Delhi (13 page)

I stared out of the window. Almost all of Delhi's tallest buildings can be found here, mostly looming apartment complexes. Its mirror twin Noida, the New Okhla Industrial Development Area, is building upwards too. Noida Wave City poster reads like an action film tagline: ‘MASTER PLAN APPROVED. TIME TO CREATE HISTORY.' In reality it feels like a huge dry footnote. It is famous for a pair of brutal serial killers and a park full of elephant statues, a vastly expensive (and still unopened) vanity project by former Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati. However unlovable, such subcities bubble with money—together with Faridabad and Ghaziabad, Gurgaon and Noida have received more investment than the city itself—and all lie in the neighbouring states of Uttar Pradesh and Haryana, outside the control of the Delhi government.

The view from the Iranian's window hardly screamed money, though. Just behind the fenced-in swimming pool was a wasteland of rubble. It was full of the same giant black hogs that had gazed hungrily at me on the road to the Rose Garden. There were black piglets too. They snuffled busily in piles of garbage and stagnant water, and grew almost visibly. Gurgaon is an environmental and infrastructural disaster. Outside the immaculately kept private areas, public space has been abandoned to the law of nature.

‘It's strange,' said a friend thoughtfully. She was moving out of a flat complex where ‘they welcomed us with a note saying we should consider ourselves fortunate to be in such a prestigious community'. In fact, she was ditching Gurgaon altogether.

‘Inside, it's so lavish and spacious. Outside, the roads are potholed, the water table is falling, the air is full of grit, the electricity is from expensive generators, the police are nowhere.' And the pavements are imaginary, I thought, fingering a glass of bright pink ginger fizz.

The elites are particularly able to effect change by using their voices, articulate and well connected. Their capillary network of influence is strong. They can vocalize their displeasure—for example through the political process, personal networks, online, or media-savvy popular protest. When they can't escape the consequences, they protest the state's failures: so they complain about corruption in state monopolies, such as passports and railway tickets, and protest declining air quality.

When they can escape, though, Delhi's elites are withdrawing. Rather than provide well-aimed pressure for state improvement, they're giving up and exiting altogether. Once the articulate and well-connected middle classes exit, the people left are less able to make their case for improvements. Bureaucrats can potter along as they wish, serving out their time before their comfortable pensions. The system limps on in the same sad state. Delhi has the clotted veins of a diabetic (and a depressingly patchy healthcare system too). The pavements disappear, the schools suffer, the lights go out.

The Gurgaon defector continued, ‘Public services are failing or don't exist. You have to pay so much for private everything: education, healthcare, power, water, security.' Only the richest slice of the middle classes can comfortably afford all of this, but the private-is-best ethos they espouse is ideologically endorsed by the aspirational middle tiers too. ‘None of these people want to pay taxes to improve things.'

The country's pushiest citizens are silencing themselves. Instead they retreat to islands dotted across India's geography—special economic zones, corporate employment and all its perks, exclusive neighbourhoods and residential associations—and avoid interacting with the messy realities of Indian democracy altogether. Travel by car, taxi or the metro between test tube towers and malls, and you never need really leave the bubble of privilege at all. Why would you expend effort on complaining? The new citizen-consumer simply votes with his feet. He doesn't actually
vote
, though: wealthier Indians tend to vote in somewhat smaller numbers than the poor, unlike most of the rest of the world. The timing of this withdrawal is convenient, coinciding as it does with the mass entry of the lower castes and classes into democratic politics and the rise of that dreaded word, ‘populism'.

Ayn Rand has long enjoyed cult popularity among business elites and students: until the rise of the Tea Party in the US in 2007, India was the world's top Googler of the libertarian author. ‘Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy,' she wrote. If this is true, then Gurgaon is one of the most civilized towns in the world.

‘None of our neighbours trust the state,' the Gurgaon defector said. ‘They would rather live on their little island, surrounded by gates and guards.'

She frowned. ‘But strangely—despite this fear and mistrust—every morning one of the guards is charged with hoisting the national flag. And every evening he takes it down with great ceremony, and folds it away…'

6

B
RAINS

Dubeyji smiled happily and said, ‘Of course we know you know nothing. Just write that. It's a formality. Paperwork. Just like a buffalo needs grass, the government needs paper.'

—Tarun J. Tejpal,
The Story of My Assassins

T
he flag can ill conceal that same despised state. But Delhi would be nothing without what Jan Morris called its ‘blur or slither'. I don't know whether it's innate or whether it's the result of several years of watching dons flapping their gowned wings as they squabble over Statute III Clause 2(iii)—but I
love
a good bit of bureaucracy. The verbosity, the uniforms, the repetition—it is as soothing as watching static. It was also my Delhi raison d'être, at the heart of my research. I headed into the vortex of power.

Just outside our flat I waited for the drone, doppler-shifting in from the right. ‘metrometrometro metro METRO METRO
METRO!
' The caller hung half out of a door by a thin shirted arm. The van skidded to a halt, was already skittering back off again before I shimmied into a seat. The other passengers regarded me indifferently, in spite of the fact our thighs were touching in a fashion I associated with non-familial the biblical.

The Yellow Line at the southerly end of Delhi climbs high into the grubby air. Chhattapur metro station overlooks a great temple complex, dominated by a South Indian-style stepped pyramidal structure. I turned from it, though, and instead followed the comforting signs on the floor:
WOMEN ONLY
, written in cursive on pink scattered with white stars, an aesthetic which naturally lures the gentler sex to follow its arrows.

At the risk of offending the rabid men's rights activists who troll the Western internet, women-only carriages are a great and necessary invention in Delhi. It is of course unfair that the men further down the train (and there are many many more of them) must travel like sardines, but unfortunately some of them are priapic sardines who require canning for their own good.

Some hazards remain in the women's carriages, though. At any time someone can bark ‘please shift', and you find yourself suddenly compressed and sitting on a humpy seat divider. I was just marvelling at the reading material of the demure-looking woman opposite—
Fifty Shades of Grey
—when the doors opened again. The lascivious striped finger of the Qutub Minar was just visible over the trees.

At the entrance surfaced an Auntie, one of India's terrifyingly disapproving older matrons. She was a particularly large example of the species, swaddled in an aggressively green and expensively silken sari. She cast a cold predatory eye over the narrow tube of the carriage. There were no seats.

I crossed my fingers, and kept my eyes fixed on the socks and sandals of Ms Fifty Shades. A question arose unbidden into my mind: why socks in this weather?

Suddenly, without seeming to move a muscle, the Auntie materialized in front of me. We regarded each other for a moment, my eyes pleading. Then she turned in a slow wordless arc, and began to reverse.

For a long moment I stared at a vast onrushing expanse of green. I had a strange sensation of falling, like a skydiver plunging headfirst towards a well-tended lawn. And then she sat on me.

The Yellow Line carves the city in two from south to north. I plucked myself from between the Auntie's buttocks and staggered, dazed, off the metro at roughly its middle. Only a few others joined me. Overhead the announcer warned us to beware of bombs cunningly disguised as thermos flasks and teddybears, and then stated our location: Central Secretariat.

Delhi has no heart—it is as disparate and fragmented as India itself—but insofar as it has a psychological centre, it lies in the iconic boulevards of New Delhi. It is a city now more associated with power than with culture, a city of bureaux and ambassadors and, at least since the big bang of liberalization in 1991, a city of kleptocrats.

It was not always so. The slow collapse of the Mughals had hollowed out the city. By the turn of the twentieth century Delhi had lapsed into a doze. It was only the seventh-largest city in India, with 232,837 recorded inhabitants—a fifth the size of Calcutta, then the empire's second city and India's undisputed cultural hub, and a quarter that of Bombay. Its non-military British population comprised only 84 individuals.

Yet Delhi continued to possess a faded glamour. The British recognized it as the heart of ruling regimes before the Raj, with all the ancient imperial symbolism that brought. They admired the best of its marble monuments—not least Humayun's Tomb, the Taj Mahal's reddish maiden aunt, now rescued from weeds to become a wonderfully serene spot for canoodling lovers. As the old Mughal capital it offered the prospect of placating Muslims, otherwise resentful of the reunification of Bengal. The city had also been a major site of action and ‘British heroism' in 1857, the events of which are alternately known as ‘the Indian Mutiny' or the ‘First War of Independence' depending on your political proclivities. It was with these excuses that King George V unveiled ‘the best-kept secret in the history of India', abruptly proclaiming the transfer of the capital from Calcutta to New Delhi, during the spectacular imperial coronation durbar of 1911.

Calcutta's inhabitants were horror-stricken at the transfer (their rivals in Bombay and Madras perhaps less so). Delhi was in the boondocks, deprived of water and full of fever. Former viceroy Lord Curzon, a Calcutta fan, felt moved to condemn it in London's House of Lords as ‘a mass of deserted ruins and graves'. Even then the ominous portents for the Raj were clear, and Curzon read them like a fortune-teller's bones. Unlike the bustling ‘European' port of Calcutta, Delhi presented to visitors ‘the most sorrowful picture you can conceive of the mutability of human fortunes'. The city was sunken in a century and a half of melancholy ‘twilight' (creative, elegiac, and perhaps even slightly self-indulgent). Some even imply that's how it should have stayed: twilit and drowsy. But of course the pesky Britishers had other plans, and Delhi has always been a poor sleeper.

So it was reinvented in the international idiom of greatness and power. The Secretary of State for India countered Curzon's criticism with a comparison. One other major transfer of capital cities had occurred in living memory. Littered with the detritus of old empire, until 1870 it too had been a ‘city of the dead, like Delhi, strewn with the relics of decayed dynasties'. Now, having tellingly forced the established religion to submit, it was revivified at the head of a great united nation. Perhaps Delhi could emulate Rome.

The radial roads emanating from Connaught Place and its lesser roundabouts are strung like spiderwebs from tree to tree, stretching to the Secretariat. The politicians lurk within.

The most famous weaver of this web was the British architect Edwin Landseer Lutyens, ‘part schoolboy, part great artist, part mystic'. Whilst overseeing the designs he did indeed read Edward Gibbons' famous
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
(as a young Churchill had a few years previously in Bombay). Just as that great empire crumbled, so the Persian prophecy has become a travel book cliche: ‘Whoever builds a new city in Delhi will lose it.' Lutyens' would be the eighth city of Delhi, by most estimates. The prediction was apt. Construction was stalled by an assassination attempt, war, soaring costs, and squabbling architects. It was finally completed only fifteen years before the Britishers' final ejection. Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!