Delhi- an expats view

Here is a wonderful piece on Delhi even as the news is all about the Commonwealth games disaster....

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Simon Cox captures life as an expat in a fascinating city ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE Magazine, Summer 2010

I first visited Delhi ten years ago, drawn not by the city but by one of its citizens. I had fallen in love with a Dilliwalli I met at university in America two years before. It was past time I saw her in her “native place”, as Indians put it.

We visited the usual tombs, markets, shrines and gardens, including the domed presidential palace on Raisina Hill that once housed the viceroy. Our trip coincided with a visit by the wives (they were all wives) of the British High Commission. They cooed and fussed, like previous owners checking up on the new landlords. One even looked for dust under the carpet. It was a relief to escape into the palace’s Mughal Gardens, where a tiny Dilliwalla peed on the lawn while his parents smiled helplessly.

Delhi can be grand, but it is rarely solemn. The people can be rude, but never cold. Earlier this year I returned to Raisina Hill to watch India’s military bands beat the retreat, overseen by members of the camel cavalry. After the last bugle was sounded and the last bagpipe squeezed, a switch was flicked, and Delhi’s imposing imperial buildings, strung with bulbs, lit up like a Christmas decoration.

Visitors to Delhi often see a faded glory, like a grand carpet collecting dust. The city is casually littered with history, much of it neglected or buried under the paraphernalia of the present. But Delhi’s past will surely be overshadowed by its future. There are three times as many Indians alive today as there were at Independence in 1947, and Delhi is home to over 16m of them. Over the next three decades India should begin to regain the economic clout it lost over three centuries. To visit Delhi in a mood of nostalgia, then, is to close your eyes to history in the making.

Many people mourn the lost elegance of Old Delhi, the courtly city founded in the 17th century by the Mughal emperor Shahjahan. The decorative flourishes that adorn Old Delhi’s mansions, courtyards and commercial buildings are now obscured by the more formidable geometry of telephone wires, power cords and television cables. But Old Delhi’s decrepitude is deceptive. Those crumbling balustrades and decapitated colonnades conceal a growing prosperity. Stock brokerages sell shares in upcoming IPOs to sari merchants with cash to spare. In the Coronation Building, once Old Delhi’s poshest hotel, the upper rooms now belong to commodity-futures traders, reclining beside their terminals, as they track prices set in Chicago.

Visitors flock to Humayun’s Tomb, a magnificent 16th-century mausoleum second only to the Taj Mahal, and to the haunting Jama Masjid, a mosque built a century later. But Delhi has not stopped building spectacular monuments. In 1994 work began on a 108-foot, bright orange statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, completed 13 years later. Worshippers enter the temple through the screaming mouth of a demon crushed underfoot. At 8.15am, twice a week, Hanuman’s mighty hands rip open his chest, by means of an “automatic electronic mechanism”, to reveal Ram and Sita sitting inside. Its designers lack Shahjahan’s taste. Indeed, they lack any taste at all. But who needs Mughal refinement when you have animatronics?

Delhi’s new prosperity is not a wave sweeping all before it. Instead it courses through the city in rivulets, working around what came before. Indeed, large tracts of the city seem entirely lost to development, trapped in eddies that go nowhere. The city, clogged by more vehicles than Mumbai and Kolkata combined, is full of pastoral enclaves and bucolic interstices, where children play cricket, vagrants slumber, and cows mooch. Walking from my old neighbourhood, Nizamuddin East, to my new one, Jangpura Extension, I once got lost in a socialist arcadia: the staff colony of Hindustan Prefab Limited, one of many sleepy public-sector enterprises left over from a previous era. A monkey clambered on the modest staff homes opposite the CITU (Centre of Indian Trade Unions) building, which proudly boasts a hammer and sickle.

India’s government is good at making time stand still, and for all its commercial hurly-burly, Delhi is still a government town. A bureaucratic mindset extends beyond official corridors into other walks of life, filling a resident’s days with sluggish transactions and self-important people. It takes for ever to settle the bill in many shops and restaurants, presumably because only one or two designated personages are permitted to handle the till. These well-known irritations make me all the more appreciative of Delhi’s many unheralded examples of economy and efficiency. Five minutes from our new flat, an Afghan bakery serves warm, doughy rounds of bread, fished out of a tandoor oven with long prongs. You pay upfront and your rupees, placed on a plank of wood, mark your spot in the queue like coins on the rail of a pool table.

Another example is the kabariwallas, who recycle the old newspapers and magazines I use to line my nest. They pedal around Delhi’s neighbourhoods, announcing their passage with a low cry, as resonant in its own way as the Qawwali singers of Nizamuddin. If I answer his call, the kabariwalla will climb the stairs to my flat, open his jute sack, and relieve me of my Economist and Tehelka back catalogue. At the end of this process a few rupees change hands. I was surprised to discover that he paid me, rather than the other way round. Indeed, as Kaveri Gill explains in her book “Of Poverty and Plastic”, the defining feature of kabari is that the collector pays for it. The term refers only to the “dry”, clean waste handled by castes who steer clear of the “wet” organic and inorganic garbage that others scavenge from municipal dumps browsed by cows, crows and pigs.

The refuse collectors are not the only Dilliwallas rubbing shoulders with a surprising profusion of wildlife. Renowned for its gardens, Delhi sometimes comes closer to a jungle. I remember at the zoo watching an uncaged monkey taunting its captive brethren. Birds of prey, including dark-winged kites and hawks, perch on floodlights and swoop on unsuspecting pedestrians. I once took a boat trip on the slick, black waters of the Yamuna river, and the boat was immediately enveloped by a cloud of Hitchcockian gulls.

Back on dry land, Delhi’s 260,000 feral dogs bark and brawl. Last year, one of them sank its teeth into my wife’s leg. Like many of Delhi’s villains, the mutt enjoyed total immunity, shielded by zealous animal-welfare rules sponsored by Maneka Gandhi, one of Indira Gandhi’s daughters-in-law. In her compassion for strays she surpasses even the Mahatma, who wrote that “perfect, erring mortals as we are, there is no course open to us but the destruction of rabid dogs”.

Ten miles to the south, Delhi’s greenery gives way to rocky scrubland, punctuated by quarries and several lonely lakes. The area is home to the world’s most bashful peacocks, the occasional mongoose, verminous monkeys and amorous Haryana motorbikers, who scratch declarations of love into the bark of a solitary banyan tree. It can be refreshing to find some solitude above and beyond the city, but I long ago concluded that Delhi’s best sights are its people. Lodhi Gardens, for all the beauty of their trees and tombs, work best as a backdrop to the bright bouquets of children, nannies and parents, enjoying picnics or badminton. Even traffic jams are enlivened by young couples holding each other tight as they zip past on their motorbikes.

Every day in Delhi is a pageant of colour, clamour, charm and cruelty. There is no shortage of comings and goings to observe. My only regret is that as a white foreigner there are precious few inconspicuous nooks for you to observe from: you cannot make yourself invisible. People watch me watching. And I always blink first. Over the years, I have found a few spots that allow unobtrusive views of Delhi’s street theatre. I used to escape from Nizamuddin East through a gap in the railings that seal it off from the outside world. I would emerge behind a public toilet opposite the railway station, which bustles with rickshaws, taxis and red-jacketed porters, their copper registration badges tied around their arms. The road past the station leads to a pair of bridges crossing the ganda nallah, or dirty stream. One bridge affords sneaky views of the streetmarket on the other, where I can happily watch people haggling over the price of ginger or a cut of chicken. I can also see one of Delhi’s better-appointed slumlets, where women fetch water, wash their children’s hair, or dry chilies beside the train tracks, as their husbands play cards outside. I can cross the bridge several times before having my fill of this tableau.

Ten years after first visiting Delhi, I am now gearing up to leave. Hong Kong, I am sure, will give me all the anonymity I miss in Delhi. My new office, on the 60th floor, has panoramic views that are hard to find here. I’ll be far less conspicuous, far less visible. But I doubt that Hong Kong will be as watchable.