Delhi (20 page)

On the road the great travel writers become skinny, blistered, even peeved—but very rarely afraid. Most come in two colours, as old as colonialism. There are the intrepid, hypersexual, and permatanned explorers—T.E. Lawrence, Wilfred Thesiger, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Robert Byron, the self-appointed Bruce Chatwin—thumbing the
Odyssey
with one hand, penning witty letters to duchesses with the other. They're always climbing things and making sweeping architectural pronouncements. (Admittedly their own friends and biographers call them fantasists; his friend Evelyn Waugh even called Byron a ‘dangerous lunatic better off dead'.) Then there are the selfdeprecatingly bumbling amateurs—Bill Bryson, Eric Newby (actually a hardcore military man)—who might occasionally fall over and commit unspeakably awful cultural faux pas. But they don't seem afraid either. All wear hardy footwear and enjoy satisfying amounts of male bonding.

Their books are brilliant. But the myth they propagate is not. The Mothership has not gone too far from her semi-permanent moorings in Yorkshire: Australia seems intimidatingly distant, so she is saving India for when she's ‘more experienced'. When I'm away, she ends each Skype call with the ritualistic words ‘I'm just not as brave as you.' Well: bollocks.

I maintain that everyone (bar a few madmen and delusional hippies) feels the fear. Travel is a scary, and occasionally boring, business. There is a lot of waiting around, for planes and buses and people and electricity. The waiting is alleviated by moments of abject panic, and occasionally hunger. There is much musing on bowel movements, and on what book to read next, and on whether you are going to run out of clean knickers. There is much paranoia about whether people are talking about you, or whether you're inappropriately dressed, or your guide is going to kidnap you. The word intrepid doesn't feature much.

Travelling alone is a particularly strange and intimidating experience. New cities, with their size and guarantee of anonymity, are both liberating and lonely. Male travellers often wax lyrical about the joys of wandering the city, the joys of being on the verge of lost. ‘The crowd is his element as the air is that of birds and water of fishes,' Baudelaire famously wrote of the flâneur, the wanderer. In India wandering is generally the preserve of young men. ‘His passion and his profession,' Baudelaire continued, ‘are to become one flesh with the crowd.' As a lone woman I have the impression that the crowd would quite like to become one flesh with
me
. Women surge through public space with a purpose, not pausing or looking around too much. (Young Western men travelling alone also tend to attract a surfeit of lampreys, offering postcards, girls, and drugs.) If you're not a heroic explorer type, if you're not a man, if you are alone—you experience every street and site differently.

It can be too much. It's OK that it's too much. Take a deep breath, steel yourself,
be safe
, and go back out there. ‘We must travel in the direction of our fear': it's worth it.

Admittedly in my Indian travels around I have encountered a crocodile, cobras (twice), giant venomous spiders, moonshine, wild dogs, a scorpion, a convicted stalker, homemade guns, angry monkeys, angry bulls, angry camels, a Mach 6 earthquake, and a short circuit that exploded a lightbulb and sent fan blades whirling at my head. I have been escorted by the military through an armed uprising, and drunk tea with a group of opium-addled headhunters—skull-collectors rather than especially extreme corporate recruiters—who had facial tattoos to show they'd succeeded in carrying off a head or two. (They were friendly enough, but their children threw rocks at me.) I've also been given warnings of varying degrees of plausibility about the dangers presented by to me personally by black bears, Islamist terrorists, tigers, fake gurus, wildfires, striking transport workers, leopards, bandits, corrupt policemen, bull sharks, wild elephants, Maoists, tsunamis, Pakistan, disgruntled cricket fans, and the metre-long flesh-eating turtles released into the Ganges to help dispose of half-burned corpses.

I have encountered precisely one of these in Delhi: the earthquake. We lived on a flight path and I mistook the quake for a passing Airbus.

Delhi has a disastrous, and worsening, reputation. It is the Scientologist of cities. Some of this is justifiable—but let's put it in perspective. Delhi is not actually all that dangerous. The worst injury I've had from months of roaming, inspecting toilets, and Delhi life has been from a very small pothole. What's
really
most likely to kill you?

First, as I watch an unhealthy amount of TV crime dramas, let's look at murder. Other countries challenging India as new emergent powers on the global scene include Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Nigeria. Big cities in all four of these are far more dangerous than Delhi. Latin American cities are in an entirely different league of violence. A widely covered study published in early 2013 showed that five of the ten cities with the world's highest murder rates are Mexican, and fourteen of the fifty worst are in Brazil. Four cities in South Africa and the United States also feature in the top fifty, but not a single Indian city. In 2011, the homicide rate per 100,000 residents in Delhi was 2.7, versus 20.7 in Philadelphia and 58 in New Orleans. That's a rate not so different to London. Reassuring conclusion: you're
extremely
unlikely to be murdered.

Second, what do most Dilliwallas actually die from? The real causes of death are more prosaic than terrorists, the nuclear ‘noiseless flash', or Victorian-sounding diseases. In fact, they're remarkably similar in Delhi to other cities. Overall, there's been a transition from ‘developing world' diseases to mimic the rich West. Like his British counterpart, the average Dilliwalla is likely to die not of malaria but of prosaic, noncommunicable ‘lifestyle diseases': heart disease, stroke, diabetes.

The elephant in the room is Delhi's reputation for hating women. So what's likely to kill you if you're a young Indian woman?

In 2012, the United Nations announced that India was the most dangerous place in the world to be born a girl: you are twice as likely as a boy to die between the age of one and five. Even with the likely huge underreporting, a woman is raped in India every 20 minutes. Delhi's rape figures are the worst of any large city, and reporting has (thankfully) rocketed in the aftermath of the ‘Nirbhaya' case of December 2012. ‘Nirbhaya' means ‘the fearless one', an unnecessary and oxymoronic title. Every report makes it clear how terrified the young woman was.

The Global Burden of Disease report recently confirmed that, nationwide, some old suspects are still in the top five causes of death for 15-49-year-old women: ‘maternal disorders' related to pregnancy, tuberculosis, and diarrhoea. But heartbreakingly the top cause of death is suicide, especially for well-educated young women in wealthier areas. And also in the top five is fire, frequently associated with domestic violence and dowry murder. Countrywide in 2010, and again likely an underestimate, a bride was burned every 90 minutes.

The most dangerous things for young women, then, are not tigers or motorbikes or malaria. They are discrimination, social pressures, the continued stigmatization of mental illness, and violence. Violence by strangers—and by women's own families.

It's dangerous to be female and Indian. It's dangerous to be from an upwardly mobile family, hungry for dowry and obsessed with
izzat
, honour. It's even more dangerous to be a poor woman, a minority woman, a migrant woman—when your pregnancy is marred by poor nutrition, when you are legally all but invisible, when your rape case cannot raise middle-class protest but is laughed out by the police.

I count my blessings every day.

9

H
EARTS

He used to call me thirty times a day. It stopped for a few months, and I found out he'd moved overseas. I breathed a sigh of relief, but as soon as he came back, he started calling again…

He called so often I had to change my phone number. He used to send me SMSs calling me all sorts of terrible stuff: bitch, slut, whore. I had no idea what he was trying to achieve… We'd had coffee once.

—Friends

I
ndian men—and, dare I say it, especially Delhi men—are notorious for their stalkerish tendencies. Rare is the woman, Western or Indian, who has not been pestered far, far beyond the point of flattery.

Further south, the metro surges back through the earth and into the hot air. It carves an arc—as serene and soaring as tons of moulded concrete can be—over the quiet bustle of Kailash Colony and the Roy residence. A short swoop away are the four orangey segments of Lajpat Nagar, still famous for its cheap clothing even as it rapidly gentrifies.

Delhi's house-numbering system, at least in slightly older areas, perpetually baffled me. Block letters are haphazardly arranged, at least to my untrained eye, and E-24 is nowhere near E-23. Here, looking lost in the middle of a subdued and dusty little park in the centre of a housing estate, I encountered one of these young male tormentors.

He turned the corner, ambling in the opposite direction. He slouched, with a gluey crest of hair that lent him the appearance of a Portuguese man-o'-war.

The young man popped out his headphones with a big white-toothed grin, and asked me in slightly awkward but very confident English whether I was OK. I eyed him suspiciously, and he flicked a glance over his music player: ‘I'm so happy to meet you. Most of my real friends are Westerners. My best friend is an Australian girl.'

I was early, and lost, and convinced I had to embrace all the city had to offer: so here goes. We started chatting.

Nicky was from a large town in the sprawling state of Uttar Pradesh. He had moved to Delhi to study, and might have become one of India's vast army of unemployed graduates, but his grades were good enough to escape to Australia. There he spent six years, acquiring a business degree (the much-coveted MBA), a comparatively lucrative job, and an anglicized version of his name. He had even—he told me wide-eyed—had gay friends: ‘even a lesbian!' Now he was back, and currently worrying about finding a suitable boy for his sister.

‘Do you want to get coffee?' he said, already walking. I was still early, still embracing stuff, so I nodded, and we set off on a disconcertingly roundabout trip: quiet residential streets, the hum of the main thoroughfare, an unplugged security scanner in the middle of the street, dodging traffic, and up the stairs of a weirdly empty mall, all gleaming and dark grey.

We ordered coffee: black for me, something sickly and cream-covered for him. He let me pay.

Then Nicky began to speak, almost compulsively, palm hugging his downturned phone throughout. He wanted me to understand why I should be his friend—because he understood how to treat women
now
, especially Western women, after a long painful journey.

Almost as soon as he arrived in Sydney, Nicky fell head-over-heels ‘in love' with an Australian girl: let's call her Sheila. She was green-eyed and relaxed and kind—the couple of times they'd exchanged words. Encouraged, he set out to woo her.

Here Nicky paused, drummed the back of the phone, looked away. His floppy hair—conspicuously oiled, a last vestige of the provincial town—fell over his face. He began to speak again, more quickly.

He began to woo Sheila in the ways he'd been honing since he was a wide-eyed Indian teenager. He kept lists of all the dates and times he'd seen her and what she was wearing. He wrote her streams of emails declaring his undying love in his (at the time) rudimentary English; she replied only twice, to ask him to stop. He texted her endlessly. He had friends approach her. He sent her expensive gifts: a gold necklace, an iPod.

Finally, Nicky followed Sheila home from work, pursuing her onto the train after she had shouted at him to leave her alone.

You can see where this is going. Nicky shook his head as though something bitter was in his mouth, pushed away his coffee. He was arrested and told he would be deported by a series of increasingly foulmouthed policemen. He ended up in court—‘that was the first time I heard the word: stalking'—was kicked out of university, and served a community sentence.

By this point, my murmurs of sympathy were becoming somewhat less convincing.

Nicky pressed on. He had tried to see Sheila again—‘just to say sorry, yeah?'—and ended up back in court. (The conviction was not enough to put Nicky off Australia, though. Not until he had been beaten up three times in ‘curry-bashing' attacks, the racist Australian pastime of choice, finally being stabbed in the arm, did he decide to move back.)

We left the coffee house and paused on a corner.

He acknowledged that what he'd done was wrong and scary—‘now I understand'—but insisted he hadn't known better. When he was growing up all the boys, and all the girls (he was sure), thought that a surfeit of attention was the only way to prove your interest was serious:

You see it in Bollywood and on the TV. Indian girls always say no, they have to say no, they have to stay modest, but they expect you to keep chasing them… They want you to keep calling, calling, calling, sending SMS, gifts, following them every day, checking what they're doing and who they're seeing. That's how you show it's
real
love.

Nicky barely dates Indian girls anymore: he finds the expected process of pursuit confusing and risky, ‘though it wouldn't even be a crime in India'. He resents the fact that they explicitly demand expensive gifts, and that they are hurt and confused when he suggests splitting the bill ‘because I know men and women are equal, yeah?' or when he stops texting them after not hearing back.

He shook his head forlornly. ‘How do you know when no means no?'

That evening, another friend corroborated: ‘A friend of mine from work was getting older, and her family thought she'd never marry. One day she noticed a man on the metro, staring at her. The next day he was there too, and the next and the next, standing closer and closer. Finally he followed her home and asked for her number. They're still dating a year later.'