The area around the mosque is essentially a Muslim ghetto and is old-fashioned in a way quite unlike the quaint, pastoral charm of Bhavnagar or Junagadh. It is dirty and seedy and destitute. Full of destitutes, in fact, including many nutcases and sad men with desolate, seen-too-much eyes. In the day it is packed with bicycle-rickshaws, chaiwallahs, butchers, car-part vendors and teems with humanity. At night all this is here, but the pavements fill with the flotsam and jetsam of a city that lures the extremely poor from at least three countries. Many of these are Bangladeshi migrants, sleeping rough under tatty blankets. If the concerned Europeans I have spoken to are to be believed, this is actually a very dangerous part of the city at night, notorious for its muggings. I have experienced no such problems and have had the more positive experience of feasting on kebabs and rich Mughlai cuisine – both from street stalls and from a revered eatery called Karim’s. Outside this area radiate bazaars, wide arteries and clogged narrow capillaries, selling the usual wares: saris, silver, paper, shoes, mechanical parts, text books, sweets, chai, paan.
Old Delhi
Credit: www.psychologytoday.com
Immediately to the south is New Delhi, the starkest possible contrast. It is a Raj-era creation of grand avenues lined with trees and whitewashed bungalows, now sprouting concrete blocks - government offices, shops, and hotels. Particularly impressive is Rajpath, which leads from India Gate to the magnificent Viceroy’s palace (now the President’s palace) and twin secretariats – a superbly laid out mass of Greek columns and chhatris (cupolas). Nearby Connaught Place, three concentric circles of roads, is full of fancy shops and restaurants. It is full of the achingly stylish and beautiful jeunesse dorée of Delhi who strut around in designer shades talking refined English into their minuscule mobiles.
Beyond this my mental map becomes blurry. South Delhi is a network of highways enclosed by trees, suddenly spurting into a fly-over to reveal the life below: sometimes outrageous villas in a millionaires’ enclave, sometimes the dust roads and tarpaulin roofs of a shanty town.
*
A surprisingly efficient metro system links much of Central Delhi, and the orderly queues of people waiting outside the sliding doors are an unlikely contrast to the Circle Line. New in town on my first night I made the mistake of trying to hire a bicycle rickshaw to take me to Connaught Place from the Old Town.
“400 rupees,” quoted the driver, a wiry little man with a humorous face. I laughed derisively and walked off.
“Arre saab, three-sixty. Good price for you.”
“Fifty,” I said flatly.
“Arre saab, three-fifty. Last price.”
“Fifty.”
“Three-fifty - very good price.”
“Fifty.”
“Three hundred, OK? Good price for you.”
“OK, one hundred,” I said, knowing he’d got me. He shrugged and made as if to move away. My turn to panic.
“OK, one-fifty - absolute maximum.”
“Two-fifty, saab. Business problem coming.”
“One-fifty.”
“Two-fifty last price,” he pleaded.
“One-fifty.”
“Two hundred.”
“Thik hai, chale.”
As soon as I got in I knew it was a mistake. Adrift in a current of traffic, the flimsy contraption lurched precariously and I felt exposed to the vagaries of the road. Then the driver got lost. He pulled over dramatically and made a “wait here” gesture while he scurried across the tide of traffic without apparent concern for life or limb.
It was ten minutes before he reappeared with another rickshaw driver in tow. He told me in Hindi and sign language that Driver Number Two would take me the rest of the way. OK, I said, but I would only pay each driver Rs100. “Arre saab!” they both chorused, and described at length the difficulty of the road, the distance we had to travel, the business overheads they faced. Unmoved, I restated my position. They conferred angrily amongst themselves, gesticulating frequently, until Driver Number Two set off with a violent clatter. “Thik hai, saab, chale,” said Driver Number One, and we resumed our hair-raising journey.
On one of the radials leading into Connaught Place the driver pulled abruptly to the side. In his Hindi-sign language hybrid he intimated that he was not allowed to take his vehicle any further, so I should get out here. It was a short walk to where I planned to spend the evening, so I shrugged acquiescent and handed over Rs 200. He took it with a pained expression. “Aur do sau” (two hundred more) he asked, doubling the fare in a tone that suggested that I’d been insensitive not to do it myself.
“This is ridiculous!” I snapped in a disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells voice. “We agreed two hundred, you got lost and wasted twenty minutes and now you drop me sooner than I asked. I’m certainly not going to give you anymore.”
Cue torrent abuse. I put my hands up and with a “Bas bas bas” marched across the road. The torrent grew hysterical - I didn’t understand it, but imagine he touched on my lineage, my perceived anatomical deficiencies and my presumed sexual proclivities. In a frenzy he slammed down his rickshaw and charged after me, and the fun began. Somehow we had ended up on either side of a long railing that separated the road from the pavement. I ran pavement side and he kept apace road-side, screaming his unpaid fare like an obsessive mantra. At this point my position struck me: there was no-one else on the road, the railing was about to give out and, for all I knew, the driver might have a knife. I plunged into my wallet, tore out Rs 200 and thrust it at him. He grabbed it and swore, storming in the direction of his rickshaw. I was too much of a coward not to wait until he was a safe distance away before shouting back the strongest Hindi swearword I know: "Motherfucker!”
Near Connaught Place
Credit: Wikipedia (user Lokantha)
*
And that’s just it: Delhi makes me happy, yes, but it also makes me angry. Maybe it is the impression people give of knowing exactly my place in the tourist hierarchy that riles me. Maybe it is the strange knack the Punjabi touts have of making you feel deficient for not wanting their services. Or maybe it is just the effect of a large uncaring city after the warmth of small-town Gujarat. Whatever it is, in the last few days I have exchanged needless heated words with a taxi driver, a fortune-teller, an internet cafe proprietor and a ticket tout. Both Delhi and I seem to be in a constant state of simmering. Two of these exchanges were in Paharganj, Delhi’s backpacker Mecca, a seamy place that I only visited at night to use the internet. Fruit stalls and budget guest houses are everywhere, and offers (mostly of Kashmiri provenance) come at you from dark alleyways - “You smoke hash, friend? Wanna stay in a houseboat in a beautiful place? Like girls, brother?”. It amused me to see the metro equivalent of Hari and his crowd. Many Delhites, I understand, regard this place as the pits, and would not venture here on any account.
Of Delhites themselves I have had mixed experiences. I spent Monday evening in an East Delhi flat with Abhishek Aggrawal, a friend I made on the train, and his kind parents. Father and son are gentle intellectuals and the mother is quiet but warm. If the father was perhaps inclined to talk too much about his fertiliser business, he made up for it with his articulate love of music, and it was a delightful surprise to be given a CD of ghazals by Ghulam Ali when I left. I had not expected this kind of hospitality, or - in the best sense of the word - simplicity in Delhi, and it touched me.
I had a very different sort of encounter the next day in the south of Delhi. I first came across Aatish Sharma last week on a gay dating website and, having hardly excelled myself so far in that direction, I agreed to meet him when I came Delhi. Disappointment Number 1 came as soon as I plucked up the courage to give him a call. Rather than having what I call an SDA (“Sexy Delhi Accent”) he turned out to speak fluent Canadian! Overlooking this misfortune, I trundled down south to a neighbourhood called Saket, where I met Aatish in a shopping complex called PVR.
He was a little more nondescript in person than in his photographs, and launched immediately into a long description of a job offer he had recently received which, pausing only to ask if I wanted lunch (I did), he merged seamlessly into his coming out story (rather too dull to be repeated here). We went to a soulless fast food joint serving a choice of “Business” or “Executive” thali. A television screen above the counter was showing a news story involving a bald old man in a suit. Aatish nudged me: “See that guy up there on the TV?”
“Yes.” Not my type, I was about to add.
“I slept with him.”
“Oh.” Cue bemused laughter (on my part) and an over-long anecdote (on his) about how a chance meeting at a media conference in Bangalore had led inexorably to sex in a penthouse suite.
A tactful change of topic on my part led on to an interesting conversation about pre-Mughal Delhi and the expansion that had taken place after Partition, to accommodate “our Pakistani brothers” (it took me a while to understand that he was referring to the Hindus and Sikhs who had flocked to Delhi from the Punjab in 1948). All too quickly, via a lengthy and one-sided speculation on the nature of the malfunctioning lock on the toilet door, we returned to choice morsels of Aatish’s personal life: a story about a Swedish fuck-buddy whose car he had accidentally crashed after visiting a pizzeria in Pune; an anecdotal appraisal of the major cruising spots in South Delhi; and a description of the precise circumstances building up to his getting laid on his last trip to Bombay. As we left the restaurant, it suddenly seemed to occur to him that he might risk asking me a question.
“So did you ‘meet’ anyone here in India yet?”
I told him the story of an unfortunately brief meet up with a diamond merchant in Udaipur (after waiting for him for 20 minutes by Hathipol he had proceeded to drive me for two minutes away from my intended direction before speeding off to work. We never met again).
“Oh, so did he have poppers on him or something?”
What part of my amusingly-related tale had given Aatish the impression that the guy had been brandishing recreational alkyl nitrates, I didn’t dare to ask. By this stage it was pelting with rain, and all rickshaw fares were automatically doubled. Aatish suggested coffee somewhere and I muttered something about needing to get on, and dove into a rickshaw feeling that, whatever the sum, a fare that put some distance between me and Delhi’s most tedious lothario would be money well spent.
*
I actually returned to this area the next day to visit the most famous of Delhi’s earlier incarnations, the great minar of Qutb-ud-din, one of the earliest Muslim rulers of Delhi. The Qutb Minar complex, as it is known, is actually full of interesting architecture from different periods of Delhi’s history, and of the eponymous minar’s five storeys, only the bottom one was built by Sultan Qutb-ud-din himself in the late twelfth century, the remainder being the work of his descendants. The later Sultan Ala-ud-din Khalji (the selfsame who masterminded the first sack of Chittor) tried his hand at tower-building himself, but only succeeded in out-circumferencing Qutb, as the unfinished Ala Minar, while of admirable girth, is only twenty-seven metres high.
Qutb Minar
Credit: http://lifestyle.iloveindia.com
Delhi’s two most famous forts are both from the Mughal era. I visited Purana Qila (Old Fort) on my first full day in Delhi. It was built in part by Humayun, son of the first Mughal Babur, and in part by Ser Shah, an Afghan ruler who briefly interrupted Humayun’s rule in the 1540’s. It looks similar to other early Mughal work I have seen, although the domes are squashed and hemispherical without a hint of “onion”. The more famous Lal Qila (Red Fort) in Shahjahanabad (Old Delhi) was, as I had anticipated, a bit of a disappointment, and the fact that I had expected this allowed me to have a very interesting time, learning more about Shah Jahan’s architectural oeuvre. Most impressive for me were the outer walls, and mighty Lahore gate. Safdarjung’s tomb, in New Delhi, from the decaying years of Mughal rule I found attractive and somewhat Taj-like, if less sublime and more “chocolate box”. In William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (my Delhi bible), he sees in it all the excessive hedonism and debauchery of the Mughal twilight. If I had not read this already I think that that aspect of the place would have entirely passed me by, and even having read it I feel I am not acutely sensitive enough to the language of Indian architecture to really do this idea justice.
*
Meanwhile, the rituals of departure are gradually being observed. I went to the Air India office to reconfirm my flights today and was required to wait an hour for the two minute transaction. As I was waiting, I struck up conversation with the man on the seat next to me. He was called Mirwaiz, and was waiting to reconfirm a flight to one of the Emirates where he worked for a family business. A Delhite born and bred, and about my age, he shocked me by insisting that he had never been into Old Delhi. An odd reminder of Prakash and his never having visited old Udaipur.
He mentioned a wife in Canada, and I initially assumed he meant a Delhi girl who was working abroad. I turned out to be quite wrong.
“No man, Lisa’s from Canada only. She lived there all her life.”
“So did you meet her in India?”
“No way! She’s never been in India. She’s planning to come for a visit later this year.”
“So where did you meet? In Dubai? In Canada?”
“No, no. Actually we have met each other on the internet only.”
“You mean you haven’t met her in real life?”
He laughed. “Never! Basically it’s an internet romance. We met on a dating site and we just... clicked, yaar. Lisa is my soul mate. Like me she had a tough family life and has not many friends. And like me she has been unlucky in love. So we wrote so many messages to each other. Daily messages. Actually multiple messages every day. And we would exchange gifts - so many gifts I would send her.”
I didn’t like to ask how much she had reciprocated in the gift-sending department. “And shaadi? Marriage?”
“Ha ha - you are knowing some Hindi words. Well, Jon, it happened like this: we love each other so much we decided to marriage, but practically it was not convenient for her to come to Dubai. So we performed the Islamic marriage ceremony over the internet with webcam.”
“That’s amazing! I’ve never heard of this happening before!”
He thrust his hand into mine and shook it vigorously. “Actually I think it’s rare. Very rare.”
“And when are you going to meet?”
“At the moment it is not possible for me to go to Canada - money problems. So she will come to India quite soon. It’s really difficult for her. She is always telling ‘I miss you so much, Mirwaiz’ and it’s the same on my side. I’m truly excited for her visit.”
“I bet you are! Are you nervous at all about meeting her in real life?”
“Of course!” he said, smiling. “But I must be strong, for her sake. Actually, you know, I’ve never had any girlfriend before. I’m still a virgin.”
There didn’t seem much of an answer to this, so I asked if there had been any difficulty with his family.
“My parents are happy for me to marry the girl I love, but my brothers are really angry that I’m marrying a non-Muslim. They don’t speak to me now except on businesses. But I don’t care because I’m going to set up my own business, so I can have my independence with Lisa. You know, all I care about in this world is my happiness with Lisa.”
*
And so, I fear, it is time to bring this enterprise to a close. I had hoped to finish off with a synthesis of all my thoughts of India, given six months’ experience, but I shall abandon that in favour of fizzling quietly out. I have tried to write as much as I could in this journal about my thoughts, reactions and understanding of this country and inevitably so much remains unwritten. I have had a wonderful six months and, because it has necessarily involved a whole shift in perception and reaction, and a change in what one could call “personal norms”, it feels quite genuinely like a little lifetime.
I have arranged to spend tomorrow with Nina Dayal, a college friend from Cambridge who is working here in the Tata Energy Research Institute. I will be glad of the company, as I would probably feel flat and devastated otherwise, despite the tremendous excitement.
As for India - I will come back, of course! Only the most extreme life circumstances could prevent this. I have recently taken to saying that the desire I have to visit other countries is only equal to the desire I have to visit other Indian states. I cannot predict whether in the cold light of Britain’s temperate climate I shall feel otherwise. In any case, I shall continue to devour literature and articles about India and, given the enormously exciting economic climate, India-watching is going to be a fascinating hobby in the coming decades. How it will have changed by 2020 is hard to imagine.
Unlike with my South Indian friends of 2003, I am determined to make a strong effort to keep in touch with some of the wonderful people I have met here. I have no doubt the Europeans will be easy – I am sure to meet Ellen and Anna and others back in England, and it would be a great pleasure to meet Zelda again. Out of the Indians, I sincerely hope to keep in touch with a few IRMAns and a few Udaipuris. I have already been corresponding with Prakash and have had a few e-mails from Madhu as well as Lalita and Arun. If I ever visit Udaipur again, and I very much hope to as I am beginning to miss the place badly, then I will make every possible effort to visit Maal, as the change there will perhaps be the most readable and obvious. I will also try and seek old friends – from Vikas Samiti and from the tourist-ville crowd, as well as Prakash, Shiv, Abbas and the Khandelwals to see what has happened to them [31]. As my writing has become almost illegible with tiredness, and as I hate long goodbyes in any case, I shall herewith pronounce this mishmash of Indian experiences finished. In the words of Dr Nirmal Khandelwal: Bas, bas, bas.
*
[Continued on Friday 16th March]: No, that won’t quite do, will it? Here I am, in the no-man’s land called Indira Gandhi International Airport, with only the slimmest claim to actually still being in India. After a final breakfast overlooking the Jama Masjid, I spent today as expected with my friend Nina. We went to Humayun’s tomb, a terrifically solid and beautiful early Mughal masterpiece. Smooth, un-perforated arches without the scalloping tendencies of later Mughal work, a wonderful interplay of blue stone, an awesome squat dome and an overall pyramidal structure all combine to make this an immensely noble building. We both passed off as Indians so as to avoid paying the foreigners’ rate to get in – Nina in any case fully Punjabi in origin, and me masquerading as a Kashmiri.
Humayun's tomb
Credit: http://indiapicks.com
I later went alone to the Lotus Temple, Delhi’s Baha’i temple, in the far south of the city. By the time I reached it, the lotus-shaped temple itself was closed, but I was able to stroll around the gardens and up to a Hindu temple on a little hill to admire the setting sun over South Delhi – the Qutb Minar in one direction, Humayun’s tomb in another, both far, far away – marvelling at the fact that I would be in England tomorrow. There is a Krishna Consciousness temple nearby, which suggests that the more esoteric religions bunch together. Sun down, I returned to South Extension Part II, the well-heeled residential-cum-shopping district where Nina shares a flat with another TERI worker called Nithu. I met Nithu briefly, ascertaining that she, unlike Aatish Sharma, had an SDA , my new acronym for the infinitely sophisticated, slightly whining upper-middle class North Indian accent that has become my favourite in the world. But then, the myriad of different flavours of Indian English accents is yet another fascinating piece of diversity to be found in the country.
Nina and I went out for drinks and fast food in a couple of nearby bars and then on to a chaiwallah for my final chai. We chatted in Hindi to two guys, both from Jharkand (a relatively new state that used to be the southern portion of Bihar) and both working in the classified matrimonial ad business. Apparently putting “Caste no Bar” on your advert entitles you to a 25% discount, due to Samajik (social work). Perhaps this is perceived as a way of breaking down caste barriers and is therefore encouraged?
Coming back to Nina’s flat in the late evening we waited for a friend of hers, Deepti, from Hyderabad via America and now working for a sexual health awareness organisation. As she was also bound for the airport we shared a taxi, bidding our farewells to Nina and Delhi. Having had a very jet-setting background, she was a wonderfully competent helper at the airport and, with her brash American accent and engaging sense of humour, a great companion until she had to head off to her flight for New York.
*
[31] I am happy to report that, with the exception of Arun, I have since met everybody mentioned in that paragraph again.
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