Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  The tour resumed. We stopped by an open-air factory where farmers were boiling sugarcane. We toured ‘downtown Anupshahr’, as Sam called it. We took a boat ride along the Ganges, during which a single raftsman gently poled our boat up and down the shallow banks, the sun casting golden light on the farms to the east while bells and chants drifted from the ghats to the west. And then we stopped at a local lawyer’s house to meet a former Pardada Pardadi student named Rukhsana. Rukhsana was not a graduate. She’d quit school at the age of thirteen, when her grandmother forced her to marry.

  Sam had begun telling Rukhsana’s story on the drive to Anupshahr. Rukhsana had been one of hundreds of Sam’s students at the time, just one anonymous girl in her greenand-yellow school uniform, until the morning the halls began buzzing with rumor: just four hours east of New Delhi’s tree-lined boulevards and Gurgaon’s shining skyscrapers, thirteen-year-old Rukhsana was getting married.

  Sam called Rukhsana into his office and learned that the rumors were true. In one week, she would quit school to become wife to a forty-year-old street barber from a neighboring village. Her grandmother had arranged everything.

  Rukhsana was her grandmother’s ward. Rukhsana’s mother was mentally handicapped and fully unreliable as a parent (“She runs around the village naked,” as Sam put it). Her father was an unknown rapist.

  So Sam immediately went to see her grandmother. “Why are you marrying off such a young girl?” he demanded. “Why are you throwing her future away? What can we do to prevent this?”

  Nothing. The grandmother was in ill health and had nothing to leave her granddaughter. She feared that the moment she died, Rukhsana would be forced into prostitution. To the grandmother’s way of thinking, marriage—even to such an undesirable partner as a barber three times older—was the best choice for her granddaughter’s future.

  Sam’s protests were futile. “You want to help her?” the grandmother demanded. “You adopt her or you marry her.”

  Sam could do neither.

  As Sam told this story, Jenny found herself thinking about when she was thirteen. She was an eighth-grader at Madison Middle School in Albuquerque. She had a swimming pool in her backyard and a black poodle named Gypsy. She was on the yearbook committee. She was reading Roots. To amuse her friends, she’d smash packages of crackers from the cafeteria, pour the crumbs into her mouth, and then shower her friends with cracker dust when she talked. She loved how they always hid Wilson’s face on Home Improvement.

  When Rukhsana was thirteen, she had her first child.

  After telling us Rukhsana’s story, Sam confided that he hadn’t thought about her in a long time. As sad as her story was, it was just one of many sad stories in this part of his country. Spurred by our questions, though, he arranged for us to meet Rukhsana in the home of this prominent village lawyer. And there we all learned that things hadn’t gotten much better for Rukhsana in the four intervening years. Though she now had an adorable son, her husband had left her. Rukhsana’s grandmother was still alive, but she was even more frail and even more terrified for her granddaughter’s future—and, now, for her three-year-old great-grandson’s future as well. Against all odds, she’d somehow arranged another marriage for Rukhsana.

  This time, Sam was able to present Rukhsana’s grandmother with another option. His connections in India’s charity world had grown in the intervening years, and he now knew of an organization that taught vocational skills to young Muslim girls. It was located in Goa, unfortunately, which was inconceivably distant to a woman who had probably never been west of Delhi. Sam could arrange for them to take care of Rukhsana, to teach her the skills she’d require to earn a brighter future for herself and her son, if only her grandmother could bear the humiliation of canceling the marriage and the possibility of never seeing her granddaughter and great-grandson again. It was an unimaginable future, but it was certainly brighter than the imaginable one.

  Rukhsana cast her eyes downward and smiled bashfully as the adults discussed her fate. Her son sat quietly on her lap for a time; when he squirmed too much, she put him down and he stood patiently at her feet. Jenny and I watched in silence as well while the two prominent men—one dressed in Western clothes and another in fine white robes—berated and pleaded and cajoled the grandmother, explaining the possibilities that awaited Rukhsana if she left, and the misery that was sure to find her if she stayed. Finally, Sam turned to Rukhsana and asked her what she wanted to do.

  Rukhsana glanced at her grandmother. A negative twitch of her grandmother’s head sealed Rukhsana’s fate: she would stay, and she would get married, for the second time, at seventeen years of age.

  We left the lawyer’s house after the sun began to set, anxious to get off the roads before the drunken truck drivers took to them. We were silent as we drove down the narrow road to Bichola, the tiny village where Sam’s family lived for centuries in a mansion befitting their status as the area’s historic zamindars—feudal landlords, or tax collectors. The road was bumpy, but we didn’t complain. After all, the car was air-conditioned, and a comfortable sofa and a wellstocked bar awaited us. This brief moment of hardship, we knew, we could endure.

  1. http://www.thehindu.com/2006/02/24/stories/2006022413780100.htm%E2%80%9C

  2. http://www.hokindia.com/2009/03/who-needs-a-nanowhen-you-can-have-your-own-jugaad.html

  3. http://www.livemint.com/2007/12/30230813/Virendra-Sam-Singh—Turning.html

  9

  Challenges of a Megacity

  Delhi is a tough city. No doubt about it. The traffic is tough, the weather is tough, the pollution is tough, and even going out to eat is tough by virtue of the fact that any given meal might be garnished with E. coli.

  In fact, there were times when dining out in Delhi required us to steel ourselves against sights that should have made us run with waving hands for the first flight to Paris. There were times we’d see a cook’s sweat dripping into his mixing bowl, or when we’d enter restaurant bathrooms so dirty that we’d curse our bladders for lacking the fortitude to wait until we got home. There was even a time at a trendy restaurant in Basant Lok when a mouse ran across the feet of the four ladies seated across from me. The impromptu chorus line that occurred as they all kicked would have been funny if I hadn’t been so busy jumping up on my own seat as well. But a cook’s special seasoning or a four-legged foot massage would not deter us from enjoying our meals. Because through the moistest of alleyways and upon the greasiest of tabletops awaited some of the most unforgettable meals we’ve ever had.

  And this describes life in Delhi in a nutshell: every reward has an equal and opposite challenge necessary to redeem it.

  It’s an infinite loop. It’s a downward spiral. The challenges that shape the city’s environment exist because of the city’s environment. Extreme reactions intensify already extreme problems, and they catalyse more extreme reactions in response.

  Our bungalow provided a microcosm of this cause-and-effect-and-cause. For eighteen months, we watched how our neighbors responded to a tough city by making sure they were tougher than it—no matter what effect it had on neighborly relations.

  Our neighbors were always friendly to Jenny and me, of course. Dr. T. on the ground floor, our landlord Shankar, our friend and oracle Anya, eccentric Mr. M., frail Mrs. M., and the various maids, office employees, deliverymen and underlings who flowed up and down the arterial stairwell all day long—they were all perfectly pleasant to the two of us. (In fact, it turns out that they were all looking forward to our presence even before we’d seen the flat. As Anya told it, the moment Shankar had learned that foreigners were coming to view his empty flat, he threw the whole bungalow into a tizzy. His main office boy raced around to make sure everything was in perfect order, even telling Anya to remove her sheets from the clothesline on the terrace in case the sight of bedding proved unacceptable to foreign sensibilities. Even Shilpa the garbage maid ran up and down the stairs shouting, “Foreigners coming! Foreigners coming!” Her excitement wa
s understandable—just as Shankar was anticipating inflated monthly rent from foreigners who were ignorant of market rates, Shilpa might have been hoping for an equally rich stream of garbage she could recycle for profit. They both got what they hoped for.)

  We’d read some books about life in India before we made the move, and they told us to expect a hyper-efficient neighborhood grapevine in which gossip traveled faster than events themselves. Guards that spoke to drivers who listened to their passengers told what they heard to maids who repeated everything to their mistresses, and anyone’s business was everyone’s knowledge. If that was true, and if the entire bungalow did actually know that we were coming, then everyone in the neighborhood must have as well. So our actual arrival—the sunny morning when we pulled our oversized bags out of the trunk of the taxi and beamed at our new surroundings—was probably a surprise only to the stray dogs that stirred sleepily as we stepped gingerly around them.

  We were far too ignorant of language and culture at this point to interpret the gossip around us. So we have no idea how people reacted to our strange foreign behavior. What did our new neighbors say that first morning when we dismissed our driver and carried our heavy bags up to our flat all by ourselves? Or later on, when we’d stumble home after midnight? Or when Jenny would leave for a night on the town without me? What did they think when three young American ladies spent the night in our flat? What did they think about the visit by our friend Trevor, a tall, flamboyant black man with long dreadlocks and a penchant for sunbathing on the roof in his underwear? Or when an unknown American male arrived one morning, shook my hand outside our flat, watched me get into a cab of my own, and then spent the next week in my house with my wife while I was nowhere to be seen?

  (The truth of that last tale is far less titillating than the gossips probably speculated: a few days before Tony’s visit, my visa problems came to a head and I had to fly all the way back to the US—seriously! Thanks, Indian bureaucracy!—to get them sorted out. No sooner had I left than Tony promptly fell ill, which explains why he looked so exhausted—and why Jenny was holding his elbow—the few times he actually did emerge.)

  But our neighbors weren’t the only ones exchanging gossip. Jenny and I kept our mouths shut and our eyes open, and we shared with each other what we saw. And we realized that life within our bungalow—which should have been a collective stronghold against the challenges of the city beyond—was not one in which the residents always appreciated the pleasure of each other’s company.

  The residents of the bungalow were all men and women of strong wills, inflexible opinions and, in certain cases, over-abundant amounts of leisure time. History was never relegated to the past among these folks. Every slight was remembered, every insult was internalized, and every offense was spitefully repaid. Though shared real estate forced them into a coincidental partnership, the stairwell that bound them all nevertheless beat with tension that even Jenny and I, in our ignorance of pretty much everything, noticed.

  Intrigue and politics throbbed in the bungalow. This one hated that one because of a misdiagnosis of a family member’s illness. That one hated this one because their dogs didn’t get along. And on and on, a string of misunderstandings and retributions magnified by time and proximity: issues of construction noise, unpaid common-area painting bills, stolen scrap metal, ruptured garbage bags, ant infestations, dog noise, dog damage, dog stains. Jenny and I were the only neutral parties, and we remained that way because we feigned ignorance of everyone’s grievances and pretended not to understand when one party wanted to use us for strategic maneuvers against another.

  This wasn’t a cage match, though. This was Royal Rumble politics, which meant that alliances formed and collapsed in response to an ever-shifting battlefield. Every opportunity to save money, save time, or transfer responsibility changed the political calculus, creating and destroying coalitions on the fly. Shankar and Mr. and Mrs. M. would team up against Anya’s dogs; Anya and Shankar would team up against the construction noise coming from the empty flat; Shankar would ask us to tell Shilpa to clean up the grease spots Anya’s dogs left. Sometimes it seemed like they went after each other simply for the joy of the combat.

  Like when the hole appeared in the driveway. The driveway hole used to be an access hatch for the sewer pipes that serviced the empty flat on the second landing. Normally, it was covered by a cement slab that kept stench in and tender ankles out. But one day, that slab crumbled under the weight of Dr. T.’s beastly Tata Sumo DC (a vehicle with all the immensity of an SUV but none of the grace). Although Dr. T. was able to extract the Sumo’s wheel by shifting into reverse, the shattered cover was a total loss.

  As common property, the responsibility for the driveway was nominally shared among the five owners of the six units. But it was Dr. T.’s car that broke the cover, and it was the empty flat’s pipes that were now exposed.

  And so the dispute was gleefully on. Shankar, Anya and Mr. and Mrs. M. insisted together that the empty flat should pay for a new iron cover. The empty flat’s owner, presumably reached by telephone wherever he or she was, wanted the doctor to pay. And Dr. T. wanted all parties to share the cost equally. As the only uninterested people in the bungalow, Jenny and I were the only ones not exchanging cold silences, wordless recriminations and averted eyes as we passed on the stairs.

  When no one gave ground, temporary solutions were attempted. Twice Mr. M. told Anya to tell Shankar to order his main office boy to do something about the driveway. Twice, a new concrete slab was laid over the hole. And twice that new concrete slab was transformed by a car wheel into dust and chunks at the bottom of the hatch. As the stalemate continued, my taxi drivers must have driven into the open hole a half-dozen times, cursing with each jarring thud and thanking their good fortune that an Indica’s wheels are slightly larger than the width of the missing lid.

  We don’t know who gave in first. The hole was still there when we moved out.

  But don’t think that our bungalow’s politics were so divisive as to prevent household unity when an outside threat demanded it. In extraordinary circumstances, our bungalow could stand together against the best of them. Like when they presented a unified front in collective refusal to contribute to the salary of the neighborhood guard. Although Jenny and I had only ever known the guard to sit just beyond our bungalow, he apparently used to sit at the mouth of our block, protecting every bungalow including ours from the criminals of the night. But when our entire bungalow decided not to pay—for reasons not made clear when we were told this story—the neighborhood association retaliated by shifting the guard and his barricade twenty feet down the road, to a spot just after our bungalow.

  That would show us, right? We were now wounded prey without a protector. The guard, presumably, was instructed to give criminals free reign to walk in to the stairwell and steal our light bulbs.

  The neighborhood association must have been dismayed that our bungalow was not robbed. And the fact that we weren’t robbed means one of two things: either Delhi’s evil underbelly wasn’t connected to our local gossip grapevine and thus remained unaware of our bungalow’s exclusion from the neighborhood defense pact; or that the guard’s presence was enough to deter crime even if he wasn’t actively protecting us. I imagine our bungalow, united, had counted on the latter. And their gamble paid off: our bungalow escaped their contribution to his 4,000 rupees-amonth salary with no detrimental effect to their lives or property. I can picture everyone in our bungalow nodding and smiling at each other as they came to this agreement over tea in one of their flats. And I can imagine the afterglow of their victory must have surely meant shared smiles and exchanged greetings on the stairwell for a few days after the triumph, before the squabbles began anew.

  Presumably, the same sort of politics and pressures that our neighbors used to make each others’ lives more difficult were playing out in all the bungalows in our neighborhood. And presumably, there were even more entrenched feuds beyond borders: bungalow versus bungalow,
neighborhood association versus neighborhood association. We imagine it mirroring the battles of the neighborhood’s stray dogs, except where dogs snarl and bark to assert their territory, civilized human beings channel their disagreements into passive-aggressive parking, enforced servant-on-servant snobbery and anonymous calls to the police.

  Unfortunately, while our bungalow’s residents could still ally with each other when extraordinary circumstances demanded, the inter-bungalow feuds must have been so entrenched as to be beyond repair even when faced with the darkest of challenges. Why else wouldn’t the whole neighborhood have immediately come together to stop ICICI Bank’s assault on our slumber?

  The disturbance manifested one morning around 3 a.m. with what sounded like pieces of sheet metal being hit with sledgehammers just outside our window. Our first thought was that the very worst had happened: our air conditioner must be malfunctioning. I dragged myself to the window and raised the heavy fabric shade, expecting to see smoke belching from the unit or a monkey tearing it apart with its bare hands. That’s when I saw the armored cars, the armed men, and the laborers removing metal boxes from the armored cars and tossing them on the ground with sleep-shattering crashes. Still other men picked up the heavy boxes and lugged them into a bungalow that was otherwise unremarkable but for the small ICICI Bank logo above the doorway.

  That doorway that had, until 3 a.m. on this night, always been covered by a metal shutter. A few weeks before that colossal racket, we’d spotted some renovation work in the upper floors of the building. This building was located a few dozen meters down the main road between our flat and Hauz Khas market, and although the potted plants on the building’s windowsills had always been kept trimmed and watered, the building had never before shown any signs of life. The workers had been given the privilege of living on-site for the duration of the job, and what had drawn our attention was their shadows being thrown against the upper-floor walls as they bent over their indoor—indoor!—cooking fires.