The Great Indian Currency Scramble: Digital Money
Ravi Agrawal · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2019
An hour before dawn on November 8, 2016—a Tuesday—Sarvesh Kumar woke abruptly from what had been restless sleep. As he propped himself up on his charpoy, he told me, his eyes adjusted to the darkness of his tiny room, tucked away in a slum near New Delhi’s prosperous Vasant Kunj neighborhood. It was, he recalls, pitch black. Kumar’s inability to see enhanced his other senses. His ears picked up a chorus of mournful howls from the stray dogs roaming the streets some distance away. A few seconds later, he began to take account of a gentle rumble of snoring. Bandhana, his wife, was still asleep beside him. The next stimulation to hit him, he said, was that of smell: they had saved leftovers from dinner in a small dish, placed on the floor in one corner of the bedroom. (There was no kitchen, no fridge, no cupboards.) The smell of stale dal and starchy rice lingered in the air, mingling with the stench of urine from the latrine right outside. The apartment’s only toilet had no working flush, just a mug and a bucket with which to pour water. At night, Kumar’s father—who slept in the next room—would get up to urinate in the dark, sitting on his haunches and peeing all over the cramped toilet floor. Kumar was only twenty-two years old but looked much older. He was developing a hunch. His gray shirt and trousers—both made of the same rough, fraying cotton—seemed to fall over his limbs like oversized bags. Life was wearing him down. Kumar was working sixteen-hour shifts driving a three-wheeled auto-rickshaw, seven days a week. Ever since he had gotten married and brought Bandhana to join him in the city, his expenses had ballooned. His father, meanwhile, was working less and less, his health and eyesight beginning to fail him. Asha Ram Kumar worked as a chauffeur for a family nearby in Vasant Kunj. He had recently bumped their car into a lamppost. Any day now, Kumar told me, his father would lose his job.