by M G Vassanji
The only minus point about the citizens of the capital is that the majority of them have not yet developed a sense of pride for belonging to it. Most of them are refugees from Pakistan who have yet to put their roots in Delhi’s soil.
Succinctly put; the kind of detail and honesty only rarely found elsewhere. Admittedly, the country and the city have been looking forward. “It is hard to believe that these acts of vandalism of our historic city took place in the regimes of our two most forward-looking prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.” Here is a man looking back; but he is old. It should not be forgotten, though, that the politicians who have looked back in modern times have been those ardent nationalists who fomented a climate of intolerance and communal violence.
Khushwant Singh, of course, was witness to the partition of India. Of its place in history, he writes,
we Indians and Pakistanis have chosen to forget what we did to each other to gain our freedom. We have no museums, no memorials to commemorate what was undoubtedly one of the greatest tragedies in recorded history. The uprooting of ten million people from their homes, the loss of one million lives, rape and abduction of thousands of women have all been swept under the carpet of oblivion.
And like many others I have met, he affirms, “When we search our souls, we will be forced to admit that little or nothing of the Gandhi legacy remains with us.”
Humorous and arrogant, yes; but also committed, passionate, and sad. He’s seen wars, assassinations, horrific communal violence, and always calls for tolerance, humour his shield. When Indira Gandhi sent the Indian army into the Golden Temple, the holiest site of the Sikhs, Khushwant Singh returned his Padma Bhushan, one of the country’s highest civilian decorations. He has recently received an even higher award.
Late in his life, now, he does not go out much but gives audiences between certain hours in the evening. He lives in an upscale apartment complex quite close to the Khan Market and within walking distance of the Purana Qila and Humayun’s tomb. I paid him a visit one night in the company of my Indian editor with a bottle of wine, which he accepted with thanks; he was sunk into an armchair, a white kerchief over his head in place of a turban, a shawl around him. The place was as modestly furnished as many Indian homes I’d seen, but not cluttered. Three middle-aged women had come calling, one on either side of him, whinging somewhat. He loves the company of women, and they, his. The third one buttonholed me on a distant sofa and wouldn’t let me go, invited me finally for a drink at the International Centre, which I declined, much annoyed, for I did not get a chance to get close to my host. His visiting hour was up and we had to leave. Since then, I was told discreetly that the lady in question had been banished (for a while) from the great man’s presence. When I went again, two other women were present, and a man, and the meeting was more managed. Ever the raconteur, Khushwant still holds attention. But he is hard of hearing, and it was the women’s higher pitch that more easily reached him. He told us wistfully of a time when he shared a room one night with a Finnish woman and didn’t attempt to make a pass. The next morning the Finnish woman said, Let’s go for a swim, and she did so, in the nude. He wondered now, with a twinkle in his eye, that perhaps his reserve and fear of receiving an indignant slap on the face the previous evening had been unfounded. He had just published a book of Urdu poetry in translation. One of the two women present was a columnist, the other was involved with women victims of the Gujarat violence of 2002. We talked about a recent incident involving the Bangladeshi writer Tasleema Nasreen, who was threatened with beheading by a Muslim member of the state assembly in Hyderabad. He had his one Scotch, didn’t touch the hors d’oeuvres. Then it was time to leave.
The commercial heart of Lutyens’s New Delhi—laid out like a wheel, its hub Connaught Circus in three concentric blocks, A, B, C, with wide avenues radiating out like spokes—invites you to walk and explore this city, unlock its wonderful geometries; and indeed the odd tourist may be seen on some ample sidewalk, map in hand, somewhat hopelessly attempting to do precisely that. New Delhi streets are not always marked for the convenience of walkers or those who do not quite know the city. It is not really a walker’s city, there being few places to stroll into or otherwise engage with on the way; traffic runs in torrents beside you, and it looks terrifying simply to cross a road. But Connaught Circus: here you can indeed stroll around to your heart’s content, albeit mostly in circles. The new and even newer suburbs and complexes of South Delhi, with their wealthy populations, may boast of their bustling markets, but the Circus, due to its former status, its striking circular plan, and its quaint colonial-era business names (Pearey Lal is my favourite) to give it a sense of historical gravitas, retains a somewhat mystical hold as the centre of New Delhi. This is a place to go (or come) to, for an expedition. The shopping is leisurely compared to the mad bustles of the markets elsewhere; it opens late and closes early in the evening. If you are seen walking about outside these hours (say at eleven in the morning), you are evidently a tourist and are treated as such by the hustlers. It has its memorable old haunts—the Volga and the United Coffee House, the Bookworm, the American Express office, less essential after the advent of the ATM, the Regal Cinema, the shoe stores, and Vedis of Rangoon, tailors. And there are the modern electronics stores offering the latest technology to the nouveau wealthy of India, and the new and cute—and very kitschy—metal-and-plastic-decor restaurants, like the PiccaDelhi with its London theme, to remind you of the West, and that India has arrived. The sidewalk vendors, as always, selling curios, magazines and newspapers, and pirated paperbacks wrapped in Cellophane. There used to be the tiny STD booths not long ago, for making calls to anywhere in the world, now made redundant by the ubiquitous cell phones. There seems one stuck to every head.
One of the radial roads out of Connaught Place is Sansad Marg, or Parliament Road, for obvious reasons, off which lie both the YWCA and YMCA hostels, convenient, economic places to stay. Roads are named after great people in this area; the more modest Tolstoy Marg takes you to the major radial Janpath, where the multi-storey Cottage Emporium dispenses an impressive range of pricey but high-quality Indiana for the tourist to take away, from carpets and clothes to gods’ icons and jewellery. The book and CD section is a small treat. The atmosphere inside is rather hushed, perhaps due to the large space and the rich decor, and because those who come here are, essentially, all strangers. On Janpath one finds stores that sell the same goods as the Emporium (except for the books and music) but several times cheaper, if you know how to bargain, and quality control is up to the buyer. Further along Janpath are the state emporia, more goods for visitors to take away, each Indian state represented by its own store selling regional items.
Tolstoy Marg keeps going, changing character, getting busier as it crosses the other radial roads, then finally goes under a new bypass, where you turn into a residential area and the famous Bengali Market. We are not far from the Jumna and Old Delhi. The Bengali Market is a busy town square throbbing with commerce and dominated by two sweet shops, face to face. No one quite knows how the market received its name, but Bengal is known for its sweets. Perhaps there was an original sweet shop owned by Bengalis, perhaps not. The two on the scene today are owned by Punjabis. For decades these vegetarian havens have been places to take the family, or go with friends, or buy gift boxes wrapped in shiny paper, and I have received and bought many over the years. With the spread of the city and the growth of traffic, the market has lost some of its essentiality, for you can buy the same food items elsewhere, but the throngs here early in the afternoon are impressive. Inside is standing room only. The glass counter at the door, and the shelves behind, filled with dozens of sweets and farsaan (savouries), are an explosion of bright colours in the midst of people and noise.
Postscript: Night Thoughts, Delhi
September 1, 2007
YMCA AT 2 A.M. and dead stillness outside; then a bevy of dogs barking; silence again. The faintest trace of the muezzin’s cry, the az
aan—from a mosque in Shahjahanabad, perhaps, travelling across the unimpeded Delhi skyline. A lonely sound here, alien. The dogs again; a belch next door, someone’s not digested their curry. Then quiet.
The joys of jet-lag: time to meditate; listen to vagrant dogs barking, the muezzin’s cry, a belch.
The Samjhauta (meaning “understanding”) Express, Delhi, India, to Lahore, Pakistan, was bombed the other day near Panipat—where Babur won his decisive battle and began the Mughal dynasty. Sixty-eight people, mostly Pakistanis, died; one man lost five family members. The devices were crude pipe bombs placed in suitcases, but with sophisticated detonators—two suitcases were recovered when a passenger in a stupor threw them out, earning for himself much publicity.
According to a recent poll, 80 per cent of young Delhiites said they would like to go overseas. Of course they could mean they wished to go at least once; and the poll could include wishful thinking by the poorer classes who would never make it in any case. Many of the wealthy classes do go in and out of India. But there are frustrations that make people leave for good.
Walking at Connaught Place, I was stopped by a young man who wanted my help. Apparently he had been admitted to a hotel school in Switzerland and wanted me to draft him a letter. It was to—of all people—his employer, asking for permission to leave for a year. The whole thing sounded bizarre—the boy could barely speak English. I dictated a letter, and he gratefully took off.
It was at about this time in the night that I had arrived—nervous, excited, in a daze—from the airport during my first visit, fourteen years ago, and was dropped off at the sister institution, the YWCA, a block away, by Krishan Chander. He had not done his homework and assumed I was a returning Indian, and had me find my way through the utter chaos of New Delhi railway station. I still wonder at how I found my train, my compartment and seat…and began an adventure that brings me back here, now, many years later. Then, those who became my friends travelled second class by train and economized. There would be blackouts in the city, and water shortages. Now they casually fly in planes, use credit cards and ATMs, buy the latest electronics, eat expensively, invest; they have two cars in the family; and they all look more and more frazzled, existing on roller skates, as it were. All have at least one child overseas.
India has changed. The country brims with confidence, a refreshing contrast to the images of my youth (Life magazine) of starving, dying India. Embarrassing India. Now, on this sixtieth anniversary of Independence, the Times of India’s headline is “60 and getting sexier” tabloid language, unfortunately, is a marker of sophistication and coolness even in this Establishment newspaper. The media talk is endlessly of the economy and growth rates and “Chindia”—the superpowers on the threshold, China and India; film celebrities, cricket, and America are the obsessions. America is to be emulated, competed against, bettered. Everything on television (if in English) gives the appearance of a studied mimicry of America. Cool India (the phrase itself lifted from Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia) is to some degree Mimic India.
I love cricket. In Toronto I have sat up nights to watch it, as have others I know, from South Asia, South Africa, the West Indies. But here it is an obsession to dwarf all obsessions. Every series is analyzed in excruciating detail, as if a war, the Mahabharata, has been fought. A fallen wicket (an “out”) in a national-level match is announced in a news flash on every channel. On the sixtieth anniversary of Independence, one of the two editorials in the Times of India is on the recent victory over England. On cricket hangs the lajja, the honour, of the country. It is an emblem that cannot tarnish, for it represents the success of the country. And victory over Pakistan, above all else, represents the worth of the nation. Once, on my way to Delhi airport to pick up my family, my taxi was suddenly stopped. A dark, scruffy face appeared through the window and handed me a few sticky grapes—a sweet offering, mitho modho, for India had just beaten Pakistan in a match. But a more recent series, when India played in Pakistan, and Indian visitors were treated magnanimously by their hosts, put a wrench into this hysterical competitiveness. It touched a lot of people.
The media corniness, the naïveté and runaway enthusiasm, reminds one rather of a new country. Indeed there exists a double vision of India. In terms of economic achievements and development, India is seen as a young sixty-year-old, a dazzling over-achiever, statistics and indices trotted out like school grades, the nearest competitor, China, the role model, America; and in discussions of its many problems (“a billion people, a million problems,” someone memorably said in the papers) the nation is seen as a complex, ancient, and diverse culture that somehow always manages to stay on its feet.
This is India’s turn finally, and its people—the privileged classes, at least—know that. The world needs it, the world is theirs. Dignitaries arrive to sing its praises, sometimes in undignified, silly ways. Everywhere restoration and construction proceeds apace; new highways connect the cities, connect neighbourhoods within cities; neighbourhoods get renewed. (I visited Tughlaqabad again after many years, and what was a blackened collapsed ruin when I first saw it is now under repair and looks rather pink.) The new vision of India is that of an emerging economic, military, and cultural superpower. The enthusiasm is boundless, the euphoria catchy and undoubtedly built on substance. Nothing seems impossible—there are few other countries in the world that could feel this way.
But everywhere there is also the underclass which has no part of this shining Indian dream. Its lustre does not reach the inner cities, the smaller towns, the crowded gulleys with open drains where the poor and mutilated cry out. The girl who touches your feet in desperation after begging (and you squirm); the woman in burqa who runs after you holding up her baby (you squirm); the peon who presses himself against the wall when you pass (your heart sinks); the family at a shrine earning twenty-four dollars a month; the roadside chaiwallah who sells at two rupees a cup and rarely leaves the neighbourhood. The desperate resort to suicide, by immolation, by hanging: the school student, the techie, the farmer, the army cadre. Life is a constant battle, someone said to me, with all the emphasis he could muster, and he was not a chaiwallah but a teacher. Statistics are often skewed, he said. A few may get astronomical salaries touted by the media as comparable to those of the West, but the rest will make do with a thousand rupees, about twenty-five dollars, or less a day and struggle. Then there is the corruption, the inertia. A good number of parliamentarians are currently fighting criminal charges, but the cases will drag on till doomsday, I am assured. And the rapes, the gang rapes, and murders, even of minors. Perhaps they were always there, someone says, they only get reported more.
And what of Gandhi in this new India, you want to ask, but don’t, for you know that Gandhi has become an embarrassment.
Nevertheless, the progress is undeniable; India’s self-belief has paid off. Creatively, the movies once ridiculed are now a worldwide glamorous presence, a magical, alternative, and indeed welcome new aesthetic; Indian English, once mocked cruelly in the mother country, is now the voice of some of the world’s most admired writers. Intellectually, once possessing a glut of degreed people—in India, Ph.D.s sweep the roads, we used to hear as children—now its educated classes are the leaders of a new economy and technology. It is a military power to contend with, and there are plans to land an Indian on the moon. Once a Third World country, it is now exporting movies and software, teachers and doctors to its former colonial ruler. There is no stopping it. It’s as if a spring, long coiled up, has been set loose.
And surely those of us “wogs” who suffered slights due to our Indian origins can feel gratified, if also remain a bit wary.
Shimla: A Spell in the Mountains
I saw
the mountains of the sages
where the wind mangles eagles
(A girl and an old woman, skin and bones carry bundles bigger than those peaks)
OCTAVIO PAZ, “Himachal Pradesh (1)”
The Sahibs’ Resort in the Hills
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“Look, Hajji, is yonder the city of Simla? Allah, what a city!”
“My father’s brother…could recall when there were but two houses in it.”
RUDYARD KIPLING, Kim
THE HOWRAH MAIL ARRIVES at the Old Delhi railway station late in the night, at about 11 p.m., from Calcutta, bound for Chandigarh and Kalka in the state of Haryana. This is a brief stopover, and inside the second-class carriages passengers stir in their bunks to cast wary eyes upon their luggage as we board and find our places by the dim overhead lights. There are four of us, two adults and two wilting children. The journey ahead is seven hours, roughly, and Kalka is the last stop on the plains, from where we’ll catch an ongoing train for Shimla in the Himalayan foothills. The jolt and clang of the train stopping wakes us up in Kalka, a station vastly smaller than Delhi, and it’s a short walk across the platform to the narrow-gauge tracks from where the famous “toy trains” depart for Shimla, formerly called Simla, the romantic hill town in the western Himalayas famous as the summer capital of the British Raj.
There follows (past a few construction eyesores), a slow, winding train ride through a succession of tunnels and hairpin bends with spectacular views of the mountains and valleys. Mysterious snow-covered peaks in the distance; little towns, a hut or two hugging the hills; an ascetic on the road; tall pine trees rising straight up from the valley depths just outside the window. This could be a dream. As children, we had heard of Simla, but only in the title of a famous Bombay film. How far, this pristine mountain beauty of the gods, from the tropical paradise of our childhood, the hills and plains, the wildlife, and the solitary snow-peaked mountain of Africa which also was a god. We pass cluttered little stations where passengers get on and off, where samosas and chai can be bought. The sun is bright and hard, and the mood inside the compartment is happy, even jubilant, for many of the travellers are tourist families escaped from the sweltering plains, crowded lives in crowded cities, monotonous landscapes. On the way we are treated to a dance number from the current Shahrukh Khan hit movie, performed by two schoolgirls and much to the delight of everyone. The men like to take turns to stand on the steps of the open doorways and face the bracing headwind and take in the sights in comparative solitude; in the tunnels the youths shout to hear themselves, and when the train bends on itself the young lean out to view its entire length while held onto tightly by a parent. Our little one is asleep.