Winter Dawn, Unreal City
Delhi, New Delhi, and Naipaul
I can see my toes turn greyish-blue in the shower. It is early morning and I briefly think of death. Delhi has its way of reminding us of it. In the cold, cold winter mornings, the metro train that snakes its way through the lifting mist has an ominous quality. The Presidential gardens have been opened but the flowers look desaturated. Sundar Nursery's cheerfulness overlooks the mausoleum of Humayun. Lodhi Gardens has eight tombs within it. Nehru Park was built in the memory of the then recently-deceased former Prime Minister. All the important roads are named after the departed. India Gate and the National War Memorial are headstones for the past. Someone called this city the Indian graveyard of empires. A Republic may have died here too.
I will never forget being seventeen or eighteen and reading An Area of Darkness for the first time. It is an experience to read that wretched man and his beautiful words. They will slap you awake and pour cold water at you. They will spit at you and your patriotism, your pride or whatever remains of your oikophilia. He will make you see, really see India because you refuse to see its truth. And suddenly you cannot stop reading him and you lug all three parts of the India trilogy to read on a trip to Hampi, thinking of yourself as one of the ‘lizard-like’ people he describes. A ruined people inhabiting ruins.
Years later, I am reading Naipaul again. I walk by the many roundabouts that dot Lutyens’ and think of how he describes Delhi:
“I could sense the elegance of the city, in those colonnades hidden by signboards and straw blinds, in those vistas: the new tower at one end of the tree-lined avenue, the old dome at the other. I could sense the ‘studious’ atmosphere of which people had spoken in Bombay. I could sense its excitement as a new capital city, in the gatherings at the Gymkhana Club on a Sunday morning, the proconsular talk about the abominations of the Congo from former United Nations officials, in the announcements in the newspapers of ‘cultural’ entertainments provided by the embassies of competing governments: a city to which importance had newly come, and all the new toys of the ‘diplomatic’. But to me it was a city in which I could only escape from one darkened room to another, separate from the reality of out of doors, of dust and light and low-caste women in gorgeous saris – gorgeousness in saris being emblematic of lowness – working on building sites. A city doubly unreal, rising suddenly out of the plain: acres of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century ruins, then the ultra-contemporary exhibition buildings; a city whose emblematic grandeur spoke of a rich and settled hinterland and not of the poor, parched land through which we had been travelling for twenty-four hours.”
A city doubly unreal.
There is a romance to this city in its relentlessness and endlessness. There always seem to be more markets to go to, museums to visit, some mela to attend. The metro seemingly connects everything and where it does not stretch, Delhi presents itself as a city for walkers. It is not just Lutyens’ with its neat zebra-crossings and fairly well-maintained footpaths and broad roads. There is something walkable even in the rickety inner lanes of the city’s many markets. The city cannot be comprehended sitting in cars, it needs to be understood by sinking in its veins. My phone’s (I am told inaccurate) pedometer tells me I have walked 164 km this past month, all of it in Delhi. A common route I take is by Taj Mahal New Delhi. Gawking at the flowers and the rather gaudy peacocks at its gates has become something of a daily ritual. Vir Sanghvi calls the hotel “a Bombay company run by Bombay people” and therefore, a sanctuary for its actors and lawyers and businessmen. Some foreigners trickle in too now. There are Uber Blacks and Rolls-Royce parked out. On some late evenings, I can hear some folk music behind its walls. I imagine some wealthy guest wining and dining to this auditory prop by a glistening pool.
A little further off Shahjahan Road, a beggar sits on most days. At the same spot, on the same mat. I do not know if he is a beggar, he asks for no money. A tramp or vagabond, perhaps. A seeker even. He converses with some phantom in Hindi and scribbles in English on a clean sheet of paper. There is a large stain of spat-out paan in front of him. I get down the footpath to avoid stepping on it, risking the speeding BMWs instead.
Like Naipaul more than 60 years ago, I live in one of the city’s residential “colonies.” Such a strange word put to such varied, common use in this city. They could be posh, or colonies for government employees, unauthorized ones. There’s even a ‘widow colony.’ All colonies — the large, global ones that are separated by oceans, and the small ones populating a specific city — operate on the logic of marking out difference and pushing it out. Each colony seems to have multiple gates, to let only some in. Open: 6 AM. Closed: 11 AM. Open: 1 PM. Closed: 5 PM. Open: 7 PM. Closed: 11 PM.
Someone tells me the protocols are for safety. Safety of cars and women. I am not sure of the order of preference here. The Rapido auto driver rings me to say that he cannot reach my location. Gate No. 6 is shut. It is 10 AM and the streets are quiet. There is only the sound of chauffeurs cleaning cars.
So I walk again to the metro, along large, large houses that are simultaneously quiet and loud. Quiet in their quaint white and beige exteriors, and their woody gates. Loud in the way they still announce themselves and those who live within. Tanejas. Bhatias’. Gupta. Narangs. Malhotras. Names that are confident of their place, their proprietorship over these colonies.
The practice of cleaning, of taming, and maintaining discipline and order is replete in Delhi. The Mughals were obsessed with symmetry. They drew sharp perpendicular lines to divide up their gardens with fountains that mirror each other. They built tombs that curved and arched in identical ways. Their windows, the patterns of stars and flowers on their floors, and manicured bushes are all paired up. That impatience with spontaneity and disorder is inherited today. A board explaining the significance of the Lakkarwala Burj near Humayun's Tomb laments the “overgrown and unsightly place it had become” before conservation efforts. The colonies are replicating the same impatience in their many gates that open and shut to keep some away, while others are welcomed. But that impatience towards disorder is reflective of more modern maladies too. Naipaul narrates a story where a railway official agreed to swap train bunks with him but refused to help shift the bedding. He would rather wait two more hours for the next station so that a porter may perform that labour. Naipaul writes:
“I began to do the porter’s job. He smiled but offered no help. I lost my temper. His face acquired that Indian expressionlessness which indicates that communication has ceased and that the Indian has withdrawn from a situation he cannot understand. Labour is a degradation; only a foreigner would see otherwise”
The colonies, like Naipaul's railway official have withdrawn. They have ceased communication. There are elections going on but you would not know that within these colonies, apart from a few posters. They have shut their gates to the outside.
All of us appear to be affected by the withdrawal. A little girl tugs at my kurti and asks to me to buy her Kinderjoy. I pretend she does not exist. She disappears and emerges again with a baby brother in tow. I pretend they do not exist.
I ask my roommate to clean up after herself in the shower. She stares at me blankly. I repeat myself, in case she has not understood me. Finally she answers. Ask the maid to do it. I am not your servant. The same disdain for labour reproduces itself in our very posh colony in the 21st century. I persist in trying to explain to her why she should still keep the shower clean. She stares even more and then enters a stage of expressionlessness. She has withdrawn.
There is an incident that occurs at the heart of Lutyens’. The Hindu reports it in a matter-of-fact way. They defaced the signboards of Akbar Road, Babar Road, and Humayun Road after watching a new period movie. The “they” are a mysterious “group of people.” The new period movie is unnamed. As if the group of people are not known. As if the name of the movie is unknown. The barbarians are at the door and the Indian newspaper has withdrawn. A couple of days pass and no one speaks of the incident. All communication, all comprehension has ceased. The lawyer wining at the Taj, the beggar of Shahjahan Road, the girl on the violet line, we have all withdrawn. We have all ceased to be.
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Lovely!! You sure have a way with words!! :)
Love love love.