Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

This division by boulevards influences the character of south Delhi’s residents. How could it not? Each segment of south Delhi feels distinct in the mathematical sense of the word, like it’s completely cut off from the rest of the city. The isolating effects of the street grid are multiplied by south Delhi’s neighborhood structure: rings of housing radiate concentrically inward towards central markets, focusing neighborhood life squarely towards the center. Residents are both figuratively and physically forced to turn their backs towards everything outside. It’s introversion by municipal design.

  Our preference for a particular style of urban planning is wholly subjective, colored by our years being invigorated by the bustling streets of New York. The main boulevards there are lined by shops, and short residential streets fill in the gaps and make it easy to pass from shopping district to shopping district. New York’s neighborhoods align outwards, the borders between them don’t deter people from crossing over, and there’s a general sense of connection with the city beyond. While we understand that some people find New York’s streetscape intimidating or overwhelming, our preference is for pedestrian-scale street life that draws people out of their neighborhoods and into the common spaces. So we can’t help but see south Delhi as isolated islands separated by seas of traffic.

  But municipal psychology didn’t stop us. We may not have visited every single one of south Delhi’s markets, but we tried. Upscale and downmarket, utilitarian and specialized, modern and archaic, expat and local: we explored enough to learn where to go for Indian food, for Western food, for iced coffee and ham sandwiches, for clothes, for new books, for used books, for people-watching, for bars, for galleries, for movies, for meeting expats, for meeting locals, for buying computer parts. Each market was good for some things, but each market lacked other things, which meant there was no single market we could point to friends visiting for a weekend before their tour of greater India and say, “That is where you should go.”

  Many of south Delhi’s markets were built around central parks. The government says the city has 18,000 parks6 in total, and the ones we visited were testament to how quickly a few trees can cleanse and cool the air. Often walled off to keep out pushcart vendors and hungry cows, they provide grass and shade under which dogs and men can snooze the heat away. Open spaces are commandeered by boys playing cricket. If there’s a bench that’s even slightly obscured from sight, there’s a pair of courting teenagers sitting as close as they dare, whispering secrets away from the prying eyes of the neighborhood grapevine. Men in tracksuits walk the ring path, their dogs being walked a few steps behind them, passing old aunties with sweatshirts over their saris and tennis shoes under them. The few boys who aren’t playing cricket are sneaking cigarettes and spying on the lovers. In the bigger parks a policeman may stride casually, his belly preceding him along the paths, enjoying the weight and importance of his bamboo beating stick, ready to smack a mangy dog or drive a beggar back into the streets. Orchid bushes line the paths. Paan masala wrappers flutter in the trees.

  The parks were always green. This is another mystery of the city: though Delhi would go months without rain, its flowers never wilted, its trees always provided shade, and its frangipani blossoms smelled eternally glorious. Be it dead of winter or pre-monsoon summer, the city’s foliage has adapted just like the people who live here: it flourishes without complaint no matter what the climate throws at it.

  Many parks act as buffer zones around Delhi’s monuments. These ancient stone tombs or half-millennium-old mosques are everywhere in south Delhi, sometimes protected and landscaped and other times overgrown and squatted in. The stone mosque we passed on our way to the market every day was centuries old and still attracting hundreds of young men for Friday prayers. Just beyond our house on Aurobindo Marg was an ancient village wall that had been repurposed to enclose what looked like some sort of garrison. And when I’d go running in nearby Gulmohar Park, I’d pass a vine-covered ruin that was still recognizable as a bygone stone marvel. (A visiting friend of ours claimed to have been led into its recesses by an amorous local for a brief and unsatisfying tryst.)

  South Delhi’s heritage included everything from anonymous monuments to Qutub Minar, India’s tallest stone tower. The area had urban oases like Deer Park and the Garden of Five Senses, and ancient wonders like Humayun’s Tomb—which rivaled, or perhaps even surpassed, the Taj Mahal. Within walking distance of our flat was Siri Fort, a massive ruined citadel now containing a modern sports complex in which one can exercise, play cricket on a proper pitch, shoot an air pistol, and enjoy a milkshake at the on-site coffee shop. One can also attend weddings in the shadow of the Asiad Tower, perhaps the strangest sight on the Delhi skyline: a giant concrete lollipop, built for the 1982 Asian Games, that was once the tallest building in Delhi.

  South Delhi is a ghost town after 11 p.m. Streets that had been choked with cars all day are suddenly silent and still, except for when they’re raced upon by drunk rich kids in their dads’ shiny cars. As midnight approaches, iron gates slam shut across south Delhi to block off local streets from anyone who doesn’t live in the neighborhood. Some of the gates are manned and will be opened for innocent-looking travelers who want to pass by, but others are simply locked without attendant, forcing anyone trying to enter or escape the neighborhood to drive around until an unblocked street can be found. The Lonely Planet told us that Indians, like Italians and Spaniards, prefer to dine late, but most restaurants seemed empty by ten. The few pockets of nighttime activity—the food stalls at Nizamuddin Railway Station, the parking lots outside the nightclubs, the checkpoints and their dozing cops—are shrouded by nightly fog that dampens the sound and energy of any activity that might try to break the unwritten curfew.

  Driving down the hazy late-night roads, ghostly shapes emerge. Bicycle rickshaws parked on the side of the street, their drivers’ bare feet sticking out to catch cooling breezes. Ice cream carts assembled in rows, each one with a vendor sleeping on top of it. There is nothing more sobering than passing AIIMS Hospital after midnight, where men and women too poor to sleep anywhere else line the sidewalk while they worry about loved ones inside. My heart was indelibly broken one very late night when we drove past an old man sitting on the ground outside the hospital, staring worriedly in the distance, his frail wife’s head laid weakly in his lap. From then on, I always passed AIIMS looking straight ahead and counting my blessings.

  One reason south Delhi doesn’t stay up very late could be because everyone wants to wake up early to beat the traffic.

  Jenny’s daily commute didn’t take her out of south Delhi. She hired an autorickshaw every morning to drive her either to the Saket area (for her first job) or to Lajpat Nagar IV (for her second). She grew intimate with the traffic patterns of these areas, the timing of their red lights, their lyrical street names (Lala Lajpat Rai Path!), and the eternal nightmare that Josip Broz Tito Marg became when the city eliminated half its drivable lanes as a prototype for its Bus Rapid Transit program. Jenny learned the posture necessary to maximize comfort in an autorickshaw: slumping against the seat but always poised to grab a handhold when the driver swerves to miss a vegetable cart by six inches. There were many routes to her office, and each autorickshaw driver had his own shortcut; the various bone-jarring side streets they chose offered a roller-coaster ride that followed a new and more thrilling route every time.

  As for me, I took the same road to work every day. The same unvarying route, with the same unvarying traffic, upon which the difference between leaving at 8:15 in the morning and 8:45 was an extra forty minutes stuck listening to cars honk at each other. I had the benefit of closed windows and air conditioning for my commute, but I had the misfortune of commuting to Gurgaon.

  Considered part of the greater Delhi region, (even though it’s across the state border in Haryana), Gurgaon is an hour southwest of the city on a lucky day but only twenty minutes after midnight. It’s where 1.5 million people live7 and 200 of the Fortune 500 companies have offices.8 It’
s called the “Millennium City” by its boosters, and it’s promoted as the future of India: a city of gleaming skyscrapers teeming with India’s brightest contributors to global capitalism, apartment towers like fists raised triumphantly towards the gods, and shopping malls as far as the eyes can see. And while the city’s real estate agents boast about those modern marvels, what they fail to mention is that these heavenly structures are all linked to the humble earth by a dysfunctional infrastructure.

  Dysfunctional, that is, where it exists at all.

  Gurgaon is notorious for its lack of everything. Insufficient sewers mean flooding houses9 and wastewater lakes.10 Its absent solid-waste infrastructure forced the city to dump trash in vacant lots and parkland, creating a situation so bad that thirty-five prominent residents had to gather the news media, charter a bus, and drive everybody up to the state capital in Chandigarh to get authorities to pay attention to them.11 Its abysmal power supply has meant eight- to twelve-hour power cuts12 and forced any company that seeks productivity to rely on exhaust-spewing generators. (The one outside my forty-person office was the size of a shipping container.) All this is said to be due to the fact that the bureaucrats in Chandigarh are happy to rake in the city’s tax revenue but loath to invest it to alleviate the inconveniences of residents who, as these bureaucrats see it on television, live in twenty-first-century castles in the sky.

  10. http://www.gurgaonscoop.com/story/2008/12/25/3426/6489

  Jenny and I originally expected to live in Gurgaon. My company had leased and hastily furnished an apartment in anticipation of a stream of long-term expat workers. (I was supposed to be the first, but I ended up being the only.) Our building, Hamilton Court, was Gurgaon’s tallest structure at the time: an eighty-nine-meter, twenty-fivestory concrete monolith that so perfectly represented the typical Gurgaon apartment block that the New York Times actually referenced it as an archetype. (“India has always had its upper classes, as well as legions of the world’s very poor,” the Times wrote in 2008. “But today a landscape dotted with Hamilton Courts, pressed up against the slums that serve them, has underscored more than ever the stark gulf between those worlds, raising uncomfortable questions for a democratically elected government about whether India can enable all its citizens to scale the golden ladders of the new economy.13”)

  Though it only took one full day in Gurgaon to decide we didn’t want to live there (the night of the smell scare, and the next day when we realized that it was impossible to go anywhere without calling a taxi and waiting a half-hour for it to come), it took us five more nights to find a flat in Delhi to which we could escape. It was more than enough time to understand that Gurgaon was not what we were seeking for our life in India. Gurgaon was a cloud of construction dust punctuated by dust-covered construction sites. Private developers had operated here in a total governmental vacuum, lacking both regulatory oversight to check growth and municipal infrastructure to support it. My office was originally located in one of a dozen skyscrapers clustered around the corporate hub called DLF Cyber City, each one at least ten stories tall, employing tens of thousands of people in total, with more buildings under furious construction. All these buildings and employees were serviced by a single four-lane road that, while I worked there, functioned as a parking lot for eight hours a day. When I first arrived in Gurgaon, Cyber City’s landscaping was being torn up to build overhead power lines that were necessary because they either hadn’t built underground cables, or because they’d built them with no thought for the capacity a dozen high-rise buildings would need.

  A year and a half later, as I was leaving India, the ground there was being torn up again, this time to accommodate monstrous sewer pipes to collect the massive amounts of waste these buildings were somehow not anticipated to generate.

  Gurgaon is one of India’s most prominent technology hubs. It’s home to countless multinational companies trying to get a foothold in India’s rapidly growing market. It’s also home to many of the upwardly mobile men and women who are riding India’s wave of growth, which is why its main boulevards are lined with malls boasting all the brands we would see in Times Square, and even the drop-off area at my office building was designed around the convenience of the glitterati thronging to the trendy restaurants built into the ground level. At nine o’clock on a Friday night, I’d wait in the drop-off area for my driver to negotiate the sea of chauffeured imported cars dropping off short-skirted socialites and the biceps-of-the-month they’d be clinging to. As numerous as its malls are its towering luxury apartment blocks, and their aspirational names—Windsor Court, Regency Park, Silver Oaks, Oakwood Estates, Royalton Towers—hint at the philosophy behind Gurgaon’s development: Gurgaon is what a few private developers think a Western city is supposed to look like.

  But while they’ve focused on the monolithic aspects of modernity, they’ve neglected the human-scale parts of it. Forget walking. Gurgaon is a city designed for valet parking.

  My view of Gurgaon is probably unfairly influenced by what I endured there: a job that stressed me, an office environment of exhaust fumes and uncomfortable chairs, and a commute that sapped my will to live. When I reflect on Gurgaon, I remember the dead crow I passed on my ride to work every day, hanging by one foot from a power cable above the repair shops just east of DLF Cyber City, its wings spread wide as an upside-down avian Christ. I don’t know how it got stuck to the cable, but it hung there for months—outlasting the fall heat, the winter chill, and the dust storms that would shred the giant billboards across the street.

  But I know that a lot of people love Gurgaon. So I’ll contrast that crow with what I usually saw next on my commute. As my taxi would pass to the swampy area beyond the crow, a glorious blue kingfisher would flutter across the road or perch on a telephone wire: a reminder that beauty, too, is in Gurgaon. For many people, Gurgaon is the soul of a newer New Delhi: it’s where the rich and the successful live, where business leaders ink deals far removed from the politicians’ sticky fingers, where artists entertain in living room salons, and where music blasts until early in the morning. For those who like to see and be seen, and who like to know they’re on the forefront of India’s future, Gurgaon is it.

  But we didn’t move all the way to India to live in the DLF Corporation’s vision of America. While we also look forward to India’s future, we came to experience India’s past and its present. So every time we entered Gurgaon, our goal was simply to get out as quickly as possible. We never fully explored it. We didn’t even know there was an Old Gurgaon until after we’d left India.

  Which leaves north Delhi, east Delhi and west Delhi. Except we didn’t explore those areas, either. The Lonely Planet, Time Out Delhi magazine, and the various English newspapers all focused our attention almost entirely on the diamond-shaped swath of land between Old Delhi and Gurgaon. So for west Delhi, north Delhi, Rohini, Dwarka, Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Noida and Greater Noida, our experience only included a few meetings and dinners, and it progressed no further than marveling how big north Delhi was as we drove through it on our way to the hills.

  So many sights we didn’t see! So many monuments we didn’t visit! So many neighborhoods we never walked!

  Still, we did spend eighteen months reading and wandering and asking everyone we met for their must-see suggestions. And while we saw so little of the city by geographic standards, I think it’s unlikely that our overall impression would have changed if only we’d visited Baba Nagar or Vishnu Garden or Ashok Vihar Phase III.

  And our overall impression is this: Delhi is a city without an overarching narrative. It is an amalgamation of neighborhoods that are linked by municipal decree but without a shared sense of destiny.

  Delhi has no unifying story. Delhi is a blank slate.

  Which isn’t a bad thing. That means that Delhi is whatever you make of it. Every person defines Delhi for his or her self, and no two Delhi struggles are the same. At any given point, your experience will be the exact opposite of my experience, and we’ll bot
h be right.

  Delhi exists in a kind of quantum state: in Delhi, all things are true at once.

  1. http://theviewfromchennai.wordpress.com/2009/10/28/images-of-eviction-delhis-yamuna-pushta-in-the-news-again/

  2. http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?typeid=19&catid=460&id=2170

  3. http://www.rainwaterharvesting.org/index_files/about_delhi.htm

  4. http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?typeid=19&catid=460&id=2170

  5. Melvin E. Page (editor), Colonialism: An International Social, Cultural and Political Encyclopedia, ABC-Clio, p.415; viewed on Google Books.

  6. http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/004200906141251.htm

  7. http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2011-04-06/gurgaon/29387845_1_literacy-rate-female-population-censusofficials

  8. http://www.bpowatchindia.com/bpo_news/gurgaon_clean/september-26-2008/gurgaon_ceos_cleanliness.html

  9. http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/sewage-floodsgurgaon-colony/256983/

  11. http://www.hindustantimes.com/special-news-report/indianews/C-mon-Gurgaon/Article1-341670.aspx

  12. http://www.thaindian.com/newsportal/business/power-cutsturn-posh-gurgaon-areas-into-urban-chaupals_10060033.html

  13. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html

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  Transportation: How to Get Stuck in Traffic

  A lucky expat has no need to read this chapter, because he has no hassles getting around Delhi: his car and his driver, both provided by his company, are at his disposal from the moment he wakes. In fact, his driver may already be in his kitchen as he steps out of the shower, buttering his toast and cutting his mango and arranging his newspaper just so.

  Ah, the life of a lucky expat! There’s his driver now, wearing either a blue driver’s uniform or a snappy pink polo shirt depending on how long he’s been driving expats and how well he’s been paid for it. The driver knows his job consists of just two main duties: to drive his boss around and then, from the morning meeting to the whisky nightcap, to wait with the car (with the air conditioner off so as not to waste gas) until the boss is ready to be driven around some more.