Delhi

Published by Random House India in 2013

Copyright © Elizabeth Chatterjee 2013

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EPUB ISBN 9788184005103

Well, he was mooning about Delli, that highly pestilential place, possibly in search of some undiscovered facts …

—Joseph Conrad,
Victory

C
ONTENTS

1  The Best-laid Plans

2  Home and Away

3  Rent

4  Hands

5  Veins

6  Brains

7  Boredom

8  Fear

9  Hearts

10  Souls

11  Tongues

12  Stomachs

13  Livers

14  Noses

15  Back

Acknowledgements

A Note on the Author

1

T
HE
B
EST
-L
AID
P
LANS

Wherever she went, including here, it was against her better judgment.

—Dorothy Parker's proposed tombstone

N
othing, in in all my heaps of books and strategies, had prepared me for the cold wetness spreading beneath my buttocks.

The interview was not quite going to plan.

Outside, Delhi had begun to boil. Back when this was all an idle library fantasy, I'd pictured a white-hot city, wholesome white like milkmaids' pails and American teeth. But this felt yellowish-hot—the colour of nicotine fingers, tabloid splashes, warning lights. Delhi's rulers have always fled the heat whenever possible, the Mughals to Kashmir, the British to Shimla, today's lot to the more glamorous American and European cities. With impeccable timing I'd travelled the wrong way around.

But inside everything was frozen. Ice stacked in giant cubes: thirty tonnes of them, I read later, ‘Crystal Clear' and imported from Canada. Against one wall stood a sculpted ice animal. It appeared to be a wolverine, though that seemed a puzzling choice of whittled ice mammal, and had melted slightly under the rumps of posing customers.

A perfectly sensible place for an interview, I tried to tell myself.

But whatever else you might say about the place, Delhi is always generous when doling out life lessons. Not least of these is that it is unwise to interview a powerful man in fluffy mittens. Something had gone wrong somewhere. Several things, actually.

Half an hour earlier, pants still mercifully unsodden, I'd arrived downstairs to case the joint. The mall lay spreadeagled under the sky's murky eyeball. It hadn't been my suggestion. That was the first error of the afternoon, deceptively tame but spinning inexorably towards calamity. The interviewee had bowled me a right old googly.

A guard pawed me through a security scanner. The interrogation would take place in one of Delhi's many glossy coffee shops, I decided. I would order a tea, with a poignant comment about the shared tastes of Britain and India. The interviewee would open up like a broiled oyster.

Be prepared
, a voice said somewhere among my little grey cells. It was satnav-cool and, like all the best prophets, managed to sound both vague and ominous.

The interviewee arrived exactly on time. He looked like Luigi, the better-looking Mario Brother: same moustache, bulbous nose, coquettish eyes.
Establish control
, the satnav voice said,
but be reassuring. Create rapport
. We shook hands at the mall's entrance. I squeezed firmly, exuding rapport from every pore, just as I'd practised in the autorickshaw on my own left hand.

So far, so good.
Control the agenda. Lay out your goals
. The planned questions ticker-taped through my head. I was the David Frost of PhD research, cool, charming, incisive, I was the fusion of Letterman and Oprah and Karan Johar. I rehearsed the introduction in my head, formed the first line—

‘Do you want a drink?' Luigi said. The
t
in
want
thudded against the roof of his mouth.

‘Um,' I said professionally, and consulted the satnav-cool voice.

Retain control, but
, it said,
but, er, create rapport
. Unfortunately the good cop—bad cop dilemma appeared to be the satnav's Achilles heel.
The interviewee is more likely to talk if you seem perfectly harmless. Authoritative but, like, harmless
.

There was a pause, then quietly at the very edge of my grey cells:
Bugger
. The satnav lapsed into guilty silence. Touché, Luigi, touché.

‘Come.' Luigi left no room for an answer. I looked longingly at the coffee shop as we swept past.

And so I found myself in a bar made entirely of ice, draped in a waxy borrowed poncho and praying to all the gods of India that this would bring a cartful of rapport. Our smoggy breath mingled awkwardly. The place itself was peculiarly distracting. It was small, our footprints invisible on the clinical tiles. Besides the ice wolverine, the walls glowed the hot pink neon of a suburban lapdancing club. In one corner, a barman was discreetly turning blue. The door had an unreassuring industrial heaviness. I thought of airlocks and quarantines and zombie apocalypses.

The whole place was like a psychotic Narnia and must have taken the energy of a small town to keep frozen 50°C below the outside world. It was vigorously tasteless. At least for the first time in months I wasn't sweating from my eyebrows.

‘What will you take?' said Luigi.

RETAIN CONTROL
, said the satnav voice.

‘Um,' I said. ‘A tea, I think, please'—though it would probably freeze over and taste like a Yorkshire millpond—‘just a cup of tea, please. Isn't it funny how Britain and India both—'

‘No.' His moustache had taken on a decidedly dictatorial aspect. ‘You will take something interesting.'

Two drinks in ice glasses appeared on the ice table. They were bright red and sticky and altogether un-tea-like. The barman emitted a censorious tooth-chatter in my direction. Any remaining poise, gravitas and grasp of Interview Techniques 101 quietly perished. I was prepared for jargon, mistrust, slipperiness—even silence. I was not prepared for cocktails.

Each drink cost around ten times the controversial figure selected a couple of months earlier as the official daily poverty line for urban India. The government was in the process of a characteristically slow and quarrelsome retreat, while we sucked and slurped icy handfuls of rupees, tossed monthly incomes down our frost-huffing throats.

The bar was quiet, at least. Most of the clientele was male and grinning and suspiciously young. The boys shivered in small homoerotic clumps, heads steaming like horses, and whipped out their smartphones. They took turns in posing for photos with an ice mannequin, loaned mitts groping her cold curves. Her face was blank.

I shifted in my ice chair, which had begun to melt disconcertingly into my trousers. (Tight black jeans: the informal uniform of an international generation, a half-solution to that elusive Goldilocks midpoint between Indian conservatism and elite Delhi-mall-rat cool, and sensible for neither yellowish-hot nor frozen conditions.) This sort of thing didn't happen to Oprah.

Luigi watched me intently, stroking his moustache, as I picked up the glass. I looked away and gave a discreet cough, which formed a small guilty cumulonimbus at my shoulder. The satnav voice shrilled:
Make U-turn when possible!
I knew in India only bad girls drink. Worse, he knew that I knew.

‘Cheers,' I said.

Opposite me Luigi's moustache shuffled with pleasure, and he began to talk. He was wearing a poncho over his office shirt; its furry collar was the exact texture of his moustache. He was waxing lyrical about coal-fired power plants he had known and loved: the sensual curve of a special cooling tower, the thrust of a favourite turbine. His waxing sent little plumes of steam into the air.

As Luigi's glasses misted over with enthusiasm, I pondered some crucial life questions. How had this happened? What was I doing there in Delhi, the City Formerly Known as My Second-Least-Favourite Place on Earth? And was that a hand I felt upon my thigh?

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody who lives there, nobody at all, has much good to say about Delhi. Along with Milton Keynes, Detroit and Purgatory, it is one of the world's great unloved destinations. Its inhabitants, Dilliwallas, take a perverse pride in complaining about it. At best they tolerate it. At worse, some despise it with the fire of a thousand June suns. In his novel
Delhi
(1990), the irascible Khushwant Singh describes how the city appears to a stranger: