Delhi (22 page)

Western women can also embrace their promiscuous reputation in ways denied to Indian women who must preserve their modesty. Indian neighbourhoods are notoriously gossipy. My flatmates and I frequently crashed elsewhere to milk acquaintances' air conditioning, turning up panda-eyed in the morning. A young man even came to stay with us (awkwardly, nobody realised that Feckless Brother and I were related). Alas, the gossip surrounding our flat—where pretty young foreign women come and go every month or so, occasionally having flings with the downstairs people—was so epic in proportion that the neighbours decided it must be a brothel. The landlord called in to check, but unfortunately only a blonde Russian monoglot was home.

There are news reports of assaults on Western women almost every week. Statistics are difficult to come by: the government does not release crime figures for tourists. But for all the staring and groping, we are simply too high profile a target much of the time. Even the police cannot simply sit by and let Delhi's international reputation fall into even more tattered tatters. It is Indian women, at least the poorer or less ‘sisterly' ones who cannot inspire huge elite protests, who bear the brunt of massive, institutionalized hatred of women.

India's population continues to grow, and by 2028 is likely to overtake China's to become the world's largest. So, when confronted with the results of a study claiming most internationally sized condoms are too big for Indian men, the former editor of an Indian men's magazine quipped: ‘It's not size, it's what you do with it that matters. From our population, the evidence is that Indians are doing pretty well.'

For most of the chattering classes this is no laughing matter. The black-clad spirit of the Reverend ‘Pop[ulation]' Malthus, himself for decades a professor at the East India Company College, is alive and well here. When asked what would solve India's energy crisis, one bureaucrat leaned forward and dropped his voice as though trading gossip. ‘The population must stop growing. I am not advocating Sanjay measures'—Indira Gandhi's widely despised older son, who led forced sterilizations in Indian slums in the 1970s—‘but something serious must be done.'

This is an old argument. In 1968, Paul and Anne Ehrlich produced their flawed but enormously influential book
The Population Bomb
, which quickly became a classic of the misanthropic ‘survivalist' genre of environmentalist writing. In their vision, the world is ‘Spaceship Earth', a small contained body hurtling through the blackness with clearly limited resources to support life. Consequently they treated the developing world and its endless breeding with unconcealed horror and contempt. Chapter 1, ‘THE PROBLEM', opens with ‘one stinking hot night' in Delhi, full of fleas and smoke and, worst of all, ‘people, people, people, people':

People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating… [D]ust, noise, heat, and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect.

This image of India, perhaps with the valiant Mother Teresa thrown in, is one that haunted American and English minds at least until the 1990s. The Ehrlichs' solution? Alongside incentives for voluntary sterilization and research into mass sterilization chemicals, cut food aid to India to force population control.

In fact, one of India's great underreported achievements is its falling birth rate. The Ehrlichs' apocalyptic predictions have not come true. Unlike China's brutal One Child Policy or the Ehrlichs' own authoritarian recommendations, this declining fertility rate has relied not upon heavy-handed government intervention but on the power of urbanization, rising wages and female education to incentivize naturally smaller families. The most recent figures show that in several of India's wealthier, well-educated states, including Delhi, the birth rate has fallen below 2.1, the natural rate of replacement, and stands at around 2.3 nationwide. It is still uneven: the rate of growth is fastest in the enormous, poor states of the North, nicknamed BIMARU (for Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh) after the Hindi word for ‘sick'. Nonetheless, it is an impressive and promising development, which improved economic growth, healthcare, and education could spread across the subcontinent.

The belatedly falling birth rate is not an unmitigated good, for all the fond talk of a ‘demographic dividend' as China and Europe rapidly age. First, this sprawling young population lacks skills and opportunities, confined to frustration, waiting, and ‘timepass' in a growth trajectory that neither educates the masses nor provides enough employment. Second, it is complicated by Islamophobia. The average birth rate amongst Muslims remains high—and I have lost count of the educated Hindus who prefer to view this as some sort of conspiracy. ‘They intend to outbreed us,' one toilet correspondent informed me, his hand closing into a fist. In large-scale studies there is no relationship between religion and birth rate. There is, though, between poverty, insecurity and fertility rate. Muslims remain by and large one of India's poorest and most marginalized groups, even (or especially) in international business's favourite state, Gujarat.

Third are India's missing women. In this brutal logic, if you must pay a dowry to marry off your daughter, and she will then leave to keep house for another family, it does not make much apparent sense to have a daughter at all. While increasing wealth and its dispersal led to the decline of dowry in medieval Europe, pressures to marry within caste groups keep prices high and rising. So with falling birthrates comes preference for sons, and illegal sex-selective abortion. Dowry itself has been technically illegal since 1961, though you wouldn't know it: payments are rising rapidly throughout the social hierarchy, stretching well beyond its earlier roots in the upper castes of the North. One friend described going to dowry viewing parties in which the ‘generosity' of the bridal family is on display, from scooters and jewellery to Victoria's Secret underwear.

Scans and abortions are expensive. Keeping a woman in the home, foregoing the income from her work, isn't cheap. Dowries rise with your ambitions for a rich, higher-caste husband. These women are not missing from the poorest, but from the ranks of the rising, increasingly wealthy classes. Depressingly, a wealthier India may not automatically be positive for women. Despite Delhi's conspicuous wealth and conspicuous greed, money cannot cure all.

10

S
OULS

I thought India was pretty jammed with poor people and cows round streets, witch doctors and people sitting on hot coals and bathing in the Ganges…

—US President Harry Truman

A
nother month, another friendly if terse message from a relative:
WE ARE INVITING YOU TO TAKE A LUNCH WITH US
.

Yet this brought the dreadful dilemma: which gifts to bring? A swift spot of websurfing suggested some ‘culturally appropriate' gifts. Alcohol seemed a bit risky for hitherto unknown family members. The internet suggested you cannot go wrong with sweets, but I have an unerring eye for bringing them to diabetics or, like the last relatives, dieters with weak willpower.

‘Indian giving' is of course named not for the subcontinent but Native Americans. Most
Indian
Indians I have met are extremely generous as both gift-givers and hosts. Some are also the worst recipients of well-intended gifts imaginable, especially when the gifts are from younger relatives and overseas guests. Gratitude is an awkward attitude to display to your juniors.

Uncle unwrapped the gifts. He was a dapper elderly man with an impish smile, rarer nowadays. First, some dental glue to secure false teeth, as per transnational request. This met with a grunt of approval, a slight head wobble—Indians do not distribute pleases and thank-yous with the same wantonness (and insincerity) as the British. Second, a crisp shirt from Marks & Spencer, a reassuringly prim British brand now making inroads into metropolitan India, seemingly in part as a purveyor of luxury underwear. Their Indian advertising campaigns seemed to feature a lot of scantily clad women; I'm not sure which demographic it was targeting.

Uncle's eyes darkened. He cast the shirt down. ‘I will not take this.'

‘Why not, Uncle?' Oh no. Maybe he'd seen the advertising campaign.

‘It is very bad for you to give me this. There is no point. I will not wear this shirt,' he said gloomily, ‘because I am not long for this earth.'

Another gift failure. Lunch was more successful, though Uncle didn't eat himself, but simply sat and watched. It was a Bengali feast: bowls of rice, cubed potatoes, deep-fried airy
luchi
breads. Dishes of the choicest seafood: prawns with coconut, fish with mustard seeds, fried fish, smoked fish-head daal, fish in a thin garlicky stew. The flavours were wonderfully clean and light after the heavy ghee-filled Punjabi stuff that dominates Delhi. The capital does have Oh! Calcutta, a chain restaurant loveable not only for its food but because (a) it is named after a nudity-filled musical with a title (unwittingly?) based on a French pun,
O quel cul t'as!
or ‘Oh what a luvverly arse you have!', and (b) in the bathrooms was an oh-so-Bengali sign offering to provide key supplies for your dinner: ‘reading glasses, sewing kit, woollen shawl, ear buds'.

The only unwelcome arrival was a plate of bitter warty karela; I discreetly hid it under the rice. Having eaten my fill, at last I let out a sigh.

Error. Family love is expressed through quantity of food. Out came second helpings.

‘No really, Uncle, I'm fine.'

His eyes darkened again. ‘What is this? You have eaten nothing. We have made this for you only!'

Under the table I loosened my belt, and set back to work.

The Bengalis have a famously sweet tooth. Out came dessert. I braced myself.
Mishti doi
, an almost caramel yoghurt. Sweet and crumbly
sandesh. Rasgulla
, round spongy balls in syrup, and
rasmalai
, my dad's favourite, scattered with crushed pistachios. They were individually delicious, but together they set my pancreas groaning. And then finally a large glass of Fanta, presented proudly. I felt the elastic in my knickers give way.

I must have lapsed into a short post-food coma under the fan for a moment. Uncle coughed gently.

‘I shall show you the family tree,' he said, rising from his armchair and propelling me deeper into the gloom. A chunky yellowish desktop took pride of place in the room. He flicked the switch and it made a strange noise like an old tree about to fall. The screen flashed once. We waited.

Eventually the computer released a series of froggy croaks. He opened the files: three giant spreadsheets, one each for Clans Chatterjee, Mukherjee, and Ganguly. Each contained a long string of names, a thin erratic string at first, flaring into a broad tree in the nineteenth century when there seemed to have been a profusion of brothers. (A long tenuous sidestream attempted to prove our relationship with Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the famous nineteenth-century author of India's slightly sectarian national song
Vande Mataram
, ‘Hail to the Mother(land)!') It was at this point that I realized my father's proud middle name ‘Hari' was in fact pronounced ‘whorey'.

‘We have astrology reports for all the recent relatives, so we can tell what their personalities are like. Here is my father, for example,' Uncle explained.

‘But you
knew
him. Wouldn't it make more sense to write down your own memories of his real-life personality instead of using the star chart predictions?'

Uncle's smile didn't waver.

Each sheet went back roughly forty generations—‘to 942 A.D.,' Uncle confirmed. A short and erratically written paragraph informed me that this was the year when a king brought five Brahmins over from Uttar Pradesh to perform a ritual.

‘The Aryan invasion!' Uncle said brightly.

I bit my tongue. Prehistory is a sensitive subject in India, where pseudo-archaeologists claim the Taj Mahal is a Hindu temple and that Indians invented most things ten thousand years ago, from toilet paper to bicycles (more on which in a second). Even so, the old ‘Aryan invasion' theory is pernicious. It claims that a fairer-skinned race of Ubermenschen swept in from the northwest, bearing Sanskrit, and conquered the subcontinent's existing, darker-skinned inhabitants. This racial story was overlaid upon the caste system. The theory was disproved a long time ago: linguistic evidence suggests slower, older waves of migration, and genetic evidence shows much admixture took place between the two populations. Even its old proponents dated it two millennia before 942A.D, but the theory seemed to survive within my family.

‘This is why you find so many Chatterjees everywhere, even in Germany!' Uncle continued, mistaking my bitten tongue for awe. ‘It is the most common family name in the world!' (It is not. That honour almost certainly does belong to Asia, although reliable statistics are rare, but is probably Chinese: Li, Wang, or Zhang. ‘Chang!' Uncle exclaimed when I suggested this—‘that's the Chinese version of Chatterjee!')