Delhi (2 page)

a gangrenous accretion of noisy bazaars and mean-looking hovels growing round a few tumble-down forts and mosques along a dead river… [T]he stench of raw sewage may bring vomit to his throat.

—and he's a fan.

Sure, there have been writers who praise the city's magnificent imperial past as the heart of Mughal civilization. But they lament its subsequent decline into Punjabi aggression and consumerist bling. Others damn it with faint praise, as though reluctantly reviewing a friend's very bad restaurant. They call it
contradictory
or
interesting
—the décor's OK and the waitresses are pretty, but for God's sake don't put anything in your mouth.

Delhi's inhabitants are scarcely more popular. According to stereotype, there seems to be some terrible syndrome that afflicts big-city folk. New Yorkers are foulmouthed, over-caffeinated snobs. Parisians are viciously rude and dipsomaniacal sexual deviants (if exquisitely dressed). Londoners are famously grumpy, as territorial and hostile to eye contact as feral dogs. Narcissistic, consumerist, restless, aggressive, neurotic, media-obsessed, social-climbing, credit-card-wielding, lonely—the clichés locate Western megacitizens somewhere between
Sex and the City
and
American Psycho
.

Other Indians are just as brutal in stereotyping Dilliwallas. In this bitchy vision, Delhi's citizens look like the cast of Dante's Hell. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here: it is a city of touts, thugs, gluttons, brats, voyeurs, hustlers, crooked politicians, suits, pencil-pushers, pimps, perverts—every kind of sinner. Khushwant Singh again:

They spit…; they urinate and defecate whenever and wherever the urge overtakes them; they are loud-mouthed, express familiarity with incestuous abuse and scratch their privates while they talk.

For all their bad reputations, New York, Paris and London can at least claim grudging recognition of their dominance from the rest of their countrymen. Delhi can't even manage that at home, let alone in the world. Independent India's founding fathers, especially Gandhi, had a famously ambivalent attitude to cities. India's soul was in its villages, the Mahatma argued, not in the dark satanic mills of the crowded cities, cheap imitations of the imperial West.

Delhi's rivals today are on the doorstep—rival cities hate each other like warring ex-wives. Its worst critics are Mumbai's great fans, who contrast their hometown's Bollywood curves and sea views with the capital's bureaucratic grumpiness. Bombay (as the crème still call it) is the younger, taller, better-read sibling. It even does sinning better, with more glitz and glamour: its gangsters, religious rage and dancing girls have attracted the best of India's urban chroniclers. Just look at its nicknames: Maximum City, city of gold, gateway to India.

Delhi is starting with a handicap. It might be heralded as one of the twenty-first century's rising world cities—but no wonder it has an inferiority complex.

I too arrived with a host of preconceptions, some concealing a grain of truth. One hoary old myth, though, would be proved emphatically wrong as soon as I set foot in the city.

It's often said that India is blessed (cursed) with a strange timelessness, as constant and otherwordly as the sun's arc. Delhi scorns this notion. It isn't changeless: today you can practically hear the hourglass frothing—even if IST, ‘India Stretchable Time', does run a little less predictably than GMT.

At least until 2012, Indians were among the most optimistic people in the world today, confident that India is not just another Third World country, but a civilization which will eventually inherit the century. India is going places—and Delhi is too, at least its richest segments. On my evening jaunts, people often remarked on the change with a sort of smug astonishment. ‘Five years ago there was nothing in Delhi. Nothing at all. But now,
but now
…'

Soon middle-class Delhi won't be content to be compared to other Indian, or even Asian, cities. It wants
recognition
. It wants to be a real, undeniable world city, in your face and by every metric—trade, tourists, summits, dollars, nukes, haute cuisine.

Such rapid change inevitably brings a crisis of identity. The city is in either its seventh or tenth or twelfth incarnation, depending who you listen to, with a history stretching back at least three thousand years. At the same time it is an adolescent city, wrestling with the wake of Partition, waves of migration, and hypertrophic growth, and reborn yet again with the economic opening of 1991. It is both a city of past glory and get-rich-quick newcomers, big-spending populists and big-spending corporates, incredible wealth and even more incredible corruption. It is the skittering heart of a democracy claiming to represent over a billion people, yet just as often governed by elite privilege and authoritarian fiat.

Yet Delhi's swagger is fragile. It is at once expansively confident and deeply insecure, as the recent turmoil in India's financial markets has shown. Middle-class urban Indians are beginning to doubt, railing at the corruption and ineptitude of their New Delhi rulers, even as the fundamental strengths—and weaknesses—of the Indian economy remain. India's growth will slow and its politicians will falter; the city's roads will become ever more choked and its throat parched. But Delhi's murky star will continue its uneven rise, yellowish-hot.

I only ended up there half by accident, half out of duty, deep in the heart of wealthy, middle-class Delhi. Somehow as I came into contact with its various evolving faces I almost came to love it, in an embittered and judgmental fashion—or at least to respect the scale of its ambition.

But as I sat wet-buttocked in the ice bar and peered at Luigi's misty spectacles, the warm fuzzy feelings were a long way off.

2

H
OME AND
A
WAY

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.

An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

—G.K. Chesterton, ‘On Running After One's Hat'

A
ugust, 2009 or maybe September: I first set eyes on Delhi. It wasn't exactly love at first sight.

It was a flying visit. Delhi—c. 2,500 years of history and power and spilt blood—was just a slightly inconvenient airport on the way to the hills. I felt obliged to experience it firsthand, if only to complain convincingly, so I decided to stick around for a handful of days. Plus I had a World To Do List (‘bucket list' sounds too morbid, ‘world agenda' too Hitler) including several railways, carnivores, irritable ex-colonies, and a couple of hundred cities. These I planned to work through over the next three-score years before death, collecting snap judgments to wear at dinner parties.

It wasn't my first Indian adventure. The previous year I'd briefly swanned about in South India, green and wet and toothsome. I hoovered up vast amounts of coconut-based produce and watched clumps of invasive water hyacinth float by, mindless and smothering as jellyfish.

But everyone assured me Delhi was different and much more hostile terrain. I made the mistake of reading about it first, as bookish kids tend to do even when things are best left under-researched, like young love or hiphop lyrics.

More horror stories surrounded the place than Halloween. A week earlier, a friend's pre-university Gap Yah adventure had lasted precisely six hours before he fled in terror all the way back home to the cider apples and clotted cream of Devon. Well-meaning acquaintances kept consoling me that at least I'd come back thin. The Mothership, a woman whose sunny optimism I've inherited, dropped dark hints about writing a will. In between motorbike accidents and outbreaks of dysentery, I should expect to be blown up at least three times by terrorists and/or bootleg machinery. And then my corpse would be mugged.

She shook her head with finality. ‘And the insurance company probably won't even pay to send your body back.'

By the time I landed I was hyperventilating so hard I could barely carry my suitcase of toilet paper. Reeking of antiseptic hand gel and fear, I walked around expecting the worst and Delhi helpfully delivered.

I took a taxi from the airport. It was black and yellow and pungent and listed to one side like an old tugboat. There was no seatbelt. I clung to the sticky seat and, snail-eyed, peered warily out of the window. Big roads, barricades, clumps of policemen. Then honking and signboards and endless blocky buildings. The air was hot and dry on my face. When we arrived I panicked and tipped twenty times too much with my fat airport bills.

New Delhi Railway Station was carpeted with bags and bodies. Indian Railways is one of the world's largest employers, with over 1.4 million workers; a guesstimated eight billion journeys are made on it each year, and it shows. At any one time half the continent seems to be lurking around with sacks and suitcases on heads and fistfuls of snacks. Shysters pursued tourists through the dank corridors and to the counters and queues outside, offering fictional tickets from fictional offices. Mile-long blue locomotives crawled in and slumped, hissing gently. In the distance their lost number let out mournful Chewbacca hoots, like whales in the deep. Overhead the loudspeakers blared out a tinny
TA-DAH!
every fifteen seconds in celebration of arrivals and six-hour delays alike.

Like a lot of first-timers I wound up in Paharganj, the grimy huddle of narrow streets just west of the station. It's one of the crummiest parts of town, as though Delhi is intent on making tourists battle uphill to like it. The alleys were fringed with stalls selling fake designer bags and those Aladdin pants that make owners look like they're wearing a soiled nappy. Blurry faces inside: ‘Hello-o, madam, which country?' Dreadlocked Germans stomped by, haggling over badly printed postcards of the Taj Mahal and jaggedly stitched North Fake gear. Puffs of incense and weed drifted over the potholes.

(Two years later looking at the main strip would be like wearing X-ray specs. The government would solve the problem of illegal encroachment onto the road by simply smashing the fronts off the buildings. Passers-by gazed into storerooms and bedrooms. The odd toilet hovered in plain sight. At night the flames of blowtorches licked the concrete shells.)

The hotel, once I finally found it, was a multi-storey concrete block which threw in loud drilling and hammering noises for free. At intervals sleazy waiters knocked on the door and my heart drilled too. I spent my first evening aligning my toilet rolls and looking meaningfully out over the city. I tried for the eighteenth time to make it through
Midnight's Children
, Salman Rushdie's bearded visage smirking over me like an evil genie. I even saw a cockroach, though admittedly a rather small torpid one.

All this was par for the course, traditional even, to welcome me and prove my grit. The bed retained the imprints of previous tourists, just my shape and size and sweatiness. Even the cockroach looked bored, like an extra who'd appeared in the background of one too many coming-of-age stories. The predictability was reassuring. I felt in control, just. Then the rains began.

At the burnt end of summer, the sky heaves its bosom and spews forth a sultry green new city. Spit and a bush leaps up: the Victorian colonizers must have been scandalized. The rain soothes Delhi's nerves a little, greening it even as the roads overflow. Unfortunately Paharganj had yet to smear the ground with uneven concrete. Instead it seemed to be a gigantic plughole, a drain down which all the city's grubby fluids gurgle.

On the third evening, the cockroach having given up any attempt at self-concealment, I headed out. A debonair and swashbucklingly bearded former classmate was escorting me to a snazzy ‘pink rupee' fundraiser (Delhi's gay rights activists being both active and corporate-savvy). Encased in squirtings of hand sanitizer, I stepped gingerly out of the hotel, balancing on a pair of bricks in the stream. The street appeared to be drenched in greasy French onion soup. A dead rat floated past my foot, emitting villainous smells.

My phone rang, and I hovered precariously on one soggy foot to answer it. From the briny depths of their shops the locals regarded me with interest.

It was my classmate. ‘I'm only forty yards away in the car,' he said, with the irritating composure of the rat-free man. ‘Can you make it?'

Forty yards of glutinous, scum-encrusted, corpse-reeking liquid. A veritable shit creek. The skies were just reopening overhead to sluice further waves of sewage down the lane. My shoes were adventure shoes, sold with promising phrases like Neoprene and Gore-Tex and TC5+ Rubber—but they were also too new and pretty for anything like this. The villainous smells would follow me into the car and the evening and the city, thwarting my dreams of an urbane new life. And when I returned the road might be up to my nostrils in the soupy remains of expired rats.

‘No. No, I can't do it.'

Defeated. I retraced my steps over the dead rat, its eyes gloating, and slunk back into the hammering. Back into my chrysalis of hand sanitizer. The other damp youngsters on the roof top ignored me, too busy chain-smoking over their own
Midnight's Childrens
.

Aside from this sewage-induced house arrest, my overriding memory of that first visit is of a small boy grabbing my left breast in the street with a disinterested look on his face. I looked at several monuments, red and white like candy canes, and bought some curly-toed slippers I would never wear. My train out went from Old Delhi, and for several blocks on the journey to the station two boys on a motorbike followed with detailed commentary on my imagined underwear.

As the train pulled away, at the sort of weakling speed that enables an entire Bollywood scene to take place during departure, I caught a final
TA-DAH!
from the station speakers. I settled back to write my verdict on some badly printed postcards of the Taj Mahal: Delhi deserved a minor natural disaster. Nothing too destructive, but something that might wipe the smirk off a few sleazeballs' faces and prompt some minor remodelling. A plague of locusts, perhaps, or a B-movie tornado full of sharks.