Delhi (19 page)

The insurance market appears to think the risk is declining. Nonetheless, scanners, soldiers and security guards are ubiquitous, especially in locations frequented by tourists and the middle classes, like the entry to malls, monuments, the metro, and big hotels. You might think there is nothing less reassuring in the metro than the sight of an archaic-looking rifle sticking out of a sandbag emplacement, but for the lonely fieldworker the security caress is a rare and overstimulating moment of intimacy. Sometimes I went in and out of the metro just for the human warmth.

But the procedures are slow and awkward and unaccountable too. Dilliwallas are pumped with enough X-rays to cut the subcontinent's fertility rate. At the Taj Mahal, two months after Holi, guards would confiscate my brother's playing cards, of all weapons of mass destruction. The prodding and probing goes hand in hand with an intensifying censorship regime. For all India's democratic claims, Reporters Without Borders ranked it 140th out of 179 countries for press freedom in 2013, below Afghanistan and Zimbabwe. Their shameful verdict:

the [Indian] authorities insist on censoring the Web and imposing more and more taboos, while violence against journalists go unpunished and the regions of Kashmir and [Maoist-‘infested'] Chhattisgarh become increasingly isolated.

The second bogeyman is ubiquitous in cities, especially those with striking levels of inequality: the rampaging poor. Big cities are precarious places, vast and dynamic but always on the verge of hysteria. Streets are not controlled solely by force, but by social norms. I remember the strange eerie hush of affluent disbelief during the London riots of August 2011. So this is what would happen if we stopped believing in authority and law all at once: smoke, destruction, bonfires of designer trainers. Delhi, like many other Indian cities, has also had its violent and lawless moments. 1984 is the most famous: murderous mobs targeted Sikhs in revenge for the assassination of Indira Gandhi, with the not-so-tacit approval of the authorities.

The fear is concretized in Delhi's geography. Mughal-era Indian cities were composed of insular neighbourhood clusters,
mohallas
. These were typically internally homogenous—through shared regional, caste, occupational or religious lines—and largely self-regulating. This segregated spatial logic was only reinforced after independence as Delhi increasingly became a city of administrators. Clusters of residential housing were built and allocated to government employees. This survives in place names, which often tellingly retain the imperial terminology of ‘colonies' and ‘enclaves': Defence Colony, Railway Colony, Press Enclave, State Bank Colony, Engineers Enclave, INA (Indian National Airways) Colony. There are others with weirder names: New Friends Colony, Sunlight Colony, even a Nasbandi (‘Vasectomy') Colony out in the eastern suburbs, where a programme in 1986 reportedly offered plots to anyone agreeing to a sterilization.

Today's middle-class neighbourhoods face towards their own local markets and parks, effectively shunning the outside. The insularity, the resultant fear, has been taken to new levels: ‘Folks with plenty of plenty, they've got a lock on the door.' Our own flat was perfectly on trend: secured inside walls, fences, fistfuls of locks, wandering nightwatchmen, and bored guards jotting down vehicle registrations and (I always suspected) our late-night comings and goings. Swimming in a morass of roads and oh-so-many people, the wealthy inhabit an archipelago of guarded mansions and gated communities.

At present the patrolling
chaukidar
generally carries nothing more threatening than a whistle and a stick to clack around in circuits through the night. Yet reports are on the rise of heavily armed Aunties, well-built trigger-happy women packing Glocks under their saris just in case. India allegedly has the second-largest number of privately owned guns floating around in the world (after the US), and even its own National Rifle Association-style lobby group. One German anthropologist writes of a quasi-militarized ‘Fortress Delhi'.

Other fears are disease-related, again bearing with them a fear of the poor and their packed and squalid slums. In Britain the most dangerous thing is the lesser spotted office stapler. In comparison India seems violently dangerous, a Pandora's box of dengue, malaria, giardia, TB, cholera, Japanese encephalitis, an alphabet's worth of hepatitises, diphtheria, dysentery, typhoid, HIV, and the disgusting-sounding chikungunya, which I'd never even heard of before arriving in Bangalore. Oxford insisted my Chennai-born friend got fourteen vaccinations before she returned to her own hometown. Every itch might be leprosy, every spot bubonic plague—though nobody ever warned me about necrotizing fasciitis. A plague fear struck in 1994, dengue fear in 1996, and again in 2013, and in lower-grade incarnations throughout the monsoons, capable of striking fear deep into the heart of the American embassy with its huge mosquito-magnet swimming pool.

Together fears about crime and disease reinforce calls for increased security and slum clearances, never mind the destruction of homes and livelihoods this might entail. India has always been segregated, but this trigger-happy paranoia is something different. This
is
the twenty-first century. Private security and weapons are everywhere, while rent rises and heavy-handed governments drive the poor further to the margins. The elites hole up in similar gated communities in Capetown, London, Dubai, Buenos Aires, Guangzhou, Mexico City, and virtually every urban agglomeration in the United States.

Delhi is positively fashionable.

Finally, there is the fear of nuclear apocalypse, something that seems very remote but probably is a lot less unlikely in Delhi than in, say, the pretty Cotswold village of Little Barnacle. India has an illustrious nuclear connection. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atom bomb and Sanskrit fan, famously (mis) quoted Krishna's line from the
Bhagavad Gita
after the world's first successful nuclear test: ‘I am become Death, the Shatterer of Worlds.' (Beat poet Allen Ginsberg used the same chapter to describe the effects of LSD. Apparently God looks a lot like a mushroom cloud.)

I hadn't thought about this much until I had to teach a class on the undying nuclear-powered hatred between India and Pakistan. Several times in the heat of almost-war, parties within the Indian and Pakistani states have allegedly contemplated nuclear escalation. Under its nuclear shield Pakistan eggs on India with its terrorist proxies in Kashmir. How patient will India be? The optimists think that all parties are too rational to risk nuclear war. The pessimists prophesy doom.

By the end of the class the students were pale and shaking. John Hersey's classic 1946 essay ‘Hiroshima' outlines what the apocalypse might look like: just a ‘sheet of sun', a ‘noiseless flash'—and then ‘a sort of twilight'. It makes me wonder about my parents' generation, when everyone seemed fairly resigned to instant senseless death. I'm not sure how anyone gets out of bed, let alone goes out and roams the city.

Why was I dwelling on all this scary stuff? Might the secret be that travelling makes you just a bit mad? Not only that: heat sends the mad blood stirring. By May, it was homicidally hot in the urban jungle. The weather forecast showed a line of tiny, unblinking 40°C+ Saurons. The temperature had replaced bowel movements as the expat topic of choice. The whole city looked badly cremated.

For the first couple of weeks everyone seemed to sink into lethargy, glassy-eyed in the dust. Stuck in our foolishly un-air-conditioned flat, we had tacitly agreed to ignore each other's increasing near-nudity. Showering three times a night in pyjamas and sheet, my bed gathered brown outlines like the rings of a tree or the police outline of a corpse. I quickly became unable to talk about much else, even though I realized that admitting you don't have AC in civilized circles is as incomprehensibly eccentric as admitting you have a phobia of buttons (a phobia my Australian housemate really did suffer from, so at least the heat-enforced nudity was helpful on that front). People were mildly intrigued, but mostly a bit disgusted.

In the freezing Decembers of my teenage years, we used to stuff wrapped-up burgers up our tops to keep warm while waiting for a late-night taxi home. Now I found myself slipping bottles of iced water inside my T-shirt. I lay back on the scalding plastic of the autorickshaw and fantasized on Patrick Leigh Fermor's description of England—‘like living in the heart of a lettuce'. He meant it as an insult, but just think of it. The bland watery crunch, the green-white coolness. Delicious.

Then, like the flick of a switch, it suddenly became intolerable. The heat lay like an iron dome across the sky. The air was hotter than blood. That the apocalypse was nigh was confirmed when I was caught in a hailstorm. Out of the boiling May sky, golf balls of ice thundered onto North Delhi's corrugated roofs. They melted in seconds.

Some argue Europeans colonized Africa not through some devilishly rational imperial scheme, nor even in Seeley's ‘fit of absence of mind', but in a fit of madness. The men on the ground were riddled with disease, booze, opiates, fatigue, fear, jungle fever, delusions of grandeur—the dark hot madness of Kurtz in
Heart of Darkness
and
Apocalypse Now
, or the fire-starting madness of
Jane Eyre's
Mrs Rochester, far from home and crazed by confinement.

I simmered at inanimate objects in perpetual lethargic rage. If you looked closely there would be sweat patches on my skull, under the hair. I tried to drink water Indian style, pouring it into waiting lips without touching the bottleneck, but it splashed all over my face and left me angrier than ever. I started going a little bit mad too.

My interviewees' offices were still Alaskan wastelands of air-conditioning and office chairs. But outside the city was a hothouse of unease. It is well known that violence increases with higher temperatures: summer is murderous. Adrenaline courses through the blood and tempers fray. Delhi's famous and terrifying road rage escalates, especially with the rapid, rainless rises of April and May—tens of people are killed for minor scrapes or slights—as does sexual violence. Like me, the city seemed in the clutches of some sort of urban jungle fever.

The most famous contemporary outbreak of Delhi heat hysteria was the ‘Monkey Man' panic of April and May 2001. It is not just the wealthy who are afraid in the city. In April and May 2001 fear swept through the narrow winding lanes of poorer areas from the eastern outskirts into the city itself. Monkey attacks are not unusual in Delhi, but the Monkey Man was something else. Generally appearing on balconies and scratching people (rather erotically), he first appeared in witness accounts as a black half-monkey, half-man. He evolved into a mutant cyborg with glowing eyes and metal claws, able to jump four storeys, or even morph into a cat. The panic escalated, with a four-foot-tall monk beaten up and handed over to police in the suburb of Noida, while at least three others leapt to their deaths to evade the beast. Vigilante groups instituted patrols and the police offered a reward for the Monkey Man's capture—though he was never caught.

The diagnoses were as interesting as the panic. Middle-class Indian columnists lamented the irrationality of the lower orders (never mind that in 1995 the ‘miracle' of Ganesh statues drinking milk, first witnessed in New Delhi, had relied heavily on middle-class support and spread to the diaspora in the UK, US, Canada, and beyond). The virulently Hindu nationalist party Shiv Sena blamed Pakistan for unleashing an army of cyborg monkeys. Conversely Bollywood immortalized the Monkey Man in
Delhi-6
, a paean to national integration in which the
kala bandar
, the black monkey, represents the sectarian evil in all of us, or something. Writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, the anthropologist Lionel Tiger compared the phenomenon to
The X Files
as part of a ubiquitous urge for ‘the ghoulish and disastrous'. He suggested citizens were recognizing that ‘everyone from New York to New Delhi lives on the edge'.

The eventual consensus was ‘fear psychosis'—exacerbated by heat, mass communications, and pranksters. The attacks all took place within half an hour of blackouts. The postcolonial theorist Aditya Nigam evoked labourers ‘living through prolonged spells of power cuts and darkness, sweating it out' on joint terraces in gossipy high-density areas. Like Frankenstein's monster, the Monkey Man is electricity's dark side.

In the feverish nighttime, the bogeyman thrives. If Delhi gets a little hysterical in the heat, what chance do I have?