Delhi (33 page)

On the other hand, as in the West, virtue is fragrant. Fragrant breezes waft divine messages and draw mythical actors together or carry them to new places, like Mary Poppins. Pleasant or auspicious smells are offered up to the gods: golden ghee lamps, the bright manly scent of sandalwood paste, burning cremation pyres. Statues are garlanded with flowers, from the cool scent of lotus to the headier jasmine, and sometimes bathed with honey and milk. Some of this aromatic language is now familiar in the West, like joss sticks, incense, the old hippie favourite patchouli. Indian perfume production also goes back centuries, both for worship and as an aphrodisiac, and the Mughals were fond of oily attars of rose and jasmine.

Try to relax. The smells won't kill you. At their best they are glorious; even at their worst they can be pretty interesting. Delhi can be a bouillabaisse, a compost heap, a blue cheese, a fine wine, with all the fun of trying to find pretentious adjectives to describe those things like a connoisseur. Let your nose voyage too. Each of these scents is worth twelve postcards and twelve hours on Instagram.

Perhaps it's wise to get in training at home first, though, by sniffing a few wet dogs and men's locker rooms.

Oh, to be able to bottle those scents and instantly whip friends and family to—well, most likely a traffic jam on the Outer Ring Road, or my armpit. Fair enough, I needed tangible trophies. Some would be gifts to apologize for all those long-delayed emails and missed birthdays. Some were just for me.

Finding the perfect trinket is a buzz, albeit a slightly shameful one. I was leaving Delhi behind, maybe forever. Love, hate, relief, regret: were my emotions really reducible to a little plastic snowglobe of the Taj Mahal? Ought I instead admit the souvenirs were for showing off, bribing British snowglobe lovers into reaccepting me, or (the best case scenario) compensating for a memory so bad that I needed stuff to weight it down? Would I rather be smug, trite, forgetful or manipulative?

Still, Delhi looks infinitely promising through the souvenir seeker's hungry lenses. It bulges with cheap and cheerful markets, successful chains, and thickets of boutiques. The pickings are rich: Aladdin pants at Paharganj, cheap knickknacks at Janpath, shady DVDs from Palika Bazaar, fake birdcages at Meharchand Market, achingly fashionable clothes at Shahput Jat, copies of achingly fashionable clothes from Chandni Chowk…

The haul from my end-of-days souvenir binge included, but was not confined to:

Delhi is a souvenir natural. It (deservedly) has a reputation as a macho, aggressive city—for gang rapes, institutional misogyny, violence and sleaze. But it has another side, too, one readily distilled down into the garish and sentimental. Whisper it (a touch breathily, with a coy pout and a flirtatious twirl): D-Town is
camp
.

Imperial rule of course had more than its fair share of high camp, as the foppish Britishers Carried On Up The Khyber with their cocktails, uniforms and obsession with deviant sexuality. If kitsch is the artistic expression of camp, colonial-era ‘tropical gothic' architecture is archetypal: the flamboyance, the clichéd imagery of power, the fakery (wealthy Brits like Thomas Metcalfe even built fauxmediaeval monuments to spice up their Mehrauli views), the sentimental imitation of Home. In Lutyens' extravagantly orchestrated New Delhi, neoclassical lines flirt with odd domes, cupolas, and elephant motifs, in two shades of pink Agra sandstone. Butch,
non
?

Everywhere you turn in Delhi today, you glimpse camp's potential, sitting prettily atop the muscular highways and throbbing noise. It's there, largely unselfconscious, in the sashaying yellow hips of autorickshaws in traffic, in the painted trucks with their big warbling horns and the sultry-eyed, improbably skinny young Roadside Romeos slinking snake-hipped down the streets in their shiny purple shirts. It's there in the childishly sweet vivid orange whirl of jalebis, the love of song and dance, the pot-bellied jollity of Buddha and Ganesh, the tendency for melodrama in politics and relationships alike. It's
definitely
there in Bollywood, in Salman Khan's pierced navel and the perpetually twinkling Shahrukh Khan's drag-queen pirouettes for Indian film awards. It's even sometimes there in the faint undercurrent of slightly self-conscious menace on some streets or some evenings—like staring at Steve Buscemi's upper lip fur.

Journalist and professional sociopath A.A. Gill wrote, ‘If New York is a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo and Berlin a wicked uncle, then London is an old lady who mutters and has the second sight. She is slightly deaf, and doesn't suffer fools gladly.' Delhi, then, might be an ageing tsarina: ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid—and fond of bright colours, pretty trinkets, and sex scandals. Like all grandes dames, she's showy, cash-splurging, hard to love, easy to photograph. Or perhaps, given her recent reinvention, she's more like a nouveau riche socialite—exactly as above but on Twitter. The whole city jangles with theatricality, bling and the so-bad-it's-good.

All of this is effortlessly gift-wrapped into trinket form. It's easy to pick up something instantly recognizable as ‘Indian'. India is an A-grade iconographer.

In fact, in the face of massive internal diversity, India's government has desperately tried to harness icons to stimulate everyday nationalism. The country therefore has an unusually large pantheon of official national symbols, some more famous and T-shirt-friendly than others. They include the Bengal tiger, the peacock, the banyan tree, the Ganges River, the four conjoined lions of Ashoka, and the lotus flower (this latter now more heavily associated with rightwing political party BJP). In 2010 the elephant finally joined the roster as ‘national heritage animal'. India even has a National Reptile (the king cobra), a National Fruit (the mango), and a National Aquatic Animal—the blind, toothy and half-poisoned Gangetic dolphin, one local nickname of which,
susu
, unfortunately means ‘pee' in Hindi, and which looks like a porpoise whose face has been slammed in a door; it has yet to really take off in the souvenir world.

To this list we might informally add Ganesh, the PR natural in the Hindu stable; Gandhi, face of the rupee; holy cows; the unmistakeable silhouette of the Taj Mahal; and, judging by their ubiquitous green-and-yellow presence in souvenir shops, the autorickshaw. It is also obligatory for tourists both male and female to buy a kurta, destined never to be worn; I have several aggressively dowdy efforts from left-liberal-darling-cum-Louis Vuitton-sell-out Fabindia, all resembling something Julie Andrews would make out of curtains. Optional extras include Bollywood posters, curly-toed Punjabi
jootis
, and saris.

These icons are not
Delhi
icons, though. There is no real Brand Delhi, beyond the odd phallic image of the Qutub Minar. Dilliwallas are by and large too disloyal and the city's reputation too shady for such things.

Instead the capital excels in packaging the entirety of India into manageable morsels. Once confined to dingy state warehouses, this has become much slicker. The state-run souvenir emporium Dilli Haat, site of my mango-based TV humiliation, presents a carefully groomed selection of regional handicrafts and foodstuffs for a small entrance fee. Middle-class girls and genteel tourists rub shoulders on its paths.

Corporate India has got in on the action too. One weekend I ventured to Gurgaon's Kingdom of Dreams, a sticky borrowed three-year-old suctioned to my torso. It featured an indoor beach, star-studded musical shows, and a clown who left the three-year-old weeping hot suncreamy tears. In the midst of all this—
Time Out
describes it as ‘the happy lovechild of Dilli Haat and Las Vegas'; its exterior sculptures were oddly reminiscent of Akshardham—on display was the same taxidermied range of Indian souvenirs. Only twice as pricey, of course.

‘Somewhere between the exotic and the kitsch is real Delhi,' says Ranjana Sengupta. She's right that Delhi's exotic side—the ‘irretrievably lost worlds' of the Mughals and Lutyens—is just that, irretrievably lost. But kitsch is not. Never underestimate the power of kitsch.

All this makes for excellent souvenir shopping—but it comes at a price. Kitsch items are ‘instantly and effortlessly identifiable', the Israeli philosopher Tomas Kulka said, and ‘highly charged with stock emotions'. They reassure rather than challenge. Our emotional responses to India's icons teeter on the verge of shallowness, so overexposed are they that we borrow sentiment from elsewhere rather than reflecting. India's real problems are only admitted in their most photogenic and sentimental guises, and difficult questions vanish in a puff of Old Spice.

Rich Delhi has repackaged India for its own tastes. Delhi kitsch is both hyper-Indian and totally divorced from Indian realities. A rich Dilliwalla can eat at the Claridges hotel's Dhaba restaurant, which ‘recreates the ambience of the archetypical rustic highway eatery', complete with truck mural, Hindu imagery, ‘an old radio belting out golden oldies', and even ‘walls replicating the uneven mud painted texture of a village hut' (the food is incidentally very good, though calling Punjabi cuisine ‘wholesome' is an artery-clogging oversell). Maybe he sips a vodka
nimbu pani
and heads to a swanky boutique, full of unashamedly garish (and pricey) consumer goods covered in Quintessentially Indian Symbols. He feels nostalgic—but for what?

What is the relationship between Dhaba and a roadside
dhaba
, or between a cartoon cycle rickshaw and the impoverished reality? For that matter, what is the relationship between Delhi's visible politics, in which politicians assiduously wear traditional dress and storm out of parliament—the media obsessing over every minute—and the cynical backdoor reality of deals and contempt for public service? Kitsch photoshops reality, places a pair of heart-shaped rose-tinted Lolita spectacles on it, sugarcoats it and spoonfeeds it. This India is a fantasy. It replaces the stereotypes of ‘smelly Delhi' with something prettier but equally caricatured.

This is why Akshardham is so successful and so alarming. It takes something good and noble—religious piety—and processes it. The difference was neatly captured by Milan Kundera. Kitsch, he said, was marked by two tears flowing down the cheek. ‘The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass!' This is the household shrine, the family temple visit, the humble meditator.

‘The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass!' And, Kundera might have added, how nice to buy the souvenir brochure. This is the self-congratulatory back-pat of Akshardham, soothing nationalism all packaged up ready to be consumed. Consumption
is
nationalism. It's the overblown Bollywood love scenes, the elephant statues outside Noida, and the raising of the national flag in swanky Gurgaon housing complexes, where the idea of a unified public is all but ridiculous.