City Improbable- Writings on Delhi

by Khuswant Singh

  I go off to sleep over at a girlfriend’s house. She and her husband are busy, successful television producers. Our friendship dates back to the divine 1970s in Delhi University, a glory time of political upheaval, great world cinema, ferment in dance, music, theatre and the start of both the NGO revolution and the ‘ethnic’ wave that connected rural crafts with urban markets, changing the Indian home for ever. Acts of possession by an old country–young nation growing more comfortable in its skin; joyous purpose before the long shadows of Punjab terrorism sandbagged the 1980s and our playgrounds, like Lodi Gardens and the Ridge, turned for a decade into areas of darkness.

  Delhi was good to us even then, when we were painfully young and struggling to make our lives happen right here, too much in love with its green avenues and jasmine-scented nights to try escaping to America, dreaming big dreams in a poor, fraught but stubbornly hopeful country. We’ve trod a long measure, I think, as I hug her children and collapse on the carpet in the family room. Her pre-teen daughter combs out my hair while I admire her school project.

  My friend, one of the loveliest women in Delhi, tirelessly photographed by Page Three shutterbugs, is touchingly unaffected by her success. We settle down to our new fad—watching Pak TV and giggling ourselves sick at how similar yet different they look and sound.

  ‘Panun Hindustan!’ we shout, when we catch Pakistani propaganda on Kashmir. Secure at home while our soldiers guard us from our covetous, unhappy neighbour, we talk of her relatives, who once led useful, valuable lives as doctors and professors in Srinagar. They were forced to flee their ancestral homes and life is now forever reckoned in terms of ‘Migration ke pehle’ and ‘Migration ke baad’ (before and after they fled in disarray in the early 1990s).

  Next morning I buckle down to a few hours of serious reading from the holy books of every religion. This is a self-imposed routine for my betterment as religion columnist and Editor, Arts and Culture, for the feistiest national newspaper in India. A paper I’m proud to write for, as much for its historical opposition to political tyranny as for its concern with invisible India. It is also a paper that allows a fair amount of elbowroom to its writers, a fact that encourages the habit of homework. What makes work even more piquant is that the extreme right-wing party that backs the government of the day regularly rips apart my columns on its website and sneers at me as ‘Our Lady of the Secular Church’.

  I lose myself happily in the action-packed episodes of my favourite Hindu scripture, the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. If India had nothing else left over from history, perhaps this one book would be enough to furnish a strong life code for generations to come. I marvel again at how the Upanishads seem to have inspired even reformers and iconoclasts of almost every persuasion in India, and re-read a beloved old story:

  Prajapati the All-Father created the three races of devas (celestials), danavas (men) and daityas (titans). He bade them go forth and inhabit the three regions of sky, earth and netherworld. Each race begged for a watchword to live by.

  ‘Very well,’ smiled the All-Father.

  To the devas who had magical powers, He said, ‘Damyata.’ Be restrained.

  To the interdependent race of men, He said, ‘Datta.’ Give, be generous.

  To the daityas who had supernatural, ferocious strength, He said, ‘Dayadhvam.’ Be merciful.

  Know then, that when we hear the thunder crash DADADA, it is our All-Father’s voice, minding His children to be restrained, generous and merciful.

  The phone rings to interrupt this reverie with exciting news. A dancer I wished to keep track of has called to tell me about the new choreography she’s presenting that week. Listening to her, I realize with an electrifying jolt that she belongs to a whole generation of Indian classical dancers in their thirties and forties who are currently on a terrific creative roll. No other generation has had so much education, exposure, travel and inward journeying as this glorious company. They are reaching within and scooping out treasures to share with the public, in the biggest new lease of magic since the 1950s and ’60s when newly-independent India reconstructed her arts step by lovely step. And it is Delhi that spearheads this new victory parade, finally sharing the action with that sturdy bastion of classicism, Madras (where, incidentally, the best popular movies and music now come from).

  I meet up early that evening with a dear friend from college days, who’s an opera addict. But he happens to be in a bad mood and we sit through three different versions of Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito before he decides to cheer up. When I demand to hear ‘Chahe koi mujhe junglee kahe! (Call me a barbarian!)’ as an emotional antidote to ‘O nero tradimento, O giorno di dolor (O black betrayal, O day of sorrow)’, he sits instead at the piano to quiz me on major and minor scales, from which I perversely take off to sing Carnatic devotional music. We call a truce by going off to Geoffrey’s, a pleasant wood-panelled pub, to meet friends from our play-reading group and to catch up on Edinburgh Festival gossip.

  Three evenings later, I’m overjoyed to see with what rapt attention the hall responds to Indian classical dance. People leave humming and smiling: greybeards, grand dames in silks, hip professionals, cool young things in jeans and tees. Clearly, the public knows when a good thing’s happening in an area of national life, even if the print media prefers ectoplasmic blobs from fashion shows as its main visual offering.

  Afterwards, at a farewell party for an Indian writer-diplomat who’s a friend and co-author and about to leave on a Mediterranean posting, the lawn swarms with bureaucrats, politicians, artists, media people and writers. Gossip travels from lip to lip with languid ease, smiles of a summer night sparkle brighter with chilled vodka, women drift gauzily about while men flock gallantly around them.

  Conversation never flags and talk turns with real relish to dinner. Glad cries greet the announcement of nihari, a spicy shank stew typical of Old Delhi, mopped up with fresh, fragrant rotis. A groaning pudding table yields, amidst more formal dishes, a whimsical plate of homemade fudge. It is such down-home grace notes amidst the foonfaan that make Delhi a truly hospitable place, plus the fact that you can always take a house-guest along to a party. Meanwhile our host, a media man of honourable standing, and hostess, a radiologist, inquire tenderly about the state of everyone’s plate. When contentment reaches critical mass, the host and hostess, both excellent singers, lead off into a bitter-sweet old Hindi film song.

  An appreciative shush descends and before you can say Jai Hind, we’re off on a Sufi trip. Soulful medieval lyrics, some born of Delhi’s own soil, melt everyone’s remaining defences. I see Sikhs, Hindus, Christians and Muslims nodding and smiling together in a bond of such good fellowship that I want to run out and round up all meddlesome politicians, priests and evangelists for a public ducking in the fountains of Vijay Chowk at the foot of the Presidential Palace.

  Back in my flat, I make a face at the clock that says it’s well past the pumpkin hour and happily shuffle my bedside books. Shall I read Amin Maalouf’s Samarkand (a magic city I’ve visited twice) or Jose Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ or Lily Prior’s La Cucina? Or shall I call my best friend at work, who’s mad about physics, writes wicked editorials and has opened my mind to a score of new authors I’d never have broached on my own? She’s sure to be home now from her carousals and we could swap post-mortems, fix up to eat our next therapeutic Thai curry at the Oriental Octopus.

  My cellphone shrills. ‘Baby, are you home? We’re on our way to Djinns. Want to come along?’

  City of Walls, City of Gates

  RUKMINI BHAYA NAIR

  ‘In My Mind’s Eye’1

  The clear Danish sunlight seeps into my room at midnight. It is Sunday and the streets of Odense are enveloped in a Lutheran calm it would be hard to imagine anywhere in India—let alone in Delhi! But despite the lateness of the hour and the pervasive quiet, sleep is impossible. I know of no switches that can turn off the relentless brightness of these northern skies. As a consequence, my biological clock ha
s gone predictably haywire and to add to my miseries—damn!—the only reading I have is a bunch of conference papers. Under the circumstances, what choices exist? I can wander out in search of other wakeful company in a strange city or I can wander about the familiar alleyways of my own head …

  It takes less than a second for me to realize that my pusillanimous Indian upbringing will not allow me to exercise the first option. I’m left, like it or not, with only the unreliable resources of memory at my disposal. And so, in a distant, sunlit room—I summon up Delhi. That, after all, is the place to which I must shortly return—it’s where my family is, where I work, where I spent the first five years of my life. What about the last five years though, asks the demon in my brain. That’s the acid test of belonging! Would you choose to die in Delhi, would you, would you …?

  Ah well, I have to admit I’m not convinced that I would like to spend my dying days in this metropolis of road rage and toxic fumes. Nor am I a scholar of Delhi—aficionado of the havelis of its walled city, seasoned hanger-outer in the dhabas of JNU or even a student of the myriad tombs and gardens that give the city its legendary character. So what does Delhi mean to just another boring, middle-class person earning a living there, a quasi-migrant? The ‘real’ migrants, as we know, came earlier, trekking into the city from Sind, from divided Punjab, from Lahore, not just in search of livelihood but to hold on to life itself. They were the genuine ‘1947-diaspora’ who today constitute a significant proportion of what one might call the immigrant aristocracy of the city, its haute bourgeoisie. In contrast, my own status as a Dilliwala is palpably ersatz, fake.

  It strikes me that I never had to struggle to make Delhi my own …

  And as I wait, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, in the inadequately curtained wings of Hamlet’s country, a line from Shakespeare’s play comes back to me, suitably transmuted: What’s Delhi to me, or me to Delhi, that I should weep for her?2 This improbable question seems to me suddenly urgent. I realize that, without my being aware of the fact, I seem to have been haunted by it for a long time.

  ‘Murder Most Foul’3

  Some years ago I wrote a poem ‘Malviya Nagar–Sissinghurst’ trying to express the complicated links between my own elite post-independence education, the residue of a dead colonialism and the immigrant psychology of the residents of Malviya Nagar, the area of south Delhi where I was living at the time. But this sort of endeavour can backfire! More than one reviewer seemed convinced, on the slender evidence of this poem, that it was about the struggles of my particular family to settle down in Delhi after Partition. No question of reading any universal truths about the human condition into my account—no, sir. Instead my feeble attempts at ‘understanding’ my neighbours had furnished me—a Bengali-Goan of uncertain origins—with a new ‘Sikh’ persona!

  I had, in effect, lied my way into somebody else’s head. Or to change the metaphor, I had been handed, so to speak, that familiar object—a ‘duplicate ration card’. This valuable commodity, which can be acquired for a price just like anything else in this city, would now enable me to partake of a variety of goods and services within it. It would even enable me to pass myself off as ‘belonging’ here. Yes, to ration—and to rationalize—the complicated facts of our lives so that they fit into a proforma, preferably one that can be tagged with a bureaucratic label, that was the secret of success in this ancient capital.

  Slowly, I began to grasp that becoming a Delhiite involved an ambiguous aptitude. It was to learn to negotiate the shadowy terrain of a permanently uncertain identity, what Jan Morris has called ‘the blur and slither of Delhi’. Despite its unimpeachable lineage as a city of kings and aggressors, courtiers and bureaucrats—or perhaps because of this ancestry—the spirit of the place spells transience. Everyone in Delhi seems always under threat of ‘transfer’ or ‘dismissal’—as a South Block official might put it. But what accounts for this almost metaphysical sense of alienation, of ‘multiple personality disorder’ that Delhi imposes on its citizens? Is it that it was always a city of campers, nomad-people who pitched their tents here because they saw the city as a gateway into the heartland of India but never as home?

  There are many etymologies that have been offered for Delhi, but perhaps one of the most appealing is the philosopher Ramchandra Gandhi’s suggestion that its name could derive from the words ‘dehri’ or ‘dehli’, both meaning ‘threshold’4—a permanent point of entry and departure but forever resistant to any stamp of permanence.

  Now, I do not know whether it is permissible to include poetry within the space of an essay, but two excuses for doing so spring to mind. Historically, Delhi has always inspired poetry—it is the city of Zauk; and, theoretically, this piece is about exploring contemporary Delhi via the ill-defined, in-between, and, ultimately, perhaps brutal and uncaring attitudes adopted by some of its recent denizens—such as myself. My poem, then, as the point of departure to describe a city of ceaseless arrivals and departures:

  Malviya Nagar–Sissinghurst5

  He dreams of a white garden camellias, lilies, briar roses

  With their colour bled out the Sackville-West saxifrage …

  Up on a roof see the old Englishman

  Dozing at noon his skin sun-rusted

  While one tall cockerel steps high, high

  Prince among the mongrel rabble …

  Fringes of eucalyptus bravely rising

  All the trees in Malviya Nagar possess

  That stranded look blocked in concrete

  And far, uncompromising the defiant Qutub

  Exactly as the Slave King built it in 1198 …

  Winter herbs in kitchen boxes silver ash

  And a river without colour without a name …

  It is not as if we belong here—far from it

  Literally, I mean Partition drove us from Sind

  From Multan, Punjab there are still some who

  Imagine fountains, blood, chinar brushing the clouds …

  Nehru gifted us this ruined city Jahanpanah

  Our trades grew with the wheat besides Begumpur

  Now Sat Sri General Stores stocks everything …

  First-class auto-repair! and now we have started

  Chow-Mien Restaurant though Chinese food

  Is a mystery to us EXELENT ELECTRICK EQUIPMANTS

  Good Night Chemist LOrd-in-DECor UPholsterERS

  Heavenly Travel Company business is good

  By God’s grace our sorrow has turned to gold …

  He dreams with his blue eyes wide of freeze-encrusted ponds

  A late November pea-fog sharp, invisible scenes …

  We came straggling to Malviya Nagar in twos

  Threes, struggling the British pushed out

  Our country free but this old Sahib remains

  Stuck in a lane behind the Blind Institute deaf

  He cannot hear their canes tap, tap, tapping …

  Canes painted white trellised plants at Sissinghurst

  Summer’s mating swans the enclosures of his boyhood …

  To us he is like newspapers black on whiteness

  Old papers we use in our shops to wrap up goods

  Then torn and crumpled tossed into a corner!

  Or used to light our Diwali fires only, we cannot

  Read him we tell our troubles on the Gurdwara steps

  He speaks to no one and no one will weep for him

  When his time comes No one but the Sahib’s bearer

  For forty years Kirpal Singh tended the dumb old man

  Loved him but the truth is that for us he never really lived …

  Snow at Sissinghurst soft as a woman, feathers

  In her hat, laughing dandelions in the spring …

  He calls his house White Haven we do not give

  Our houses names still, in one way or another

  Partition broke us all this place of garbage dumps

  And desolate smiles is not ours we refugees know

  The dust never settles in
the heart’s deserts it rises

  Chokingly this is not written in the guidebooks:

  Khirki Masjid kisses the moon but a refugee

  Grows crooked neither like gulmohar nor chinar

  Nor like the Qutub, pitiless sword dividing the sky …

  It seems clear enough that writing poetry about a city—its current refugee hordes or the ghosts of its troubled past—does not entitle one to claim roots in it. But what does? My own simple conjectures about the processes that confer ‘rights’ to a place include the following. First, the desire to include it in one’s dreams of the future; second, the sacrifice of one’s present time and energy towards its well-being; and third, the need to return to it as the site of one’s past however far one roams and however attractive other destinations might be. On all these counts—future, present and past—there’s no doubt in my mind that I have signally failed Delhi. I have not only not stood by it, I have not stood in it. Even as I have lived there, I have walked away from it and the seething undertow of its problems. Delhi has been for me a forever absent city. I have never cared to weep for her.

  Deadend in Denmark?

  Well, all those ugly, uneven gaps in my poem were meant, I suppose, to serve as visual signals of the impossibility of making satisfactory connections in Delhi. But is it not my own isolationist, academic gaze that renders me so unfit? My landlord in Malviya Nagar, a genuine Sikh who ‘bought’ his land in Malviya Nagar from the Government for the magnificent sum of two rupees and remains unswervingly loyal to Nehru and the Congress, has a different vision—far truer, tougher and unutterably more tragic.

  Ajit Singh is a huge Vesuvius of a man, calm and gentle for the most part but prone to an occasional, shattering eruption. When we first rented the apartment on the first floor of his home, he told us that even at the height of the 1984 riots, when Sikhs were targeted throughout Delhi, Malviya Nagar was a model of brotherhood. His own unlikely profession of manufacturing—of all things—billiard tables had long flourished, and he did business with the highest in the land. There were pictures on the mantelpiece of him with Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in Rashtrapati Bhavan to prove this. Also, other pictures of a large and contented family—sons and sons-in-law, smiling daughters in sparkling dupattas and milling grandchildren. It seemed impossible that anything could happen to change the even tenor of this happy existence …