by Dave Prager
The first time we smelled it was during our first night in Gurgaon. We were jet-lagged and bedraggled when we entered Hamilton Court, a massive apartment complex built for the kings and queens of the new Indian economy, where my company had rented a flat to house Jenny and me and all the other expat employees they expected to imminently hire. We dragged our suitcases past the children running about the walled compound and the couples walking laps around the building, through the featureless lobby and up the elevator to the four-bedroom, 4,500-square-foot duplex on the very top floor. The master bedroom, which had been earmarked for Jenny and me, was a 700-squarefoot concrete echo chamber. It was bigger than our entire apartment in Brooklyn. And it was completely empty except for a bed, two chairs, a small television and the smell.
The smell got worse as the evening wore on. It was so bad that I woke in the middle of the night convinced that poison gases were leaking from the pipes. This is no exaggeration: I actually shook Jenny awake and hissed, “That smell! Do you smell it?! I think there’s some sort of gas leak!” We were the first people ever to sleep in this brand-new bedroom, and I had visions of Ratan, the apartment’s live-in servant, finding us choked to death as he came to deliver our morning mangoes. What else but some sort of terrible plumbing malfunction could explain that enveloping odor of rot and death?
It was two in the morning, but I nevertheless forced Jenny out of bed and into one of the other empty bedrooms in the flat. The smell was there, too, but not quite as asphyxiating. And that was where Ratan was surprised to find us the next morning: Jenny grumpy, but both of us alive.
As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with the pipes. That was just how winter smelled. And we learned that the smell comes on every fall, ushered in by Diwali fireworks that create a haze of smoke that seems thick enough to choke out a city-wide infestation of flying insects—which, during the second Diwali we celebrated, actually happened. The smell is the aroma of cow-dung cooking fires, of coal-fired power plants, of brick kilns that almost outnumber cows in rural Uttar Pradesh, of the dead leaves and plastic chai cups that tent-dwellers and security guards burn to keep warm, and of Delhi’s millions of cars, trucks and motorcycles that haven’t yet been converted to run on natural gas. The smell comes at night; daytime provides a respite. And every day as dusk would fall, we would hope that maybe the weather had finally shifted, that maybe the smell had finally moved on to Rajasthan or something. But then the sun would set and the smell would rise, permeating every corner of the city just like those flying insects did, except the smell couldn’t be dissipated by swatting at it. When morning came, the cycle would repeat, much to the dismay of the city’s sixteen million lungs.
Until the seasons changed. And the heat began.
Delhi’s winter surprised us by existing. Packing our suitcases back in Brooklyn, we anticipated eleven months of unbroken heat and one month of unbroken rain. But by the midpoint of our first December we’d purchased two electric heaters and two thick wool blankets to wrap around our shoulders during those moments when we’d exit the narrow arc of air that the electric heaters kept warm. And still the drafts radiated through our windows and wrapped icily around our souls. Walking upon the marble floor—which was intended to echo the air conditioning in the summer—was a barefoot trek across an icy lake, despite the three pairs of socks I would be wearing. (I couldn’t find any slippers my size in the market.) Going to the bathroom made us wish our flat had a squat toilet—anything other than sitting on that icy seat.
The dropping temperature had been a gradual revelation. At first, we only needed a comforter for our bed. Then we only needed a sweater around the house. Before long, we were buying hats, and then scarves, and then gloves, and then jackets, and then those electric heaters that we’d also use to thaw our bathroom—without the heater, the bathroom was more useful as a walk-in freezer. Late night rides in open-air autorickshaws made us regret not leasing a car. Huddled together in the back seat, staring at the driver’s back through our own fogged breath, we’d envy the surreptitious warming sips he’d take from the small bottle in his breast pocket, no matter the impact they had on his driving.
But winter also brought splendor to Delhi. Driving down M.G. Road on the coldest mornings, segments of the Metro would disappear into the vanishing point, majestically suspended in the sky, more massive and beautiful than they ever seemed on a clear day. The air, thick and still, would be broken only by brilliant flashes of blue as kingfishers flitted across the road. Passing through Gurgaon, the skyscrapers would be hidden behind gray clouds, an invisible presence somewhere beyond the black silhouettes of the electrical towers.
Beautiful as it was, though, this fog was trouble. Every winter morning the newspapers told of canceled trains and flights forced to land in Jaipur and wait on the tarmac for half a day until conditions improved. To combat this smog, Delhi had by 2003 forced nearly all its buses, autorickshaws and taxis to convert to compressed natural gas, reducing air pollution considerably—except that Delhiites added 1,000 new vehicles to the road every day, increasing the total from 3.6 million vehicles in 2001 to 4.8 million in 2006.1 The benefits of CNG were lost in the volume of new traffic.
And worse than travel delays was the toll this pollution took on health: India Today said that Delhi was “India’s asthma capital.” By New Year’s, it seemed like all of Delhi was coughing at once. The rattling hacks of drivers in desperate need of antibiotics shattered the serenity of our foggy rides home.
The weather never went below freezing in Delhi. So it never snowed. Which meant Delhi had all of the misery of winter but none of the fun. But winter was relatively short; so by February the nights were comfortable, the days were pleasant, the winter fog was no longer delaying midnight flights until 6 a.m., and the air was slightly more breathable. With the April heat just around the corner, spring was a frantic rush to squeeze in as many outdoor activities as possible: walks in parks, rooftop barbeques, trips to desert cities in Rajasthan.
The heat began on schedule. And it ushered in a series of dust storms that blew into our house through the same loosely fitted doors and windows that the winter drafts found so conducive to making our refrigerator redundant. A series of springtime storms washed the dust off the trees, quickly transforming the roads into mud that would just as quickly dry in the sun and turn back into tree-coating dust—but not before hopelessly snarling traffic.
And then the spring rains stopped, and only the heat remained.
That was when both my mother and Jenny’s father began reading to us from the global weather forecasts printed in their local newspapers, each independently conniving to convince us to move back home. “I see it’ll be 110 degrees for you today,” they would both say, “but gee, you know, it’s only seventy-three in Brooklyn . . .”
By their numbers, April, May and June appeared to be the hottest months. But July and August were worse. Because that’s when the humidity kicked in. I couldn’t complain too much, as my daily exposure was limited to those moments I’d leave my air-conditioned taxi to dash into my air-conditioned home or air-conditioned office. Jenny had it worse: she commuted by autorickshaw, so reaching her air-conditioned office necessitated a sweaty crawl through unmoving traffic, with her scarf draped around her mouth to filter the dust as well as draped over her arm to block the sun and below her neck to dissuade the driver from trying to ogle cleavage she wasn’t revealing anyway.
Still, we complained about the heat much less than we complained about the cold. That’s because we knew we were among the fortunate few in Delhi who were never far from an air conditioner, and also because we were even more fortunate to live in Hauz Khas, which had fairly reliable electricity. Power in our neighborhood failed relatively infrequently and then only for an hour or two at a time, and our flat’s backup power was sufficient to keep our fans whirring until power returned. As long as we didn’t turn on too many lights. Compare that to our friends Scott and Sally, an American couple from Chicago who lived in Shan
ti Niketan, a few miles and a whole infrastructure west of us: they spent many of their summer nights staring at silent air-conditioners as the (batterypowered) bedside clock ticked slowly towards morning.
But while the heat and humidity wilted us expats, making us pine for a return to the British tradition of moving the capital’s business to cool mountain towns for the summer, native Delhiites endured with proud stoicism. That’s because they knew something about the humidity that we didn’t: it meant the monsoon was on its way.
The monsoon is storied in both ancient and modern Indian culture. It’s a giver of life. It brings the rains that feed the crops that feed the nation. The monsoon begins in Kerala in June and meanders its way across the subcontinent, a beloved air mass that’s bounced around the country by ocean currents or winds off the Himalayas or whatever other global weather patterns magically ensure it touches every part of the country. The newspapers predict its arrival, debate its strength, and warn of a disappointment for farmers; and the whole of the city scans the skies in the mornings, hope rising with every cloud, every breeze stirring anticipation and joy in Delhi hearts.
Our friend Penny said it best: “I didn’t realize why people here loved rain so much until the first summer the rains refused to come.”
But eventually, they did come. For us, the first rain brought water spilling into our living room, thanks to the clogged drain on our terrace; we plugged the gaps under the sliding wooden door with our clean towels and sacrificed a few paperbacks to lift the air-conditioners’ power stabilizers off the soggy floor. And we were so engrossed in mourning the laundry (which we didn’t do ourselves anyway) that we nearly missed noticing that the rest of the city had turned joyful eyes to the sky. We looked out the window, beheld the scene, and then pulled out our umbrellas and went down to the street to watch. Children ran merrily through the puddles. Men held babies in the downpour. Laughing women adjusted soaked saris that clung to their curves like Bollywood song numbers come to life. Motorcycle riders smiled despite their soaking, enjoying the coolness with the knowledge that the sun would soon return to make everything too hot again.
The monsoon delighted all: the adults, the children, the farmers, the mosquitoes and the foliage. Unfortunately, the pavement in the streets also wanted to get in on the action: like a boy tilting his face into the rain, the roads would crack wide open to absorb as much water as they could. But while the boy would eventually close his mouth and move on to school, the roads didn’t stop: cracks widened into potholes that swelled into chasms. Water collected in puddles that became ponds and then lakes. Sinkholes transformed whole stretches of road into impromptu Indian Oceans.
This had a negative effect on traffic. And this effect was compounded by the apparent fact that the city saw it as futile to repair its infrastructure while there were still more rains to come.
But potholes weren’t the worst of it. When the run-off would overwhelm the drainage, roadside gutters would overflow two lanes beyond their banks. Sometimes entire roads would be cut off by floodwater, as was the case with Aurobindo Marg during one downpour, when a flood stretched from the far end of the street all the way to our building’s front door, a hundred meters away. (We grabbed our umbrellas and went out to watch the chaos; as the water receded, manhole covers appeared on the road dozens of feet from the holes they’d covered—the pressure of the run-off backing up in the sewers had literally blown the cast-iron lids into the air.) In Gurgaon, whole stretches of road and pavement that had washed away early in the monsoon remained that way weeks later, forcing commuters to drive over rubble hillocks and through rock-filled gulches to enter the Millennium City.
When the monsoon ended, the heat returned. But it was feeble. We weren’t frightened of it any more. We’d seen its worst and the heat knew it. Its post-monsoon effort was a last gasp, a pathetic attempt to salvage some dignity before collapsing into the coolness of fall.
As with spring, fall was a time for outdoor activities, for daytime football without fear of dehydration, for enjoying the terrace on evenings when the breeze blew the gathering pollution into Rajasthan. And by November, the nightly fog was again rolling in, the nightly flights were again being delayed and, as we celebrated our one-year anniversary in Delhi, the smell and the cycle began anew.
But back in that first morning in our new apartment, we were still blissfully unaware of the cold that awaited us, the heat we couldn’t imagine, the monsoon we didn’t understand; we were still even unaware of the household mysteries that awaited us just outside our bedroom door. And we would have remained innocent at least until after our showers had we not heard the next sound to join our Delhi morning chorus: our doorbell rang.
I put on my clothes, exited the bedroom, and opened the front door to reveal a woman I didn’t know who began shouting at me in a language I didn’t recognize. Tugging her headscarf with a humility belied by her shouting, she mimed shapes I couldn’t discern and pointed emphatically out to the terrace.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. “I don’t understand.”
More shouting, waving, gesturing and pointing, all punctuated by sharp tugs of her headscarf.
“I’m sorry!” I told her. “No Hindi!”
The woman paused as Jenny came to the door and stood behind me. As we regarded her faded mustard sari and the big brass ring in her nose, she regarded us: a pretty blonde with brown eyes standing next to a taller, slightly goofy looking guy who’d clearly gotten lucky in the spouse department. Our puzzled faces were tinged with just the slightest amount of panic. “No Hindi,” I repeated again.
She frowned at me. “Something something?” she asked in her language.
“No,” I said, relieved. “No Hindi.”
She threw her head back and laughed. And then she resumed shouting, and she continued shouting, and she wouldn’t stop shouting. So Jenny and I decided to try a different tactic.
“Aha!” I said, nodding with as much vigorous sincerity as I could muster. “Haan, haan! Yes, yes!”
The woman grinned with triumph and marched down the stairs.
We watched after her, shook our heads and closed the door.
The next morning, the doorbell rang again. More shouting, and more gesturing on her part. Again, neither Jenny nor I could wave or mime well enough to convince her that we didn’t speak her language.
As the week progressed, she grew increasingly frustrated with our inability to comply with her plainly stated requests, and we grew increasingly frustrated with the scene at the door.
When we stopped answering the doorbell before noon, she started ringing it at one.
Finally, our landlord Shankar explained it: she was Shilpa, and she was there to collect our garbage, which we were supposed to leave for her on the terrace. For this, we were to pay her 300 rupees a month, plus a bonus on Diwali. And Shilpa wasn’t going to let us forget it.
Shankar didn’t ask what we’d been doing with our garbage up until that moment. Which was good, because we’d spent our first week carting our trash a few hundred meters up Aurobindo Marg to a dumping station that had been constructed in the parking lot of the Swift Car Rental company. Swift’s workers had stared at us each time, as if they’d never seen anyone dumping garbage into the garbage dumping station before. Now we realized that they’d probably never seen anyone dumping garbage who wasn’t a maid.
Shilpa would ring our doorbell every morning that we didn’t leave a bag for her, always chattering away with no acknowledgement that we had no idea what she said. We even tried practising our Hindi on her. “Hamlog Hindi nahin samehajta hoon,” we would tell her, reciting what we’d learned in our lessons as phonetically as we could. “We don’t understand Hindi.”
“Nahin?” she’d cock her head and regard us as if she understood. But each time we were about to rejoice at this communications breakthrough, she’d laugh and then continue her indecipherable lecture anew.
Shilpa provided the garbage-hauling and stair-sweeping services for all the fla
ts in our bungalow, which is what our landlord called our style of building. It consisted of six units on four levels that shared a driveway and a stairwell, plus a seventh flat with a separate entrance around the corner on the main road, three stories below our living-room terrace. We never saw any signs of life in that flat, but during our final Christmas party, one of our guests knocked a wine glass onto their property below. When I went down the next morning to clean it up, the shattered glass was already gone. Which meant that somebody did actually live there, and that his only impression of Jenny and me was that we were vandals who threw trash in their driveway and didn’t apologize for it.
The other ground-floor unit, with its entrance just off our driveway, belonged to Dr. T., a throat surgeon in his sixties who boasted to us about having both taught and practiced in New York state. I’d periodically come down in the morning to find him berating my taxi drivers about the sprawling manner in which they parked. Most of our conversations with him were in passing, and almost every single one ended with an invitation for a drink that I always declined—not because I didn’t want to get to know him, but because Dr. T. had a terrible timing. He was always inviting me to join him right when I was coming home from work late and just wanted to collapse into my dinner, or when I was actually coming home from work early and wanted to take full advantage of that miracle.
Just past the entrance to Dr. T.’s flat was a swinging iron gate that was locked at night to protect our bungalow’s central stairwell from the neighborhood’s nocturnal evils. Its padlock was old-fashioned and difficult to open even in the best of circumstances; had there been a fire in the building, I could imagine all of us residents piled up behind it, our faces squished into the gate as we shouted at whoever’s trembling hands were fumbling to insert the key while Dr. T. shouted from beyond the gate that we should have replaced that padlock years ago.