed dry. A priest put a garland of orange chrysanthemums on the factory equipment, streaked the pristine parts with yellow and red turmeric. The scent of jasmine and burning incense filled the room.
Her husband would pour the molds that made the turbines. She never saw him do it, but there was something about the machinery that evoked her imagination, and though her husband was standing next to her in a suit and tie, she imagined the arch of his shoulders and back as he strained to turn the wheel at his station, releasing the massive bucket of molten steel into the molds below. The fiery light of the metal, something akin to the rays of the sun, illuminated his face, covered by the welding mask, and his head, protected by a helmet. The whole room was a mess of metal limbs, each set of intersecting beams like two lovers stumbling over each other. She could imagine that, by the end of the day, it would be hard to tell what was man and what was machine.
She felt her husband shift next to her. They pressed their hands together and bowed their heads slightly down to the machinery. The priest uttered something in Sanskrit. And they prayed.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
Her boy — the eldest — was in a Shakespeare play. She laughed the first time that she saw him: his youthful body absurd against the large gray scarf he draped over his head and shoulders, his hunched back and deliberately shaking hands. He said all of the words in a thick Hyderabadi accent, and though she thought she knew what English sounded like, she had no clue what the boy was saying. The theater, right next to the community pool, filled with curious guests watching the children in the play.
The stage was slightly higher than the sets of folding chairs where the audience sat, so she looked up at the boy as he said his lines. She thought about her own father, how he sat in the same chair at home for a decade, and the gruff and measured voice that her boy was trying to emulate. Back home, her house had shelves filled with books: her father’s Telugu translations of the Russians, their red covers in stark contrast with the lilting, curvy text. At times, it felt like the language itself was incongruous with the sharp angles of the book, such that any attempt to contain the words on something as trivial as a page would be as foolish as putting water through a sieve.
Back in the village where she came from, field-working women stood ankle-deep in rice paddies, their backs bending over as they sliced through the crop with their crescent sickles. If you went far enough, you would be able to watch them gather the plants together, the unruly bundles larger than their bodies and their billowing sarees hiked up to their shins, and carry them away from the field. Any understanding of this world that she now lived in, with its paved pathways and regimented organization, would be nothing but a whisper of a dream.
ROMANCE, PART THREE
The majority of the photos of Nehru and Khrushchev are from those 1955 visits. By 1960, relations between the two countries, though cordial, were strained. Nehru had been repeatedly asking Khrushchev for help with the conflict on the northern border. China and India had been quarreling over the northern part of Kashmir, a territory called Aksai Chin. The great white sand desert, as it has been named, was a remote and inhospitable stretch of land. Aksai Chin — which sits at double the height of where altitude sickness kicks in — requires any human settler to undergo a painstaking acclimatization or suffer incredible headaches, nearsightedness, nausea, and fatigue. Why stand by such a hostile expanse? In doing so, Nehru joined the canon of Indian leaders that insisted forcefully upon Kashmir’s integration into the Indian republic.
In a statement to Lok Sabha, Nehru explained his reasons for the war: “It does seem to me rater absurd for two great countries — or two small countries — to rush at each other’s throats to decide whether two miles of territory are on this side or on that side, and especially two miles of territory in the high mountains, where nobody lives. But where national prestige and dignity is involved it is not two miles of territory, it is the nation’s dignity and self respect that become involved in it.”
It was this self-insistence that Nehru hoped to impress upon Khrushchev in their meetings. Khrushchev visited India once in February to little fanfare and much hesitation, according to State Department reports. During the meeting, the Russian proposed negotiations, much to the chagrin of Nehru, who continued to assert that there was no budging on India’s border.
Seven months later, the two men met again in New York. They were photographed together during this visit sitting together on a couch, presumably in the United Nations building. Like an animated couple, they were cartoonishly opposite in shape — Khrushchev’s rounded body stands in stark contrast to Nehru’s stiff, angular face. It was obvious that they are discrete entities, that the space between them was intentional. They did not look at each other. Khrushchev was turned inwards, chest pointed towards the Indian leader, arm resting on the sofa back. There was something childlike about the way that Nehru sat, hands resting on his lap, face in a partial smile. He was careful, almost uncertain in the way that he interacted with the Russian. It was as if they were both taking part in separate conversations.
Khrushchev declined to interfere in the Sino-Indian war.
DISREPAIR
By the nineties, her children had all moved out of the house. There were rumors of privatization. India had a declining need for thermal energy, and there was less reason for steam generators and turbines. Once supplying 95% of power generation equipment to India, BHEL’s market share had dropped to 5%. Private companies began to manufacture electrical equipment faster and cheaper.
At a conference in 1993, A. Gavisiddappa, the chairman and managing director of BHEL, announced, to a crowd of eager open market industrialists, that he planned to fight back: “Even though we have to adapt to free-market determined circumstances, we are looking forward to an exciting future, despite certain odds against us,” he said. “Why should I bother to hide the fact that I'm faced with steadily dwindling orders? But I also believe that eventually we shall recoup.”
And yet — the town faltered. The government stopped painting the houses, letting them streak with rainwater and dirt. The roads were lined with plastic and debris, candy wrappers and aluminum cans covered the neglected ground. The children's park, the library, the recreation center stood like empty monuments, idols whose original meanings were lost to time. Shops populated the town like weeds— a grocer, a popular shoe outlet, a car dealership. The state continued to build the town outwards, creating a low-income group (LIG), a medium income group (MIG), and a high income group (HIG).
Her husband developed a perpetual cough, and was unable to stay at his job, every task interrupted by his discontinuous breath. In the middle of the night, she listened as her husband forcefully emptied his lungs from the other side of the bed.
THE HOUSE THEY LIVE IN NOW
is two stories tall, with a big gate of its own. There is no front yard, only an orange tree on the neighbor’s property that they would steal fruit from and a henna plant that stretches from the upstairs balcony down. When the grandchildren come over, they grind and crush the leaves and add lemon juice to make a paste that they put on their hands. There are no other plants to tend to. They install an air conditioner in the front room and a computer the size of a small child in the hallway. Everything in this new house is under their dominion; they are the rulers of a small kingdom.
When her voice begins to go, they don’t believe it. At first, it is like a small swelling, a perpetual itch that grows from within. They found the tumor a year later. The illness is a slow crawl, creeping towards something, out there — the alive eating the already alive. A hunger that painstakingly swallows every inch of what is left. Her muscles ache, her joints inflame, and she wonders what a body can weather.
When she dies, they take her body from the hospital back to BHEL, place it on the floor of the veranda. After the priest finishes administering last rites, he wraps her body in a white sheet, and they drive her to the outskirts of town, where there is nothing but dust and cracked earth, where you could walk for miles and miles and never reach another soul. When they return, they can hear the wind twisting through the empty rooms, waiting for something that will never come back.
BLOOD
Back in 1955, as Nehru rode through the streets of Yalta, excited spectators would toss bouquets of roses at the windows of the car. In stretching his hands out to catch the stems, Nehru’s fingers got caught in the thorns. “Look,” he’s reported to have said, “I have shed my blood for Russia.”
2025