Delhi (11 page)

Back in the auto, conversation is progressing as expected.
‘Shaadi-shuda?
Married, madam? Boyfriend?'

Sometimes I display a ring. Sometimes I suggest I have a mysterious hunk somewhere in the world, working or travelling; I usually stress how tall and musclebound he is, and how honourable and permanent his intentions. One really creepy time I showed a picture of Feckless Brother, my younger sibling.

Maybe I give off some spinsterish vibe, maybe it's that the ring is made of plastic, but they never really seem to buy it. My favourite response came from a handsome young driver with proper Delhi swagger: ‘No problem, madam. I like fun only. My girlfriend, she is married also.'

Ahead flows a scooter with an entire family stacked upon it. They are lower-middle-class and law-abiding: the husband is wearing a shirt and suit pants—and a helmet, of course. His wife sits with suicidal decorousness: side-saddle like a Victorian, baby clutched to her bosom. Her sari dangles terrifyingly close to the wheels as the scooter sways. She has no helmet. At the very front is perched another child, wedged between the handlebars of her papa's moustache and those of the bike. ‘It doesn't look safe, but it must work,' I think, and then remember that India has only 1 percent of the world's cars, and 10 percent of the world's road deaths. Up to 190,000 people a year die on Indian roads, more than Oxford's entire population.

The sluggardly trucks are banned from the city centre until deep into the night when they reel onto the roads, juddering fatly. They scar and eventually crumble the tarmac under their illegally heavy loads. In an industrial area outside Bangalore's Electronic City, we saw a pothole so large that one of the lorries had upended in it. For days the autos pottered ant-like around the edge of the crater, the lorry's flabby body still aswoon at the bottom.

Alongside prices (plane tickets, student fees), the drivers enjoy holding forth on how grim Delhi is. Like many others, this driver is from Uttar Pradesh, the big dry impoverished state to the east. His family remains behind in Agra. Delhi is too expensive and too dangerous to bring them over, he says, although he only makes the short journey back home a handful of times a year. He leans far out of the side of the auto and spits another meditatively bloody gobbet of
gutka
onto the road. He's careful with money, though—he doesn't have the vampiric rotted red mouth of the addict.

Overhead swoops the metro. It is undeniably classier than the rattling grime of the London Underground. Since my first abortive Delhi visit, its expansion has reshaped the feel of the city, bringing together opposite corners and liberating wealthier women. Passengers seem to be on their best behaviour inside. It is clean and cool and spit-free. On the other hand, I am deeply sceptical about claims it has taught Dilliwallas to queue. Bear in mind that I come from a country where the queue
is
civilization, and any breach of its logic a sign of moral degeneracy. In the Delhi metro everyone waits patiently along the painted lines until the train arrives—and then the civilized pretence breaks down. Sociopathic elbows everywhere, those trying to get on headbutt those trying to get off. For a month I hung back, tutting in British horror, but gradually I too turned
Lord of the Flies
.

A violent horn and a roar from behind, getting ominously close: a bus. The city's rapid transit buses largely cleaned up their act for the Commonwealth Games. Their hunchbacked green forms stalk the roads like mantises. The plan was to let them stalk dedicated bus lanes, though this plan proved way too controversial and has all but collapsed, leaving only treacherous lumps of concrete in the middle of the road. Some of the most deadly private buses—the famously murderous Bluelines—have been phased out or pushed to the city edges. Other private buses continue to ply the routes, however, often packed and full of groping hands.

The auto driver skitters to the left, horn whining madly. A big beefy SUV is coming up fast, blaring. Its windows are tinted, though tinting has been banned in a vain effort to prevent sexual assaults. I wonder who is at the wheel. Probably someone like the honourable Mr X: clearly able to afford a driver, but too impatient to sit through someone else's geographical ineptitude.

The SUV is so close that I close my eyes and resign myself to a sticky end. At least then the honourable Mr X won't see my auto-induced Afro.

The auto driver hunches forward on the horn and lets out a string of imaginative obscenities (‘You
padkora
fried in the oil of a dirty…!'). The SUV's blare gets louder and louder.

Suddenly we lurch sideways at high speed. I'll say this for Dilliwallas: they really can drive. They have reflexes and spatial awareness I've never seen outside
2 Fast 2 Furious
, skidding and weaving fearlessly an inch away from the next car. Apart from the drunk drivers, of course.

The SUV roars past. We tuck in behind with a deferential parp and gaze at the prominent Germanic logo on its rear. It belches a gassy tail like a gleaming black comet.

Blow your nose in Delhi and you are greeted with a claggy mass of black, perhaps punctuated with interesting orange and brown flecks. This is the air Dilliwallas resentfully share, one of the great public goods. It hangs around and coughs and mutters dirty little mantras:
NO
_x
, CO, SO
₂
, CH
₄
, plus tiny evil particulate matter,
PM10
and
PM2.5
, which I'd never even heard of before I arrived, let alone inhaled. The sun, a groggy aspirin white, at times seems to dissolve altogether.

Virtually all contemporary cities are cursed by air pollution, but Delhi has the dubious distinction of the second-worst air quality in the world, narrowly behind Beijing but rising fast. Just living in its smoggy streets is allegedly worse than smoking a packet of cigarettes a day; jogging is a form of self-harm.

I proudly nursed an increasingly lavish cough as a badge of Dilliwallihood. Two in five of the city's residents suffer from respiratory illness, killing an estimated 10,500 a year; across India, Greenpeace claims coal-fired power plants kill 120,000 annually. Delhi is low-lying. The hot air doesn't shift in summer. The winters feature thick, greasy smog which resembles the ‘pea-soupers' of pre-1950s London, ‘the yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes'. And what, or who, is to blame?

It is Mumbai, not Delhi, which has become famous as the city of
Slumdog Millionaire
and Asia's largest slum, Dharavi. But Delhi has its slums and beggars too. They are simply less visible, and the city handles them with discreet authoritarianism.

Still virtuously exploring, I set off to explore the roads around our colony. A hundred meters from the guard, a paunchy man with a Freddie Mercury moustache and dreams of becoming a chef in London, was a
jhuggi-jhopri
cluster. It comprised a series of scrawny shacks with corrugated iron and blue plastic roofs, stretched in a narrow band along the roadside. On the pavements its inhabitants patted cakes of dung to dry for fuel. The women wore cheap polyester saris, partially concealing their faces, and squatted over small grills of food for sale at regular intervals along the road. Their children played cricket with a broken tennis racquet, the ball occasionally thwocking into the path of passing autos. An enterprising advertiser or homeowner had hung a gleaming Vodafone sign on the side of one of the huts. Overhead messy coils of wire poached electricity for the odd lightbulb and black-and-white TV.

The sky overhead looked like a wheezing lung, one of those sad cases who lights up and takes a drag through their tracheotomy tube. After five minutes my eyes were streaming. The road opposite the JJ cluster was a turbulent sea of thick choking smoke. My stomach shivered: burning plastic smells like something going very wrong on a molecular level.

The source of the smoke was a series of fires on the roadside, gasping smoggy creatures short on orange and hot on grey. Behind, a couple of skinny figures watched with scarves over their mouths. They poked the fires every now and then, tossed on more rubbish, and coughed as I did. Behind me a dog-walker dragged one of our colony's many pets, an obese pug, its fist of a face mewling and sputtering.

This is the type of scene that sparks disgust among middle-class Dilliwallas. In their gated colonies, served by guards and maids who may live in the very same
jhuggis
, they condemn the poor for burning rubbish, illegally occupying land, and a myriad of other environmental crimes which choke up the city's bronchial tree. They complain that the state's hands are tied by democracy, unlike Beijing's. Some citizens, though, are far more equal than others.

Further down the road was a pile of rubble and ashy dust, a few scattered bits of plastic and tattered cloth. This is where the JJ cluster had been until a fortnight before I moved in. Then, though, it had looked far less temporary: the huts had been made of bricks and mortar, with large plastic water tanks alongside and electricity posts. They had been abruptly and ruthlessly torn down. The demolition squad had deliberately shattered every brick to make the inevitable rebuilding more difficult.

Delhi
is
environmentally active, for all India's intransigence in climate change negotiations. But it is a very middle-class activism, one which does not want to share the airways. Urban beautification and middle-class ‘quality of life' is all: greenness, space and cleanliness. The Delhi government has systematically closed polluting factories and evicted squatter communities—although not the equally illegal settlements of the middle classes. The pavements have been cleared of small traders, who must keep moving. Slums have been bulldozed, notably in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games (how very Beijing, you might say), and much of the seized land turned over for commercial development. Thousands of the city's poorer residents, who enable the middle classes' ‘first-class world-city' lifestyles, have lost their homes and livelihoods.

At the UN's first environment conference in 1972, Indira Gandhi famously claimed that ‘poverty is the biggest polluter'. But this simply isn't true. ‘Urban beautification' alleviates symptoms, not causes. These symptoms particularly affect the poor, who cannot flee for holidays or the more expansive suburbs. The inverse of Indira's statement might be more correct: pollution is a cause and form of poverty.

Far more environmentally destructive, of course, are the lifestyles of rich Dilliwallas (and yes, I realize the hypocrisy of flying there to write this). Delhi's air quality enjoyed a couple of years' plateau with the metro's arrival, the daytime ban on trucks, and the switch from diesel to CNG in buses, taxis and autos. But it's worsening again. Those belching SUVs are flourishing: in February 2013, the
Financial Times
reported that 1,400 new cars are hitting Delhi's clogged arteries every day, with 6.5 million already in action. Electricity demand is rocketing, less for the
jhuggi
s' lone lightbulbs than for gadgets and air conditioning. The waste produced per capita, hitherto comparatively limited, is rising as (profitable) plastic packaging and bottled water take off. In summer, the city shrivels and dehydrates. In the last decade the capital's groundwater levels have dropped precipitously, especially in the rich south, including our very own Vasant Kunj.

So, the shit's encounter with the fan is imminent. A typically reassuring Indian government response is visible at one of my favourite Delhi spots, Lodi Gardens. The Lodi dynasty ruled for seventy years from the mid-fifteenth-century. The ruins—tombs, a mosque and domes with long dark foreheads—are by far the most famous remnants of their rule. The British turfed out villagers and landscaped the place. Nowadays the Gardens combine flowers and ruins with the odd exercise pole. The tombs' etched arches, orangey stone with turquoise tiled inlays, are filled with reading passers-by and canoodling couples. Mobs of pigeons line the paths, cooing sleazily—in fact, mobs of pigeons line the paths of every city I've ever visited, as ubiquitous as Irish pubs. Occasionally Rahul Gandhi, bumbling scion of the Nehru dynasty, and his bodyguards jog the paths too. There is even an icecream stall, a bar-restaurant, and a border of expensive residential accommodation.

Swilling a dazzlingly expensive beer in the bar one day, I suddenly discovered I was in a forest. I checked: the tombs were still there, and the icecream stalls. I could hear the gentle hum of the road. It didn't look terribly like a forest, but what did I know? It contains a tiny bonsai park—perhaps the government in its infinite wisdom meant that.

With this arithmetic, nudging the goalposts closer and closer together, the state can claim that you only imagined imminent crisis. India's area under forest has been increasing for a decade and a half. Other ‘forests' include orchards, parks, timber plantations, even tree-hedged cricket pitches. The number of actual
trees
might be declining, the biodiversity certainly is—but forget that. Enjoy your Lodi Garden icecream.