Delhi (12 page)

Speaking of the proverbial hitting the fan, I maintain that you can tell a lot about a people from their sewage arrangements, least glamorous of all the city's internal systems. The British have a complex geography of international lavatorial stereotypes. We have a rich toilet vocabulary, from the downmarket ‘bog' to the upper-class ‘loo'. Our opposite is the American, too paralyzed by disgust even to say the word despite their propensity to die on the can, burger in hand. The toilets of the French, Britain's historical enemy, are mere holes in the ground, which emit a terrible stench of cheese and surrender. Japanese toilets sing and vibrate and spurt unexpected jets of water; German toilets contain a sinister tray to catch and inspect turds; all Australian toilets are rusty outside dunnies full of poisonous animals. There is surely something profound to be learned from all this.

The Indian sanitation system is notable by its all-butabsence, as though the oft-cited Hindu obsession with purity makes thinking about shit untenable (‘Shit is a more onerous theological problem than is evil,' pointed out Milan Kundera). Considering shit might be unclean, but shitting outside is a venerable Indian tradition: a staggering half a billion Indians do it daily. Famously, more Indians have cellphones than toilets. The sight of a row of winking early-morning buttocks lined up over the railway tracks is a travel book staple.

Eighteen months earlier, I had surged south to the rural areas just outside Bangalore, full of coconuts and fat white silkworms for the wealthy city market. There I asked strangers awkward questions about their defecatory habits. (This history was hard to shake off: at least half of my friends think my PhD is called
Shit Matters.
)

It's fine for men. They gushed about the traditional pleasures—going out with their friends to play games and chat, before taking a joyful shit beneath their favourite tree as the birds whirled overhead. As the sickly sweet smell of heat-dried piss on every Delhi roadside indicates, they are relaxed about relieving themselves all over the place; in Bangalore NGOs had even tried painting pictures of gods on public walls to discourage this. Women had a rather different stance. Thanks to patriarchal tradition, they could only go under cover of darkness, suffering pain and infections as they waited all day long. Their tales featured no birdsong, but shame and snakebites and rapes in gloomy fields of other people's shit. Some actually gave up food and water in the evenings because they were afraid of having to go. Yet very few had been able to persuade their husbands that toilets ought to be a priority.

Lest you think this is an issue confined to rural areas, recall ‘Delhi belly', that inspiring mix of
E. coli, Salmonella
, and other overfriendly pathogens. Its fame is unsurprising: the city's remaining groundwater is increasingly contaminated with wastewater and untreated sewage. Almost half of Dilliwallas live in ‘unauthorized' colonies and slums; until recently many were deprived of basic infrastructure. Though the majority of Delhi slum dwellings have electricity, a phone and
TV
, many do not have toilets or sewerage; a third of their female inhabitants have been physically assaulted while trying to access shared toilets. In non-slum areas too there is no requirement to construct houses with proper sanitation, and many neighbourhoods do not receive a reliable water supply. The sewage system is overwhelmed, drains clogged and pipes leaking. Four billion litres of raw sewage pour into the Yamuna daily, as
Newsweek
noted, turning the holy river into ‘a putrid ribbon of black sludge' with levels of faecal bacteria 10,000 times higher than the safe bathing limit.

The combination of these massive infrastructural failings was malodorously evident when I tried to prove my research with tired feet. With the paranoia of the new arrival, I attempted to sneakily eye the miniature map in my guidebook. The entirety of southwest Delhi—not really on the beaten tourist track—was squeezed onto one small page. I resolved to walk from birdsong- and American-laden Vasant Vihar to the Hauz Khas Rose Garden, which looked close and was coloured in pleasing shades of pink.

Little did I know that (a) Hauz Khas is really not that close, three centimetres on the map, three miles on the ground; (b) psychologically much longer given the route would take me along one of the varicose highways that rings central Delhi; and (c) a white woman walking said route would attract a great deal of morbid curiosity.

Cars slowed down to goggle and honk. The miscellaneous souls who haunt every Indian street followed me with blank eyes. Beyond a certain point, though, the logic of the walk talks over in a way that would horrify a rational mind. ‘I've already walked so far, I might as well keep going. It'd be embarrassing to turn back now. Maybe they'll think it's a Western thing.' A lumpy bus queue stared wonderingly as I walked past. They nudged each other, but I held my chin still higher and thought British thoughts.

‘And this has to be health—' The bus roared carcinogenically past, coating me in bits of gravel.

The world alongside opened up as the road began to rise. Before me R.K. Puram fell away to the left. Munirka, a busy mass of students and migrants, sprawled to the right. A few months later in almost this spot, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student and her friend would board a private bus, on which she would be savagely gang-raped. On my birthday, thirteen days after the attack and under the eyes of the world's media, she died of her injuries.

I dropped into the mapless gap between guidebook pages, and saw a different city entirely. I passed a clutch of very temporary huts, little more than tarpaulin tents, cooking fires smoking. I passed strange little shops selling furniture and textbooks, tucked into the concrete. Everything smelled like chewed cigarettes and petrol, with the odd glimmer of shit from the lower slopes. Downhill giant hogs armoured with wiry black hair were rootling in rubbish. Even at a distance they were formidable, more like wild boar. They stared up at me hungrily. I wondered whether the exhaust fumes were going to my head.

Why are Delhi's veins so sickly? ‘Nobody,' a girl announced with a hair flip as we were chauffeured forth, ‘walks in the city.'

The middle classes jog in Lodi Gardens; in the cooler moments buffering the day pleasantly plump women and once even a retired army general, arms swinging in military rhythm, could be found pacing around our Vasant Kunj home. They were evangelical about walking. But they weren't walking
to
anywhere. In the name of keeping fit, they would make their tiny repetitive circuits, inhaling smug lungfuls of carcinogens. Round and round, like the rhythmic second hand of a pocket watch. Then they climbed in their cars and roared off in a cloud of exhaust fumes.

Nobody
walks in the city.

I looked out of the car window. I'd been lucky on my Hauz Khas jaunt: for all the shit, garbage and inadequate public transport, there were at least pavements for me to walk on, steep and cracked as they were. There were no pavements here in Gurgaon, Delhi's famously dystopian satellite city.

The road was edged with walkers, murky in the dust the cars kicked up. There were any number of them: women with shopping bags, shiny-shirted teenage boys, men in thick rubber chappals and oiled hair, customers of the little cigarette and snack kiosks that sprout on the roadside. This is ‘nobody'. They are maids, cleaners, guards, laundrymen, cooks, builders, chaiwallahs, vegetable sellers. Without them the city would not function. But just as their employment is invisible to the law, they are invisible to the people with the networks and skills to be taken seriously by politicians and businessmen. Their employers take illegally tinted SUVs, taxis, the gleaming metro—why should they care if the pavement is nonexistent?

Gurgaon, a swelling southwesterly tumour just beyond the airport, is India's twenty-first-century poster boy in all sorts of ways. Even ten years ago it had only a smattering of titanic office buildings. Now it swaggers dustily across the plains, tower after golf course after mall. It markets itself as the new Singapore, a business and shopping hub plus a cluster of gated communities.

Its reputation is more Wild West: frantic expansion, violence, dirt, clots of men. A virtual gangland in the 1990s, sitting in the back of a taxi at night still feels like you're being driven to a quiet spot to be executed. The whole place was practically created by the giant developer DLF, India's largest, now embroiled in corruption controversies and suffering from the economic slump. The DLF City Court complex is even crowned by a weird spire that gives it the appearance of a church-cum-saloon on the frontier. Even the cattle are more threatening than Delhi's elusive lot, looming next to the highway with their huge U-shaped prongs.

The area is notorious for rapes and guns. In one notorious case, a tollbooth attendant on the expressway was shot dead by drunk young men in an SUV, over Rs 27 (less than 40 US cents). The authorities are nineteenth-century. In March 2012 another 23-year-old woman was gang-raped. The first remedy officials mooted was a ban on women working after 8 pm, the unspoken rationale being if women are out that late it's really their fault, and rapists only come out at night.

I stayed there for a few days in a sleek, glassy test tube of an apartment block, courtesy of a wonderful Iranian who hums Indian film songs from her childhood. Her flat was huge and the fridge empty, bachelor-style: 70 percent alcohol, 30 percent mysterious floating things in jars. This was globalized New Gurgaon at its slickest, cheaper than central Delhi and much more spacious. I pedalled next to seriously toned housewives in the private gym, and swam alongside seriously overweight kids in the private pool.

Back in the room I mulled over my electricity research, basking in the cool of the air-conditioning. The AC was powered for much of the time by a dirty house-sized private generator, roaringly guzzling expensive diesel. In its abortive election campaign of 2004, the then-incumbent Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) famously deployed the slogan ‘India Shining'. The slogan suggested the glow of a million computer screens, the gleam of the gold to be minted in the globally connected Indian market, and the polish of a twenty-first-century nation. It implied that the lights worked.

But all too often they don't. In Old Gurgaon, just a short distance away from the Iranian's ritzy flat, the power cuts last for hours a day. ‘No power is as expensive as no power,' Homi Bhabha, father of the Indian nuclear programme, famously said. Lack of reliable electricity hits economic growth, education, healthcare, pretty much all the goals of a democratic government.

July 2012 revealed the scale of the problem. The largestever blackout in human history hit a huge swathe of north and eastern India, including Delhi. For two days an area home to over 600 million people, a tenth of the world's population, was left without power—though many of these people didn't have it anyway. Three hundred million Indians lack reliable electricity; three hundred more lack it altogether. A third of all power generated is lost or stolen.

The failure of this system is a very political one. Politicized power subsidies are the opiate of too many states. The whole sector is riddled with unviable tariffs, chronic bureaucratic disorganization, a lack of fuel, corruption, theft, and lack of cash: India's own finance minister admits there will be a US$ 1 trillion deficit in infrastructure investment over the next five years.

New Gurgaon is a tumour with its own privatized nervous system, anaemic as it is. It glimmers with neon signboards and glowing towers; occasional lasers carve the night sky. Many of its buildings flick their lights off for an hour too, one day a year. Not out of sympathy for their poorer compatriots—they're joining in with the World Wildlife Fund's international Earth Hour, like other world cities. Yet the streets are frighteningly dark at night, public lighting striking by its absence. The city is an archipelago of bright pools set in darkness. Some have air conditioning, laptops, high-speed internet; most do not. ‘The future is already here,' said the science fiction writer William Gibson, ‘it's just not very evenly distributed.'