Delhi (5 page)

Such a chaos of mixed time, in which history is marked and markedly ignored, is perfect for a Generation Y-er like me. Not to put too fine a point on it (Generation Y is famous for its narcissism), we are both the soulless children of global homogenization and the people most likely to Wikipedia ‘Shah Jahan'. We know that ruins are inevitable and everywhere and symbols of the futility of our aspirations: the seminal event of our generation was 9/11. We know too that they make an excellent soulful background on Instagram. In this jumble of eras and settlements as temperamentally different as herons and haberdashers, and with almost zero prior knowledge, I knew with utter certainty that my life would be over if I didn't choose the right neighbourhood.

The first viewing slightly dented my confidence. I had narrowed my focus to South Delhi. The British created a dual city, and built to the north a civilian-military combination of civil lines and cantonment for themselves quite distinct from the native city of Old Delhi. Today, apart from the slogan-spattered hubbub of Delhi University's 130,000+ students, who never seem to study but all hang around in cafes outside, North Delhi has faded. Civil Lines' leafy avenues and once-lavish Maidens Hotel are mired in somnolence. Since independence, Delhi's centre of gravity has gradually oozed southwards. South Delhi is now a sprawling series of wealthy, introverted quarters, each with their own parks and markets.

Safdarjung Enclave seemed an appropriately ambivalent historical area. The neighbourhood is named after an opportunistic nobleman. Just down the street sits his bulbous-headed tomb and gardens, ‘the last dying flicker of Mughal architecture', largely constructed of cheaper materials and scrappy marble nicked from a general's older tomb. It is an affluent area of modern residences and gossiping neighbours.

This particular flat, though—only the rich own full houses—was on a dingy back street and up eight flights of stairs. The door was heavy with locks. Electricity wires of dubious legality hung in thick parasitic clumps and mistletoe sprigs. Traffic jangled below.

The ageing, blue-jawed owner had a dramatic pair of seagull eyebrows, a son in America, and an enormous rattling chain of keys. His eyes were seamed with veins, but sharp and sidelong. Once he had recovered from the climb, he eyed my whiteness.

‘I think you saw a wrong number. What can I do? It is like this only.' The price mysteriously leapt by a third.

I felt a twinge in the region of my pocket. As the novice—isolated, marginal, betwixt and between—goes through the rite of passage like ‘water being heated to boiling point, or a pupa changing from grub to moth', in the words of the anthropologist Victor Turner, described her condition—as one of ‘sacred poverty'. The formidably dangerous fieldwork sites of all my International Development chums are, crucially, often pretty cheap. I had haughtily surveyed Delhi on Google Maps (lightly fictionalized for the city, I would discover during a physics-defying car journey through a market) and assumed I would be living in a princely mansion in the location of my choice.

The scales were falling from my Oxford-coddled eyes. Delhi is certainly not the place for sacred poverty. In fact, it is jolly bloody expensive—perhaps especially in terms of accommodation.

Forget the stereotype of impoverished old India, with its begging bowl in one hand and leprous stump the other. Or at least set it aside for a moment: of course India still boasts poverty, malnutrition, and over half of the world's remaining lepers. But there is a lot of money in Delhi—and I mean a
lot
. You can almost smell it in the air: the warm and faintly sweaty vegetable smell of old paper money.

Money washes over the city in waves. It congeals in malls and mansions and the fatty gleam of SUVs. It seeps into surprising cracks. My favourite tale of excess is that of a competition running in the robotically shiny atrium of a shopping complex. The prize: several thousand rupees for the person carrying most pictures of M.K. Gandhi. Of course, the Mahatma's toothless smile appears on all Indian banknotes. The winning family rushed to an ATM and took out a sum of cash that far dwarfed the prize itself. That whooshing sound isn't Gandhi's noble spinning wheel: it's his ashy phantom cycloning on his slick black Raj Ghat memorial.

It's horrifying in retrospect to see how quickly I internalized the importance of this kind of conspicuous consumption. I'd managed to claim one crucial pillar of Dilliwallihood, a SIM card, thanks to a thoughtful young shopkeeper who generously took it upon himself to Photoshop my passport photos until the government had no chance of recognizing me. It was obvious I ought to be flaunting a snazzy phone; everyone else did. There was just one problem: my smartphone didn't actually work.

Nonetheless, I devotedly flashed it around, an expensive idiot. For the niche matter of actually making calls I concealed about my person a cheap plastic phone that seemed to horrify all who saw it: ‘a farmer phone, shudder.' Occasionally it buzzed incriminatingly in my bag. ‘What? No, I didn't hear anything.'

A lot of the money swilling around is black, or at least dark grey: money from scams, corruption, crime, tax avoidance, under-the-table industry, cheaply privatized state assets and natural resources, and other slightly dubious and unsavoury sources. It flows into land and property (along with India's addiction of choice, gold), partly because keeping aspects of property deals quiet and largely untaxed is far cheaper for all parties. Indians are also not a very urban lot, perhaps surprisingly: two-thirds of the population still live in rural areas. Perhaps as an agricultural hangover, land is perceived as safe and bestowing status. It is prestige given concrete and inheritable form—‘a real estate Rolex', in the words of the
New York Times
.

Until 1990, India was famous as the land of the Licence Raj, a morass of red tape and the dismally low ‘Hindu rate' of economic growth. In the 1980s, under Indira Gandhi and later her son Rajiv (neither related to the Mahatma, though their far less popular memorials are close to his at Raj Ghat), the country began in fits and starts to become more pro-business. In 1991, facing the realities of a post-Cold War world and a short-term external payments crisis, the government opened to the world economy with a bang. In selected sectors it reduced tariffs, permitted some foreign investment, and allowed private competitors in alongside government corporations. Many tariffs remain comparatively high, state corporations are still powerful, and the bureaucracy still produces Five-Year Plans. Nevertheless, slowly but surely over the two decades since 1991, India has reoriented itself towards the market.

Consequently, Delhi doesn't have a single ruling elite. On one hand is its peaceably globalized Anglophone upper crust, with their Western educations and accents and, more rarely, nostalgic attachment to the leftwing ideology of the pre-liberalization era. On the other is a rather more rambunctious—and increasingly wealthy—crowd. Set foot in the westerly neighbourhood of Karol Bagh, for example, and you'll see a swirl of garishly sequined clothing, imported electronics, and hard-drinking Punjabi men.

On one side is the power of snobbery and ‘high culture'; on the other, that of popular politics and cold hard (or perhaps warm soft) cash. From this latter group Delhi rather unfairly gets its frontier town reputation: that beneath the veneer of universities and galleries lurks a semi-wilderness of casual violence, opportunism, machismo, and enormous self-made fortunes. The old elites watch the challengers' rise with a kind of dull refined horror, lamenting their avarice, knowing the money and the power is beginning to flow elsewhere. But some of the old trappings of power—English, overseas education, corporate employment—are still attractive to the upwardly mobile. Their sons and daughters may appropriate these trappings to secure their own position. The result is an uneasily shared city.

Occasionally these loose groups clash head-on. One evening in an upmarket bar I witnessed the launch of a book of queer erotica, followed by a glossy Audi event. A trio of burly turbaned sardars must have arrived early for the red-blooded German sports cars. They awkwardly threw back whiskey, beards bristling, while a lipsticked man simulated a startling range of same-sex practices with wooden puppets.

The upshot of this moneyed ferment is that house prices, and increasingly rents, are becoming more and more expensively bubbly, hitting Manhattan or even Moscow levels. A lawyer chum acting on behalf of a group of farmers selling land just outside Delhi expected the deal to be in the tens of millions.

‘Of rupees?' I asked naively.

‘No, dollars.'

Central Delhi prices are even more grotesquely inflated, especially in the wide avenues of imperial New Delhi. In March 2012, a run-down, water-stained bungalow near Lodi Gardens sold for US$29 million; the Mexican ambassador's residence was valued at $110 million. Much of this area, often called ‘Lutyens' Delhi' after the architect of its most famous buildings, is still devoted to government housing, giving the Government of India control over one of the world's more valuable real estate portfolios. The death of ministers and former presidents leads to vicious squabbling over the villas. Green and spacious, stalked by peacocks, the pressure to seize and develop the space is immense.

There is so much money swilling around the city that high house prices alone can't make people spend it fast enough. Home improvement is one option for the big spender, especially for those who want to show they have good taste. There are even consultants who thoughtfully help you spend your cash.
Vaastu
is an Indian version of feng shui which promises peace and prosperity. It's now big business: earlier confined almost exclusively to temple architecture, it has found favour for the new houses of metropolitan elites. Pricey consultants use this ‘ancient science' to produce prescriptions on everything from the position of air-conditioning units to the direction your feet should point when sleeping, lest the house be attacked by Negative Forces.

‘We had a terrible time with our new place,' my friend sighed over breakfast one day. She is a true elite Dilliwalli, always immaculately dressed and attached to her Blackberry; she even has a tiny adorable dog. ‘We'd already finished building it when we called in the
vaastu
guy. It turns out we did it all wrong. The entrance is bad because it faces south. My room should be next to the door because I'm an unmarried daughter and will be the first to leave the home, or presumably the first to be murdered by any passing maniac. And it turns out the house is unlucky because it's on a T-junction—we've had to put up a convex mirror to compensate. He wanted us to rip up the entire place. It's
jinxed.'

Back in Safdarjung Enclave, I pointed out that there was no kitchen. ‘Oh, we'll build that this weekend,' the blue-jawed man said cheerfully. I could almost see his seamy eyes calculating my weight in gold, a seedy Archimedes.

I must have looked unconvinced, so the man upped his sales pitch: ‘We'll treat you like our own daughter.' It became clear over the next few minutes that this meant he would generously treat me to the finest despotism the Evil Patriarchy had to offer. I would be banned from leaving the house after dusk, and my calls, callers and diet monitored. He looked affronted when I asked whether the bedroom door locked. ‘Why would you lock out your own father?'

When he went next door, the walls were so thin that I could hear him breathing.

As I went back downstairs he called after me, ‘By the way, you're not a Muslim, are you?'

Thankfully, I had found somewhere to rest my head during the search. In the most appalling breach of British etiquette of my life thus far, I threw myself on the kindness of virtual strangers. A good Englishperson would sleep in a septic tank rather than actually take up an acquaintance's offer of hospitality. I spend much of my time apologizing to Indians for this fanatical hostility to overnight guests—in the subcontinent, by contrast, ‘the guest is God'—along with the ghastly dishes the British serve up in the name of korma. But hey, I was throwing out the English rulebook; besides, I'd have my own place in no time. And so I ended up staying with the great Family Roy.

(Here I must assuage the social horror of my British readers. In one of the bizarre twists that characterizes India, three months later I found out I was actually related to the Roys, via a clump of undiscovered relatives living only two doors down.

‘Well, yes,' said Mrs Roy reasonably, ‘I did wonder if you were related to those Mukherjees. I knew they had a Chatterjee relative who moved to England, married an extremely tall Finnish woman, and had a Yorkshire-born granddaughter who went to Oxford… But I thought there must be a lot of those about.')

For decades the Roys had lived in the southeastern neighbourhood of Kailash Colony, named after the residence of the gods on Mount Kailash (more meditative and unbitchy than Mount Olympus). When they arrived the colony was separated from the city proper by dusty farmland filled with oxen, but now it is appealingly central.