Delhi (21 page)

Admittedly the man has married someone else in the meantime, but ah well—it's the romance that counts, isn't it?

Many young metropolitan Indians find themselves in an awkward middle ground. They lap up Bollywood love songs and stories (men just much as women), gossip about dating and sex, swap tales of passionate affairs. Unlike their parents they want a degree of individual choice, not a dictated ritual arrangement. They believe in something more than duty and the love that grows from familiarity: they want marriages that bring emotional closeness, intimacy, and friendship.

In Delhi's public spaces, the parks and monuments, young couples furtively snuggle, half-hidden in nooks and bushes. (Many pairs of boys do something similar.) Even if they are not having ‘full sex' but just ‘fooling around', they like to talk about it. Another PhD researcher, with a good deal more fieldwork stamina than I had, carried out research in the South Indian IT hub of Hyderabad (‘Cyberabad'). ‘Of course I know what sex is,' one of her interviewees said impatiently. ‘An orgasm? Um … is that a kind of condom?'

A journalist friend kindly filled me in on what I might expect from dating a Rich Delhi Boy. ‘He texts you from his expensive phone:
hi babez. u wnt to go 4 dinr
. You don't reply, so he calls two hundred times. He arrives in his Black Honda Accord, Punjabi music blaring. Swaggering out, he's wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt covered in graffiti, or maybe a shirt open to show his chest. He keeps his designer sunglasses on indoors.

‘He takes you somewhere in Lajpat Nagar for your date, followed by a “partay” at a “lounge bar” in GK1. He drinks a lot (expensive Scotch with Coke) and hits on the waitress. They don't have a table. His witty reply: “Do you know who my dad is?”'

The Rich Delhi Boy might think I was an easy date, but certainly not marriageable. A surprisingly number of the young people I spoke to were sceptical about pure ‘love marriages', seeing them as fragile and frequently ill-advised. This is perhaps not surprising given that ‘falling in love' seems two young people, often from very different social backgrounds, are fiercely sexually attracted to each other so they elope after two impulsive weeks. They also noted the West's high divorce rates, though, not something to aspire to.

‘I don't want to make my parents unhappy,' a long-limbed and elegant friend told me, ‘and I trust their judgment. They know what to look for.' She shrugged. ‘Plus I'm shy. There are loads of one-night stands at JNU'—Jawaharlal Nehru University, the huge leftwing safari park for students near our flat—‘but the dating scene's not for me.'

She argued that family consent and involvement in conflict resolution is the best foundation for a stable and long-lasting marriage. ‘Our families will make sure we work on it.' She certainly did not intend to live in a joint family with her husband's parents, though. The majority of Delhi households have already converted to the nuclear family: data from 2011 shows 69.5 percent of the city's households include only one married couple, even if household sizes still remain larger on average than in the spinsterish West.

At the same time, she said, ‘I will have some choice.' Half-laughing, she used to point out the wealthy young men and women on awkward dates in the city's upmarket coffee chains, à la the talkshow
Koffee with Karan
, sometimes with a watchful chaperone just out of earshot. The pairs darted looks at each other's angles when they thought the other wasn't looking. They had the nervous energy of two strangers discussing how many children to have. ‘If we don't click, if there's no chemistry'—a popular word—‘then I can say no.'

Something else is emerging, then: the ‘arranged love marriage'. It means intimacy and chemistry, celebrating wedding anniversaries, and sharing confidences. It means that the hallmark of marriage for women, ‘adjustment' to a new life and new demands, applies at least somewhat to men too. It even means dating—but largely in the safe confines of the engagement, with the family's endorsement.

How durable this unusual combination of family facilitation and individual choice will prove versus the seemingly unstoppable sweep of Hallmark Valentine's cards is anyone's guess. The institution is undoubtedly modernizing, though. Another friend told a horror story about her brother's search for a wife. The family of one prospect hired a private detective to check them all out and hack into his phone records. A progressively minded marriage counsellor had only this advice: ‘You must make your prospective spouse undergo a full medical examination. Blood tests. Swabs. Urine samples. Etcetera. So many have AIDS nowadays.'

Who said love is blind?

For all his claims of revelation, Nicky did send me first one, then three, then tens of texts. The first were friendly, the next angry, the later ones full of vitriol and obscenities. This, as he himself recognized, is the dark side of Delhi men, made all the more frightening by its wide acceptability.

In ancient Hindu tradition women are the libidinous, uncontrollable, lustful sex. Men are meant to be able to keep it in their pants, something scholarship on sex in India has perhaps reinforced through its weird obsession with famous celibates (like Gandhi, who famously used to test his powers of control by sleeping naked next to his nubile great-niece) and semen containment. Within two minutes of arriving in India this would seem ludicrous to all, male and female.

The Indian-English term I most detest is ‘Eve-teasing'. It is a viciously coy term that obscures the spectrum of fear and woman-hate beneath. ‘Teasing' spans everything from whistling to sexual jokes, obscene gestures to physical assaults. ‘Eve' suggests that it is always Woman, that lascivious red-lipped apple-plucking whore, who is to blame.

True to form, Delhi never stints on victim-blaming. Without improvements to its overstretched and unrepentantly prehistoric system of law enforcement, it is impossible to see how the city can alter its culture of sexual violence. The police are perhaps the most grimly inadequate of all India's many institutions, permanently dogged by accusations of misogyny, corruption, torture and even illegal executions through fake ‘encounters'. The Delhi police's famously sinister slogan is
With You, For You, Always.
A sting by the campaigning magazine
Tehelka
in 2012 revealed some characteristic statements by the capital region's police officers.
Tehelka
summarized: ‘She asked for it. It's all about money. They have made it a business. It is consensual most of the time.'

Despite the speed with which the attackers in the ‘Nirbhaya' rape case were found guilty and condemned to execution, an estimated 23,000 rape cases are stuck in the judicial system. In 2011 its chief justice reported that of the Delhi High Court was lagging 466 years behind schedule, despite the fact that it considers each case for an average of only four minutes and 55 seconds. ‘It's a completely collapsed system,' the prominent advocate Prashant Bhushan was quoted as saying. ‘This country only lives under the illusion that there is a judicial system.' Given this, is it reassuring that India has revived the death penalty after an eight-year unofficial moratorium? Or does this, as
The Economist
warns, mark part of a broader ‘illiberal turn'?

Poor treatment of women is all the more shocking and outrageous given India's plethora of women leaders. Most famous is Indira Gandhi, who virtually dominated Indian politics from 1967 to her assassination in 1984. Despite her uneasy reputation—she led independent India's only brush with dictatorship, during the ‘Emergency' of 1975 to 1977—her white shock of hair continues to flash from postage stamps, green like the Wicked Witch of the West. When asked where the centre of Indian power lay, my interviewees agreed that (1) India is deeply dysfunctional at present, and nobody is in control, but (2) insofar as power rests anywhere, it rests with a woman: Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of Indira's son Rajiv and president of the ruling Congress party.

Delhi itself has had a female chief minister, Sheila Dikshit, since 1998. My interviewees in the Delhi power sector spoke highly of her for her willingness to listen to business and her technocratic inclinations. In this she is very different from two of India's other high-profile women politicians, Mamata Banerjee and Mayawati, both renowned for their cynical populism, patronage politics, and enormous egos: ‘Didi' painted swathes of central Calcutta her party's vivid blue, whilst ‘Behenji' lost the Uttar Pradesh elections in part because of her tendency to blow public funds erecting gigantic statues of herself. Misrule is gender-equal in India.

‘Hinduism respects women,' one of my interviewees said, in yet another of those answers that seems puzzling in retrospect, given our interview was about pylons. ‘We have Durga and Kali, for example—goddesses with necklaces of skulls who ride tigers and crush men underfoot.' Yet such powerful female figures have not necessarily led to improvements for most women. How could they, when everyone—especially their families—feels the city is so scary, so risky, for women? Far better to control the movements of the women in your family than risk her dishonouring herself and you. Sympathy too often seems reserved for a select and idealized bunch of ‘good women'. A recent campaign against domestic violence showed Hindu goddesses covered in bruises under the title
Save our Sisters
. Similarly ‘Nirbhaya', as the journalist Jason Burke noted, could be ‘neatly slotted into one of the three legitimate categories allowed to women in India: mother, spouse or child'. But what about women who aren't goddesses, or your sister?

Foreigners have already made up their minds about how all this applies to them. In 2012, 6.6 million international tourists visited India, the vast majority safely. In December of that year, the ‘Nirbhaya' rape case hit headlines across the world. In the following months companies reported that foreign tourist numbers had fallen by 25 percent, and female tourists by 35 percent. Really, though, it is worse for Western women in some ways—but much,
much
easier in others.

Indians are fond of highlighting the differences between the dissolute, materialistic West and the spiritual East. This contrast is perceived to be especially strong on the terrain of women's bodies. Western women wear short skirts, bikinis, and turn up in pornography around the world. Indian women of course come in a multitude of varieties. But the ideal Indian woman is modest, demurely dressed, and chaste even in the twenty-first-century megacity. Bollywood makes this clear: for all that heroines may dance in skimpy clothes and drape themselves over the heroes' pneumatic torsos, they finish the film in traditional wedding saris.

Foreign women—and my delicate brother—frequently complain about constant violation by hundreds of goggling strangers. Some beaches now even have signs imploring locals not to harass visitors. On one hand, Indians (some themselves internal tourists) have an inexplicable urge for pictures of dreadlocked albinos holding their unamused babies. On the other, young men—and often less young ones too, wearing suits and with their families mere feet away—are clearly interested in something else.

I don't deny the staring grows wearing. But gradually you become inured to it, just as you stop seeing the dirt. After a while your skin becomes hardened, callused, by the roving eyeballs, and you barely notice it anymore.

Except for the most egregious instances. There are moments when it becomes almost intolerable. My friend and I were wearing deliberately baggy, modest clothing for a nightbus. Yet for hours we suffered a creepy guy poking his fingers through cracks in the seat, trying to fondle our arms, backs, buttocks. We protested increasingly loudly, but the rest of the bus ignored us avidly. Around 5 am I lost it.
‘Tu janvar!'
I shouted: you animal. Everyone just stared, muttered, even looked disgusted. At me.

But Western women get a free pass in other ways. For example, Indian women never, ever call in at local ‘English wine' shops, those faintly embarrassed purveyors of beer and spirits. Even respectable men do it away from home. My ability to buy booze means narrowed eyes from the neighbours and the nightwatchmen and the men in the ice bar, but it does mean I get my own lady queue. Smoking, too, is permitted (just barely) for Western women. It means you're a slut, but well, everyone could see that anyway.