City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  I can trace the beginning of the deterioration to a particular incident. I had avidly started collecting photographs of filmstars and in the course of this activity fell hopelessly in love with Ashok Kumar, the popular screen hero. I saw his famous film Bandhan nine times along with similarly smitten school friends and we sent off an ardent fan letter requesting an autographed photograph, in the approved fashion of hero-worshipping teenagers. We didn’t really expect a response and soon forgot the whole thing. One afternoon, as my cousin and I were getting off the horse carriage that used to take us to our Christian mission school in the Tis Hazari area, grandfather’s clerk Chhail Behari came up to me and said that I was wanted in the legal office that had been set up in one of the annexes of the big house.

  This was most unusual. Chhail Behari never spoke to us and we never visited grandfather’s office when he was working there. Anyhow, when I tiptoed in on this occasion, he said in the voice of a stranger, ‘Show it to her’. Chhail Behari silently held up a large photograph of my idol from the silver screen, with the words ‘Best Wishes to Sheila from Ashok Kumar’ scrawled across the bottom in green ink. He also held up the manila envelope in which it had arrived with my name in large type on it. From outside it looked like a serious official communication and they had been most intrigued that I was the addressee. ‘Who is this young man?’ grandfather asked sternly. ‘Why is he writing to you directly? Are you by any chance under the impression that you are old enough to arrange such matters without consulting your elders?’

  It was clear from his withering tone that he was truly outraged. No explanation on earth could change that. I realized in panic that neither he nor Chhail Behari had any inkling of such innocent pastimes as collecting mementos of famous personalities. It took several interventions from Tauji, who happened to be in Delhi at the time, to calm grandfather down. But after this incident he viewed all my projects and activities with scepticism and at least mild distrust. Though he continued to receive the greatest respect from everybody in the family, his control and energy began to wane during my adolescence. The fast pace of change in the lives of his growing grandchildren wore him down and a point came when he could no longer recognize the map of their world.

  Mrs Gupta Never Rang

  JAN MORRIS

  Indira Gandhi was in power in Delhi in 1975, but though she had clamped the country under a State of Emergency, harshly limiting the press and imprisoning much of the Opposition, to the stranger the Indian capital felt much the same as ever. In this extract from Among the Cities, there is not much to reveal which particular regime governed India at the time of its writing: Delhi is one of those cities whose age, manner and disposition easily absorb the styles of its successive rulers.

  ‘You see,’ said the government spokesman, ‘you may liken Delhi to the River Ganges, it twists and turns, many other streams join it, it divides into many parts, and it flows into the sea in so many channels that nobody may know which is the true river. You follow my train of thought? It is a metaphysical matter, perhaps. You will do best to burrow under the surface of things and discover what is not revealed to us ordinary mortals! In the meantime, you will take a cup of tea, I hope?’ I took a cup of tea, milkless, very sweet, brought by a shuffling messenger in a high-buttoned jacket with a scarf around his neck, and between pleasantries I pondered the spokesman’s advice. Indians, of course, love to reduce the prosaic to the mystic. It is part of their Timeless Wisdom. For several centuries the tendency has variously baffled, infuriated, amused and entranced travellers from the west, and India is full of pilgrims still, come from afar to worship at the shrines of insight.

  But Delhi? Delhi is not just a national capital, it is one of the political ultimates, one of the prime movers. It was born to power, war and glory. It rose to greatness not because holy men saw visions there but because it commanded the strategic routes from the northwest, where the conquerors came from, into the rich flatlands of the Ganges delta. Delhi is a soldiers’ town, a politicians’ town, journalists’, diplomats’ town. It is Asia’s Washington, though not so picturesque, and lives by ambition, rivalry and opportunism.

  ‘Ah yes,’ he said, ‘what you are thinking is quite true, but that is the surface of Delhi. You are an artist, I know, you should look beyond! And if there is anything we can do to help your inquiries,’ he added with an engaging waggle of his head, ‘you have only to let us know. You may telephone us at any time and we will ring you back with the requisite information in a moment or two. We are here to help! That is why we are here! No, no, that is our duty!’

  Certainly Delhi is unimaginably antique, and age is a metaphysic, I suppose. Illustrations of mortality are inescapable there, and do give the place a sort of nagging symbolism. Tombs of emperors stand beside traffic junctions, forgotten fortresses command suburbs, the titles of lost dynasties are woven into the vernacular, if only as street names.

  One of the oldest and deadest places I know, for a start, is the crumbled fortress-capital of Tughluqabad in the city’s southern outskirts. For a single decade it was a place of terrific consequence, for nearly seven centuries since it has been a grey wasteland of piled stones and ruined alleyways, a memento mori by any standard, inhabited only by the disagreeable monkeys which are the familiars of Delhi, and by a melancholy watchman who, recently transferred by the Archaeological Survey from some more frequented historical monument, now sees nobody but the apes from one day to the next.

  Or consider, in another kind of allegory, the Lodi Gardens. These are popular promenades, but they are also the cemetery of the Lodi kings who thrived in the early sixteenth century. Here death and life consort on familiar terms, and especially in the early morning, when Delhi people go out for some fresh air before the sun comes up, they offer some piquant juxtapositions. All among the memorials the citizens besport themselves, pursuing their yogic meditations in the tomb of Sikander Lodi, jog-trotting among the funerary domes, exercising their pampered dachshunds beside the Bara Gumbad Mosque or pissing, in the inescapable Delhi manner, behind the mausoleum of Mohammed Shah.

  They used to say, to express the marvellous continuity of Delhi, that seven successive capitals existed here, each superimposed upon the last. Nowadays they are always finding new ones, and the latest tally seems to be fourteen. Few foreigners and still fewer Indians have ever heard of most of the dynasties represented, but here and there across the capital some of them have left not merely tombs or ruins but living remnants of themselves. Embedded, for instance, in one of Delhi’s smarter quarters, almost within sight of the Oberoi Intercontinental, is the Muslim village shrine of Nizamuddin, built in the time of the fourteen-century Sultan Ghiyasuddin Tughluq and still as holy as ever.

  Through tortuous mucky lanes one approaches it from the busy highway, past the statutory Indian lines of beggars, crones and saddhus, through the spittle-stained portals where the old men stare, and into the intricate jumble of courts, tombs and arcades that surrounds the mosque of Nizamuddin and its sacred pool. Here mendicants lope around on knobbly staves, saintly scholars are at their books, sweet old ladies sit outside tombs (they are not allowed in, being female), and in the mosque there hustles and brushes the muezzin, an indefatigable goblin figure with white eyebrows and dainty tread. Nothing here is unpremeditated. All moves, though you might not guess it, to an immemorial schedule: the prayer call comes precisely to time, the rituals are meticulously ordered, even the whining beggars have their appointed place in the hierarchy, and when I left the precincts the imam gave me his visiting card—his name is Al Haj Hazrat Peer Qazi Syed Safdar Ali Nizami, and his cable address is Headpriest Delhi.

  Even more a living relic, so to speak, is the Begum Timur Jehan Shahzadi of Daryaganj, in the old walled city of Delhi. This lady is a Moghul princess of the dynasty which made Delhi its capital in the seventeenth century and built the very city, Shahjehanabad, in whose labyrinthine recesses she lives now. Just go to the Old City, her son-in-law had assured me, and ask for the Begum Jeh
an’s house; and though in the event this proved insufficient advice, and I spent half an afternoon stumbling through the high-walled maze of Shahjehanabad, vainly presenting the inquiry, still I relished the form of it, and thought it was rather like knocking on the door of the Great Pyramid, asking for Cheops.

  I found her in the end anyway, ensconced in her front sitting room between portraits of her imperial forebears: a short, decisive old lady with a brief mischievous smile and an air of totally liberated self-possession. There is no pretending that this princess lives much like a princess. Her old house, into which her family moved when they were ejected by later conquerors from their imperial palace, is a beguiling shambles in the old Islamic style: a couple of rooms in the Western manner for the convenience of visitors, the rest more or less medieval—a wide decrepit courtyard, a dusty trellised vine, thickly populated chambers all around. There are granddaughters and sons-in-law and undefined connections; there are skivvies and laundrymen and assorted sweepers; there are children and dogs and unexplained loiterers in doorways. Forty or fifty souls constitute the tumbled court of the Begum Timur Jehan, and through it she moves commandingly in green trousers, issuing instructions, reminiscing about emperors, traitors or ladies of the harem, and frequently consulting her highly organized notebook, all asterisks and cross-references, for addresses or reminders.

  Like Headpriest Delhi she lives very near the earth, close to the muck and the spittle, close to the mangy dogs and the deformed indigents in the street outside. Delhi is scarcely an innocent city, for on every layer it is riddled with graft and intrigue, but it is distinctly organic, to an atavistic degree. An apposite introduction to the city, I think, is provided by Map Eight of the Delhi City Atlas, which marks a substantial slab of the municipal area as being Dense Jungle: though this is now a city of a million inhabitants, it feels near the bush still. From many parts of it the open plain is in sight, and the country trees of India, the feathery tamarisks and ubiquitous acacias, invade every part of it—the animals too, for squirrels are everywhere and monkeys, buffaloes, cows, goats and a million pye-dogs roam the city streets peremptorily.

  There is simplicity everywhere, too, for rural people from all India flock into Delhi for jobs, for help, to see the sights. There are Sikhs and sleek Bengalis, Rajputs ablaze with jewellery, smart Gujaratis from the western coast, beautiful Tamils from the south, cloaked Tibetans smelling of untanned leather, clerks from Bombay smelling of aftershave, students, wandering sages, clumping soldiers in ammunition boots, black-veiled Muslim women, peasants in for the day from the scorched and desiccated Punjab plains. Endearingly they trail through their national monuments, awestruck, and the attendants intone their monologues hoping for tips, and the tourist buses line up outside the Presidential palace, and the magicians prepare their levitations and inexplicable disappearances in the dusty ditch below the ramparts of the Red Fort.

  This is the Gandhian truth of India, expressed in Delhi chiefly by such reminders of an earthier world beyond the city limits. Though I fear I might not give up my electric typewriter without a struggle, still I am a Gandhian myself in principle, and respond easily to this suggestion of a vast Indian naïveté, stretching away from Delhi like a limitless reservoir, muddled perhaps but deeply wholesome. The Gandhian ethic is rather outmoded in India, in fact, and the Mahatma himself seems to be losing his charismatic appeal, but still I liked the inscriptions in the visitors’ book at Birla House, where he died in 1948 (his body was displayed to the public on the roof, illuminated by searchlight), and where many a country pilgrim reverently pauses. ‘My heart heaving with emotion,’ wrote P.H. Kalaskar. ‘Moving indeed,’ thought A.K. Barat. Several people wrote ‘Felt happy’. One said, ‘Most worth seeing place in Delhi’, and when, quoting from the master himself, I contributed ‘Truth is God’, the inevitable onlookers murmured, ‘Very good, very good,’ nodded approvingly to each other and touched my hand in sympathy.

  Delhi is a city of basic, spontaneous emotions: greed, hate, revenge, love, pity, kindness, the murderous shot, the touch of the hand. Its very subtleties are crude: even its poverty is black and white. On the one side are the organized beggar children who, taught to murmur a few evocative words of despair like ‘hungry’, ‘baby’ or ‘mummy’, succeed all too often in snaring the susceptible stranger. On the other are the courtly thousands of the jhuggis, the shantytowns of matting, tentage and old packing cases which cling like black growths to the presence of Delhi.

  There are beggars in Delhi who are comfortably off, and people too proud to beg who possess nothing at all, not a pot or a pan, not a pair of shoes. I saw one such man, almost naked, shivering with the morning cold and obviously very ill, huddled against a lamppost in Janpath early one morning. He asked for nothing, but I felt so sorry for him, and for a moment so loved him for his suffering, that I gave him a ten-rupee note, an inconceivable amount by the standards of Indian indigence. He looked at it first in disbelief, then in ecstasy and then in a wild gratitude, and I left him throwing his hands to heaven, singing, praying and crying, still clinging to this lamppost, and sending me away, slightly weeping myself, to coffee, toast and orange juice (‘You’ll be sure it’s chilled, won’t you?’) at my hotel.

  The voice of the people, Gandhi used to say, is the voice of God. I doubt it, but I do recognize a divine element to the Indian poverty, ennobled as it is by age and sacrifice. Indians rationalize it by the concept of reincarnation, and I see it too as a halfway condition, a station of the cross. ‘In the next world,’ I suggested to my driver after a long and exhausting journey into the country, ‘I’ll be driving and you’ll be lying on the back seat,’ but he answered me with a more elemental philosophy. ‘In the next world,’ he replied, ‘we’ll both be lying on the back seat!’ For even the inegality of Delhi, even the pathos, often has something robust to it, a patient fatalism that infuriates many modernists but is a solace to people like me. It is disguised often in Eastern mumbo-jumbo, preached about in ashrams to gullible Californians and exploited by swamis from the divine to the absurd: but it is really no more than a kindly acceptance of things as they are, supported by the sensible thesis that things are not always what they appear to be.

  But pathos, yes. Delhi is the capital of the losing streak. It is the metropolis of the crossed wire, the missed appointment, the puncture, the wrong number. Every day’s paper in Delhi brings news of some new failure, in diplomacy, in economics, in sport: when India’s women entered the world tabletennis tournament during my stay in Delhi, not only were they all beaten but one actually failed to turn up for the match. I was pursued in the city by a persistent and not unattractive Rajput businessman. I thought him rather suave as I fended him off, in his well-cut check suit and his trendy ties, confident of manner, worldly of discourse: but one day I caught sight of him hors de combat, so to speak, muffled in a threadbare overcoat and riding a battered motor scooter back to his suburban home—and suddenly saw him, far more endearingly if he did but know it, as he really was, smallish, poorish, struggling and true.

  He dropped me in the end anyway, perhaps because I developed an unsightly boil in my nose—men seldom send roses to girls with red noses. The side of my face swelled up like a huge bunion, and I was half red and half white, and sniffly and sad and sorry for myself. In this condition, self-consciously, I continued my investigations, and at first I was touched by the tact with which Indians in the streets pretended not to notice. After a day or two, though, I realized that the truth was more affecting still. They really did not notice. They thought my face quite normal. For what is a passing grotesquerie, in a land of deformities?

  ‘Certainly,’ said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions, ‘by all means, these are all very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend an important meeting this afternoon—you will excuse me I hope?—but I will leave all these little matters with our good Mrs Gupta and all will b
e taken care of. I will telephone you with the answers myself without fail—or if not I myself, then Mrs Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning. Did you sign our register? A duplicate signature here if you would not mind, and the lady at the door will issue you with the requisite application form for a pass—it will make everything easier for you, you see. Have no fear, Mrs Gupta will take care of everything. But mark my words, you will find the spiritual aspects of our city the most rewarding. Remember the River Ganges! As a student of history, you will find that I am right! Ha ha! Another cup of tea? You have time?’