Delhi (6 page)

Prices rocketed with the arrival of the metro in the run-up to the 2010 Commonwealth Games—an event we shall tactfully call a slight goof, more on which later—and the main road is now lined with coffee shops and gyms sporting the tangerine likeness of David Hasselhoff. Within a warren of quietly bustling streets, sleek, energy-hungry new houses are replacing the faded older terraces and their traditional heat-defying architecture. In a vain attempt to stop middle-class bickering over the vast number of cars that cram the roads, garages are to be compulsory. The Roys were being gently evicted a month later by developers eager to thrust a sleek substitute upon them. I helpfully showed up in the middle of their packing four generations of old clocks and model planes.

Throughout the agony of my homelessness the Roys were probably the only thing standing between me and a murderous rampage through the streets, and they also provided a wonderful and bemusing early education in the ways of Delhi. I learnt, for example, that it is impossible to sit around compromisingly clad in only your pants, because at least twenty people—salesmen, builders, acquaintances, lost citizens, indeterminate others—will ring the doorbell before lunch.

One special feature of daily life particularly struck me. A cultural quirk of the British is the tendency to eat our evening meal very early, before we all crowd around the wireless and sing God Save the Queen. Indians typically dine a lot later, as do all the other grown-up nations of the world—but the Roys took this to a whole new level. Immediately they warned that dinner would be around 11 pm. In fact, sometimes they would call their British-based son, my wise friend and newfound cousin Indrajit, and all eat together across the airwaves on Skype despite the five-and-a-half-hour time difference.

‘Why?'I asked.

So came the shamefaced revelation. The family was nursing a serious addiction—to serials. At first, I heard ‘cereals', and thought this was some late-night jonesing for the Honey Monster, a little muesli-snorting. We've all been there. In the United Kingdom, the lurid American cereal Lucky Charms and its creepy leprechaun mascot are considered so dangerous that they are banned, lest all the nation's schoolchildren lapse into a diabetic coma.

But no, the Roys were addicted to good ole-fashioned soap operas. I was fascinated, and sat down with them to watch.

There are hours of these serials each day, drip-fed in tiny ten-minute crack-morsels in between adverts for biscuits and whitening cream. They are quite clearly directed at the advertisers' beloved demographic of podgy but well-meaning females who don't get out of the house all that much. Every ten minutes an extended break aimed to entice me into buying chocolate, shampoo, or electronics.

Luckily, there's so much English in the dialogue that I could get the gist of the least ludicrously implausible episodes. (This was a lot more successful than my first foray into Bollywood, when I watched ninety whole minutes of
Kaminey
before realizing that the plotline revolved around that hoary old chestnut, identical twins. I had assumed the hero just had a very bored costume designer.)

Generation Y also knows that you should never, ever underestimate the power of TV. It can make and break communities, creating identities and stereotypes in equal measure. Through TV you belong differently to the world. Your spheres of empathy expand and shift even while you are shut up alone, watching. India is no exception. The TV version of the epic
Ramayana
, serialized between 1987 and 1989, broke viewing records. Crowds gathered around the sets and cities came to a standstill. It's almost a cliché to credit (or blame) the TV show for helping to create Hindu nationalism as a key political force in the 1990s.

Until 1991 there was only one broadcaster, the state-owned Doordarshan. Satellite TV arrived alongside the opening of the rest of the economy, and viewing exploded. First global channels and then Indian entrepreneurs quickly got in on the act. Twenty-four-hour television news has particularly boomed, in a variety of languages. Doordarshan and the state All India Radio still have a vast budget ($2 billion in the five years to 2012), but the government's bland and propagandistic voice is generally outshouted in the cacophonous market.

A myriad of commercial channels chase down the news in its goriest, sexiest, and most populist varieties. They are credited with deepening Indian democracy, but it is an amoral phenomenon: they also spread fear, stoke nationalism, hound their objects, and prize the superficial. Their pretty anchors and epileptic graphics, says one commentator, ‘whirr like fans on a hot day—fast and furious'. Another claimed that today's Indian politics is like ‘a mutated version of
The Truman Show'
, except that the politicians know it's there and have adapted strategies to cope. For the first time I heard a country's senior journalists pleading for state media regulation, lamenting the decline of quality and ethical standards in their own industry.

Mrs Roy's serials themselves turned out to be a strange mixture of the progressive and the regressive. The protagonists are all in their mid-twenties and implausibly good-looking with vast hair. The men are either rugged child-schlepping love interests, or—once they've been pinned down by a large-haired woman—lazy, incompetent buffoons. Many of the women are bolshy and assertive, not simply decorative, but simultaneously their role as chaste and selfless wives, mothers and daughters-in-law is stressed. The villains are easy to spot, because they cackle a lot and have luxuriantly evil moustaches.

Alongside the traditional soap opera fallbacks (adultery, bereavement, poorly explained return from the dead), the plotlines lurch through all sorts of worthy subjects: corruption, child marriage, dowry payments, pervy bosses, wife abandonment, and the relationship between the dreaded mother-in-law and her daughter. At the same time, the focus is generally on the individual and family, not the nation. They seem to suggest that the only real option for social change in contemporary India is vigilante action, complete with firearms.

All this drama occurs to a thundering operatic soundtrack punctuated by inexplicable lightning strikes at moments of particular high tension, such as doors opening and tea being served. In one ten-minute segment, nine minutes were in slow motion; eight people were kidnapped; fourteen people got married; a grandmother menaced her family with a shotgun; two brothers unconvincingly pretended to punch each other with cartoon
thwocks;
a drug-addled middle-aged woman attacked people with a trident; and a lot of mobile phones rang whilst the camera swooped to and fro into each overacting
O.M.G. WHO IS CALLING ME
face. I went to bed with high hopes for Delhi life, and indigestion.

Delhi, with its architecture of draughts and gloomy coolness, is a city built to survive the bleeding hot summers. It whines in winter. By February there is still a slight chill now and then in the air. At night the odd fire still flares for warmth, although the air was clear, unlike January's choking smogs. Dilliwallas still wore a disproportionately forlorn refugee air, with the odd clothing and demoralized aspect of British tourists in the Heathrow homecoming lines. Guards wear woolly hats, auto drivers sport padded jackets and earmuffs, older women wear thick socks under their sandals (‘We are defrosting,' Mrs Roy explained). I even saw one driver with beetle brows and what looked to be a fully ear-flapped Russian fur cap, a three-wheeled Brezhnev.

My Britishness stopped me from asking for hot water. This came from a geyser—not, as I thought, an Icelandic spring that periodically dispatched jets of boiling water across the kitchen, but a small water heater in the other room with an eerily flickering red light. Turning it on in time requires military-style planning skills that I lack.

So on the second optimistic morning of flat-hunting I hummed as I took a traditional bucket bath. I had finally worked out what ‘2BHK' meant (‘two bedrooms, hall and kitchen'), set up several more flatmate dates, and expected to be installed in a new home just in time for my latest serials fix.

Undaunted by the Safdarjung strikeout, I headed further south to Saket. It was a little further out than I'd hoped, but Hauz Khas had offered nothing more than a mattress on the floor for US$400 a month. It was a shame: the location was great and full of unassumingly futile ruins. I spotted a squat tower filled with holes, allegedly for displaying the severed heads of thieves, but still the perfect flat remained elusive. A Green Park flat had been let five minutes before I arrived; the landlord in a boutique-heavy block of Greater Kailash-II suddenly stopped returning my calls. With a heavy heart I let Kalkaji go too, although it would have brought me close to my Bengali roots.

The Saket neighbourhood is famous for its vast glossy malls, so I decided to plunge through the ubiquitous security searches and sample one. After being thoroughly groped a few times by the security guards, I was inside. It was utterly forgettable, full of the same familiar brands and wearily smirking assistants of any other big city. Glossy-haired wives trailed their chubby polo-shirted husbands around a shrill-voiced woman trying to flog a sports car. Later, I would have the best haircut of my life here, although it took three men to blow-dry and made me look like a First Lady for the first 24 hours.

Moving into the belly of the mall, I was inspired to see the place full of gaudy red hearts. Richard Branson's grinning visage peered down from one side like a disconcertingly bearded Cupid. A Valentine's Day celebration! Sponsored by Virgin! Rarely has naked consumerism made me so cheery. The Indian festival calendar is already bursting with lights and incense, but this could actually be a progressive woman-friendly addition to a set that otherwise revolves heavily around fasting for husbands, brothers, and sons. And it was surely a good omen for my next flat-date.

Further away from the malls, the traffic lapsed a little further into chaos. The flat turned out to lie alongside a gigantic open sewer. Nonetheless, I forged ahead—and suddenly found myself in the middle of a beauty contest. The Machiavellian flatmate-in-chief worked in social media in one of the events-based jobs that Delhi has invented over the last couple of years, and consequently had an acute sense of how accurately popularity contests can illuminate human value. He had invited several prospective tenants altogether for a sort of
Hunger Games-
style battle royale. Like displaying stags, we four challengers all vied to deliver the knockout blow and be the last man standing.

Sounding simultaneously visionary and ineffably fun is, however, difficult when asking questions about fridges and fan speeds. I've never quite trusted my laugh at the best of times—it sounds either too enthusiastic or slightly sarcastic. Now with horror I found myself emitting an obvious fake that sounded quite like a sea mammal's mating call. As if from a long way away, I could hear my own treacherous voice saying, ‘Sure, I love early-morning vuvuzela concerts. You're right, this is a good space for a crack den. Yes, go right ahead and sublet the corner of my bed to the Forestry Commission—I'm, like,
so
chilled about personal space.'

Machiavelli watched, expressionlessly stroking his goatee. Occasionally he threw out impossible questions: ‘Do you smoke?' The four of us spasmed. ‘Um. Yes? No? Yes, but for you—for you, lovely handsome Machiavelli—I'd quit. No, but I simply love people blowing it in my face, and I buy cigarettes for all my smoker friends—no, packs of cigarettes! cartons! of rare Cuban cigars!' I hated myself. At one point I may even have called him ‘dude'.

After some hours, Machiavelli seemed to be content with the volume of social awkwardness he'd extracted from our desperate-to-please veins, and dismissed us with a flick of his wrist. He was, of course, off to play golf.

We four challengers looked at each other with the peculiar embarrassed grin of people who both know you'd gladly stab each other in the back and sell the still-warm corpse. As I walked back down towards the giant open sewer, I fought the urge to grovel under the window.

Machiavelli never called.

By Day 3 I'm ashamed to say my morality—never my most robust attribute at the best of times—slunk off for some sightseeing and
chaat
. Promiscuity seemed the only answer. I honed an ingratiating smile and a patina of white lies like some nymphomaniacal estate agent, and flirted with every single flat out there. I admired sofas and sinks with the kind of coos reserved for newborns. ‘What a charming cosy place! What a simply divine concrete view! Of
course
I didn't think “furnished” meant “contains a bed”, or expect running water.' I feigned extreme religiosity, lied about my soufflé skills, and promised to shower only between 8.05 and 8.07 am.

They were either unconvinced or wanted vast unsanitary deposits of cash.