City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  Now, bastis of all kinds house kabaris, who also provide an invaluable service to all citizens. But there’s something about Delhi that spawns indifference to the essential: the Masterplan of Delhi makes no provision for the sector, so the kabaris can claim no formal space. In 2000, Delhi’s then Lieutenant Governor and former Urban Development Minister, Jagmohan, banned kabaris from working in jhuggis. In a previous speech, he had declared that ragpickers must be banned. The muncipalities, though, are gradually coming to realize the value of this rich human resource, even as the Supreme Court comes down heavily on them. The New Delhi Municipal Council has already begun privatization initiatives with the help of kabaris and ragpickers, and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is also open to involving them formally in some areas.

  Yet all this threatens to fail if bastis and jhuggis are going to be demolished and relocated and kabaris banned from working within them while they exist. Clearly, a kabari can’t be expected to go to an office each morning. His work is local, so shifting him away will fracture the economy. The reason why a kabari works in a particular area is because the area demands a certain kind of waste handling service. It’s a blessing if he carries out his work from home (a trend being widely welcomed internationally) in space-crunched Delhi. It’s an even bigger blessing that his work is not writing sophisticated software for international clients, but keeping upto fifteen per cent of the city’s waste—approximately 900 tonnes every day—from landing up in its fast-filling landfills, of which there are only three. Recently, a move to dump this waste on the Delhi Ridge was being earnestly discussed, after attempts to dump it in a neighbouring state were stalled due to local protests. Without recycling, the landfills would already have been full, oozing more of their toxic soups into the ground water, poisoning Delhi and its neighbourhood.

  If the kabaris and ragpickers refused to work, Delhi’s municipalities would collapse upon themselves having suddenly to clear all that extra waste. They would have to spend some six lakh rupees that the work of the kabaris and the ragpickers saves them every day. And there’d be no recycling at all.

  Santu Kabari, Santosh, Wasim, Ramesh: they would never see themselves this way, as important elements in a chain of waste recycling essential to the very survival of a metropolis. But what they do see themselves as are Delhiites, and they hope for a life of some security and dignity that most citizens of the capital take for granted.

  The recycling process, properly managed, is essential to the health of any big city. But it is also a harsh social process. It’s an oddly powerful position to be a kabari: so many ragpickers swarm around you, they believe you protect them. Your work is praised by policy makers at the highest level. Yet those who implement policy despise you. The middle classes believe ‘their’ cities should have no place for the likes of you. You have your little kingdoms, but you are hardly able to keep the blow of the police lathi and the contempt of an aggressive public at bay. You’re a ruler without powers. Naam ka raja.

  Sujan Singh Park

  MADHU JAIN

  There are places one passes by and wonders about the dramas unfolding behind the half-drawn curtains. They awaken the Peeping Tom in us. In Paris it is the hushed apartments in the Isle de la Cite or Isle St Louis, the two little islands in the Seine in the aristocratic heart of old Paris. In London, it is the quaint, nouveau-chic areas like Islington or Notting Hill, and in Bombay the elegantly crumbling buildings hugging Marine Drive. In Delhi no place fascinates me more than Sujan Singh Park, eighty-four flats arranged in two handsome quadrangles separated by a road in the privileged heart of ‘VIP’ Delhi.

  From the outside it appears a staid and somnolent place. Of the two quadrangles, one is red brick with white pointing, which gives it a misleading institutional, rather ‘conventy’ look. The other is painted creamy-white and has the recently souped-up Ambassador Hotel in the centre. Built during the last world war by Sardar Sobha Singh, it is a stone’s throw from the beautiful Lodi Garden (more ruins per acre—inanimate and animate—than in most other parks). It is also ambling distance from the half-century-old Khan Market, where the well heeled and travelled loiter with intent.

  These are not the abodes of the Great Gatsbys. The rich and the nouveau-famous of the capital live elsewhere: in ersatz farmlands skirting the city, or in the more rarified, tree-lined bits of Lutyens’ Delhi like Amrita Sher Gill Marg and Prithvi Raj Road. These sprawling mansions and bungalows often have their innards displayed in interior and design magazines. There’s less mystery in Posh Land. The Sujan Singh Parkwalas are far more interesting. There is a whiff of eccentricity here, an air of shabby gentility, of lives lived with a fair amount of passion. And yes, the frisson of gossip and rumour; whispers about dark deeds behind closed doors—when passion or greed got the better of reason.

  Old inhabitants still talk about the days when the wife of a senior government official stormed into the Ambassador Hotel and shot her husband and his inamorata—the husband died, his mistress survived, and the lady herself got off lightly because she was related to a VVIP. Her car remained outside the hotel for almost six months. Adding to the sweet touch of notoriety was the arrest of one of the tenants for spying. And the enigmatic Q—Quatrocchi, Octavio—is believed to have lodged here during his early days of relative obscurity in New Delhi, before he became the most wanted foreigner in India.

  Were I looking for characters to inhabit a novel—or better still, a soap opera—this quirky bit of leftover Britannia would be a first stop. And the narrator, the sutradhar, without doubt, would be Khushwant Singh, novelist-raconteur-scribe-ex-MP-self-confessed-lover-of-womenand-gossip. Also, son of Sardar Sobha Singh, and one of the city’s living monuments. But before we get to the dramatis personae, let us examine the setting.

  Sujan Singh Park (SSP from now on) forms a golden triangle with the India International Centre, the original watering hole for Delhi’s elegantly fraying intellos and culturati (which one wit described as ‘the GB Road of retired ambassadors’) and the flashier new kid on the block with cultural pretensions, the India Habitat Centre. Like Noah’s ark, these three are awash but still bobbing along on a sea of philistinism. Culture’s got a high table in this charmed circle. Socialite evenings tend to be round a table of good khaana and the politics du jour is usually the main dish. This is the land of the concerned liberal, pale pink in hue, likely to be clad in handspun and rarely in synthetic, with some ancient books and jewels and old frames with ancestors to add a touch of vintage and class. Many are friends of The Family—the Nehrus and Gandhis—or friends of the friends of The Family. Most would also be card-holding secularists.

  The architecture of SSP is quintessentially British; the chief architect, Walter George, was one of Edwin Lutyens’ men. One of the legacies of the Raj to stay on, and on, George was an eccentric man, though you wouldn’t guess looking at the buildings he designed—besides SSP, the Royal Embassy of Netherlands on Aurangzeb Road and Scindia House in Connaught Place. Khushwant Singh remembers him driving around in his Rolls Royce without lights and with a torch tied to the car to help him navigate through darkness. Says Singh: ‘He frequently ran out of petrol. One day the car stalled. I was on a bike. I pushed the car to the nearest petrol pump, and he gave me a four-anna tip—he did not know I was Sobha Singh’s son.’

  Built during the early years of the war, and occupied initially by younger British military officers, SSP was a prototype for apartments. Until then Delhi was bungalow land, and South End Lane was the end of Lutyens’ Delhi. In fact, SSP was called Sir Sobha Singh’s Folly because what is now Golf Links, one of the most up-market colonies of Delhi, was one huge jungle—there was nothing else for as far as the eye could see. Many people refused to move into the flats. Rahul Singh, a journalist and scion of the Sobha Singh clan, remembers going out shooting deer, rabbit and partridge when he was growing up in SSP. How much more English can you get?

  Today the jungle has retreated to neighbouring states. But SSP remains an oasis of the o
ld world in a rapidly changing Delhi. In the beginning, the British government and later the Indian government leased many of the apartments. A number of the original incumbents were those rendered homeless after Partition. Some of them returned their flats, but Sobha Singh allowed many of his friends and friends of friends to stay. These original tenants still pay as little as Rs 200 a month, and many not more than Rs 800 (several of the new tenants of the apartments that are being sub-let pay as much as Rs 60,000 a month—but more of the New World later). Not surprisingly, after the original incumbent has passed on, his or her family is reluctant to give up the house, and every once in a while there are hushed conversations in SSP about how some of them were ‘encouraged’ to leave.

  The remains of the British Day still stare you in the eye. Each block of the four-storied buildings encloses a small square park. Tall, almost three-storey-high arched entrances, long, dark corridors, broad stairways and huge windows set these blocks of flats apart from others in the city. The rooms are large, have high ceilings and large windows. Some of the flats have only one bedroom; others have two or three. And in all of Delhi these are perhaps the only flats with a fireplace in the living room. There are also a hundred two-room servant quarters. (Our soap opera could be stretched to infinity if we incorporated the tryst between Upstairs and Downstairs and a class angle into our story.) The Sobha Singh Trust Pvt. Ltd. runs SSP: its inhabitants are not allowed to alter the facades of the buildings. Only recently, nodding to the changing times and the encroachment of the rest of the world, the trust has hired security guards.

  From the outside looking in you can’t but help feel that time has stopped in some of the apartments. These usually belong to the original incumbents who are still around—the octogenarians who now rarely venture out and continue to cling to a world where hierarchies of breeding and education are stapled in place. This is a world of sundowners, and tea in silver pots with cheerful tea cozies, and platters in chafed silver, and white-gloved khansamas as old as the hills shuffling about silently. A world of bread puddings, roast chicken and, of course, buttered toast with those early-evening teas. Discussing Anglophilia in his perceptive book, Anglomania, A European Affair, Ian Buruma writes that snobbery ‘was one of those institutions that lends aristocratic airs to bourgeois striving’. In these SSP homes the marriage of new money and old style keeps the Indian class system propped up and comfy.

  It is hardly surprising, then, that glamorous old beauties and onetime royalty chose SSP as their home in Delhi. The late Meenakshi Chettur, mother of politician Jaya Jaitley, and journalist and erstwhile Kerala beauty K.P. Bhanumathi, whose list of political friends (stalwarts of the past and present) is enviable, are only two of the enigmatic ladies who came here and stayed on. Their autobiographies would make for riveting reading. Amarinder, Maharaja of Patiala, was a resident of SSP, and the Nalagarh scion and his wife still live here.

  Several worlds and generations coexist in SSP. Each morning while dawn has not even thought of breaking, a light comes on in a bedroom on the ground floor of Block E. It is 4.30 a.m. and Khushwant Singh is getting up to begin his day: he writes while the world sleeps. Simultaneously, a few lights start going out elsewhere—the teenyboppers and twenty-somethings, some from the Sobha Singh clan, have come home from a night out and are getting ready to sleep.

  SSP now has become almost a family affair. You could christen it Singhan di Haveli (the Haveli of the Singhs). The prodigals are returning. Today, three generations of the Singh clan possess flats. As each flat fell vacant—government officials left, death or litigation hurried the exit of many others—the family began to return. Initially, three of Sir Sobha Singh’s sons (including Khushwant Singh) moved in. The next wave of the family came in the 1970s: Sir Sobha Singh had twelve grandchildren, and many of them returned from their sojourns as students overseas. In the 1990s his great-grandchildren started getting the keys. In fact, there’s quite a unique waiting list—strictly by age, the gender or the branch of the family does not matter. The SSP flats had been hurriedly finished, and some of the inhabitants continue to live with the perennially peeling and damp walls, very rare power points, and the general air of mustiness. But the new lot, several of them NRIs, are finally modernizing the flats: sheer glass, Jaisalmer stone or marble floors, stained glass windows and a bit of international chic.

  The most famous address still remains Khushwant Singh’s ground floor flat. (Just how famous he is you can tell by the fact that a postcard addressed simply to ‘Khushwant Singh, Bastard, India’ reached him within two weeks of being posted.) There is a sign outside the door admonishing people not to ring the bell without an appointment. And until a few years ago, there was another kind of barrier: Black Cats to protect the former Rajya Sabha MP from terrorists (he’d on occasion invite the guards in for tea). But these warnings don’t deter visitors; most visiting journalists and writers call on him for sound bytes, or for forewords for their books, some of which are bad beyond words. But the man—generous and at times naïve underneath the put-on cynicism—just can’t say no.

  He also holds court—his hair carelessly gathered in a saffron cloth and his feet on an upturned moora, like a spider-king at the centre of a huge web of stories, apercus and naughty asides. Women courtiers predominate in his durbar. They come and go, talking of poesy and their intimate lives; Urdu verse, some gossip and a bit of adaa get you in fastest, and keep you there longer. But even these ladies of a certain age (though young ones are beginning to replace the older lot) would not dare drop by without that de rigeur phone call. Tea time used to be the main visiting hour in his book-lined living room (once upon a time the best brownies in town were made here). Lately, though, it’s the happy hour: 7 p.m. for drinks (only Scotch). If you are lucky you might be invited for dinner, which is at 8 p.m.—you can set your watch by it. But no matter who you are, your luck runs out at nine sharp: you’ll be shown the door if you don’t head there yourself.

  The other salon is across the road. Malavika and Tejbir Singh (another scion of the clan) have one of the best tables in the capital. And gossip of the elevated kind: what’s really happening in the corridors and antechambers of power. This is another stop on the map of politicians, culturatti, journalists, maharajas and maharaja-manques, corporate honchos and ambassadors, both Indian and foreign. And indeed many a PM. Malavika recalls one prime minister drinking a Bloody Mary, happily thinking it was tomato juice.

  The chattering, posturing humans have the salons. The animals and birds of SSP have Bhim and Rita Dev Burman. They are not your average people next door. He’s a prince of Cooch Behar (Gayatri Devi of Jaipur is his mother’s sister) and she a famed beauty clicked and feted by international photographers like David Bailey. She’s also an indefatigable social worker who shuttles between Assam and New Delhi and has done a lot for patients of AIDS. What sets them apart in this corner of Lutyens’ Delhi is their love for animals.

  Bhim is the man people wonder about—he’s often seen in his white Esteem on roads radiating out of SSP, feeding stray dogs. Each day he feeds 150 dogs. Dogs with puppies are fed twice a day. More recently twenty-two cats of the area have joined his menagerie. After the dogs and the cats have had their fill, the crows swoop down on the crumbs. Crumbs in baskets are also put in the windows for the birds.

  Animals have also taken over their home, which has become a sort of nursing home for the four-legged creatures brought in from the cold. Of the five dogs in the flat one is epileptic and two had acid thrown on them. SSP inmates can’t afford to be unkind to animals. Says Khushwant Singh whose new guardian angel is Rita, ‘Once somebody hit a dog, and Rita reported him to the police. They landed up and he was in a panic—if you live here, you have to be nicer to the dogs than to your neighbours.’

  Khushwant Singh himself is not quite the neighbourly sort. ‘I don’t encourage the sense of community. It is not good to be too close to neighbours. I stay away because otherwise they think I am part of the management and complain about
electricity or water, and then I scream at them.’ But the younger Singhs are turning out to be more neighbourly. Let’s say they have it both ways. Malavika Singh certainly does. ‘These are compact flats, close the door and you are free.’ Open the door, and voila, there’s the larger joint family. ‘You can ring a neighbour’s bell if you run out of coffee or take your dinner there and eat it.’

  And lately, SSP has acquired a more international mien: the goras (a SSP term for them) have also arrived. And continue to do so. There are nearly a dozen, most of them journalists. A Spanish diplomat has lived here for about two decades. And for a while American designer Michael Aram made SSP his own. For them it is a good ‘working base’. ‘You feel as if you are in the centre of political-administrative Delhi,’ says David Housego, formerly of The Financial Times. Like some of the other expats, he too feels that there is a sense of community here: ‘If you want to call people at short notice you can just walk across the road.’ It’s a PLU place all right.

  The PLU circle is rippling outwards now. There is a new man on the block—the Fiji-born Bhaichand Patel, who was formerly with the UN and has now turned columnist. He is the new party giver; some of the evenings, especially in his garden, put SSP on the page three map. Singleton ladies, intellectuals, journalists, diplomats and those famous-for-being-famous people these socialite evenings.

  And let us not forget the Downstairs people. The same sense of community exists here as well. The servants have created a shadow, parallel world. The community of staff is also interlinked—they bring in their own relatives and friends and PLU. While the Upstairs people still maintain the Raj upper lip, at least in public, it’s in the servants’ quarters that the changing world outside is more visibly apparent. These quarters and garages are reflective of modern Delhi: let out and let out, endlessly. Small traders, garage mechanics, tailors—the real world comes in here. People dry clothes outside, and outside is at times one big loo.