Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  Beyond that gate, past the ancient electrical meters nailed haphazardly to an equally ancient piece of mounted plywood, was the stairwell. It was our bungalow’s central artery, linking all our individual cells, feeding us our daily ration of maids and deliverymen and chance encounters and overheard gossip. The first landing was stained with grease from where Anya’s dogs slept during the day, when the gate was open and they could sneak in. The second landing boasted a nondescript gray door, behind which was our landlord’s office. A businessman in his late fifties, Shankar lived in Vasant Vihar but worked in this converted flat alongside a handful of other men and a cacophony of computers, contraptions and piles of paper. We never really understood quite what they did, even though we entered his office a few times every month to ask him a question, report something broken, or hand him our rent check.

  Up one more set of stairs was the only landing with two doors. Behind the door on the right was a flat that stood empty almost our entire time in Delhi. One day we were surprised to notice activity as we passed by: noises coming from inside, luggage resting on the landing and, oddly, newspapers stuffed into the crack under the door. A few days later, we met a man coming out of the flat who told us he worked ‘in the films’ in Mumbai; we shook hands and never saw him again. From then, there were no further signs of activity until shortly before we moved out, when a team of remodelers began to gut the entire place, working for weeks but showing no progress visible from the front door that they always left open. Their only clear accomplishment was to brick up an alcove in the stairwell adjacent to this flat and then tear down the wall behind the new bricks—a land grab that added ten square feet to the flat, and stole ten square feet from the stairwell.

  Across the landing was Anya’s flat. Its door was labeled with the name and military rank of her late grandfather, who’d owned the flat until he passed away; inside, fading photos of old army regiments still covered its walls. A single woman in her early thirties, Anya worked as a freelance Japanese translator, speaking glowingly of her love of sushi and everything else Japanese. She was the first person in the building we met after Shankar, and she became our conduit to the neighborhood gossip. But it’s fortunate that we became friendly at all, seeing as how I managed to mortally offend her during our very first conversation, which took place on the driveway as she was feeding her dogs. When she mentioned in passing that she liked south Indian food, I asked her in all my innocent expat ignorance, “Oh, are you from south India?”

  She looked at me crossly. “Do I look like I’m from south India?”

  “I . . . don’t know,” I stammered. “I, like, just got here.”

  Anya had a razor-sharp wit that often left me sputtering and Jenny laughing. She was a wealth of knowledge who helped us understand the culture around us, from the trivial to the profound to the deeply catty. She taught us that one Japanese motorcycle company broke into the Indian market only after inventing “sari guards” to protect women sitting side-saddle from getting their clothes tangled in the gears. She regaled us with stories of the Delhi in which she grew up, a city that even ten years prior to our arrival had “no grocery stores and no takeaway restaurants.” And she told us stories of Mr. and Mrs. M.

  Mr. and Mrs. M. lived one landing up from Anya and one landing below us. Mr. M. possessed a shock of white hair that fell behind his ears and down to his neck in a manner that, in America, would only have been appropriate for an ex-rockstar or a mad scientist. But as amazing as his hair was, we hardly noticed it, because our eyes were drawn inevitably to his spectacular white mustache that contrasted so heroically with his dark skin. He was a formidable-looking man with a formidable-sounding voice that could be heard up and down the stairwell, through doors, around corners and sometimes in different neighborhoods. Conversations with him were intensely one-sided: whatever opinion or fact we tried to inject was either steamrolled over or interpreted as confirmation of his worldview, regardless of whether it actually was. His wife, Mrs. M., was a frail woman, a tiny figure with an exaggerated tremble who, despite weighing what seemed to be no more than fifty pounds, nevertheless managed to successfully walk Izabelle—their beautiful golden retriever who exuberantly jumped after anybody who passed by—without ever being dragged down the stairs and around the neighborhood.

  Mr. M. took a dim view of his fellow Indians, I’m sad to say; and he never grew tired of sharing his dim views with us. Sitting on his terrace in the mornings, he’d spot me when I’d step out to see if my taxi had arrived. If it hadn’t, he’d gesture angrily at the empty parking spot and shout how one couldn’t trust “any of them,” initially meaning taxi drivers but quickly broadening his thesis to encompass his countrymen at large. “Indians are very cunning!” he’d shout at me and the rest of the neighborhood. “Very cunning, very selfish! They park like this!” He’d wave his arms at the nearest parked car. “Not even God can help!”

  Mr. M. was always very friendly and helpful to us, and it pains me to present him as a caricature; but almost every interaction we had with him was succeeded by Jenny and me turning to each other and saying, “I can’t believe he said that.” His heart was in the right place: he just wanted everyone around him to meet his standards of civilization. So from his perch upon his balcony, he waged a one-man war on street-level transgressions. He’d yell from above at cars that parked sloppily, at taxi drivers who had the audacity to wait downstairs for me instead of coming up and ringing my bell, at autorickshaw drivers who didn’t help Jenny carry her bags, at boys spitting, at guards sleeping and, of course, at men urinating. Anya told us that she’d seen him on numerous occasions run downstairs and chase peeing men away from the object of their affliction, hollering at their receding backs as they duck-walked away.

  Perhaps because he spent his whole day making enemies from above, Mr. M. was very concerned about the neighborhood’s security situation. “You can have your stone-clad house, but outside it’s worse than Harlem!” he told us. One day he and Mrs. M. grew convinced that someone was stealing light bulbs out of our stairwell, so he unilaterally instituted a policy of padlocking the front gate at 7 p.m., right after Shankar’s employees left, instead of at midnight as it had been up until then. Unlocking the padlock was difficult enough from the inside; unlocking it from the outside, as I now had to do every night when I arrived home from work, required contorting my wrist to ease the reversed key into the hole, pressing my face against the dusty iron gate and usually dropping my belongings in the process.

  Mr. M. periodically shared his political views with us. He praised George W. Bush and worried during the American election that Barack Obama was “a secret Muslim.” And as our time in India grew short and we began considering a number of Southeast Asian cities as our next home, he had some advice: “You should go to Singapore, because in Kuala Lumpur are the Muslims.”

  With the guilt that one feels when brushing off an elderly relative, Jenny and I politely squirmed out of Mr. M.’s invitations for coffee, mostly because we didn’t want to spend our brief weekend leisure time being told how to treat our maid and what “the real problem with Indians” was. But on the day we moved out for good, we did take a moment to say goodbye. At first, we mutually lamented the small amount of time we’d had to get to know each other; but then Mr. M. made it clear that he’d gotten to know us in other ways. “I read that too much wine can cause cancer,” he told us, raising his white eyebrows poignantly, clearly referring to the empty bottles we’d leave once or twice a week on the terrace for Shilpa to collect (and, as we were now learning, for him to scrutinize). He looked at us critically. “But . . . you’re young, and life is exciting for you right now.”

  Up one more landing past Mr. and Mrs. M. were two doors. One led to a large, empty roof terrace with clotheslines that we used to dry our sheets; and the other, with a horseshoe nailed atop the frame, led to our flat. A small terracotta Ganesh on the wall—the only other decoration on that landing—smiled patiently at us every time we opened the door to
answer Shilpa’s morning knocks. Shilpa’s visits had become part of Ganesh’s morning symphony as well as ours, joining the honking horns and sweeping brooms and shouts of overbearing neighbors and murmur of armed men.

  As in Brooklyn, it all became background. Even the paellawallah’s morning rounds stopped waking us up with hunger pains. Although that’s also because we found out he was shouting “ka-baaaaaaaaad-ai,” which meant he was looking for old newspapers and empty bottles to buy. An entrepreneurial garbage collector, in other words. In fact, “he” was probably a “they”—a number of different men bicycled through the neighborhood every morning, shouting their intention to buy rags or cans, or to sharpen knives, or to make keys. And while at first we couldn’t understand how people could equate their cries with garbage removal or on-the-spot button affixing, we realized there was an American parallel: Indians visiting America in summertime must be equally baffled that the music emanating from speakers atop a white van can suddenly cause all the children in the neighborhood to run to their parents begging for ice cream money. The kabadiwallah has combined the business model of Brooklyn bottle collectors with the marketing strategy of the Mister Softee truck. Only to our wistful Western ears did it sound like a Mediterranean delight.

  Still, the paellawallah idea is a good one. And we claim no patent on it. Some reader of this book will start this service and make a fortune, at least once he figures out where to source cuttlefish in India, and once people stop trying to sell him their scrap paper.

  1. http://urbanemissions.info/simair/SIM-22-2009-AQManagement-Delhi.html

  2

  Delhi: The Sprawled City

  On my very first night in Delhi, jet lag and foot pain woke me at 3 a.m. This was in my company’s rented apartment in the Greater Kailash-II neighborhood at the beginning of my trial month in the country, eight days before Jenny would join me from New York and three months before we would move to our flat in Hauz Khas. My feet were a mess of blisters because the brief neighborhood tour I’d embarked upon after arriving from the airport had turned into an hours-long trek once I’d gotten hopelessly and panic-inducingly lost.

  It’s embarrassing to recall how frightened I was while wandering those unfamiliar streets. But this is the truth: those hours I spent searching for my flat were the most overwhelming of my life. My terror can be blamed perhaps on jet lag and naïveté (I had traveled without sleep for twenty hours to a country I’d never realistically imagined I’d visit), but it was compounded by the fact that I had no Indian currency, I couldn’t get my bank card to work, I carried no mobile phone, I was wearing no sunblock, I had no water, and I could discern absolutely no logic in the layout of the hot streets. Dogs glared at me as I encroached on their shade for respite. Monkeys swung menacingly overhead. Crows perched like death, cawing curses as I passed. Every vehicle on the street seemed to be honking at me. And every person I asked for help pointed me in a different direction.

  It took me hours to find my flat again. My neck was as bright and as red as, well, a tourist who didn’t wear sunblock. Once safely inside, though, my throbbing fear devolved into quivering malaise and hunger crept forward to assert primacy in my hierarchy of needs, compelling me to knock on my new landlord’s door and humbly borrow money for food. And then I hobbled to the market, ate a delightful meal, followed my carefully noted route back home, and gave in to exhaustion even before the sun had set.

  Now, eight hours later, I was wide awake and staring at the unfamiliar ceiling. My company had offered me this assignment in India just two weeks prior; and in the rush of paperwork and vaccination and sunblock purchasing that followed, the full weight of my commitment hadn’t set in. It was there, in that hard bed, with my sunburned neck gingerly lifted from the pillow and medicated gel slathered on my feet, where angst began to bear down on me. If I were a religious man, I would have prayed for a sign.

  Instead, I turned on the television. And there was my sign anyway: The Simpsons was on. And it was the episode in which Homer moved to India.

  As unlikely as this coincidence may sound, it’s the absolute truth: it was 3 a.m., I was in India, and so was Homer Simpson. Springfield Nuclear Power Plant had outsourced its jobs to Bangalore, and Homer was here to train the workers. Against all odds, he was so successful that he was promoted to manage the entire plant.

  This, somehow, was exactly what I needed to see: if Homer Simpson could succeed in India, so could I.

  Though the rest of the episode descended into nonsense (while Mr. Burns rafted down the Ganges with a group of corpses, Homer declared himself a Hindu god, and the rest of the Simpsons journeyed upriver Apocalypse Now-style to stop his madness), I’d already gotten my inspiration from it. I continued watching American sitcoms (I couldn’t believe they showed Friends in India!) until the sun rose. And then I opened up my map of Delhi, put my finger on the point towards which the city’s main roads imprecisely converged, and said to myself, “There is where I will go.” I walked outside, hailed an autorickshaw for the very first time, and went straight to Old Delhi.

  Nine hours later, I returned home with a deep love for India and the perspective to appreciate how peaceful and quiet Greater Kailash-II actually was.

  For both Jenny and me, Old Delhi became our favorite part of the city. Old Delhi is what Westerners imagine when we imagine India: narrow streets, bustling alleys, pressing crowds, bleating animals, and ancient buildings with sculpted stone lattices still visible behind jury-rigged aluminium siding. Humanity’s technological progress can be charted in the Gordian canopy of cables strung overhead, with frayed telephone lines hanging limp like severed jungle vines over inch-thick power cables, and mobile phone masts competing with minarets to block whatever sunlight still trickles down. Every corner turned in Old Delhi revealed something we never imagined we’d see: a monkey fight, for instance, or a metal trunk full of severed goat legs. Women in black burqas sat stoically on bicycle rickshaws steered by impossibly thin men in impossibly thin shirts. Porters lugged burlap sacks, bent halfway by the weight on their backs but still not sweating half as much as we tourists taking their pictures. A right turn opens up to a deserted mosque. A left turn takes us into the courtyard of a nineteenth-century mansion, where a maroon sari swirls and disappears into the darkness beyond an upper-story balcony. Children giggle and follow us and ask to shake our hands.

  We’d each recall a different experience every time we visited: there was always too much to see in Old Delhi for two people to see the same things. Old Delhi can’t be remembered linearly, but only as sensory bursts, as a mosaic of fleeting thrills that disappeared before they could be focused upon: chickens squawking, women squatting next to vegetables, pigeons cooing, kites flying, children hollering from the backs of bicycle rickshaws, bangles glinting on wrists, potatoes frying in giant vats of oil, hawkers shouting, bells ringing, beards, sweat, sticks slapping on bulls’ flanks, prayer beads clicking, scooters honking, tourists screeching in indignation, and then suddenly we’re both choking and tearing—we’d wandered into the wholesale spice market, and they’re roasting chilli peppers, and even the workers are coughing and breathing through their sleeves, only they’re carrying fifty-pound bales of dried peppers on their heads as they do so.

  Old Delhi has hundreds of thousands of residents, but nobody we asked knew anybody who lived there. Its economy is bustling, but none of the friends or colleagues we queried knew anybody who worked there. Depending on with whom we spoke, Old Delhi either provides the city’s economic lifeblood with its wholesale markets, or it’s a completely self-contained entity. It’s where all roads converge, or it’s where no one goes. A few of our Indian friends enjoyed exploring it as much as we did, but many of the people we talked to viewed Old Delhi as the opposite of the India they celebrate. They look with pride on skyscrapers and shopping malls and streets wide enough to actually accommodate cars; Old Delhi, to them, couldn’t be torn down fast enough. For the majority of Delhiites, daily life takes place on the periphery, in
the sprawl, beyond the Ring Roads. Daily life in Delhi moves around the physical center, and almost never passes through it. The majority of Delhiites live outside the center and are content to ignore what goes on inside.

  Like most tourists, Jenny and I never went anywhere those first weeks without a bottle of sunblock in one hand and a copy of the Lonely Planet travel guide in the other. And on our first joint trip to the Old City, we followed the book around the area’s major sights. We admired the Red Fort, we bought scarves on Chandni Chowk, we climbed the minaret at the Jama Masjid, we ate at Karim’s. And then we put the book in my backpack, slathered additional sunblock on our necks, and plunged blindly into the nearest alley until, finally, our eyes glazed from sensory overload, hungry but not yet brave enough to try street food. Wondering why we were the only ones who were sweating, we retrieved the Lonely Planet and sought its advice on the nearest air-conditioned restaurant. And that took us to Connaught Place, a half-mile southwest of Old Delhi and a century forward in time.

  The very first thing we did in CP was get lost. Which is what we also did on every subsequent visit. CP (as everyone calls Connaught Place) is a set of three concentric streets and radial spokes set around a central plaza. Opened in 1933 by the British rulers as their central business area, it’s promoted today as Delhi’s top destination for shopping and entertainment. But CP’s unvarying two-story colonial buildings, with brightly lit lower floors and dusty windows above street level, offered few landmarks to provide bearings. Each whitewashed block had supposedly been assigned a letter to aid navigation, but none actually displayed their designations anywhere we could see. Some streets were two-way, some were one-way, and some were blocked to traffic and used as parking lots. The sidewalk vendors who sold sprouted lentils, patchwork handicrafts, softcover books, and posters of smiling babies and snarling American wrestlers all added to the confusion, because the same goods were peddled on every block of the inner circle, making it seem like we were passing the same spot over and over again.