Of Delhi But Not For It

:: Mridula Garg

I have spent most of my life in Delhi. But I do not feel sentimental about it. Why do I not? Is it because it is a faceless city or is it because I am not given to nostalgia? Both are true. It is not that I have a bad memory; quite the reverse. My problem is not being able to forget, unless creative passion is upon me. That must be the reason I had to write. he only way to take the sting out of remembering everything is to give it a fantasised form. Memory soon becomes adept at fictionalising itself. The painful and trivial is turned into the tragic and ironical. Soon the tragic merges into the comic. Life is largely trivial and Delhi makes quite
a craft of it. Not an art; that is not Delhi’s way. It deals in craft, and of course graft. Let us say, to be crafty is essential to succeed here.

Fiction touches the commonplace with passion and turns it into art. It touches the tragic with the comic and reduces the bombastic to the absurd. It imparts hope to the hopeless, desperation to the complacent and plays havoc with the given ideas of right and wrong.

So much about writing and me. What about Delhi: It’s not a city, which encourages non-conformity. So,naturally, it was home to the most non-conformist of all Poets, Mirza Ghalib. That is called irony. But he was totally hooked to Delhi; did not want to go elsewhere. Maybe like me, he felt that one could not be a non-conformist unless most other people conformed. Once a particular brand of non-conformity was accepted, it became politically correct and demanded conformity. If one did not want to be sucked into the mainstream, one had to find some other idea to back.

I remember how my earliest attempt at writing became a victim of the mainstream. I was-then in the tenth class in school. Our Hindi teacher had asked us to write the autobiography of a beggar. My beggar was a writer, who took to begging because writing brought hardly any money. He begged by day and wrote by night, and was happy. The teacher was livid when she read this. She told me I had insulted both the writers and the beggars of the world.

I could not resist pointing out the fallacy. One or the other, fine, but how could I insult both? She added teachers to the list and the usual recriminations followed. I have often wondered whether that experience put me off writing for the next twenty years. I began to write again only when I was rid of Delhi and its teachers.

It is not as if there was no positive side to the Delhites. In fact, the ones, I remember with pleasure today, were of Delhi but not for it. There was the young man who read The Return of the Native twenty-six times and then tried to commit suicide, unsuccessfully. There was the headmaster of my school who allowed me to take the final exams three years running without my attending a single class. It was in this fashion that I was promoted to the eighth class from the fifth. I used to fall ill shortly after school reopened in July and recovered only in time to take the finals in March.

I wonder now whether it was an unconscious ploy to read a lot of ‘out of course’ books. Interestingly, that is the term the iconoclast Hindi writer, Manohar Shyam Joshi, uses to describe the critics’ rejection of offbeat fictional works.

There was the teacher at school, who had me act in a play during the preparatory leave before the board exam, to clear my mind. There was the writer, who blamed society for all his ills and felt justified in fleecing everyone of its members of their money and time. In fact, he did it with an air of doing a favour. He was, after all, allowing them to support a genius. There was my father, who quarrelled with the rules and with those who made them, as a matter of course.

And finally, there was my mother, who, just by being herself, flouted all rules for a wife and mother. She never cooked for us, never petted or fondled us. But as we grew up, she became a friend and a confidant. She also instilled in us a passionate love of literature. Not by giving us books to read but by reading them all the time herself. Routine duties were often neglected, which might have taught us forbearance and acceptance of the unusual.

All of them influenced my writing, to some degree, but not everyone found a place in it. Delhi entered my work in the same way, influencing the undercurrents and the collective memory of the characters. What in modern parlance is called the subtext. Not only many of my characters live, work, doubt, wrangle and love in Delhi, they do it the city’s way. They are either excessively self-centred or annoyingly interfering. They are disillusioned, incompetent and materialistic. The only saving grace is that, they see themselves for what they are and take time off to laugh at themselves. And God laughs at Delhi and another novel is born. That was how my latest novel, Kathgulab (Country of Goodbyes in English translation) was conceived. The characters in it, however, refused to stay put in Delhi. They escaped to various cities all over the world. Why did all of them then come back at some point of time? Perhaps because they realised that God was the greatest jester of all, and life—though absurd —needed to be lived. Also, the only way to make God laugh with you and not at you was to be prepared to laugh at yourself.

That is exactly the lesson that Delhi has taught me. Having learnt it, I found I was not much use as a hypocrite. My protagonists were no better. It is not that I have not portrayed hypocrites. I have in plenty. But most of my characters are shown battling hypocrisy. That constitutes the basis of conflict in the narrative so that hypocrisy becomes a negative trait. In Delhi, on the other hand, it is cultivated as the ultimate quality, the epitome of sophistication. —

That could well be the reason why the Delhites in places of power do not laugh. There is so much inequality in the city that those who have everything, have to distance themselves from those who have nothing. Laughter cuts across the distance, so it has to be eschewed. Everything, by the way, does not include clean air, water, order and safety on the roads. They may be considered urban necessities elsewhere but not in Delhi. Delhi’s elite lives with air-conditioners and aquaguards and to hell with garbage disposal and supply of drinking water outside their castles. They live in their cocoons and amass secret wealth to make frequent trips to the USA to visit their progeny, and join them in their shopping sprees. So what can lesser mortals like me do but laugh at their pettiness, arrogance, crass materialism and worldly success and end up laughing at themselves?

My novel, Anitya, was a product of such a state of mind. In the scene, where the hero, Avijit, experiences the flood in Delhi which had the whole city in the grip of terror in 1982, he cannot but opt to pray for repeated floods in the nearby villages as a lesser evil. He, of course, goes on a guilt trip about it soon after. Aren’t we all, who live in Delhi, so close to the backward villages in a state of constant guilt? Am I not my own protagonist? Someone who lives the essence of Delhi in the very act of rejecting it. Are we not held in thrall even more when we hate than when we love?

Let me recount a true story to bring out the spirit of Delhi. Each colony here has a presswali, a woman, who goes from house to house ironing people’s clothes. Ours had a child of five, who was deaf. I wanted to get him admitted to a good school for the hearing impaired. As luck would have it, the best one came to be located in my colony in South Delhi. But I was determined to get him admission on his own merit, without the customery political or economic clout, it was no easy task. For the next one-and-a-half years, | paid a weekly visit to the school, trying to talk the people in the authority into allowing him to take the admission test. They asked me who I was and what interest I had in the child, I replied that he was a deaf child and they ran a school for the deaf and I was trying to bring the two together. They, then asked me if I was going to teach the child, I replied, no, they were. But, they went on, who will coach him at home since the parents are uneducated? I replied that since they were experts at it, why would any further coaching be required? Back and forth we went, week after week, covering the same ground. After each parley, my parting words were always the same. The child deserves to be admitted to the school because he is doubly handicapped, deaf and poor too.

By the end of eighteen months, the school authorities were convinced that only a journalist or social worker could be as pig-headed as I. They played safe by allowing him to take the test. He passed with flying colours. I knew I had only won the battle, the war was still to be fought. I had come to know that he had passed the test through clandestine means, the school was yet to confirm it. I knew that it would do so only if I could brainwash the headmaster enough to make him think, helping the needy was his very own idea. So, I bided my time and hoped for the best. Finally the day came when the chairman rang me up to say that the presswali’s child had been admitted in his school, because he thought he must help someone, who was doubly handicapped. I waited for him to add, and bright too. But that was not to be. This episode actually shows the better side of Delhi. It happened more than ten years ago. I doubt whether I could take up a project like that now and hope to win. Truth to tell, I doubt if I can conjure that idealism now, having stayed in Delhi far too long.

I have known Delhi in two of its avatars. Like all the cities, which spread outside the walls surrounding them, it grew into a schizophrenic new-old combine. That was the first avatar, I came to know in the 40s and 50s. The New Delhi of my childhood was a shrine to babudom; well ordered and inane. All the colour and character was in the older part, the congested, noisy and inequitable Old Delhi. We were taught to be wary of it but that only added to its fascination. The funny thing is that both parts were equally slow-paced. In my case, since my father was not a babu but a belligerent manager in a private firm, who had daily truck with the walled city, I teetered between alarm and empathy for it.

Then came the Partition in 1947. It brought in a huge refugee population to Delhi. Once the violence and the trauma had settled down, the slow pace of the twin cities was gone forever. The new arrivals, in quest for new soil to replant their roots, had brought an aggressive market philosophy and a dog-eat-dog mentality with them. That is an essential feature of refugee culture anywhere. What was unique about Delhi was that it was neither willing to accept them nor able to hold its own against them. Unable to adapt to the new but unwilling to give up the old, it grew more and more schizophrenic in character. From the Delhi of clerks, it turned into the Delhi of traders and petty politicians. It also became the capital of the power hungry and the corrupt. Yet, it retained its small town character. For ages Delhi has been a conglomerate of villages rather than a metropolis; so great has been the inequity and the diversity between different parts. Barring a few islandsoccupied by political VIPs, it is woefully deficient in the supply of electricity, water, public health, transport and educational facilities. Some change has come about in the last decade with a new infrastructure of roads, flyovers, initially stadiums and office complexes. But the change is largely cosmetic.

All it has spawned is fast traffic, road rage and car crashes but no complementary rescue, trauma care or traffic regulation. The only consistent growth has been in the vulgarity of the public functions and festivals. The peculiar hallmark of today’s Delhi is a curious blend of indifference and interference. It is indifferent to tragedy, corruption, beauty and art but not to gossip and scandal. It loves to pry into the private lives of people, stifling originality and experiment. Delhi symbolises a hulk without kernel, speed without purpose, development without design, politics without principles.

Such a state of affairs is a great challenge to a writer. Caught in the tradition of physical proximity and voyeurism, he has to struggle to find a personal space. At the same time, braving the onslaught of indifference and self-centredness, he has to struggle to keep his capacity for empathy alive. This dilemma has always fascinated me. Commodities take precedence over human beings when there are too many consumer goods to choose from. The first applies to the affluent West, the second to most of India. But both apply equally to Delhi. So on one hand I have dealt with the loss of privacy imposed by lack of space and respect for the individual in my stories.

On the other, I have also portrayed the loss of empathy and fellow feeling due to excessive withdrawal into that very private space. In my fifth novel, Main Aur Main (Me And Me) I put the two together. Set squarely in Delhi, it dealt with the dilemma in the person of two writers. Creativity devoid of compassion became its own executioner as the novel reached its inconclusive end. The old spatial schizophrenia of the twin city, one within and the other outside the walls, is re-enacted all over the iniquitous city of Delhi. Braving a city that exemplifies form without content, I feel compelled to experiment with the content and then find the form. The first tenet of fiction for me is that the content always finds its form. My main concern is to take a fresh look at the inner contradictions, which motivate people to act the way they do.

Delhi has played its part in highlighting the contradictions. For example, the greater the hypocrisy and conformity Delhi demanded, the more I tore it to shreds in my stories. In many of them, I sent my characters to other places to find their true selves and rid themselves of hypocritical values. The story, Tuk (Unreasonably Yours in English translation) came closest to analysing the process, which makes people play safe by imitating others.

It was not that I did not give detailed descriptions of any city in my work. But those described in greatest detail were the ones I had visited just once and never again. I could look at them with the wondering eyes of a visitor.

The superficial features were there for all to see. Imagination could build the rest; unfamiliarity helped it do so. However, something very interesting happened when I wrote my popular and controversial novel, Chitcobra. Its protagonists—two people in love, an Indian married woman and a Scottish minister of church, also married — meet in Delhi. They initially pretend to go around it as visitors but that does not last even for a day. As soon as they are together, they are totally engrossed in being lovers.

But the city cannot be ignored. In fact, it gradually becomes a character in the novel. It’s my only novel in which tourists recognise Delhi as Delhi. I don’t describe the monuments or sights in detail but they keep impinging on the story. For the characters engrossed in love, the woman becomes the embodiment of Delhi. But they do not remain untouched by the history of the city, which is really a part of our larger colonial history. When they reach the Khooni Darwaza in their wandering around the city, they feel suddenly thrown apart, separated by the past in which they were on the opposite sides of a fight for Independence.

Khooni Darwaza reminds them of the massacre of Indians during British rule. Again, when they go to Rajghat to see the Gandhi darshan exhibit, they quit into a discussion on Gandhi, Marx, cartoons, if you please. As the woman says, if you love someone from a country that you hate for other reasons you soon learn to strike a balance. They do that and continue to feed their passion in Delhi. They see the city not as a house of historical monument and picturesque sights but as a personality, which reveals itself most poignantly at dawn and dusk. The nature of light is different in each city and it is best revealed at dusk.

Remember the effect the evening light of Paris had on the Impressionist painters. The discerning visitors to Delhi would feel its effect on the Qutub Minar, the Red Fort, Chandni Chowk, Ajmeri Gate, Rajghat and the Old Fort as do the two lovers of Chitcobra. As I do.

In Uske Hisse Ki Dhoop (A Touch of Sun, in English translation), the characters come to Delhi to start a new life. Its political and social unrest has a powerful impact on the course their lives take. It is the time of the total revolution of Jayprakash Narain, and everyone is touched by it, what with rallies at the Boat Club and dreams of overthrowing a corrupt system. Again, the tourist sights or the outward features of Delhi remain undefined. The city does define the thematic content and the absurd ending of the book.

Finally, a word about the reception Delhi gives to books. A few years ago, the literary community was enraged at what a jouralist from India Today said at a seminar: that the publication of a book was not an event. It became newsworthy only if there was a scandal around it or if it got an award.

There was no need to get angry; he was just being truthful. I know when I publish a book it is not an event for Delhi. It is just a book and one that will be read outside it. To write it is like thumbing my nose at the city and believe me, that is an exhilarating experience.

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(The presentation was first published in Tehelka Online)