City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  How long can Sujan Singh Park continue to keep the nouveau world out? ‘Some people are lowering the tone of the place,’ laments one of the scion Singhs. But architecturally speaking, the new world is already creeping in. The new international Esperanto of interiors has already crossed the moat: the Ambassador Hotel, lately taken over by the Taj group, has re-made itself in the image of anonymous, anodyne interiors with most of the quirks of the Raj ironed out. Dasa Prakasha, the South Indian restaurant with its original ballroom parquet floor and domed interior, is no more. The hot Dubai look is in.

  What would dear old George have said?

  Bitch

  MRINAL PANDE

  I have the greatest admiration for the newspaper vendors who deliver papers in the area serviced not by the august New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC), but by its down-market cousin, the Muncipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD). I am amazed at how each morning before it is seven they will have found their way across pot-holed lanes and sewage and dug-out cables, past many dogs and pigs and cows, and thwacked your day’s paper across the yard and into your veranda, tring-tringed their bicycle bells to let you know they’ve been there, and left.

  But for reasons I cannot fathom, they also have a particular genius for delivering your paper with a mauled and stained front page. I scowled at mine as I worked my way back into my room. Then suddenly a story caught my eye. It was about a four-year-old-girl who was married to a dog to ward off the evil eye from her family.

  In comes Gauri, the matronly Bengali cleaning woman, two brooms in one hand and a can in the other. I have the greatest admiration for her too. She finds her way to our house every morning even without a bicycle to help her negotiate the perils of MCD areas. She lives in an unauthorized cluster of jhuggis in southeast Delhi and has been abandoned by her husband Haran, the father of her four children. She works for me not because she needs more work, but because of her daughter Sumitra, who used to be our cleaning woman, who has abandoned her husband and gone off to live with one Pontu, in another unauthorized shantytown across the Yamuna. Before she went away, Gauri tells me, Sumitra told her to take over her job in the ‘TV Memsahib’s’ house, because she does not follow you from room to room or inspect the plastic bag that you carry.

  ‘Move,’ Gauri commands me, and I put my feet up on the sofa. She sets to work with the bamboo broom. ‘Come here first,’ I say, and point out the picture of the little girl in the newspaper. ‘See, she is from your part of the country. She is only four and her parents have married her to—a dog!’ I say, adding a dramatic pause for effect.

  ‘Oho,’ Gauri says, resuming her work. ‘So? She is their daughter. They can marry her to anyone they like.’

  ‘But don’t you see it is illegal? The police—’

  ‘What police?’

  ‘The local police.’

  ‘No, no, why should the police bother?’

  ‘Because you can’t marry off a girl before she’s eighteen. It’s the law.’

  ‘So? She’s not married to a man.’

  ‘Gauri, don’t you see? Her parents could still go to jail for this.’

  ‘Who will speak against them? The dog?’ Gauri collapses in laughter.

  ‘It is no laughing matter,’ I say. But I, too, am laughing.

  ‘Oh Ma, at least he won’t come home drunk and beat her. Or arm-twist her family for a wrist watch or a bicycle, or get her pregnant as soon as he can, and then run off with another woman. A son of a bitch is better any day, Ma, any day, than the son of a man.’

  ‘But the girl …’

  ‘What about the girl? She looks happy. She must have eaten her fill of sweets, been dressed in new clothes. What more can a girl want?’

  ‘But why should she be married to a dog before she knows what marriage is all about?’

  Gauri takes a deep breath and speaks in chromatic and halting sentences:

  ‘Last year I had this neighbour next door … She is an evil person with a real black tongue … My children, they were playing outside and she began to scream curses at them for no reason … “May the pox strike you … may you rot and turn blue …!” She does not have a husband or anything but does black magic for a fee … she can give you magic potions to attract a man or a woman beyond their good judgment … how else do you think I lost my husband to that daughter of a jackal in Seemapuri? How did that good-for-nothing Pontu get my daughter to elope with him? My younger son falls sick at night, vomiting his bowels out till there is nothing inside, and a raging fever … then I go to the other woman in the Patpargunj Mother Dairy jhuggi …’

  ‘But we were talking about the girl married to a dog …’

  ‘So I knock on her door and I say this is what has happened … She asks me for a bottle of country liquor and one chicken and a hundred rupees … I beat her down to fifty because that is all I have … I come home and I find my son playing with his sisters. And the evil one, she falls sick next week … from trying for a bad abortion, they say … and disappears …’

  ‘Didn’t either of you think of going to a doctor?’

  ‘Are you mad? All we have are haturey (quack) doctors with no degree … how can they fight black magic with injections and pills?’

  ‘Did the evil one know that you cast a spell on her?’

  ‘Would she let everyone in the colony know that she was powerless before the bigger evil one from behind Patpargunj Mother Diary? There was blood everywhere inside her jhuggi, we saw, and rags soaked in blood … Disgusting … the new people who moved in had to burn everything inside and get a puja done for purification …’

  Gauri wrings out the mop and begins to swab the floor with deft strokes. ‘Doctors, Ma, are no use to the poor … what do they know about us? Eat well, they all say, and give us prescriptions for expensive bitamin golis … If we ate well, would we be sick? I had a terrible time with my last baby …’

  She is going to cap it with another story.

  Here it comes.

  ‘Before that good-for-nothing Haran was made to drink tea with the burnt-up public hair from that daughter of a jackal from Seemapuri …’

  I begin to laugh. ‘Is that what a love potion is made of?’

  ‘Don’t laugh at me. They show it in so many TV serials, don’t they? How black magic works …’

  ‘They’re just stories. You shouldn’t believe them.’

  ‘And why not? To us they are more real than your news, where they say we will give the poor this, and we will do that … Empty air, that’s what it is … they would steal the shroud off a corpse if they could.’

  ‘You were telling me about your last pregnancy …’

  ‘Yes, yes. After the third one, my Haran had got a nasbandi done. The doctor, she told him and me, You both need not fear another pregnancy now … and here I was vomiting like the Kishangarh nullah! I told Haran, I think I am pregnant, and he got violent … he hit me with whatever he could lay his hands on. I ran … other women came … they all sniggered even when I swore upon my older son’s head that I had not done it with another man. They took tests, and told him there must be some mistake, or something must have undone the operation … you are fertile!’

  ‘So? Haran apologized?’

  ‘Apologize? A man? Next thing I knew he had run away with that niece of a jackal from Seemapuri and I am told she is waddling around now with a belly as big as a Yamuna watermelon …’

  I laugh. I find it hard to laugh, but I am laughing.

  ‘Next I know my Sumitra goes and drinks tea with that good-for-nothing Pontu and decides to leave her husband …’

  ‘I was told that her husband was too old and beat her and she wanted a baby …’

  ‘No, no, it was nothing like that. It was the evil one’s love potion. In our colonies, what good are children? If you do not have them, you get beaten, if you have them you get beaten … and both ways you suffer.’

  ‘Then Sumitra could have gone to a doctor, maybe she could have …’

  ‘What do doctors k
now, Ma? Can they look into our souls? Can they ward off the evil eye? Or undo the love potion? All they can do is tell us that we have a child inside us, or take it out … Can they see that that is not what ails us?’

  Gauri smiles, as she departs with her implements, ‘This child, her parents are right about the dog. The evil eye will get distracted now and they will all be better off. Who knows, some day a real man might marry the little girl. Meanwhile, she is better off than I am, for sure …’

  Suddenly the story of the little girl who was made a dog’s bride doesn’t seem so distant. It could easily have happened in New Delhi.

  City without Natives

  VIJAY NAMBISAN

  In an early 1980s Tamil film, Kamalahasan (he became Kamal Hassan only when he went to Bombay) is one of four young men who have come to Delhi looking for a job. He sings a somewhat bitter song as they roam the streets:

  Sing a song, brother, let’s forget hunger for a while.

  In India’s capital, seeking, seeking, seeking work, O my brothers!

  Singing, singing of India’s greatness, what need have we of rice?

  The film was a hit. It was called Varumaiyin Niram Sivappu (The Colour of Poverty is Red).

  I too first went to Delhi seeking a job, and though I never actually had to worry where my next meal was coming from, I sometimes got close to worrying about the one after the next. If my poverty was never red, my bank balance often was. But I knew a city which tourists and VIPs don’t, not the Delhi which decks itself up and admires its own smugness on Republic Day.

  There are few better ways to discover a strange city than to work on the staff of a struggling city magazine. Travelling a good deal by bus (because we didn’t always get paid on time); dropping in to office at any hour to check proofs; spending nights at the typesetters’ in Green Park or the press in Okhla; and best of all, scouring Delhi for topics, visitors, anything new or offbeat with the smell of a story—it’s one way of living your early twenties, and I’ll never know any other.

  When I first went there, I didn’t have to sing in Tamil. I was proud of my shuddha Hindi. I had studied Hindi for eleven years, in school. As I was to understand, that was a very different kind of Hindi.

  I’d been in Delhi two months when one day I went to a paan shop for a box of matches. ‘Bhai saab,’ I said, ‘diyasalai ka ek dibba deejiyega.’

  ‘Kya?’ he said.

  ‘Diyasalai ka ek dibba.’

  ‘Kya??’

  ‘Ek machis do, yaar,’ I snapped.

  He gave me the box and mumbled, ‘Hindi mein bol diya karo na …’

  Hardly anyone speaks Hindi in Delhi. It’s Punjabi, or Urdu, or Khadi Boli, or Avadhi, or Rajasthani. I can’t think of any other state capital which doesn’t have a native tongue, though Bangalore is fast going that way. But I was a migrant myself in those days, and not competent to criticize.

  It has been said that Delhi is not a city, but a collection of villages. Every colony is fenced off from its neighbours by not only metal railings and ‘green spaces’, but by cultural fences as well. Good fences make good neighbours. I lived first in Chittaranjan Park in a Bengali village, then in Amar Colony, Lajpat Nagar, in a Kashmiri village, then in Chittaranjan Park again, and last in Greater Kailash II which was no village at all but only a suburb. There were Tamil villages, and Gujarati and Kannadiga, and over everything, like a blanket—like a blankety-blanket—a vast and spirited Punjabi joy in living that kept the city together and made it one, made it as much as was possible a city.

  As a migrant, and fresh from Madras, what struck me about Delhi was the incredible wealth. Or rather, the wealth on display, the ostentation. The Maruti boom had just begun, and the flyovers were still fresh from the Asiad. Rajiv Gandhi was in his first year of office, and there was hope everywhere—except among the Sikhs. Shops, hoardings, hotels seemed to cover every square metre of the city. Delhi was, as it has often been in its history, a boomtown.

  Everywhere there was prosperity, but the Punjabis expressed it best. In Madras I had met a couple of millionaires who wore dhotis and ate off stainless steel. No doubt they enjoyed their lives too, but they never showed it with such lavish abandon as did the Punjabis, especially—despite everything—the Sikhs.

  I had a friend who was a Sikh—who was the reason I had come to Delhi for a job—and I was (somewhat) personally involved in their predicament. It was less than a year since Rajiv Gandhi had held back the Army for two whole days while the Sikhs were massacred, and though they partook of the prosperity they did so with a certain wariness. They certainly did not share the hope. Those who could afford to were opening Swiss bank accounts and stashing most of their savings abroad; those who had lost families or factories were working with savage desperation to make enough to be worth stashing abroad. India, for the Sikhs, was no longer home, if home is the place where, when you go there, they have to take you in. And that was somehow spiritually true even of the Sikhs who would never leave: like my friend, who was a student of Indian culture. Perhaps because of this tension which tinged my life a good deal in those early days, Delhi has never appeared quite peaceful to me.

  Another reason was my constant interaction with Delhi’s bus drivers, who like Delhi’s policemen, live a life which burns the humanity out of them. One afternoon I was sitting right behind the driver on a nearly empty bus bound for Connaught Place. My elbow was on the window bars, and it must have fractionally obscured the driver’s vision in the wing mirror. Instead of asking me to retract my arm, as any sane person would have done, he swung the bus in a wide curve on his next left turn so that my arm actually brushed the creepers that hang from the flyover before the Oberoi InterContinental. That was my cue to pull in my arm.

  Another time I witnessed a bus driver, asked by a very country boy to tell him when the Chittaranjan Park stop came around, deposit him in Chiragh Dilli, then laugh at him, ‘Arré lallu!’ I was too withdrawn to intervene, and I was ashamed of it. But Delhi bus drivers are madmen and not lightly to be interfered with.

  They provide their share of laughs too. Very late one night a friend of mine was on a bus wending its way through Lajpat Nagar when, somewhere near Bhogals, the driver suddenly braked where no bus stop was and announced, ‘We have to wait for Lovely.’ A pick-up when on duty, on government service? But you can’t put anything past a Delhi bus driver. So everyone waited, titillated by anticipation of a houri. After ten minutes or so some of the passengers became restive. ‘Nahin, nahin,’ the driver chided them, ‘Lovely will be here any moment now.’ At last Lovely arrived, and was well worth the wait: an enormous Sikh in khaki daubed with grease and a bag of tools in his hand. Lovely Singh, what a lovely name.

  There are cities which overwhelm you, make you feel like something the cat didn’t want. Bombay sometimes made me feel that way. I hear New York does that to people too; and I wonder if having to commute on a mass transit system is the key. Delhi’s buses certainly have none of the soul-searing, dedicated indifference that Bombay’s trains do. It’s only when the trains come to a halt that you see a human face to Bombay.

  Delhi didn’t overwhelm me, but then I didn’t overwhelm Delhi either. I have little cause to be nostalgic about Delhi. It always seemed a corrupt city to me, and a dangerous one. I soon knew it much better than Madras, where I’d attended college for four years. Of course it is corrupt: The bureaucracy has its hive there, and one enduring vignette of the capital is the sight of the babus playing cards on the lawns of the government offices in winter. But winter has other charms, especially to one who had hardly any occasion to wear a sweater in his first twenty years.

  I revelled in the cold. I bathed in cold water; I wore a coat only as a fashion statement; and if it stunted my growth, it also put hair on my chest. One of my proudest moments came one winter when I was travelling back from Chandigarh by a Haryana State Transport bus, and at four in the morning a Punjabi sitting behind me asked me to close the window.

  Those were also the winters
of the Festivals of India; Rajiv Gandhi was selling us abroad, and in Delhi we got some of the leavings. There were exhibitions at the National Museum and the National Gallery, and for the first time I saw the Didarganj Yakshi in the flesh; also Amrita Sher-Gill’s paintings. There was the Triennale; the film festivals at Shakuntalam, in Pragati Maidan, where I saw practically all of Scorsese and Tarkovsky and Woody Allen; best of all, there were the music festivals. Imagine listening to Mallikarjun Mansur and Bhimsen Joshi and Amjad Ali Khan in the Purana Qila.

  In Delhi I had for the first time money of my own to spend. Much of it went on books. I went to the book fair and bought a dozen books—most of them new—for 250 bucks. I also ordered and paid sixty rupees for Wendy O’Flaherty’s The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, I don’t know why. In The Bookshop, in Khan Market, I bought a copy of Milligan’s Puckoon for seven rupees. Those days are certainly vanished.

  Is this nostalgia? God knows there’s little to justify it. It’s okay for a Delhiite, it’s okay for Khushwant Singh to sit back and be eloquent about the vanished days. Though he wasn’t born and bred a Delhiite, he is part of the Raj-and-Lahore culture which coloured the early days of the new city. Indeed, his father helped to build New Delhi. I knew Delhi for a much shorter time, and much later. My only excuse for nostalgia is that those days are gone too.

  Khushwant Singh is the archetypical Delhiite, and sight unseen I can tell his essay is going to lead off this book. (If it doesn’t, it’s because he’s tired of doing the same thing over and over again.) But who else call themselves Delhiites? The well off, certainly; those who have apartments and steady jobs. Not the people who make the city work. I don’t mean the enormous corps of Government servants, they only keep the machine ticking over. I mean the cops, the bus drivers and conductors, the road sweepers, the scooter and taxi drivers, the plumbers and electricians. The overwhelming majority of these are migrants who do not think of themselves as belonging to the city.