by Dave Prager
Now there was this colossal 3 a.m. racket, which lasted until 5 a.m. The racket began again the next day at a slightly more reasonable 6 a.m., and repeated itself two or three times a week thereafter for the duration of our stay in India.
Until we learned to sleep through it, this wake-up call often forced us out of bed at ungodly hours. I’d walk out on the balcony and study these men while sipping my coffee, slowly assigning them “mortal enemy” status in my sleep-deprived brain. Their operation involved a disproportionate number of thin older men standing around the armored cars, holding ancient rifles with worn wooden stocks that wouldn’t have looked out of place firing on the British in Meerut. They were doing their best to look intimidating and alert, but they were casting longing glances at the chaiwallah setting up for the day in the shade of the nearby tree. Beyond establishing their security perimeter, the older men did nothing more than watch the younger men in the trucks throw the boxes. The boxes would land with spectacular thuds, making the kind of sound that metal boxes dropped from a truck make when they’re full of thick, juicy stacks of rupees.
Once the trucks were empty, the young men would reemerge from the building carrying multiple metal boxes with an ease that implied that their contents had been emptied, presumably into a big pool of money in which ICICI executives would bathe. They’d toss the empties lackadaisically into the trucks, and then the guards and the men would stand around and scratch themselves for a few minutes before hitching up their pants, spitting one last time, and piling into the trucks to drive away.
Everyone in the neighborhood surely hated the ICICI guys as much as we did. (Except perhaps the rich merchants across the street, whose houses were next door to the ICICI building—it may have been the sound of their money echoing around the neighborhood.) We couldn’t believe a corporation could inflict such misery upon a neighborhood with no concern over publicity repercussions or lost customers. Especially since the noise wasn’t their only transgression: the men also blocked traffic and spat and urinated all over the place. Anya told us that she’d berate them every time she walked by, saying things like, “If you do it in the road, what is the difference between you and a stray dog?” The men would hang their heads and avoid her gaze, but their stream of bodily fluids would renew as soon as she passed.
Anya wasn’t alone in her anti-urination campaign. In fact, the urinary habits of Delhi men are legendary across India.
“When it comes to answering the call of nature, the Delhi male does not look very far and relieves himself as soon as he finds a wall, corner or crevice,” the Hindustan Times reported in a 2006 exposé on the urinary habits of the male of the Delhi species.1
Three years later, another campaign intended to shame city men into zipping up their pants2 may well have been a direct reprint of the last. “Practically every large wall in Delhi bears a warning against urinating upon it and below are telltale wet patches left behind by men who don’t care two hoots.”
Jenny and I would spot urinating men everywhere we went in Delhi, and we’d smell everywhere they’d been. No journey down a Delhi street was complete until we’d both smelled humid urine and passed someone unloading a fresh addition into a bush, onto a wall, next to a public urinal, or wherever else they could let loose with their back to passing traffic so nobody could see too much of their willy.
The media, in their constant clamor against the urinary scourge, blamed two municipal conditions: Delhi’s lack of public facilities and Delhiites’ lack of civic sense. The Hindustan Times points out that the only place that’s truly urine-free is the Metro—because, as their commentator put it, it’s one of the few points of pride for the city.3 Because Delhiites don’t feel a sense of ownership of the city, the papers said, they don’t mind urinating all over it. Journalist Manoj Joshi elaborated on this point in Time magazine. “If you ask anyone in Delhi where they come from, they don’t say Delhi, they name their native city or village. No one knows anyone else, so people behave very differently from how they would where they come from. They have no affiliation with the city.”4 Many of our friends and co-workers echoed this, telling us that the bulk of their fellow residents feel no kinship towards Delhi.
But in terms of public facilities, we don’t think it’s their absence that causes the problems so much as their inaccessibility. In south Delhi, public urinals are situated most prominently in neighborhood markets that are tucked at the center of Delhi’s island neighborhoods, far away from the urgent urges of the men traveling the main city streets. The bulk of the peeing we spotted took place on Delhi’s broad boulevards, with men aimed against the cement walls that segregated those who live inside from those they want to keep out. These roads are plied by men who travel long distances; when nature calls, they have neither the time nor the inclination to leave the stream of traffic and negotiate unfamiliar neighborhoods in search of public toilets. It’s far easier to just pull over, jump out and let loose. Thus, with the sheer volume of men on the roads, our journeys from any point A to any point B would inevitably pass dozens of point Ps along the way: men silhouetted against the sun, a golden stream twinkling, our eyes turning away but not before—despite the man’s best efforts at shielding himself—alighting on the tip of a disgorging member or on one shaking out those last few drops.
I’m a critic of street-side peeing—as are most men, if you ask them. And like most men, I suspect, I’m also a practitioner, having peed on the side of a Delhi road exactly once, in the wilds south of Vasant Kunj, on that eternal Friday night ride home in my co-workers’ cab, when our booze and our bouncing got the best of all of us. Someone called the driver to a halt, and we men all spilled out of the cab and onto the ground.
Assuming my experience is not unique, it seems possible that Delhi’s urine challenge is a problem of numbers, not manners. What if the male half of Delhi’s sixteen million citizens pee on the street no more than once a year? That’s still 21,918 men peeing on the road any given day. And if the problem is even slightly more habitual, with each man averaging ten times a year, then we’ve suddenly got 219,180 men urinating on just 25,000 kilometers of road5 daily. That’s one man for every 114 meters.
That’s why Jenny and I think this repugnant fixture of the urban landscape is less about the lack of public facilities than it is about their inaccessibly—which, in south Delhi, is caused by inward-focused urban planning that makes streetsides featureless and anonymous, good for nothing but passing by and peeing on.
The newspapers’ quality-of-life campaigns, regular though they have been, haven’t seemed to change much. We admire the approach taken by the Sulabh International Social Service Organization, which helps entrepreneurs build spotless for-profit toilet blocks that convert swollen bladders into steaming rupees.6 It solves two problems at once, and we wish they’d build more of them. Otherwise, we know of only two techniques successful in dissuading men from peeing on walls: using shame, and using divinity. Mr. M. and Anya both made liberal use of the former, shouting at men until they’d pinch off, zip up and move on. But that technique relied on spotting a man in the act. For deterrence, the only way to stop urinators was to plaster tile portraits of Lord Hanuman or Lord Krishna or Lord Jesus into the wall. No man will pee on another man’s god.
It goes without saying that we never saw any women peeing on the street. Modesty forbids it: no matter how bad a woman has to go, she has to hold it until she is somewhere decent. As always, life in Delhi is much harder for women.
Urination is just one of the problems that the newspapers regularly criticized Delhiites for inflicting upon their own city. There’s also spitting at red lights, for instance, in which drivers open their car doors and spit upon the pavement—not a hawking, forceful phwat with the goal of distance, but a weak-lipped sputter that drips big red gobs of paan down to the street below. And spitting isn’t confined to the roads, either: red stains also ran up and down the under-construction stairwells of my Gurgaon office building, speaking either of a downpour of sp
at paan or of repeated ritual sacrifice of tiny leprechauns on each and every landing.
The newspapers also criticized the city’s littering, a practice to which I never saw anyone give a second thought other than my co-worker Govind, whom I once saw groan in protest when someone tossed some paper out of the window of our car; the man doing the tossing was genuinely confused as to what Govind was unhappy about. Litter is generally dropped wherever it is convenient, as attested by the mountains of used cups that grow at the feet of every chaiwallah. Jenny and I could never bring ourselves to follow suit, which meant we’d carry empty cups for hours while looking in vain for a trash can. We’d usually arrive home before we found one.
The newspapers also regularly targeted the state of food sanitation in the city. When the Confederation of Indian Industry surveyed 1,000 restaurants and eateries to see which ones qualified for a sanitary stamp of approval, the newspapers led the chorus of shock at the results: not a single one did.7 Given those dismal statistics, we learned to follow the reaction of people around us when eating out: if nobody else seemed bothered by what was revealed when the kitchen door swung open, why should we worry?
Still, as much as we trusted the collective wisdom, sometimes our eyes beheld sights that were too much even for our hungry stomachs to bear. Our last trip with the Eating Out in Delhi crew took us to that set of competing storefront kebab stands near Nizamuddin, where grease from daytime auto repair mingled on the cement with that of nightly mutton burra. This was our fourth eatery of the night but the first to really give us pause. We’d started at a paratha stand across from the Times of India building, which had been built on the kind of cracked pavement that vermin love; but although cockroaches did dart about, they were far enough away that we could pretend they always kept their distance from where food was stored. The second stop was a perfectly hygienic restaurant in Old Delhi. The third stop—a paratha vendor outside the Nizamuddin Railway Station—would have been far too close to the public urinal for nasal comfort had the breeze not been so favorable.
So far, so good. But at this final stop of the night, Jenny and I watched an employee stomp through black puddles on his way to a basin of steaming brown water into which he dunked an armful of dirty plates. As our group stood around in a circle waiting for the employees to hose off a table for us (they did, in fact, use a hose), our friend Supratim idly rocked back and forth on a poorly fitted manhole; though he didn’t notice it, his absent shifts on the unbalanced lid caused bubbles of black liquid to gurgle forth from the loose seal. We could smell the kebabs cooking, but we could also smell something else.
We had full trust in EOID. And we reminded ourselves over and over that they’d never steered us wrong before. But we couldn’t do it. Suddenly, I loudly realized that that very last bite of the very last paratha we’d eaten at the previous stop had, amazingly enough, been exactly what it took to make me completely full. Jenny then took the opportunity to remind everyone that she was a vegetarian but no, she didn’t want any paneer tikka because she wasn’t hungry anyway.
Urination, spitting, unsanitary food stalls—in Delhi, filth begets filth. But it goes the other way, too. And this is why I have full faith in Delhi’s ultimate redemption: because in Delhi, clean also begets clean.
Take the Metro, for example. It’s spotless and it’s shining. Nobody litters in it. Nobody pees in it. The Metro proves that Delhiites are neither barbarians nor sophisticates at their core—instead, like citizens of every other city, they simply act in accordance with the influence of their surroundings. In dirty areas, they feel no injunction against being dirty. In clean areas, they keep things clean. It’s like the ‘broken windows theory’ of crime, which suggests that graffiti and vandalism create a sense of decline that leads to further criminal activity.
Call it the “spotless Metro theory”: cleanliness creates a sense of responsibility that leads to further conscientiousness.
Proof of this theory lies in the orderliness of the queues in the Metro. In most other parts of the city, a queue is chest-to-back whether there are two hundred people in line or only two. And if there’s even an inch of space between two people in a queue, they can rest assured that a third person will slip into it. My boss Murali explained to me that these queues became part of the culture because of economics. Until the 1990s, he told me, India was a country of shortages. It lacked food, water, and power, but it also lacked motor-scooters and air conditioners and other consumer goods. Queues and waiting lists were the norm. Journalist Amit Varma had a similar recollection. “When I was growing up in the 1980s, getting a telephone was difficult. The state had a monopoly over the telecom industry, and one could be on a waiting list for a telephone for years. (Yes, years.)”8
So Indians learned to jump queues, to jam into elevators, to ride on the roofs of the trains—not because they were impolite or impatient or insane, but because there was never a guarantee that another train would arrive, that the elevator would return any emptier, or that whatever they were queuing for wouldn’t abruptly run out. In a country of a billion, opportunities were fleeting and must be instantly seized.
In the Metro, Murali told me, expectations are different: if people miss one train, they have full confidence another is right behind it. Confidence begets respect, and respect begets cleanliness.
We believe that the underground expectations of Delhi’s citizens will eventually be replicated above. Scourges like urination—which are failures of infrastructure, not culture—will be fairly easy to solve.
And because the newspapers will need to find new moral outrages, I’m hopeful they’ll turn their attention to what will probably be a much more challenging problem to solve: Delhiites’ penchant for drunk driving.
We were introduced to the casualness with which Delhiites drive drunk in our first month in Delhi following that party thrown by Abhishek, the realtor who’d found our flat for us. As Abhishek wound down his 2 a.m. paan detour with his friend Arvind at Nizamuddin Railway Station, we finally thought our night was concluding. But though Abhishek had been the one to drive us all to Nizamuddin, it was Arvind—the same Arvind who had been prolonging the party with ‘just one more scotch’ for hours—who collapsed into the driver’s seat.
Arvind fumbled the key into the ignition. Then he turned to the radio and commenced an intense minuteslong search for the perfect song. Abhishek, meanwhile, got in on the passenger’s side, laughing as he wiped the last of the paan juice from his mouth. He twisted around to talk to us. “Arvind’s going to drop me and then take you home,” he said amicably. Then, seeing the horror cross our faces, he added, “Don’t worry! He’s the best drunk driver in Delhi.”
Abhishek faced forward and focused on the music as Arvind sloppily rejected one station after another. A moment later, a thought crossed his mind. He turned to look at us again. “But he’s not drunk.”
Arvind did indeed get us home safe and sound. However, we aren’t ready to bestow the mantle of Delhi’s Best Drunk Driver upon him, because he has a lot of competition. Drunk driving may rival golgappas as Delhi’s favorite nightcap. It’s a practice enjoyed by the richest BMWdriving trust-funder and the poorest autowallah. Hardly a week went by when we didn’t hear some terrible story about a family of pavement dwellers crushed beneath an inebriated driver’s wheels. On winter nights, auto drivers would pull quick sips from small bottles. Sometimes it was hard to know what was scarier: the daytime traffic, when no Blueline bus could be counted on to have functional brakes; or nighttime, when no driver could be counted on to actually be awake. We once rode in a taxi with a driver so drunk that he wouldn’t pull over no matter how much we shouted at him. He finally agreed to stop his vehicle only because we convinced him that the side of the Ring Road was actually the GK-II main market.
But of all the problems we read about, the one the papers covered above all others was crime.
Every city has crime, of course, and every newspaper in the world relies on breathless crime reporting to boo
st circulation. Even in Singapore where crime is famously low, the papers give ink to it whenever they can. (Although theirs is a lower threshold: while we lived there, the Straits Times devoted space on its front page to a crime spree in which vandals broke into a total of seven parked cars.9) But we’d moved to India thinking that all its crime was concentrated in Mumbai. That’s because we’d read Suketu Mehta’s book Maximum City, which presented a Mumbai so terrifying and violent that when Murali and I were asked to fly out for a twelve-hour focus group, I initially refused to go. My colleagues were surprised that I was more worried about Mumbai than Delhi, because Delhi is considered to be the most dangerous city in the country.
Especially for women. Our friend Tarn, who grew up in Mumbai, had been warned by her female friends before moving to Delhi that “for women, Delhi was different.” Delhi was reputed to be much more conservative, which meant that single women who lived by free-wheeling Mumbai mores were in constant danger, and that it simply wouldn’t be safe for her to be out after 9 p.m. Tarn told us that she didn’t believe it when she first moved to Delhi, until the night she and her friends were followed around Saket PVR market (an upscale, youth-friendly market) by a group of thuggish men who grew increasingly threatening and refused to relent until Tarn called some male friends to rush to the market and chase them away.
Journalist Ketaki Gokhale argued in the Wall Street Journal that Delhi’s women were suffering deeply because of the cultural acceptability of “eve-teasing.” “That’s a benign-sounding term for the catcalls, groping and other forms of abuse that women here endure daily. It forces us to modify our behavior—from walking a longer route home to wearing thick scarves in the dead of summer—in ways in which men are never troubled.”10