Delhi (30 page)

Dogs prowled, tails up, the females with rows of teats nearly to the floor. Instantly my hackles rose. India has tens of millions of strays, Delhi alone probably quarter of a million, and they often travel in packs. The country has a strong animal welfare lobby, so New Delhi has resorted to sterilizing them—slowly. The world's first rabid dog was probably Indian; tens of thousands of Dilliwallas are bitten every year. I debated throwing my useless smartphone at them if they attacked. Luckily on the corner Fortis Hospital glowed like an ocean liner at night, all crisp white lines and corporate rude health.

Across the world darkness has traditionally meant danger, a time of violence, chaos and nightmares. Doors locked and bolted, the good people are all tucked up in bed, asleep and dreaming of filling in their tax returns. God has put his feet up to watch Netflix: as Jesus said, ‘But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because there is no light in him.' The bad people are loose.

As dusk fell I felt increasingly unsettled, even more conscious of being female. Women virtually disappeared from most streets: 96 percent say they don't feel safe in Delhi after sunset. Throngs of young men emerged. The city, already overtly masculine, became an unashamed boys' playground.

There are so many joys of city life that are next to impossible for a woman in Delhi (and might even give some men pause for thought). London's night was documented on foot by an insomniac Charles Dickens; Gladstone paced the same dark streets rescuing prostitutes; Teju Cole narrates similar nocturnal wanderings in post-9/11 New York City. It's addictive, seeing a city's dark side. But night walking was, or felt, too dangerous even for me to really contemplate (just as it does in some areas of London, admittedly). Sometimes I did explore alone—don't tell my family—walking to auto stands and being motored buzzily around the city. In the half-deserted muttering streets I would be on high alert, keys sticking out between my fingers like a budget knuckleduster and mentally unspooling horror films at high speed.

But darkness means much else too: leisure, revelry, rule breaking. In the nineteenth century Dickens contemplated ‘the restlessness of a great city, and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep'. Even more so, today's global cities are meant to be 24-hour affairs, so aggressively confident that they can take on the night. This is one of my favourite parts of the adventure. Oxford is a crusty old man of a town, a teatime city. Its watering holes stand out for the high quality of their toilet graffiti and the pleasant laxative effect of their many murky ales rather than their all-night frolics. It's virtually asleep by 11 pm.

Delhi, by contrast, is a
proper
city. It certainly has its share of nocturnal action. It begins to ebb earlier than many European cities, but fantastically outperforms several other Indian competitors. We were unable to properly celebrate our toilet conclusions in Bangalore, India's self-proclaimed ‘Silicon Valley', because Hindu nationalist violence had compelled an 11.30 pm closing time. (Dancing was also banned between 2008 and 2011.) A fellow fieldworker described nice university girls in Chennai going out clubbing in the afternoon to be home in time for their 7 pm curfews. Compared with this, Delhi is
jhakaas
.

So it was with defiant excitement, and just a tinge of fear that I went out into the darkness. As wary and night-loving as a cat. Squinting into the blackness for an auto, arms waving frantically, heart beating just a little fast. A driver pulled up, only to utter the twilight curse: ‘Madam, night charge.'

Like a good researcher I'd done my cricket homework in advance of the afterparty, sort of. Early one morning, before the dome of heat had sealed the sky, I visited Feroz Shah Kotla, ruined fortress of the fourteenth-century Muslim sultan Feroz Shah Tughlaq. As ever, the driver had only the most approximate conception of the fort's location, and kindly offered to take me to an arbitrary second location instead, but using call-and-response we gradually homed in on the fort, off a large newspaper office-lined street to the east of Connaught Place. The tour group was waiting—Delhi has any number of excellent historical walking tours, perfect for scholarly timepass.

‘Keep quiet,' my friend hissed as we passed the ticket booth. I belatedly realized I had been mistaken for an Indian, for the first and only time. ‘They must have thought you were a Punjabi.'

I scowled, white liberal guilt forgotten.

Above us inky showers of birds periodically spattered against a sky the colour of an old manuscript. The fort was dishevelled but still recognizable, a crumbling mass of squat formations and domes in misshaped orange and grey stones. Sections seemed decapitated wholesale, a couple of feet from the ground. A clay-coloured dog watched from the fragments of a wall. It was mirrored by a couple of guards in sky-blue shirts and berets and shiny high belt buckles, twitching bored moustaches. The lawns still retained faded patches of their spring green, and the bushes flowered pink. Below the fort the industrial east unfurled; bridges, eyeless concrete, the cigarette-shaped towers of power plants along the river's edge.

The highlight of the fort's remains is its Ashoka pillar, a thirteen-metre-high polished sandstone phallus set atop a three-tired crumbly pyramid. It is over two millennia old, though it has not always belonged to Delhi: in the fourteenth century Feroz Shah Tughlaq appears to have had it lowered on a bed of silk, and dragged hundreds of miles to his capital. It still bears the worn letters of the emperor Ashoka's edicts, in a surprisingly open and curvaceous script. They proclaim an iconic message of Buddhist virtue and tolerance, plus a smattering of detail about taxation. Ashoka, a great conqueror too, is still celebrated for this message.

In the fort's dark recesses, under its squat arches, are discreet signs of worship—petals, a few messages. Genies or djinns lurk here.

A little further down the road was another place of worship: the cricket stadium. Named after the fort and now far more famous, it is the home ground of the Delhi Daredevils, in celebration of whom the fashion-show-cum-afterparty was being held. From djinn to gin.

The C-word is the one conversational topic that almost never fails—I just wish I knew something about it. ‘Cricket,' the postcolonial critic Ashis Nandy wrote, ‘is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English.' It inspires at least as much passionate devotion as religion. It should be a conversational gift: I am from Yorkshire, itself a place with a proud cricketing tradition. (Cricket has made Indian geography strange: the common man is more likely to have heard of New Zealand than Argentina, simply because of the Kiwis' love of balls.) When Indian fans learn my birthplace their eyes light up. ‘Ah, Geoff Boycott! Do the accent.'

Cricket was a colonial import—the ICC was formerly known as the Imperial Cricket Council—and former British colonies continue to dominate. But the game's centre of gravity has gradually moved towards the subcontinent and its enormous cricket-watching populations. Advertisers now rely on good performances by India and Pakistan to boost World Cup profits. The two are deadly sporting enemies: as relations deteriorated in the 1990s cricket became ‘war minus the shooting'. Indian cricket took on a shrill chauvinist new edge, to the extent that recently deceased Hindu extremist Bal Thackeray said, ‘It is the duty of Indian Muslims to prove they are not Pakistanis. I want to see them with tears in their eyes every time India loses to Pakistan.' Conversely, ‘cricket diplomacy' has often been used to calm bilateral relations at moments of high tension, somewhat hampered by the current prime minister's immovable face.

Since 2008, India has revolutionized the game with the Indian Premier League, a fast-paced combination of sport and entertainment. It is sodden with money. Models and celebrity owners, most famously Bollywood star Shahrukh Khan, watch the world's leading players compete, some defying national call-ups to play. The ten-year television rights were eventually (re) sold for US$ 1.6 billion, and advertisers hurled money at the franchise; in 2010 IPL players were the second-highest-paid athletes in the world after America's strike-prone National Basketball Association. Victory in the 2011 World Cup, with a thrilling semifinal defeat of Pakistan, boosted India's claim to be the world's new cricketing superpower—and certainly its financial capital.

This commercialization was controversial, however: a Communist Party spokesman called the decision to auction off players the ‘death knell' of the gentleman's game. The dedication of some non-Indian players has been questioned—are ‘white men in India just for the money'?—and viewer figures have fallen since the heights of the first three tournaments; the opportunistic trading of players each season undermines fan loyalty. The gentleman's game with its puritanical morality risks falling into disrepute with a series of corruption and spot-fixing scandals. In 2000 each one-day international attracted an estimated US$227 million in (illegal) Indian bets: the subcontinent also lies at the heart of cricket's murkier geography.

The fashion-show-cum-afterparty, hosted at a luxury hotel, therefore whispered of illicit thrills. To preserve the social order the tickets turned out to require that we (a) travelled in couples and (b) gave up all our personal details and Facebook access to the sponsor—which, inevitably, was a whiskey offshoot of the United Breweries empire, which also produces India's largest-selling beer, Kingfisher. Even after several months of exposure I couldn't tell if I liked the beer. The taste was OK, especially the dark ‘Strong' brew. But it gave me awful hangovers almost instantaneously. Apparently it's the preservatives: I met a bunch of Irishmen who swiftly upended every bottle into a glass of water to counter this. The glycerine floated out, shimmering innocently.

The Kingfisher brand has taken surrogate advertising to a whole new level. Its billionaire chairman, Vijay Mallya, took it upon himself to embody the beer's slogan and proclaimed himself ‘the King of Good Times'. He is of course also an independent MP in India's upper house. A swanky new complex in Bangalore, complete with helipad and sky-grazing bars, is named ‘UB City' after the brewery, shrugging off the failure of Kingfisher Airlines, perhaps the most dramatic effort to surmount advertising restrictions. Mallya even snapped up an India Premier League cricket team himself and named it after one of UB's whiskey brands. Yet even the might of UB has not been sufficient to break Bangalore's early closing times. The elite might sip in comfort in India's ‘pub city', but other more demagogic groups wield power outside the bars.

It was one of the more surreal chunks of my fieldwork. At the hotel door I quickly honey-trapped a nice young man into handing over his details to the brewery. A security scanner or two later and we were inside, facing a huge food table and trying to look as though we did this all the time.

The young man's phone flashed: the whiskey had taken over his identity on Facebook.

Alas, we were distracted from the freebies by the entry of some bored bristly-faced blokes: the Delhi Daredevils. ‘That's
exclaimed someone. The small crowd surged, a mixture of eyelash-fluttering girls and distinctly unsporty boys, expensive camera phones flashing at all angles.

At one side I spotted England batsman Kevin Pietersen, just about the only cricket player I could pick out of a lineup. He was looking even more unimpressed than usual, skunk hair scuffed. This seemed a bit rich given he was ending his stint as the IPL's most expensive player, reportedly earning over US$1 million for a month's work.

As I was picking pensively at the buffet, my ever-resourceful Nepali friend grabbed my hand. ‘Quick!'

She dragged me towards the ladies' toilets at high speed. I feared a biological emergency, but once inside she nudged me and wiggled her eyebrows. A very tall pale woman was retouching her hair with deliberate slowness.

The Nepali nudged me again, harder. ‘That's whatshername! From
Rock Star
! Quick, click a photo.' She thrust herself forward at the exhausted smile of the Bollywood actress, who teetered at least a foot above us in murderous heels. Feeling a little stalkerish, I pulled out my phone, trying to dodge the toilet bowls.