I could not think of Delhi as a single city because of the vast disconnect between so many areas. Nangloi, Najafgarh, Chirag Dilli, Gulabi Bagh, Lajpat Nagar, Karol Bagh, Darya Ganj, Vasant Kunj, Timarpur, Shalimar Bagh, Janakpuri, Lutyens’ Delhi and Chandni Chowk did not seem like areas that belonged to one and same city. (There was no place in Delhi I hadn’t seen as I delivered ration cards.) Some sights, however, were common everywhere: gentlemen in business attire munching on peeled radishes in winter, women knitting woolen sweaters, the smell of piping hot moongphali, barbers giving haircuts under the trees and the ear-experts under the same shade, digging out the dirt in people’s ears with metal ear-cleaners. In summer, pushcarts selling nimboo paani are visible everywhere.
From Timarpur, I moved to Kalyanvas in a corner of East Delhi where the government quarters for chaprasis of the Delhi administration were located. I later moved to Kalyanpuri and from there to Mayur Vihar. I often wondered about Khichripur, Shakarpur, Shahdara, Patparganj and Chanakyapuri. To me, Delhi seemed like a very curious mix of slums, villages and urban centers.
Ever since my friend, the poet Thirugnanam told me, “It’s a must-see, don’t miss it,” I began to seriously consider visiting the Mughal Gardens. The garden was open to the public only in December. I was bent on visiting the gardens, but I began to have second thoughts: I had only one day off in the week, so should that one day be spent at home or wandering outside? If I decided to spend it in the gardens, pending chores would have to be put on hold. But when Nalini herself expressed a desire to visit the Mughal Gardens, I couldn’t refuse. Maybe I should have kept my trap shut. Though it felt like a punishment for me to go out on a Sunday, Nalini looked forward to it.
I spent a whole Saturday thinking about whether or not to go on Sunday. For the past five weekends, we had been busy running around with work and consequently, some personal tasks were left undone. I hadn’t been able to read the Sunday newspapers which had accumulated and if we decided to go to the Mughal Gardens the next day, another paper would join the pile, but even that wasn’t too big a deal. I’d been writing a novel that was near completion and I felt I could use a Sunday to write a few more chapters. I didn’t know which task to postpone. Maybe I could ask Nalini to excuse me from helping her cook the evening meal, but it was unconscionable to expect a woman who came home tired from work in the evening to do the cooking, the cleaning and the laundry all by herself while her husband sits and reads the papers or writes a novel.
When I woke up the next morning, I was hoping Nalini would forget about the Mughal Gardens. For the past few days, neither of us had brought it up.
I made some tea and woke her up.
As she drank her tea, she said, “Let’s not go today. I don’t feel well. I’ll feel much better once I take an oil bath.”
How relieving! I gathered up all the newspapers to catch up on my reading. When the fish vendor arrived at ten, I couldn’t resist buying a kilo of fish from him even though I was short on cash.
“Half a kilo will do!” Nalini insisted.
“Never mind,” I said. “We hardly buy fish. Today we can eat to our heart’s content.”
Out of the fifty rupees I had set aside for my monthly expenses, I took twenty rupees and gave it to the fish vendor. Then I headed to the kitchen and chopped some vegetables and in my good mood, I attended to a few other chores as well.
At two, Nalini went to take her afternoon nap. When she woke up at five, she made tea and we went for a little walk. I would have preferred to finish that book I’d borrowed from the Central Secretariat Library. They’d already cancelled two of my cards and if this, the third one, got cancelled as well, Nalini wouldn’t hear of giving me another. (They were all her cards.)
The next Saturday, Nalini unexpectedly announced that she wanted to visit the gardens. Seeing how anxious she was to go, I couldn’t refuse her. Also, the gardens were closing in three days, so I couldn’t suggest deferring the visit.
When I got up to make our tea the next morning, I was shocked out of my wits to find the damn stove missing. I looked for it everywhere – in the living room, in the bedroom, even in the bathroom. Where on earth could it have gone? Completely baffled, I went and woke up Nalini.
“The neighbors asked for it,” she told me groggily.
I didn’t really feel like knocking on their door so early in the morning to ask for our stove back, but when I saw that their child was up, so I called the little girl and asked her to inform her parents that we needed our stove. Shit! That was idiotic of me. What if they sent the little girl back with the stove? I went to their house to ask for it myself.
I couldn’t even think of why people with a gas stove and two cylinders would want to borrow a kerosene stove.
“Thank you ji,” said the woman of the house as she returned the stove to me with a sheepish smile. “We had to borrow your stove yesterday because our gas cylinder wasn’t working.”
After she shut the door, I realized that I was holding a lit stove! What a bloody imbecile that woman was! Who gave a man a lit stove? Did she want me to explode? “Housewife burnt to death after stove bursts” was a headline that appeared with depressing regularity in the newspapers. Not only was the stove burning, but it was also coated with a thick black substance. When I turned the wick up, enough smoke to suffocate two people issued from it. It was only after examining the wick did I realize it was burnt. There was no kerosene in the tank either. They’d left the stove burning all night!
I shouted, “Nalini, the stove is not burning. It’s burnt. Get up and come here!”
Nalini came and explained to me that the neighbor had come and asked for the stove at eight the previous night. Since Nalini was done with the cooking, she gave it to her. The woman conveniently didn’t return it and Nalini had forgotten all about it. I’d come home late after watching a movie at the Hungarian Center. Had I known that our stove was in someone else’s house, I would have gone and got it back even if I had to bang on their door in the middle of the night. This was a Nutan stove which we’d bought with great difficulty. It had served us well all this while and now, it was ruined.
The stove in her lap, Nalini tried to draw out the wick, but it had burnt all the way down, so it was impossible.
“Why did you have to lend our stove to that woman in the first place? Don’t you remember how you suffered with that old stove? It frustrated you so much that you cried you’d hang yourself!” I yelled at her.
I didn’t think the neighbors were deserving of our charity. They were not do-gooders. Because our landlord rented out two portions to two separate parties (excluding us), the custody of the keys became a problem. One winter day, I returned home early from work as I was under the weather but I had to wait outside the house till six-thirty in the evening in the freezing cold. After this terrible experience, I asked the neighbor who worked for Godrej, if he could make me a couple of duplicate keys. I didn’t feel reluctant to ask him to do this for me as he was always asking if his guests could park their vehicles on my veranda.
After two days, he gave me the keys and a bill. As I had no change, I said I’d pay him in the morning.
“But I have to leave early for work tomorrow,” he whined.
“Oh, you work early on Sundays too?” I asked. “Fine. I’ll see how I can get some change and pay you.”
He’d been talking to me in English. As soon as I told him I’d pay him later, he switched to Hindi and said irritatedly, “Arrey, nahi bhaiya. Mujhe saat bajhe jaana hoga.”
“Teek! Ab dhe dhoonga,” I mumbled angrily, going to a shopkeeper to get change.
“Why did you give the stove to those chutiyas?” I asked. “If you’d borrowed her stove and ruined it, wouldn’t she yell at you? Call her here and show her what she’s done. She didn’t even have the courtesy to come and return the stove in the morning. I had to go and ask for it!”
The chutiy
a neighbors were Punjabis who thought that Madrasis are bewakoofs. Poor things! They have no idea of the wrath of a Tamil man. When I first came to Delhi, some Punjabis, assuming that I was a bewakoof, started mocking me.
“Keeya halley jee? Teeeeeek hooo?” they asked me.
“Oye, mere ko chutiya bana rahe ho, kya? Behenchod!” I nasally retorted and silenced them.
Most of the Tamils in Delhi are Brahmins. In general, they keep a low profile to stay out of trouble, but the North Indians take this for fear and try to bullyrag them.
When Periyar would come to our town and preach his famous Brahmin and snake sermon on the erected stage opposite the agraharam near the Perumal temple, his black shirts would go to the agraharam houses and ask for water and the Brahmins would warmly offer them even a potful.
The Delhiwalas have encountered only the Tamil Brahmins.
Within a few days of arriving in Delhi, Pasricha, a colleague, asked me quite seriously, “You Madrasis are so short. How the hell do you manage to do… it?”
To help me understand what “it” was, he curled the fingers of his right hand, brought them near his navel and started moving them up and down.
I didn’t get rattled or offended. I decided to play the game.
I asked him in return, “How long has it been since you last bent and looked at your dick with your own eyes? With a potbelly like yours, I’m assuming you have to pull your drawers down in front of the mirror and look at it. If you can do it with such a big potbelly, what makes you think I might not be able to do it?”
Pasricha’s face deflated like a pricked balloon. To take the sting out of my retort, I told him a story.
“Once upon a time, there was an orphan called Subramoni. He was so frail that one thought he would get blown away if you sneezed near him. He was very short too. He would go wherever he was summoned and do whatever he was asked and eat whatever he was given. At night, he would curl up in the Pillaiyar temple.
“One day, a bus traveling at top speed on the highway ran over a male from the village and crushed his face beyond recognition. A little boy who had witnessed the accident rushed to the village to break the news.
“‘I couldn’t identify him, but his penis was as long as a donkey’s,’ he said.
“On hearing this, all the women in the village started wailing, ‘Ayyo, our Subramoni is dead!’ and they all ran to the site of the accident.”
Parischa laughed out loud, his potbelly bouncing.
Nalini tried again with the wick of the Nutan stove. She was struggling.
“I can’t seem to get this one wick out,” she said. “Why don’t you try?”
Despite my best efforts, I couldn’t do it. She persisted and eventually succeeded. Her fingers were all blistered.
Still, the stove continued to smoke and did not emit a blue flame like it used to.
When I saw the blisters on Nalini’s fingers, I was reminded of my mother who had never set eyes on a kerosene stove. Her life was spent beside a firewood stove. The karuvelam trees in Nagore were felled for firewood. These trees were thorny, so the branches had to be carefully cut and chopped into smaller pieces. A dark brown liquid would ooze when the wood was burning. Even if the twigs were dry, one’s eyes would sting. Cakes of dung were also used with the wood to fuel the stove. Smoke would fill the house and my mother would divert it with a blowpipe. Her eyes would sting, redden and water.
We were a family of eight and my mother had to serve us three meals daily. She had to grind a large amount of idli batter and then go to the pond to wash all our clothes. Then, she had to fetch water in pots from the taps for household needs and for the women’s baths. She, and all village wives, had hard lives.
My thoughts were broken by Nalini’s voice.
“We needn’t go to the Mughal Gardens today,” she said. However, I insisted we go for if we didn’t, we’d have to wait another year.
The gardens were as expansive as a city. There were some residential quarters hither and thither for the chaprasis who worked in the President’s mansion.
“These people get proper gas connections,” Nalini told me. “And not just gas. All their basic needs in life are properly met.”
Even our needs would have been met if only I’d grabbed the opportunity that had presented itself three years ago when I was working under Khanna as a stenographer. The notes that the lieutenant governor received from the deputy commissioners were laden with so many errors that reading them was an unimaginable ordeal. This was because most of the stenographers hailed from villages and were only familiar with the English alphabet, nothing else. My typewritten notes to the lieutenant governor, unlike theirs, were perfect.
One day, Khanna called me and said, “Congratulations!”
“Why?”
“The LG wants to meet you.”
If the LG wanted to meet me, it could only mean that he wanted me to be his stenographer.
“Do you know what a quantum leap this is for a stenographer?” Khanna asked. “The LG’s notes go straight to Indira ji and that woman knows ability when she sees it. If you work as Indira ji’s secretary for some time, she will make you a Member of Parliament and from there, it’s a cakewalk to ministership. Udhay ji, you are going to become a minister soon, mark my words! Go see the LG at once!”
Instead of feeling excited when he told me all of this, my heart sank as I was not at all an ambitious man. All I ever wanted was to be known as a writer.
What will become of me if I become the LG’s steno? I thought. Should I sacrifice my writing for the sake of a gas connection and government quarters in Baba Kharag Singh Margh in the heart of Delhi?
I went to see the LG in his chambers and he repeated what Khanna said.
With folded hands, I told him, “Forgive me, sir! I am only a poor writer and a wanderer in Mandi House. I work here only to support myself financially.”
The LG understood. People of his station don’t have the time or the energy to persuade people like me to do something they were clearly not interested in doing. All because I’d refused that opportunity that was served to me on a gold platter, Nalini had to struggle with the Nutan stove. I looked at her fingers and sighed. She made a big mistake when she married a writer.
There were as many cops as there were flowers in the Mughal Gardens but they must have been napping or on leave when the President’s grandson shot and killed the migratory birds that were visiting. The newspapers had reported that hundreds of dead birds littered the footpaths of the Parliament House.
The lawns were well manicured. Prize-winning rose bushes flanked the footpath. One plant, that was just an inch off the ground, had a bloom the size of a human head. Most of the plants had no leaves but only thick stems. To me, the stems appeared like skeletons of dead mongrel dogs. In another place, two fountains sprung from a flower vase on a huge plate. On either side of the fountain was a walkway paved with red stones. If a person stepped onto the grass, screeching whistles immediately rent the air. A young woman struck a pose near the fountain for a photograph. A policeman rushed to her side and said, “Behenji, aisa nahin hai. Grass mein mat aana.” The woman, who had been smiling for the photograph, frowned and went back to her husband.
The place was crowded and the people seemed to be moving at a snail’s pace because of the picture-snapping folks. After an eternal wait, we were able to view the fountain. It had five tiers, each one adorned with flowers of a particular color with paper-textured petals. Beyond the fountain, there was a forest clearing where more quarters stood and the clearing was followed by the exit.
On the way back, I noticed that every house in the clearing had its own garden. I took a look and was amused to see a cauliflower plant and some slender shoots that, Nalini told me, were garlic plants.
After I returned home, I was plunged into deep thought about my life on Mall Road. I remembered the Majnu-
ka-Tilla forest where there were no manicured lawns, whistles or neat rows of roses, but only free-living trees, shrubs, thorny thickets and flowers. Could the Mughal Gardens, in all their perfect manmade symmetry, ever compare to that wild forest?
When I lived on Mall Road, Sugatan and I used to visit Majnu-ka-Tilla’s Tibetan refugee camp and have tang and buffalo meat. Tang is a Tibetan wine made from barley. It got its name from Princess Wencheng of the Tang dynasty. It is customarily served by beautiful Tibetan women.
Note: The following notes were written in the November of 1984. None of the events narrated and described here are fictitious or exaggerated.
The house in Mayur Vihar, Delhi, was the eighth house I lived in. Every house I lived in presented its own problem. None of them were independent houses, they were all sub-let and most of the owners lived in the same building. One of the owners was a devoted Ram bhakt. He would wake up every morning – hail, rain or apocalypse – and sing bhajans to Ram. During winter, all the glass windows would be closed which meant his loud chants – Om Jagadeesa Hari! Swami Jaya Jagadeesa Hari! – would echo off the walls. Like his robotic chanting voice was not irritating enough, there was musical accompaniment too – his wife played the dholak and echoed his bhajans. The moment he started, we the entire residential body would wake up with a jolt and submit our helpless ears to this cacophonous torture. The weather rendered it impossible for us to escape by slipping out of the premises.
In another house, there was a problem with the way the toilet smelled because the house owner and his wife did not pour enough water in the toilet bowl. (But they were very particular about washing their hands clean.) I approached the owner and told him that the stink was overpowering and unbearable. I requested him to pour more water in the toilet.
“Toilets stink, shit stinks” he replied indifferently. “What’s so surprising about that?”
Then, he went on to give me a painfully long lecture about the scarcity of water in villages whose dwellers suffer immensely while the urban lot was busy wasting water by the gallon.
Marginal Man Page 34