Delhi (17 page)

It was…well, a bit boring, and sometimes lonely. Just thinking that feels ungrateful. How can being somewhere so faraway and different ever be
boring?
After all, travel is often prescribed as a cure for boredom, healthier and more respectable than drugs or nymphomania.

Actually, there's a venerable tradition of not doing a whole lot in India. It's no accident that one of India's most famous exports, meditation, is basically about boredom. It means taking that grey husk of frustration and tedium and repetition, and enclosing yourself in it, exploring its corners, until it's something like bliss.

But the boredom of many Indians is not the luxurious quiet of meditation. India is a land of enforced idleness. Cities everywhere are full of commuters and isolated newcomers and queues (or milling crowds with a notable absence of queues). In India waiting can often feel even worse. Deliveries don't show. Trains are delayed. The internet creaks. Bills are paid in person. The TV is full of the same adverts. Sending a parcel or getting a licence still takes a thousand and one steps. Important people demonstrate their power by arriving hours late. Unless you are yourself important or rich enough to get someone to do your waiting for you, you need the patience of a saint. Or a cricketer.

This is especially true for educated unemployed youths. Waiting for life and adulthood to begin, they pass time, waste time, kill time, clock watch, temporize, procrastinate. There's even an expressive Indian-English phrase for it: ‘doing timepass'—complete with a plethora of timepass websites.

Much of this time-killing looks the same as it does for teenagers and twentysomethings everywhere. Lots of TV. Games. Cards. Music. Porn. Chatting. Texting. Flirting. Films. If the cult-classic novel
English, August
(1988) by Upamanyu Chatterjee—no relation, I don't think, but you never know with Bengalis—is at all accurate, marijuana and masturbation also play a central role.

My home turf, Vasant Kunj, is almost entirely ignored by travel writers. Not so by Delhi's middle classes, who nod approvingly when I give my Stalinistically number-heavy address. ‘Ah!' they exclaim wizard-like—‘Ambience! Promenade! Emporio!'

For I live in the centre of polysyllabic, Europhilic modernity. This is Mallsville
par excellence:
three of Delhi's finest flank our street. They loom, alien, a kilometre beyond the pat-a-cakes of dung fuel that line our local mini-slum.

Spotless, soulless, ice-cold, the malls are where the middle classes come to play. Here ladies—and the whining albino freaks that are Westerners—can hang out without being stared at. Families make a day of it. I concede they are relaxing places for those with doctor-parent-induced OCD and a financially ruinous love of imported goat's cheese.

They are also sinister, dystopian places, always too empty and heavily guarded, with feral rich kids and lab rat lighting and interrogation room chic (in fact, Indian changing rooms are Kafkaesquely called ‘trial rooms'). I hold my breath waiting for a doomy voiceover from HAL.

Luckily vestiges of Indian customer service survive to recontextualise you: car parks reached only through barbed wire-filled building sites, layers of receipt bureaucracy, whitening creams. Once I tried to return some ill-advised shorts. ‘Exchange?' repeated the security guard, with a sharp intake of breath. The entire mall clattered to a standstill. No fewer than seven people were required for the transaction; I signed four different documents; and finally I was forced to placate them by buying socks. Only trying to buy football boots was worse—the incredulous ‘For
ladies?'

Many observers are horrified by the rise of malls and the consumerism they signify. Pavan Varma, for example, laments
The Great Indian Middle Class
for their ‘crippling ideological barrenness which threatens to convert India into a vastly unethical and insensitive aggregation of wants'. Undoubtedly there is a grain of truth in this, though not one unique to India. Yet the malls are a great place to kill time for a generation that knows and accepts that you are what you buy.

The malls are full of rich kids, who have more options in boredom as in anything else. They loiter over macchiatos and imported beers, shop, get makeovers, go clubbing, go bowling, pick at pizza and muffins, watch football and Hollywood premieres, holiday, road-trip, name-drop, blog. Crucially, the malls and upmarket café-bars are less overtly masculine than most Indian public space—so rich girls can loiter there too. The result, according the
Wall Street Journal
, is a life of air kissing and ‘fancy drinks, new toys and branded clothes'. ‘In India's capital,' the same article states piously, ‘the children of the nouveau riche often get whatever they want, apart from happiness'.

Those a few rungs down the social ladder must make do with less, as ever. Clumps of bored young men—they are almost always men—are ubiquitous. They ‘hang out', smoke bidis, snack, drink tea, drink booze, piss on walls, do odd jobs, wander around, mutter and whistle and sing to one another. At college they are loud and lascivious and obnoxious. In the parks they blast cellphone love songs and hold hands and lie in each other's laps (macho Indian behaviour is more overtly homoerotic than its English equivalent). They stand around watching their friends work, lounging against walls, sprawled over the city.

I watch them sidelong, they stare at me. These sleazy and occasionally aggressive young men, purveyors of sexual harassment, are flippantly termed ‘roadside Romeos'. They are everywhere, and they are threatening. Often they leer and catcall at passers-by. As a
Wall Street Journal
blogger noted, the horrific Delhi rape of December 2012 began as a form of timepass: the alleged perpetrators ‘were basically lounging about partying with food and drink. And the fateful bus ride began as a “joyride”'. A recent UN study across six other Asian countries found that, after sexual entitlement, the most common reason that men rape was entertainment seeking, ‘out of boredom'.

Everywhere they seek to dominate space. Boredom, anger, fear. It shapes the city's psychogeography.

As I typed one morning (an essay arguing that Foucault was either a visionary or a cretin, I can't remember which), a fly landed on the edge of the keyboard. Of course I stopped working and watched. The fly surveyed the keys with bulimic satisfaction. Clearly snacks lurked within. It tapped the Escape key covetously a few times with its fleshy mouth-trumpet, then sat back, rubbing its paws together like a corrupt businessman. How nostalgic: it was a housefly,
Musca domestica
, identical to the irritating buzzers of Britain.

I needed to get out of the house.

Bones and dignity still more or less intact despite another Auntie onslaught, I emerged from the metro in central-east Delhi. To the left sprawled the halls and avenues of Pragati Maidan. Heavy with concrete and Soviet pseudo-optimism, ‘Progress Field' hosts international expos on everything from toys and bulldozers to cutlery and (yes) electricity.

It had more gates than a football stadium. I followed a couple of slick moustaches with briefcases along the path. Everything was on the same titanic scale characteristic of depressing utopian projects. Signposts promised food, auditoriums, buses, but the few walkers were swallowed up by the size. Built in 1982, it is gradually expanding.

The main event, inside a much-celebrated building that looked like a honeycomb gritting its teeth, seemed to be invite-only. Instead I slipped inside a slightly smaller building behind the moustaches, chucking a business card into a fishbowl at the entry as proof of intent. A young coordinator, dressed like an air hostess, head-bobbled her approval.

Inside was an electricity expo. It looked like a car showroom, with pipe samples and pastel sketches of drills instead of Beemers. Only the lighting was worse, ironically. Endless hysterical placards boasted more solutions than a meth lab: wiring solutions, storage solutions, finance solutions, solutions to all your multifarious power needs.

The vocabulary of electricity lends itself to manic self-promotion. How could we even talk about modern politics and business without it? Power and networks and dynamos, crossed wires and live wires and short circuits, flux and fuse and juice and high voltage. Feeling plugged in, amped up, electrified, recharged. Making connections, pulling the plug. Even our selves are explained through such analogies, from the ‘hardware' of our bodies to the ‘wiring' of our brains. (Of course, man is literally electric too—‘a mass of electrified clay' in the irreligious phrase of Percy Bysshe Shelley, himself intrigued by electric experiments and one of the inspirations
for Frankenstein.
) Our ideas ping like lightbulbs overhead, and our emotions feel electric: headaches like an electric shock, that lightning jolt when he touches your hand. The chugging rock of AC/DC notwithstanding, it's the language of speed and interconnection.

Suitably recharged, I left utopia and continued walking south. Once again, my tiny map proved a reliably unreliable aid to distance, and my tongue threatened to loll as I walked. I stopped and asked a pair of idle construction workers where I might find Purana Qila.

‘Purana Qila? The Old Fort? Never heard of it,' the first worker said.

I tried to describe it thoroughly. As usual, my Hindi failed me. ‘It's a fort. And it's old.'

Nothing. I tried again. ‘It is not far from here, from my opinion. It is old. Ancient. A big building, old and very big. Many white people'—or I might have accidentally said ‘horses';
gora
and
ghoda
are far too similar for comfort—‘want to see this.'

‘Oh!' his eyes lit up with recognition. ‘You mean the Jew Gate!'

Between two arrow-slitted watchtowers, the terracotta entrance to Purana Qila did indeed turn out to be graced by six-pointed Star-of-David lookalikes. It is not, of course, Jewish. According to most guesstimates, this is the oldest part of Delhi. Beneath it allegedly lie the remains of Indraprastha, the legendary Pandava brothers' great capital, enshrined in the epic
Mahabharata
.

It appeared to be an unlikely centre for timepass. Yet people paddled aimlessly around the bathing lake, slumped on the grass in each other's laps, even resorted to zorbing. Close, too, only a little further south again, is one of the more profoundly depressing theatres of boredom I have had the misfortune of visiting: Delhi Zoo.

Zoos are always depressing. Nice Western liberals aren't meant to enjoy them anymore. Delhi Zoo is PETA's dystopian fantasy. It's a shame, because it has an excellent menu of animals. India has long been admired for its wildlife: in the 1610s the trustworthy English travel writer Thomas Coryate praised the Mughal emperor's menagerie of ‘Lyons, Elephants, Loepards, Beares, Antlops, Unicornes'. At least some of these are on display.

Unusually, it was the small animals near the entrance which looked more appealing. Virtually all the zoo's cages were small and exposed, heavy on concrete and chicken wire. The larger animals appear to have succumbed to lassitude or mental illness. An alopecia-stricken lion paced the smallest corner of his enclosure over and over and over. A chained African elephant rocked to and fro, ears flapping in a terrible rhythm. Several tigers have died there. But reptiles always seem pretty lassitude-stricken anyway, so it's a bit less tragic to see them slumped in a corner.

‘Madam! Madam!' It was the reptile house guard, gesticulating wildly with a stick. ‘Snake! I will bring you snake! You will put it on neck, click photo!'

Have a large comatose serpent slung on my neck, get papped by every passing teenage boy, and pay for the privilege? I politely declined.

Further in, timepass materialized in all its worst incarnations. PUT YOURSELF IN THEIR PLACE, a cartoonish signboard ordered, DO NOT TEASE ZOO ANIMALS OR ANY ANIMALS. It was futile. Groups of young men were blasting tinny music from their phones. A couple of men, their children watching, were throwing rocks at a gharial to make it move. At last they hit it full on the snout, with a terrible hollow
thwock
, and it shuddered and slipped into the water. At least where the animals were utterly exposed the crowd seemed satisfied simply by shouting.

I'd met up with the ever-noble Persian, my Gurgaon chum, and some boys from a home run by Tara, an NGO—all around twelve years old, very self-possessed and curious as they explored the zoo's endless winding paths. They were polite, charming, and unfailingly kind to the animals.

And then up swaggered some older timepassers: ‘Oi, shorty, is that white bitch your
girlfriend?
'

You bastards, I thought.

Yet it is difficult not to sympathize—
very
grudgingly. Many of these young people have little option but life in limbo, watching indefinite tracts of time flutter by. Like me they often are or were students. Waiting forlornly for a middle-class job to open up in a phenomenally competitive labour market, as Oxford's Craig Jeffrey has shown, they collect endless degrees from fourth-rate colleges—the sort of places notorious for scandals, like the entrepreneurial registrar who subcontracted postgraduate examination marking to schoolchildren, and the student campaign for the right to cheat in exams because cheating is so widespread.