Delhi (4 page)

But really, India left barely a mark on my childhood. In terms of impact on my youthful consciousness it was somewhere above Thatcherism but below the Spice Girls. In the late 1990s, I remember watching the sitcom
Goodness Gracious Me
together on the sofa. (The rasp of my father's crisp packet, the exasperated sigh of the iron. The Mothership perhaps cradling a glass of wine, back when Chardonnay was still the apex of British middle-class leisure, a small brother slumped over each sofa arm.) One of the sketches that evening involved the provenance of the British royal family:

They all live in the same family house together: Indian. All work in the family business: Indian. All have arranged marriages: Indian. They all have sons; daughters no good: Indian!

It seemed plausible. I think I assumed
everyone
had a few Indian relatives, scattered here and there across the family tree like brightly coloured birds.

We spent many summers in Scotland and its soggy family sites with their soft names: Paisley, Pumpherston, Campbeltown, Craigellachie. We visited Finland and the more clipped places of my grandmother's past: Helsinki, Lahti, Tampere, Ruka. We met family from New York, Toronto, Sydney, Melbourne.

But we never visited India. My father had been, and assured us it wasn't worth it. He told tales of despotic relatives, diarrhoea and magpie-sized cockroaches, in various combinations. The only Indianness I carried from my childhood was a sort of dark shapeless curiosity that rusted in the corner like an old heirloom, turned in my fingers every now and then. On the map India remained a flat unfamiliar diamond, surprisingly small as it dangled into the blue.

By this time the Talker, thoroughly out-talked, was slumbering on my shoulder. Each breath made small confidential rustlings, like a badger in the undergrowth, and a tender tear pricked my eye. He was in many ways the ideal listener. I ordered another whiskey and miniature coke, and decided I might as well keep talking.

Now, as I say, I was heading to Delhi on a mission. Three times I'd visited India: as a tourist, then a rather useless language student, and finally a researcher of toilets. (This might sound like Michael Jackson preaching the virtues of a teensy pharmaceutical pick-me-up now and then, but India
is
addictive.) Quite clearly, the logical next step was to do a PhD—specifically, a PhD on the glamorous topic of Pressing Questions in the Indian Electricity Policymaking Process. And as everyone knows, from Margaret Mead to the Mormons, fieldwork is an essential component of any decent mission.

The process of doing a PhD, especially a PhD involving fieldwork, is much like the quest yarns of yore. There is a feckless young hero, probably spotty and pubescent at first. (Never mind that at the crusty old age of 26, I am older than half of all Indians. In fact at independence in 1947, Indian life expectancy was only 32—it's now 66. But in the West, I am part of the so-called ‘Peter Pan generation'.) Unfortunately, our hero lives in a callous and gerontocratic society. He is exploited by his seniors, who have grown long malicious beards and forgotten their own feckless youths. He chafes at the homeland's pointless superstitions and at his subordinate role in its rigid hierarchy, and is prone to staring into middle distance as the sun sets. But then there comes to him a rumour on the wind. There exists a miraculous beast or holy grail or golden fleece, recovery of which will guarantee him fame and fortune or at least a tenure-track position. At first our hero is reluctant, but his wise ageing mentor cryptically spurs him towards his destiny. He departs, carrying only a small knapsack and the
Lonely Planet
.

Our hero ventures to a faraway land on his quest for the miraculous unicorn or magic ring. The faraway land contains vicious mountains, poisonous beasts, and many foreigners with amusing accents. Amongst them, our hero overcomes adversity and passes a series of tests, to grow into a man with manly skills and a sword and designer stubble. He makes peace with the spirits of his ancestors—Marx, Foucault, Max Weber—or at least learns to ignore their voices in his ear. Through trial by fire, he has arrived at the Truth, or at least some moderately convincing approximation of the Truth that fits into 80,000 words.

Finally, with the trusty sword and his newfound skills, he defeats his nemesis and seizes the scroll of knowledge. He returns triumphantly home to claim his kingdom/bride/ tragically overrated educational qualification from the bearded old men. He then discovers the quest was only symbolic all along and, chuckling wryly, writes his memoirs and retreats into happy obscurity to grow his own beard.

So we have the key ingredient of a decent rite of passage: separation from the world you knew before, ready for the dramatic transition from naïve caterpillar to worldly butterfly. The problem is that rites of passage can be quite painful. A substantial chunk of the internet is devoted to lists of such masochistic practices. The least imaginative involve isolation, the equivalent of the dweeby history PhD student locked away in a dusty Soviet archive for a year. The most dramatic incorporate poison, hallucinogens, and self-cannibalism. Wannabe men in one Amazonian tribe, for example, traditionally must dance wearing mittens full of poisonous ants (after the ice bar I feel their mittened pain). In many Indian universities entry is marked by ‘ragging', a euphemism which covers everything from forced public nudity to fatal beatings.

Fieldwork comes somewhere in the middle of these extremes. It involves a journey into the unknown, with exciting possibilities for collecting scars, public humiliations, and native amulets. In fact, it is basically a more sophisticated version of the Gap Year. Like the PhD, the Gap Yah was once the preserve of drifters too dishevelled and socially awkward to flourish in society. Now it is
de rigueur
for the British middle-class adolescent seeking some padding for a CV: six months of menial labour, followed by sunburn, cheap Asian liquor, and sexual embarrassment.

I belong to a Department of International Development, bursting at the seams with intrepid souls. All the other kids seem much hardier and more heroic, and grow up to be real academics like Indiana Jones. Their fields seem authentically distant and full of threatening vegetation. They battle typhus and dodge bullets and are periodically falsely imprisoned in Côte d'Ivoire. Back home they show off their ringworm, and tell tales of the sex workers, child soldiers, and drug lords they interviewed. Their quests and obstacles overcome would make for good old-fashioned rollicking adventure yarns.

Alas, this is not one of those tales. Delhi today is no blank space on a map marked Here There Be Dragons, but a global city. Indians are not an isolated tribe stuck up a river and waiting for literacy, but inhabit all four corners of the earth and even some corners of my family. English is widely understood, and it is easy to buy everything from Kentucky Fried Chicken to haute couture.

But debutante balls,
quinceañera
and bat mitzvahs are rites of passage, for all that they feature prom dresses and bitchy aunts rather than wrestling lions. The princess with the pea under the mattress was proving something, even if it was that girls with soft hands are far too thin-skinned for their own good. I hoped that my time in Delhi, too, would lead me out of intellectual puberty. A quiet adventure, with internet and inflight entertainment.

With little fanfare, an anonymous warehouse in Middlesex dispatched my visa. I was going.

Oh God, I was going.

Into the belly of the whale, the gates of Mordor, the tiger's lair. Time, my dear Talker, for my first dance.

3

R
ENT

…and once arrived in the City, he dispersed utterly and gratefully in it like a raindrop fallen into the sea.

—John Crowley,
Little, Big

B
efore any glamorous electricity research could begin, I had to go on a terrible journey to the bowels of Delhi and the very depths of the human soul: I had to find a place to live.

Leaving the exhausted Talker far behind, I bounded off the plane filled with foolish confidence. Delhi is a city of almost 23 million, if we include the towns it's chomping up daily. Some experts predict by 2030 it will have 46 million inhabitants, twice the population of Australia. (Mind you, these are the same people who in the 1970s predicted Kolkata's population would reach 50 million by the year 2000, versus the 13.2 million of reality. In fact, Delhi isn't growing all that quickly compared with some of the global South's other rising cities. But India has always provided a steady source of income for prophets of the Apocalypse.)

So how hard could finding a place be for little old me? Surely I was a catch, what with my student salary, adorably frail grasp of nineteenth-century Hindi, and reluctance to commit to a deposit. What's more, I'd chanced on an expat mailing list. Alongside adverts for Chihuahuas, pre-loved rocking chairs, and one memorable plea for an elephant and a marching band, it advertised a variety of rooms for the commitment-phobic newcomer. I'd be fighting off the offers!

Oh, foolish youth.

Cities are humanity's great steaming engines of economic, social, and culinary progress. In general they seem to muddle along fairly well. Yet for all that from afar they appear like single organisms, harmonious wholes like hives or coral reefs, the reality is something more complicated.

Like London, the so-called city of villages, Delhi is a more or less badly stitched patchwork quilt. Its clumps of settlements seem thrown together half by accident, held together by a wispy thread of loyalty—and not all clumps are equal. It is a Victorian attic of a city, all odds and ends, old and new and grim and fair heaped upon each other.

Actually, though it claims to be three or four thousand years old, the city might not even be Victorian. Though often described as a great Mughal city, it was already in decline even before the vicious British retaliation for the 1857 ‘Mutiny'. It might be more accurate to date the birth of today's Delhi to 1911, when it abruptly became the British Indian capital and began to grow rapidly. Or to 1947 and the great waves of migration that followed Partition and independence, changing the city's temperament forever. Or even to 1991, the year of India's ‘big bang' economic opening, when Delhi scored its own legislative assembly and began a conscious reorientation ‘from walled city to world city' (the
Times of India's
neat marketing slogan) with its eye eventually on the 2010 Commonwealth Games.

Delhi is the incarnation of an old philosophical chestnut. Can you ever step into the same city twice? (You might manage to step in the same Yamuna River twice: on its bad days it seems neither liquid nor solid, but a murky fume-belching chemical state between the two. Delhi's once-great tributary of the Ganges, choked with much of the city's sewage, has been declared officially dead. Which makes doubly troubling the novelist Javier Marías' comparison of his heroine's eyes with the Yamuna's ‘blue water'.)

Imagine a great decaying ship. Its components are repaired and replaced one at a time—a jigger here, a mizzen there—until from crow's nest to poop deck not a single inch of timber is original. Now imagine this full-scale rebuilding has occurred not only once, but seven or twelve times. When does it stop being the same ship? Humans have inhabited the city's rough area continuously for thousands of years. Monuments from many of these eras visibly survive. But the city has been changed and chipped and retrofitted by each war, exodus, regime change, and geographical shift. ‘There are only about 200 original Dilliwallas in the whole city,' said one Delhi University scholar.

The great ship's mystique has survived: Delhi the city of power, the eternal emperor's court, and nerve centre of India. Delhi today, the city of 1911 and/or 1947/1991/2010, makes much of this timeless prestige. Yet, for large chunks of history it languished in moderate obscurity, often barely more than a provincial town with pretensions. A series of small capitals wandered gradually north in present-day Delhi, culminating in the great seventeenth century ‘Old Delhi' (then, of course, New) of Shah Jahan, builder of the Taj Mahal in Agra and, in Delhi, the great Red Fort, Chandni Chowk and Jama Masjid. But as the British expanded from their Bengali foothold and the Mughals slumped, so did Delhi, revived only with the government's return in 1911.