That was the third time we had had a run-in with bandits in two days, which is why our driver was getting fed up with it. The first time he was downright scared, like the rest of us. Travelling with two daughters you’re supposed to be watching out for – Emma was fourteen at the time, and Clara was ten – adds to the anxiety in those kinds of situations, but as a two-career couple, both needing to do the fieldwork our jobs demanded, we had only two basic parental options. One of them, leaving the girls back in California while we were off gallivanting in India for a month, wasn’t something we were prepared to do. So there they were, with us, our Indian host Uma (the same Uma who was trekking up the Himalayas with Liz in the previous chapter) and our driver, the girls watching the adults to figure out the protocol in this foreign land, as the car was brought to a stop by people banging on the windows and shouting something or other in threatening voices. The odds were decidedly unbalanced from our perspective: a bunch of stern-looking fellows demanding money versus our group of two men, two women and two girls; them on their home turf, us strangers in a strange land; and none of us but our driver able to speak the language (even Uma did not speak this region’s language – there are over a hundred languages in India, after all). As this was the first attempt at highway robbery since we had set out from Bangalore, our driver took the negotiation tack, something along the lines of (as was later loosely translated for us) ‘You really don’t want to mess with these foreigners, the cops would be all over you.’ Whatever he said, it seemed to work, a small donation ensued, the brigands backed off, and we continued down the road.
We hadn’t travelled much further, maybe a couple of hours, when once again we saw congestion up ahead, this time caused by a throng of women moving from car to car. Dressed in spotlessly clean saris of dazzling colours – the pinks, yellows and blues a startling contrast to the stark countryside – they were laughing, singing and playing tambourines, the bangles on their arms sparkling in the sun and adding their own chime to the rhythm. As we got closer, though, we sensed that something was a little off. The tambourine players seemed to be intentionally creating a distraction; then a different group of saris would swoop around the car that had been brought to a halt. And all of the sari-wearers’ shoulders seemed a little broader, and their hips a bit narrower, than they ought to be. When we got closer still, we saw that the elegantly made-up faces and sari-clad bodies were in fact those of men. One more thing to explain to our daughters: it was a gang of transgenders (known as ‘hijras’ in India) who were holding us up. Honestly, there’s not much to do in that situation but laugh, part with some money, and go on your way. Even Uma was surprised.
We had landed in Bangalore a few days before, and were journeying from there to some caves we needed to explore in the off-the-beaten-path Kurnool district, about a hundred miles south of Hyderabad. As we set out, our heads were still reeling a little from jet lag and the culture shock that inevitably hits a Westerner on their first trip to India. In Bangalore the sensory chaos was awe-inspiring, at times overpowering: what seemed like infinite numbers of sputtering, belching and roaring motorcycles, yellow tricycle taxis, cars, buses, trucks, bikes and pedestrians, with a few cows thrown in for good measure, jockeying for a space on the road or on the vehicles, no apparent rules, apparently every man and woman for themselves. The tempting fragrances of baking naan and exotic spices somehow found their way through the wood-, coal- and petrol-fumed air. Women completely shrouded in black burqas clustered in front of a shop window displaying sexy red underwear on otherwise naked mannequins. Well-dressed businessmen and fashionable ladies in all sorts of colourful attire milled through elegant shops and high-end restaurants, while beggars conducted their forlorn business right outside. Feral dogs roamed the alleys even in the centre of town. And as we walked down the streets – a mishmash of pavement and dirt – there was ubiquitous chatter, none of it understandable to us, coming from faces that radiated every expression from bright smiles, to curiosity, to in a few cases a touch of hostility.
After that full-on immersion in the human condition, the road trip – highway robbers and all – felt downright relaxing, except for what seemed to us several near misses of head-on collisions, but which our driver assured us were all in a day’s work for him. Even the best roads have few signs, and many are barely wide enough for one vehicle. Passing means finding any wiggle room you can, sometimes pulling in your wing mirrors. As we drove we were barraged by pedestrians, oxen carrying their loads, crammed buses with people hanging out of the windows, sitting on the roofs or holding on to the rear bumpers, and the extraordinary Indian trucks, which are lovingly and beautifully decorated, often with little blinking Christmas-tree lights, tasselled front-window curtains, or hand-painted slogans like ‘India is Great’ in bold blue letters on a bright orange and yellow background.
We finally navigated to the caves, after driving through a village street so narrow that we could touch the walls of the houses on either side if we stuck our hands out of the window – and where surprised faces looked up from washing, cooking, napping and all manner of everyday activities to see the rare sight of a nice car with a family of foreigners basically driving through their living quarters. We were in a little-populated area by Indian standards, but still, there wasn’t a square inch of land that did not have a heavy human footprint. And we had long ago left power and running water behind.
The purpose of our journey was to find some rich fossil deposits in those caves that would tell us something about what India’s wildlife and the rest of the ecosystem were like before the country’s human population grew to its present density – among the highest in the world, with close to 1.3 billion people packed into an area about a third the size of the United States, where only 316 million people live. The part of India we were in was particularly interesting to us in that regard, because humans (or our closely related progenitors) had occupied that landscape for more than a hundred thousand years.
The fossils were there, as was an enormous python Emma revealed in the beam of her flashlight – it probably fed on some of the millions of bats whose eyes shone down from the roof of the cave. But truth be told, we were a lot more concerned with the tens of millions of people we had been seeing all around us. Because we knew that by the time Emma and Clara were our age, the average population density of the whole world’s habitable land will be about equal to India’s now. We wondered, what might we expect to see in a world like that?
Paul Ehrlich presented one vision in his classic book The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Perhaps more than any other single effort, that book brought human population growth into the public consciousness, in no small part because it painted a near-future world that looked like a slum in one of India’s most densely populated cities:
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago. My wife and daughter and I were returning to our hotel in an ancient taxi. The seats were hopping with fleas. The only functional gear was third. As we crawled through the city, we entered a crowded slum area. The temperature was well over 100, and the air was a haze of dust and smoke. The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect.
Although Paul (and his wife Anne, a powerhouse of facts, figures and logic also known for her own work on population growth) fully recognised that there is much more to India than that first impression, his point was a simple one: that night in Delhi was what he thought the world could look like if its population continued to grow as it had been doing in the years leading up to 1968. In fact, he thought there was a very