Delhi (18 page)

There aren't enough jobs, and those that do exist are often dull and humiliatingly menial: endless delivery boys and tea-bearing office peons (from the same root as the word ‘pawn'), the security guards who slump outside offices and shops in shabby uniforms, maids sweeping leaves off the driveways only for them to blow back a minute later. That this is often quasi-work, not un- but
under
employment, is obvious: the seemingly unnecessary fifteenth waiter, the miscellaneous hangers-on and odd-job-men around family shops, the eighth man holding up a ladder or a paintpot and watching the others work, that superfluous guard in the mall who stamps receipts as you exit.

The result, as in so many other countries, is a dangerously large and disaffected group who are really, really bored with the status quo. And prices are rising. There are considerably more young men than women around. Cities everywhere tend to attract more men, and in North India's patriarchal rural regions women are scarcer still. And all the time, Delhi's wealth is in their face.

Today's celebratory India storyline is not irrelevant to these young people. Worse: it's raised their expectations and left them hanging. India's population may be surprisingly unrevolutionary—but as
The Economist
wrote recently, perhaps the country's rich ‘might want to pay their security guards a little more, though. Just in case.'

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

8

F
EAR

Hungry Joe collected lists of fatal diseases and arranged them in alphabetical order so that he could put his finger without delay on any one he wanted to worry about.

—Joseph Heller,
Catch-22

I
t was my very first Holi. I'd been invited to a genteel, gin-and-tonic-fuelled event at an insulated elite mansion. But instead I was spending it with my permanently beaming French housemate, who was saving India through the medium of rugby—and so we were celebrating with half the Indian rugby team.

The Frenchman and I prepared with all the seriousness of a
Rocky
training montage. We loaded up with weapons: cans of coloured foam, packets of pink and lime and orange powder, tins of water-soluble pigment, Barbie
^®
water balloons, and giant submachinegun-style water pistols. I picked out some old clothes (white is for attention-seekers and masochists), carefully moisturised (‘Colour only sticks forever on dry skin', I was warned), and generally got into the samurai psychological space.

In the same way that Spain has a handy way with bulls and America with portion sizes, Indians excel at festivals. They might be
too
good at festivals, in fact: virtually all Indian households spend huge amounts on celebrations like weddings and religious festivities, averaging 10 percent of poorer households' entire annual budgets. They are an iconic component of India's international reputation. Tourists flood to watch the lamplit diabetes-fest of Diwali, the vast watery Kumbh Mela (the world's biggest religious festival), and the great regional highlights: Ganapati in Maharashtra, dunking the goddess Durga in West Bengal and, er, camel trading in Rajasthan.

No festival is more iconic than Holi. It is one of the most memorable—and it turns out, frightening—moments in the Indian calendar.

The Hindu ‘festival of colour' is celebrated increasingly madly across North India, most notably a couple of hours southeast of Delhi in the grubby sacred towns of Mathura and Vrindavan. Here the god Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, was born and grew up. Krishna is one of the more exciting deities, with his dashing blue skin, populist cowherd background, flute, and penchant for pleasuring milkmaids. His name has been spread across the West by ISKCOM, a.k.a. the Hare Krishnas.

From these heartlands Holi has expanded rapidly across the top half of India in recent years. In the UK, too, Oxford students gather in the rain to throw watery colours. South India largely tries to ignore it, but undoubtedly the colours will seep downwards. The festival's enormous popularity today across the country and the world probably owes much to Bollywood. Just like the 1990s fetish for white convertibles and inexplicable Switzerland scenes, shots of white-clad superstars gambolling flirtatiously through puffs of colour have been a Bollywood mainstay.

Holi looks a lot like the Roman Saturnalia and Feasts of Fools celebrated across medieval Europe. To ring in the new year, social norms are briefly overturned, or at least relaxed, and the old year is consumed in a brief carnivalesque period of fire, anarchy, and debauchery. People light bonfires and paint each other with less regard for seniority, caste, and gender than normal (although young men still sometimes bent to touch their seniors' feet, and some were very wary about powdering me). Women get to beat men with sticks. And many people quaff booze and bhang—an almond or pistachio milkshake laced with cannabis, or served in laddu or samosa form—and sway blank-eyed through the streets.

The celebrations started early, around 10 am. All the rugby players were from the same village, as the old unplanned quasi-rural settlements that the modern city has guzzled are still known, and indeed almost all shared the same surname. We headed there for the carnage. The few autos plying their trade charged an extortionate Holi premium, but it was worth it. The driver obligingly veered us towards passing pedestrians and cyclists so we could catch them unawares and strafe them with colour. I felt quite the hooligan.

All this good clean sociopathic fun went a little to my head. ‘Did you see that skill, Jean-Nicolas? Sod the PhD, I should have been a sniper!' We ditched the auto and swaggered along the street. I kept making strange chopping arm signals like I'd seen in the films.

‘Target at twelve o'clock!' Heading straight for us was a motorbike piled high with young men. ‘At my signal, unleash hell!'

Ride of the Valkyries
blasting in my mind's ear, the two of us opened fire.

‘Ai-ai-ai-ai-ee-ee-eee-aiii!' A jubilant infidel-slaying cry, last seen on
Xena: Warrior Princess
circa 1999, burst from my throat. The bike shot past us, its brood of young men now pleasingly Krishna-coloured.

The outbreak of vowels died on my lips. The bike screeched into a U-turn. The young men's eyes were holes inside blue masks, like vengeful Smurfs.

They chucked eight gallons of what looked like bona fide squid ink all over us, and roared off.

The Frenchman muttered an imaginative Gallic obscenity. We smudged our way into the village. I think under all the ink I was successfully passing as a man: at a couple of houses we were offered fly-strewn snacks and vast tots of whiskey by respectable Uncleji figures. Their respectability was signalled by their own war wounds, which were confined to decorous little stripes. I've seen more war paint on the average Delhi clubber.

The rugby players led us to the team's clubhouse for a brutal initiation ceremony involving colour, waterpistols, and a hose. Once they ran out of colours, the players grabbed handfuls of mud. I don't care what they say: you don't
‘play'
Holi—it's far too perilous. It's fun as long as you're on the winning team, like all sports. But when one person turns on you the others follow, aiming savagely for eyes and maximum saturation.

Suitably baptised, the players paused to pose in their dripping vests, assiduously cultivated muscles bulging like melons in a paper bag. Then we took off over the wasteland, full of delinquent puppies and giant pigs and people bathing in a filthy plastic-filled pond, into the village proper.

The pack started to hunt. Whooping, faces daubed, grinning mouthfuls of white teeth. We pelted through the narrow dung-caked streets, accompanied by a motorbike brought along solely for its mistuned roar. We sprayed anyone who looked like they wouldn't actively burst into tears. Most victims just stood and took it with a resigned expression, before smearing us with more powder. The entire village was left dripping with fuchsia and vermilion and lime. I thought: Crikey Moses! being an antisocial menace is
fun!

Suddenly women and children pelted us with water grenades from above, vanishing out of reach of retaliation. I do wonder why the most popular Indian festivals simulate being in the Green Zone. Diwali had been even more terrifying, with improvised explosive devices detonated every few metres. We hurried away, shaking muddy pistols at the sky—only to walk into another ambush.

Out leapt a feisty group of Aunties. They covered their faces with saris to protect against the gunfire and launched themselves upon the yelping boys, beating thighs and buttocks with until their thick sticks snapped. For once I thanked God for my ovaries.

Our reign of terror was over, and the mood abruptly turned serious. There was work to be done. Without explanation we piled into a car and drove a short distance.

Out in the yard a ring of older men were sitting, all solemnly chewing mutton curry in perfect rhythm. In the centre sat a man with all the trappings of local power: three phones, a thick gold chain snaking through a thicket of black chest hair onto his paunch, and the same smiling vicious eyes as Stalin. The others fell silent when he spoke.

The Frenchman and I were ushered to meet him. He was a local politician, and might offer the team sponsorship. He stood, and we dipped our foreheads so he could swipe us with gritty yellow powder.

‘Click photo,' he said, snapping his fingers.

We obeyed.

‘Khana,'
he said, with another finger snap.

From nowhere two bowls of curry arrived, mushrooms bobbing greasily on the surface. The two of us thanked him and ate and made appreciative sounds. All eyes were on us.

‘Bilkul lazeez hai,'
I said in my threadbare Hindi. Everybody laughed, and my heart jumped. Was it wrong? Was it too Urdu-Muslim? Was it four centuries out of date? I kept smiling and took another huge swallow and thought,
And
I bloody hate mushrooms.

Then we were back off, beers and bhang flowing. The rest of the day passed in a colourful blur, because someone sprayed me in the eye.

As the afternoon died and the players got drunker, it became clear that being the only girl in the gang has a sensible upper limit. I went back home, looking like a patchwork quilt, and tried and failed to scrub off the colour.

With time to kill, I squinted through the purple film encrusting my eyes at the computer screen, and idly searched ‘Holi India culture' on Google Scholar. This was a grave error. Instead of pleasant slices of anthropological whimsy, the results all seemed to come from the
Journal of Hazardous Materials
. With oozing eyes I scanned ‘The “Holi” dermatoses: annual spate of skin diseases following the spring festival in India' and ‘Ocular hazards of the colors used during the festivalof-colors in India—malachite green toxicity'. And finally: ‘Bilateral periorbital necrotizing fasciitis following exposure to Holi colors: a case report'.

I lay awake that night worrying that my flesh would start gangrenously eating itself while I slept.

It is not only the traveller and the Holi warrior who tremble in Delhi: the whole city is on edge every day of the year. Middle-class Dilliwallas, especially (and unsurprisingly) women, speak as though they are under siege.

‘Of course, you won't go out after 6 pm,' my recently discovered relatives nodded, ‘seeing how it's such a dangerous city.' They hadn't ventured north to Old Delhi for years, or ever visited my southwestern area, half an hour away on the outer ring road. Another older friend hadn't even braved the metro. Each day they go to the same shops, do the same daily commute, keep their eyes averted from the rest of the city, and exchange rumours: ‘Someone got shot at those lights. She was just sitting in her car, stopped at the lights. They drove next to her and shot her in the head. The police have not caught them. Blood everywhere at the lights. The police will never catch them.'

But what are the middle classes—and here I must include myself, with my gated life—afraid
of
? In its choice of bogeymen, Delhi is a dedicated follower of global fashion.

Terrorism is a consistent fear, though it isn't greeted with quite the same hysteria as in Boston or Bradford. The Global Terrorism Index claims India has witnessed the third-highest number of terrorist incidents of any country in the decade since 9/11, after only Iraq and Pakistan. Delhi has been attacked several times, and is periodically prone to spates of hoaxes and panics. As in America, the terrorist is seen as a bearded, goggly-eyed Muslim madman. Islamists with links to Pakistan claimed responsibility for bomb blasts in 2005 and 2011, and for December 2011's dramatic attack on the Indian Parliament.

The difference is that India has possibly the second-largest Muslim population in the world—
possibly
. WikiLeaks revealed that the US government thinks India has underestimated the number. The 2001 census put the figure at 138 million. As I write, the ever election-minded government has held off releasing data from the 2011 census, but the Pew Research Center gave an estimate of 176 million (14.4 percent) in 2010. Delhi itself had a distinctly Muslim flavour until Partition, from seven centuries of uneven Muslim rule and habitation. Islamophobia is a lot more dangerous in such a context: the country has also seen ‘saffron terror' bombings, allegedly committed by Hindu fundamentalists.