City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  Let us begin in the beginning, with spring and renewal. Officially, Basant Panchami in the Hindu almanac heralds the arrival of the mythological figure who represents this season. Vasanta is a winged Cupid figure who doubles as the God of Love, aiming his floral arrows at seditious hearts. When I was young it was traditional to wear only yellow on Basant Panchami, for yellow is the colour sacred to spring. Delhi in the springtime boasts blue skies and green lawns, and an incredible profusion of flowers: roses, lilies, tulips, gladioli, larkspur. In the fields and villages that surround Delhi, acres and acres of bright mustard fields announce the spring.

  Meanwhile, the leaves are falling and tender green buds are groping out from the old weathered magnificence of pipal and neem trees which have seen the passage of time, of Mughal pomp and Raj regalia. The Rashtrapati Bhawan, Delhi’s presidential palace, lets open its famed Mughal gardens to the public in March, and young women from the outreaches of Dakshinpuri and Mongolpuri, courting couples from Khayala and Narayana, old men from New Rajinder Nagar, come via the choked, spluttering public buses to pause from the delirium and dreariness of their existence to stare at the invincible beauty of the spring.

  Everybody celebrates spring differently. The clerks and babus in the government offices abandon all calls of duty and crowd to the pretty parks that are a central feature of the city’s roundabouts. They joke and play cards and lie on the grass staring at the hawks and kites keetering in the glass-blue sky, and when they are well contented they eat roasted groundnuts and sometimes smile at nothing at all. They snarl less at their wives than they usually do, and at night they dream of the time when they were children. They still have to catch their share of water before their neighbours do, they still have to deal with power cuts and transport strikes, but they do it with the joy and certainty that life has its redeeming moments.

  As is the way with good things, spring is invariably the shortest of the seasons. Delhiwalas have a short, glorious reprieve from the rigours of winter, and then April is upon us and a cruel, merciless summer begins its annual subjugation of the spirit. If you can shelter in an air-conditioned home or office, and if you glimpse the gracious streets of Lutyens’ Delhi from the inside of a cool, purring, air-conditioned car, then summer in Delhi is nice. The streets are alive with yellow and purple laburnum, and the flaming gulmohar is abloom on avenues and side lanes. This is a time to sip lemonade, or gin and tonic if you so please, and enjoy the pleasures of softly starched cottons, of chikan and mulmul fabrics that crumple elegantly in minutes. You can swim in clubs and farmhouses or your own private pool if you have one, and then ritually, by the middle of May, you leave for some mysterious destination, in a mass migration that leaves the city denuded of the glitteratti, the power-brokers, and the merely affluent.

  Otherwise you have a horrible time. June in Delhi illustrates the common belief that a Delhiwala, like a cockroach, can survive anything, for such are the vicissitudes of weather, conditioning and deprivation that the human spirit here has soared to new heights of indomitability to survive. It is quite common in summer for landlords to murder their tenants, or the other way around, over water disputes regarding storage tanks or the use of pumps and tubewells. It is common in summer for roadrage to manifest itself in murder and manslaughter; for families to fight, for postmen and cyclists to fume, for generators and inverters to work overtime while we the people nurture homicidal daydreams about the government and the Delhi Vidyut Board. In summer Delhi’s beggars bake in the asphalt, while ice-cream vendors smile and triple their takings. In summer it is rumoured that the ice in the dhabas and lesser refreshment stalls is stolen from the mortuary, though the possible economics of such a transaction have always mystified me. Every evening, until late into the night, families move en masse to the lawns around India Gate. These celebratory night-picnics are an assertion against the weather, a few hours of respite from the torture of the long hot day. India Gate is full of laughter and happiness. It is a paradise of bumpy camel rides and slushy golgappas with panipuri in earthen pots balanced on the heads of itinerant chaat-vendors, heads which bear the indelible fragrance of Chameli-ka-tel from Jaunpur. Lutyens’ Delhi regards these intruders from its outskirts with benign interest. Even as the primitive bioscopes grind out nostalgic Hindi film tunes, young lovers hold hands and sniff at braided garlands of fragrant night flowers: chameli and mogra and raat-ki-rani. What more is there to say about Delhi in the summer, except that the extreme heat keeps disease at bay, and people die only of sunstroke and dehydration. Then the westerlies, the Purabias, start blowing, bringing a gentle hint of rain in their wake, until finally the monsoons arrive.

  In Kerala, Mumbai, and many other coastal areas there is a sense of drama and expectancy associated with the onset of the monsoons. In Delhi, the rains arrive not with a bang but with a whimper. There is a sort of indecision, a feeling of afterthought, of let-down associated with their arrival. What was in my misspent youth called a sense of KLPD, an untranslatable and esoteric metaphor which the less educated of my readers will readily comprehend, best describes the advent of the monsoon in Delhi. The monsoon mystique has been built up through millennia: Raag Megh Malhaar, romantic songs, peacocks drying their damp plumes in an extravagant and erotic dance. While Delhi laps up these stereotypes, we know that monsoons are also about clogged drainage, traffic jams, choked traffic, power breakdowns, cholera, hepatitis and acid rain.

  As a sense of dank dissatisfaction depletes the already denuded spirits of the capital’s citizens, as damp towels flutter forlornly in shabby balconies, seeking amnesty from the city’s rigours, as the roads turn into waterways and the side lanes into rivers and the magnificent gardens in the roundabouts into splendid islands, as cyclists and scooterists and motorcyclists brave the moody rainfall, they console themselves, as Delhiwalas always do, with food. They buy succulent purple jamun-fruits just-plucked-from-the-trees from the roadside shops that materialize right there on the footpath every year in July and August. Their smiles stained strangely maroon from the jamuns, they negotiate their way home, where they dry their soaked and exhausted selves with the damp towels which await them in their shabby balconies. The beggars and streetpersons, however, are content in the rainy weather, and they know, as all of Delhi does, that the good months are approaching.

  As the rains dry up and the grey skies turn blue again, it is festival time, with Dussehra and Diwali and Christmas all piling up on each other. There are exhibitions and sales and special discounts and everybody is buying something for someone or the other. Delhi’s elite, the people who count, make the important sartorial shift from cotton to silk. Silk saris and kurtas are retrieved from layers of neem or clove or mothballs, and pashminas and jamavars and shahtoosh shawls are anxiously examined for damage. Delhi comes into its own in winter; washed clean with the rains, it copes with fatalistic patience with the annual bouts of viral fever, flu and pnuemonia which are suffered understandingly as ‘change of weather’. It’s another matter, of course, that in Delhi the weather is always changing. We Delhiwalas love our winter, when vegetables are cheap and plentiful, when ‘warming’ winter sweets of sesame and jaggery are sold at every nukkad and street corner, when the soft glow of braziers illuminates the late-night darkness, as chowkidars and street dogs sit in sympathetic silence and watch a shower of sparks arise from an errant log.

  All too soon, the cycle of the seasons begins again, as the city changes and observes itself change. In every change there are always constants, and it is these constants which are really the indices and deeper metaphors of change. What are Delhi’s constants? There is the river, the Yamuna, roiling between Delhi and Noida, a mess of pollutants and sewage, dissatisfied, degraded, depressed. The river flows with it all, absorbing the best and worst of the strange city that it nurtures. And then there are Delhi’s madmen, the emblem-bearers of its excesses, absorbing and maintaining its aberrations and eccentricities. Let me introduce you to some. The blank-faced idiot-savant of Shanker Market, who
looks as young today as he did forty years ago, when, as now, he sold safety pins and rubber bands from a tray slung from his shoulders. The sad and angry Sikh who stands always at the gol-chakkar outside the Ashoka Hotel, next to the rear entrance of the American Embassy, expounding on some lonely grief, perhaps bewailing the fluid fate of a city of eternal immigrants. The madwoman of south Delhi, often starkers as nature made her, planning but never executing her terrible and compulsive revenge on Delhi’s complacent privileged. This trio, and another ten million like them, try to survive the city which has spawned and bred them, but gives them very little else in the way of succour.

  I Never Knew His Name

  ANEES JUNG

  Delhi was one of the leading centres of the Sufi movement in India. The most famous Sufi saint who lived here was Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya, in the early fourteenth century, whose dargah still attracts thousands of devotees of different faiths. Besides the prominent shrines, there are a number of other smaller, lesser-known dargahs in and around Delhi like Pattey-wali dargah, described in this piece, where the faithful go to pray and have their wishes fulfilled.

  It was the month of Ramzan and I was on my way to my favourite Sufi shrine that nestles virtually unknown behind the massive and pampered Humayun’s Tomb. It is known as Pattey-wali Dargah, where as the story goes a sufi saint lived and meditated under a tree. His grave rests under the same tree, its trunk old and gnarled, its leaves still green. Devotees who come to pray at the saint’s grave eat a leaf or two, make a wish and come back to offer a silver leaf if their wish is fulfilled.

  I too have eaten the green leaves, and through the years I befriended the old caretaker whom I just called Baba. He had become a friend without ever revealing his name or asking mine. Every year, come Ramzan, I would take fruits for him. This time it was the end of the holy month already and I was in a hurry to reach him, in time for the breaking of the fast. The taxi I chose was battered. The driver, a half-town urbanite, had pasted garish pictures of gods and film stars on the windshield and at the back of the car. He also had the radio on, blaring a Bappi Lahiri song. He tapped his fingers on the wheel to its beat. He and his car seemed out of sync with my mission, I brooded. But I was wrong as I soon found out.

  ‘To Humayun’s Tomb,’ I said settling down in his musty back seat. ‘I’m in a hurry to reach there before sunset, in time for Iftaar—and I also need to buy some fruits on the way.’ He nodded and speeded the car, then screeched to a halt in front of a fruit shop in Nizamuddin where a burly sardar sat looking one with the small mounds of oranges, apples, sweet limes and bananas around him. ‘Will you arrange a basket for a rozedar?’ I asked. ‘Certainly,’ he beamed, setting aside two other baskets which were perhaps meant for less sacred occasions. ‘And these are from me,’ he said, adding a couple of extra oranges. The thought of a person fasting in a holy month aroused in him a fervour that is perhaps natural to all Indians, whatever their faith. It seemed even the driver had finally sensed the sanctity of my mission. For he had switched off the radio and was silently watching the basket being arranged. The colours of dusk changed and darkened around us as we whizzed past the receding domes of the emperor’s tomb and reached the shrine with the leaf-green door.

  ‘This is the Pattey-wali Dargah,’ I told the driver. ‘May I come too?’ he asked, and carrying the basket of fruits he followed me inside the shrine, taking off his sandals at the entrance. Once inside, facing the grave decked by a green sheet with rose petals scattered on it, he needed no further cue from me. He covered his head with his kerchief, and like a penitent child rubbed his nose on the cold stone, seeming small and vulnerable beside the revered grave. Out in the courtyard a peacock danced and the old caretaker sat in a circle of men, breaking his fast. The taxi driver was invited to join in. What his religion was did not seem to matter. It was sharing the fruits of the earth that mattered in the holy month. If harmony such as this was an aspect not merely of a place but of human beings, then there would be no room for fear or distrust. On an ordinary day in noisy, chaotic Delhi it was this matter-of-fact harmony that I sensed with the sardar fruitwala, with the taxi driver, with the Baba of the shrine …

  I would see him framed in the archway of the green door that led into his sacred space, Pattey-wali dargah, that he had served for over thirty-five years, probably half his life. For he was an old man with soft white hair that fell thinly over his shoulders despite the round embroidered white topi sitting squarely on his head.

  The topi, embroidered simply with leaves and buds, made of white cotton, sewn probably by a woman in the courtyard of a village home, was as much a part of him as was the huqqa, made of old metal that had lost its sheen with overuse. As old as him perhaps, the huqqa was his loyal friend. Late in the evenings, at the hour of dusk, I would see him seated on the stone bench beneath the shade of an old banyan, pulling leisurely at his huqqa. That was perhaps his only indulgence. Everything else about him was spare, almost spartan. He lived in a tiny room with a green door and no window. In it was a wooden takht covered by a thick mattress, and spread over that was a violet floral quilt. Under the bed rested a large tin trunk that carried the necessities of his simple life—some clothes, utensils to cook and eat in, and bundles of cloth tied up with knots (stuffed probably with dry rose petals gathered from the shrine). In one corner was a kerosene stove where he cooked his meals oblivious to the smoke that filled the room and his eyes. Watching him cook gave me a sense that he enjoyed good food. It seemed to matter to him more than the clothes he wore—a checked lungi, blue or grey, and over it a white kurta discoloured by daily washing. But one never really saw his clothes, just his face which was permanently lit by a smile that invited one to sit down beside him, stay silent or chat.

  ‘How are you?’ I would ask him, and always he’d reply, ‘Very, very well,’ even if the sky above him glared in the white heat of Delhi summer. Sun or rain he never cursed the weather. For he lived in an internal weather that remained consistent. His frail frame withstood the seasons without trying to command them. He braved the winters wearing a quilted vest but no shoes. Barefooted he would walk in the marble courtyard of the shrine, sweeping away the dead leaves, watering the plants, feeding the two cats that had made a home with him in the dargah. He never told me his name. ‘I am always here,’ he would say. I never felt the need to know more. Effortlessly, in a quiet corner of the big city, we became friends. He often told me Sufi stories, those that he had probably heard as a young boy. One that endures in my heart is a love story. It begins like any other: there was a man, a woman, and then there was love. In this case the man was poor, the woman privileged, the love doomed. He was a dhobi, and she a beautiful princess who lived in a palace on a high hill. Objects of desire, even the gods that one aspires to reach, are always resident on top of hills. I never asked him where the palace was located—perhaps it was on the banks of the Yamuna, not far from where we sat; perhaps it never existed. The place did not matter. The story did.

  A strange love story, streaked with unspoken Sufi tones. The young man was the son of a dhoban, a washerwoman, and his love was as deep as a bottomless well. His mother would go to the palace and bring the clothes of the princess down the hill to wash by the lake. He would wash them, marvelling at their beauty and delicacy, imagining how the one who wore them must be. Tenderly he would wash and dry them, fold them caressingly, sprinkling jasmines in their folds. His mother would then carry the treasure on her head and receive praise for a job so well done. Each week the clothes turned new with the love of the young man. The dhoban got worried. What if the king discovered her son’s passion? His head would be chopped off. ‘Before that happens I will end my life,’ the young man said. And he did. A distraught mother washed the princess’s clothes and returned weeks later to the palace. ‘Who has washed these clothes?’ asked the princess looking at them. They were not what they used to be. ‘I did myself,’ said the dhoban. ‘Then who was washing them before?’ queried the princess. She felt the diff
erence. These clothes had just been cleaned. No eyes of love had gazed at them. No hands had touched them with tenderness. The dhoban finally revealed her son’s secret love. ‘Take me to his grave,’ the princess commanded. Together they went in the dark of a winter night, down the steep hill beside the lake, and stopped in an abandoned yard where the lover lay under a mound of fresh earth. ‘What kind of a lover are you to leave this world without even setting eyes on the object of your love?’ the princess said. The earth split open, the princess stepped in, the earth closed over her. ‘In love there is no death nor borders,’ said the old man. His story sang on that winter evening as the sun turned rose behind a sad emperor’s tomb.

  Last Ramzan the Baba was not around in the courtyard to receive me. ‘He has had an accident,’ said one of the men who shared his huqqa. ‘A Maruti car roaring down the street hit him and fled, fracturing Baba’s back.’ It was no ordinary accident, said the man. It would be a while before Baba could walk again. Baba was laid up in bed for days. He never did stand up again. He could not give the azaan, sweep the courtyard readying it for visitors, feed the cats and the peacocks. He could not go to the bathroom, he could not pray, he could not fast. ‘How are you?’ I asked him as he made an effort to sit up and greet me. ‘Very, very well,’ he replied. The answer was the same but the voice was not. Reed-like, it seemed to flow out of a tired frame. ‘I am being looked after,’ he said, refusing any assistance. His only sadness was that he could not fast for the thirty days of Ramzan.