Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  Our neighbors and our co-workers all echoed the newspapers in their belief that Delhi was India’s Mos Eisley. We were taking our life into our hands, they’d tell us, every time we rode in an auto, walked through the Old City, or generally left our house after sundown. But despite everyone’s insistence that it was always open season on law-abiding citizens, we were only confronted with crime once in our eighteen months in Delhi.

  On Saturdays, some beggars carry buckets filled with mustard oil. People can wash away their sins by dropping coins into the oil as an offering to the god Shani. That’s why, when the bucket-bearing foursome first approached us on this Saturday, we didn’t take notice. Until their attack began.

  “Money!” the thieves screamed, surrounding us as we stepped out of our auto. “Please, sir! Money! Chapatti!” One of the thieves backed into Jenny with his arms spread wide, forcing her backwards as the remaining three danced around me, screaming and swiping at my pockets.

  “Watch your bag, Jenny!” I hollered, jamming my hands into my pockets, wrapping my left hand around my cheap Nokia mobile and my right hand around my wallet. My image of myself as my wife’s able protector evaporated as my voice cracked in a way Jean-Claude Van Damme’s never has. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Saket Citywalk Mall was just six busy lanes of traffic away: a gleaming refuge of air-conditioned marble whose security perimeter would save us, if only we could reach it. But that street is hard enough to cross without getting killed even when we’re not dodging the sticky fingers of four master criminals.

  Somehow, we made it to the concrete median. But the thugs had followed us. Traffic raced by on both sides of the street. We were trapped.

  And the bandits had discovered that there was something in my unguarded back pocket. I had to alternate between covering my phone and swatting at their grasping hands. It was just my Moleskine notebook—hardly worth stealing, but how could I explain that to them? The bad guys were to my right, but traffic was coming from my left; my head jerked back and forth, searching for a break in the cars while keeping an eye on my assailants, unable to concentrate successfully on either one.

  Across the road, I glimpsed salvation: crowds, open space and security guards whose dominion of protection didn’t seem to extend across the street.

  “Hut!” I shouted in my most commanding Hindi. “Away!” All four of the thieves jumped. I shoved the nearest one in his chest. He began flailing wildly at me, screaming, pumping his fists. Fortunately, I was much taller than he was; I kept him at arm’s length, his fists landing on my arms but causing no pain. The traffic finally cleared, and we dashed across the street and past the guards who hadn’t noticed our plight. Our attackers shouted after us from the median, but they came no closer. Our belongings were accounted for. We were safe.

  And those four six-year-olds were the biggest threat we encountered in Delhi.

  In fact, we were more comfortable walking around Delhi than the downtown Denver neighborhood to which we moved upon our return to the States. Certainly, a considerable portion of our comfort can be attributed to our skin color (nobody is going to victimize the one couple on the street whom everyone is looking at). But even accounting for that, we actually felt safer in Delhi than in New York.

  Consider this: on my first day in the Okhla office, the first thing I did was lock my laptop to the table. Aftter all, that’s what I did at every office in New York. But my co-workers teased me about that act for the next eighteen months. “Is there that much crime in America,” Murali tittered, “that you can’t even trust your own co-workers?”

  The answer is yes. At my second job in New York City, a dozen computers were stolen one night. There were no signs of a break-in, which meant that the thief had a key. A few weeks later, our IT guy spotted a bundle of equipment on eBay that matched what had been taken from us. It was being sold by a username that was suspiciously similar to one of our co-worker’s. The police weren’t interested, so we had to settle for the lesson that laptops should always be locked up.

  I believe that if 16 million New Yorkers magically traded places with 16 million Delhiites, Delhi would explode I often wonder why there wasn’t more crime in Delhi.

  After all, demographics and economics suggest that Delhiites should be perpetuating far more violence on each other. The city skews young and male: fifty-five percent of Delhi is male,11 as compared to fifty-two percent across India and a global average of slightly more than fifty percent.12 Over fifty-three percent of the city is under the age of twenty-five,13 compared to about thirty-four percent in New York City.14 Young males in America turn to sex and violence to vent their energy and aggression, but Delhi is so conservative that it’s much harder for young men to engage in the former. The city’s economic gulf is incredibly wide and incredibly visible (I’m talking Ferraris-driving-past-pavement dwellers wide and visible). And the hardships of the city—heat, cold, traffic, pollution, water shortages, high population density, minimal personal space, insults and indignities—are overwhelming even to people who can afford to overcome them.

  Any American city would surely be torn apart by these social forces.

  The official crime statistics show that while Delhi is dangerous by Indian standards (the Times of India calls it India’s “crime capital”15), it’s positively tranquil as compared to American cities. The Delhi region had 495 murders in 2007,16 or 2.95 murders for every 100,000 people as calculated against the National Crime Records Bureau’s population estimates.17 In that same year, however, New York City had 5.94 murders per 100,000 people18—and that was a year in which New York City was named “the safest big city in the United States.”19 There’s a similar story for forcible rape in 2007: 3.57 per 100,000 in New Delhi,20 10.48 per 100,000 in New York.21

  Side-by-side, the statistics are clearly in Delhi’s favor. So the question is this: are the statistics accurate? Our friend Sachin, an editor at one of the city’s major newspapers, emphatically believes that they’re not. The police often refuse to file complaints or First Information Reports, he wrote to us, for two reasons. “One, if an FIR is lodged, the police are obliged to investigate the case, which they certainly don’t want to as it may intrude upon their extortion time; and two, the chief inspector of a police station wants his jurisdiction to be the ‘most crime-free’ so that his area or police station is rewarded by the state government.”

  In a patriarchal society in which rape victims are often stagmatized, most rapes go unreported. And while it’s hard to believe that three murders per 100,000 are swept so easily under the official radar, Sachin thinks that’s the case. “A government report published earlier this year supplied statistics of how Delhi Police are the most corrupt government servants in the country,” he wrote. “I believe Delhi is a far more dangerous place than Mumbai (or New York), not only because I hear about the multitude and the variety of crimes in our daily editorial meetings, but also because the law and order machinery is so inept and corrupt, it has compromised the safety of the city’s residents.”

  We’d certainly heard enough rumors of India’s corruption to enter the country with wariness of anyone wearing a uniform. The few interactions we did have with the police were merely minor abuses of power, like when cops would briefly commandeer our autorickshaws. They’d wave us down from the side of the road, hop in the front seat, and give our driver directions with no regard to the whims of the paying customers. The officer would wrap his arm around the driver as if they were good friends, as if this was just a polite autowallah doing his friendly neighborhood constable a favor; but the moment the officer jumped out, the driver would sag in his seat with relief. I also had an experience in which an officer arbitrarily singled out my taxi driver one night on my commute home, planting himself in front of the bumper and pointing and screaming at him. He advanced menacingly, fingering his beating stick in preparation for unleashing noble justice. And then he noticed my pasty white face cowering in the back seat and suddenly decided we weren’t doing anyt
hing wrong after all.

  Our only full taste of the corruption Sachin describes came in the Jahanpanah City Forest, a protected wilderness area near GK-II. An oasis of scrub brush, trees and fresh air along its 800 acresof meandering paths, the Jahanpanah City Forest should have provided us with regular escape from the heat and pollution of the cemented-over parts of the city. But we never returned there—not after the experience we had on Jenny’s first day in India, which was just the first day of my second week. I’d been telling Jenny all I’d learned about India—how to hail an autorickshaw, how to spot suspicious bottled water, how to order lunch at a restaurant—but I obviously hadn’t learned enough, because I decided to take us on a hike at 2 p.m. on a scorching August Saturday. The blazing sun was high overhead and sweat had been pouring down my back even before we reached the gate to the park. It didn’t improve things that we had no water. It made things worse when we got lost. And just when we were at our most miserable, a policeman appeared on his motorcycle and began to blackmail us.

  We’d heard his bike puttering around the corner of the path, so we knew someone was coming. He was surprised to see us, but he’d regained his composure as soon as he pulled to a halt, and he’d clearly formulated a strategy by the time he dismounted his bike. “Park closed,” he told us, advancing menacingly. “Park closed!” From there he launched into a string of Hindi, miming that he didn’t understand English every time we spoke but somehow managing to summon enough vocabulary to demand that we come to the station and pay a 30,000-rupee fine for being in the park during closing time.

  Or, you know, we could pay him 5,000 rupees right then and there.

  Panicking, terrified, and soaked after fifteen sweaty minutes spent trying to figure out what he wanted, I finally called my landlord who was one of only two people in the country whose phone number I had, and the only one of the two who spoke Hindi. I explained that I urgently needed him to translate, and then I handed the phone to the cop.

  They spoke briefly, and then the cop returned the phone. I put it to my ear and asked my landlord what he’d learned.

  He began by apologizing to me on behalf of his country.

  “This man is only trying to extort a bribe,” he told me. “I suggest you give him nothing.”

  With our understanding of the situation now clarified, Jenny and I started shuffling our feet and edging away. Suddenly, the policeman’s demeanour changed. His glowering was replaced by pleading. His shoulders sagged. His eyes welled with actual fake tears.

  “Gift for policeman!” he begged, blocking our way. “Please, sir! Gift for policeman!”

  What now? Could we ignore him and move on? Or was not bribing a policeman an arrestable offense? And what was the going rate for a bribe, anyway?

  I opened my wallet and tentatively handed him 400 rupees.

  Suddenly his English improved dramatically. “Please, ma’am,” he asked Jenny as the money disappeared into his pocket. “I beg of you. Double that!”

  Jenny shook her head cautiously. And then the officer’s demeanor changed again. He grinned broadly. He gave first Jenny and then me a tremendous handshake. He pointed us down the path that would return us to GK-II. He even watched us walk away to make sure we took the correct fork in the road, and then he waved at us happily as we did so.

  Of all the photo opportunities we missed in India, the moment we most deeply regret not capturing was when Jenny saw an elephant get pulled over by the traffic police. But this encounter ranks as our second-most lamented missed photo opportunity. Because I’m sure that policeman would have eagerly posed with us.

  1. http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/specials/toilet/index291006.shtml

  2. http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/world/2009/0929/1224255438055.html

  3. http://www.hindustantimes.com/News/columnsothers/People-don-t-feel-they-have-a-stake-in-the-city/458704/Article1-458701.aspx

  4. http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1926146,00.html

  5. http://www.delhitrafficpolice.nic.in/articles/cops-moot-rs-1000-as-minimum-challan.htm

  6. http://www.rediff.com/money/2008/may/16ft.htm

  7. http://www.indianexpress.com/news/first-thousand-eateries-get-thumbs-down-in-quality-survey/530375/

  8. http://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2008/Varmaprofit.html

  9. http://motoring.asiaone.com/Motoring/News/Story/A1Story20090831-164485.html

  10. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125291645948508175.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

  11. http://delhigovt.nic.in/dept/economic/populationdetail.asp

  12. http://censusindia.gov.in/Census_And_You/gender_composition.aspx

  13. http://delhigovt.nic.in/dept/economic/populationdetail.asp

  14. www.nyc.gov/html/dcp/pdf/census/projections_report.pdf, appendix table 1

  15. http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Delhi-tops-crimecharts-for-fifth-year-in-a-row/articleshow/2665983.cms

  16. http://ncrb.nic.in/cii2007/cii-2007/Table%203.1.pdf

  17. http://ncrb.nic.in/cii2007/cii-2007/Table%201.6.pdf

  18. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/08aprelim/table_4mt-oh.html

  19. http://www.govtech.com/gt/370385

  20. http://ncrb.nic.in/cii2007/cii-2007/Table%203.1.pdf

  21. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/08aprelim/table_4mt-oh.html

  10

  Cheap Labor: Their Delhi Struggle

  At the conclusion of my first week in New Delhi, I crafted an email to my colleagues back in the New York office. I had worked harder in that single week in Delhi than I ever had in my New York career, and I wanted my soon-to-be-ex-colleagues to know it for two reasons. The first was to demonstrate that the company’s investment in me was paying off—given that I was plucked from corporate obscurity just one week before I was shipped off to New Delhi, I felt pressure to show them I was worth it.

  The second reason for my email was that I’d had a genuine epiphany: I’d realized that Americans were far luckier than we appreciate. An obvious realization, I know, and one that seems absurdly naïve when put in print. But it’s one thing to learn about the world’s inequities from newspapers and quite another to see it with my own eyes.

  And that’s what had happened: the full weight of America’s good fortune was suddenly clear from just a week of watching my co-workers do their jobs.

  We were doing the same tasks for the same high-tech client in New Delhi that I had been doing in New York. But the workload in Delhi was twice what I was accustomed to, and the deadlines were half of what I’d have expected, which meant that any given day in Delhi required four times the amount of work as in New York. I didn’t leave the office before 8 p.m. those first couple of weeks, and I was still leaving hours earlier than almost everyone else. And while there are obviously plenty of companies in America in which people work just as hard, what struck me wasn’t as much the effort that my Indian colleagues put in as it was how work was prioritized in the hierarchy of their lives: work came above everything else.

  I asked a co-worker why they all worked so intensely, with the obvious toll it took on friends, family and life. This co-worker responded by telling me of the weight of history. When India and Pakistan were partitioned by the British in 1947, millions of Hindus were forced to abandon prosperity in Lahore and other cities and to move to Delhi with nothing at all. Meanwhile, millions of Muslims living in Indian cities were forced on the opposite journey. By some estimates, a half-million people were killed as ten to twelve million refugees crossed the new border, with Muslims going northwest and Hindus going southeast.1 Many of my colleagues’ grandparents had arrived in the city with nothing; for them, absolute poverty is less than two generations removed.

  I clumsily articulated this attitude and its ramifications in my email to New York (“So they all work like crazy, and their economy grows like crazy, and while the country clearly has its problems, they will surely be addressed with the same drive”), along with some more mundane thoughts (“Haven’t gotten sick yet, although my co-workers took me to a re
ally dodgy tea stand for samosas yesterday, so my stomach may yet have something in store for me.”). And while so many of my first impressions of India were reversed as I learned more about it, this one—of the omnipresent specter of Partition—never lost its significance.

  But there is another layer to it. The pain of absolute poverty is not just prominent in recent history. It’s also showcased on every street corner.

  In America, poverty is sanitized, ghettoized and even romanticized by the more fortunate classes. But in India, it’s impossible to look out of a window without seeing economic reality. For every street lined with nice houses, there’s a family picking scraps in the alley behind it. For every parking lot full of nice cars, there’s a thin man in thin clothes guarding it. Maids live in slums just beyond the high-rise apartment buildings in which they serve; ice cream vendors sleep atop the carts they push around all day long.

  Compare our commutes to work. In New York, Jenny and I would stare glumly at the other sleepy faces on the subway and wonder what the point was. In Delhi, we’d gape out of the taxi window at faces that made the point perfectly clear. On the other side of any window were people coping with an economy shaped entirely by its massive oversupply of labor. Everyone—up to and including my co-workers—toiled with the awareness that someone else would eagerly take their job for half the pay. The scenes my colleagues saw on their commutes were daily reminders of stories they’d heard from their grandparents. And they were proof that there were worse things in life than being at the office when your daughter said her first words.

  Like most expats, we were shocked by some of the sights we saw. And like most expats, we quickly grew desensitized. (Quicker than we’re comfortable admitting.) But then we read Edward Luce’s book In Spite of the Gods, and a phrase that one of his colleagues said to him stuck with us: ‘In India, things are never as good or as bad as they seem.’ And that inspired us to look closer at sights from which we’d normally turn away.