Delhi (27 page)

You too can become fluent in the bobble. Imagine your head is ludicrously gigantic, like that of a Thunderbirds doll or James van der Beek. Keep your face entirely expressionless (resigned eye-closing optional): we're talking reluctant subordinate 'tude here, not African-American diva. Relax your neck and dip your left ear precisely 15° and then precisely 15° for the right ear. Repeat smoothly for several minutes. Practise in all social situations for the rest of your life.

12

S
TOMACHS

Of course reading and thinking are important but, my God, food is important too.

—Iris Murdoch,
The Sea, The Sea

Y
OU MUST COME TO OUR PLACE FOR DINNER
. The text came out of the blue, from a newly discovered cousin of unknown genetic proximity. I wrote back instantly: of course, delighted, where & when.

Then I turned and examined the condition of my younger sibling. He was lying facedown with his head in a bucket.

Three years younger and eight inches taller than me, Feckless Brother had very sweetly wangled his way into our parents' pockets and come to visit. He now sells wine for a living in a much-maligned part of southern England, where everyone is small and tangerine, and had never travelled anywhere before that didn't sell full English breakfasts on every corner. He also looks much more Indian than I do. In Delhi this proved confusing to everyone, most of all him, and led a creepy number of people to assume we were married. Nonetheless, for the first few days he had coped admirably.

My phone rang. It was the Mothership, who never called. ‘Your brother says he's wasting away.'

Yes: the only problem was feeding the poor wee mite. Feckless Brother is one of life's natural Atkins Dieters. In Britain his usual meals consist almost entirely of pigs-inblankets, an obscenely fleshy dish of sausages wrapped in bacon. Sadly for him, he was staying with a sadistic vegetarian in a primarily vegetarian country. For a couple of days he managed to restrain the carnivorous urges, although with much cursing and complaining.

At last he cracked, at the worst possible moment.

We took a bus out of the malevolent bubble of Delhi heat and headed a little northeast. After a painful juddering night on wheels, we arrived at some low hills near the hill station of Nainital. There by Naukuchiatal, the Lake with Nine Corners, we were to spend a couple of days at a music festival, complete with floppy-haired high-kicking boyband, turbaned rock guitarists, and Lou Majaw, an obsessive sexagenerian Bob Dylan devotee from Shillong, who wore long silver hair and Daisy Dukes.

If you manage to look at all nine corners of the lake at once, you vanish in a puff of enlightened smoke. It was a lovely spot, all red soil and surprisingly puffy trees and little thatched storage huts. The sky was cool, at least in comparison with Delhi, and unbroken except for the odd paraglider and staccato flutter of tuning instruments. Beside the lake a rusting green sign appealed:

I smile when you smile at me

I feel you touch my waters…

But I hurt so much

When my shores are scattered with your litter

AND NOW

I, your Darling The Lake

LOOK UGLY

The festival was quiet. We set out to liven the place up with a misplaced sense of patriotism. We were merrily headbanging to a heavy-metal group, occasionally falling into a large hole in the ground just in front of the stage, when Feckless Brother suddenly stopped and drooped.

‘I'm wasting away, I'm wasting away…'

I looked at his eyes, round and blurred as salami slices. He'd had a beer or two, and it was clear the bloodlust was raging. At a trot he set off towards the food stalls, sniffing the air. I followed.

The meat stall would have given the Borgias pause. It was deserted except for a vast number of obese flies, all busily feasting. Even the bored youngster manning it looked reluctant to touch his produce. But my brother thrust a clutch of rupees over the stained counter and seized a chicken leg. Holding it like a microphone, he tore in. It was a pleasant shade of salmonella pink. He looked guiltily over the bone.

The scythe of food poisoning struck four hours later, with clockwork predictability.

Delhi belly is an Indian rite of passage—so much so that Kipling owes another verse: ‘If you can heave—and not spill out your innards…' Feckless Brother did not appreciate this attempt at consolation. So I will repress my verbal diarrhoea on the subject of sanitation, and spare you the details and him the burning cheeks. Suffice to say, as we buzzed at the door of our relatives' house he looked distinctly forlorn.

Cousin turned out to be a kind, impatient woman with sensible hair and two little daughters. Gifts dispensed—once again sweets had proved a bad idea; they were dieting—we all thronged around the sitting room. Feckless Brother gingerly seated himself, wincing. I perched on a hard bed and smiled at the two little girls. They shrank back silently with terrified rabbit eyes.

As Cousin disappeared into the recesses of the house, things got off to a bad start. ‘Are you enjoying the school holidays?' I asked, sounding very English and a little too loud.

The two little girls burst out crying and hid.

Cousin re-entered at speed, bearing bowls. ‘Here is food. You will like it. Amma has been
slaving
away
all
day preparing it for you with her own hands.' The grey-haired lady in the corner nodded vigorously.

India's cuisine—or rather cuisines, given its vast and delicious regional range—is more than a practical business of refuelling. It's more even than a concrete manifestation of culture. In India eating is
moral
. It has
consequences
. Particular people do and don't eat particular things, offer food to the gods and receive back the leftovers. Weddings are vast and elaborate multi-course feasts, sometimes for thousands of guests. On the other hand, there are strict traditional rules about who should and shouldn't share food: competitive and humiliating exclusions are the other side of generosity. And it is a vast and labour-intensive cuisine, requiring hours of (almost always female) effort, whilst the best morsels go to the men and boy-children.

This moral marination also means that India is probably the best country in the world to be a vegetarian. Vegetarianism is so common that you can relax knowing that there will be a number of delicious, varied options available as a matter of course. It would be suicide to serve pork to a Muslim or beef to most Hindus, so you are not likely to find your veggie dinner spiked with that well-known vegetable, ham, unlike in much of Europe. Many upper-caste Hindus, especially older women, are punctiliously vegetarian: no fish, no eggs. My only criticism is that ‘wedge' restaurants tend to be rather pious and nonalcoholic, but otherwise India is my stomach's natural home. Joyous, joyous Veggiestan!

Not today, though. My stomach did a slow flip of social horror. Before me the bowlful of chicken curry glistened pleasingly, red and pocked. In true Anglo-Indian style, a pair of boiled eggs lolled in the sauce like eyeballs, ringed with a delicate layer of orange grease.

Feckless Brother had turned an ominous shade of yellow. ‘I'm so sorry—I'm sick, I can't eat that.
Really
sick.'

‘Nonsense,' Cousin said,
‘nonsense
. I am a doctor, and there is nothing wrong with you. Now you
must
eat it or Amma will be so
very
disappointed. She worked
all day and night
with her
own hands.'
The old lady's eyes filled with tears, and she nodded so vigorously that her bracelets rattled.

My little brother emitted a gurgle.

I could see a couple of bits of bone, some sinew. It couldn't have looked more chickeny if it was wearing a feather boa. There was no way to pretend this was a plant. Perhaps there was a nearby plant pot or handbag I could secrete it in. I cast around—but the relatives were watching, militant pleasure giving way to a scowl as the seconds ticked on. If only the meat-and-two-veg reputation of the British hadn't tracked us here, five thousand miles away from England's overboiled grub.

Feckless Brother looked pleadingly at me with big brown Labrador eyes. I could hear the Mothership's phone voice echoing through my head, like a lady version of Alec Guinness: ‘Protect your brother—he's only twenty-two and ever so delicate. Be a good big sister, and go to the Dark Side.'

I took a deep breath. Down went the meat, the delicious evil meat, and six years of vegetarianism. ‘Mmmm…'

Cousin brightened. ‘There is much more in the kitchen!'

Like our father, Feckless Brother returned from his Indian voyage only half the size he started at, and possibly harbouring a parasitic new friend. Rites of passage often include physical changes to mark your transition to adulthood: scars, tattoos, muscles, piercings, sensible haircuts, a new air of dignity. Yet against all the odds, each time I go to India I become fat.

There is a myth in the West that the entire developing world finds fat women attractive. Just as Botticelli's Venus proudly displays a bit of a tummy inside her medieval seashell, countries with major malnutrition problems are supposed to like voluptuous curves. Unfortunately for me, this is no longer true (apart from in the world of South Indian pornography, I hear, but this could be scurrilous gossip). Delhi has wealthy pockets enough to have begun the transition to an obesity epidemic, especially among the screen-loving middle classes. One 2012 study—admittedly sponsored by a cooking-oil maker, the rival of traditional ghee—found that three-quarters of Dilliwallas were overweight or obese. The city has correspondingly begun the transition to skinny girl love. My physical expansion was not socially acceptable.

Nor will Indians let you discreetly wallow in your newfound corpulence. It's not just foreigners who attract eyes: anyone even vaguely weird-looking or even vaguely female does. This is coupled with a famous nosiness—the classic ‘how much do you earn?' quizzing—and a frankness hideous to British ears. ‘Your personality grows larger every year!' a typically brutal Auntie said to a friend's cousin, by which she meant: ‘Fattyboomboom, you are expanding at the same rate as Delhi.' I've eavesdropped on brutal conversations that basically went ‘Woah, porky, lose the monobrow'. Equally when people say I ‘look like a Punjabi', I slap them and burst into Bollywood tears. When this comes from anyone who isn't a Punjabi, it's unflattering. Our Bangalore landlady took to patting me on the cheek and saying joyfully, ‘You are getting so fat!'

The newish and perhaps more ruthless idea of beauty comes with natural consumerist bedfellows, of course. A stroll of the nearby malls saw shop assistants pounce on me with hunger in their eyes. ‘You need a manicure, madam. And a haircut. And a good moisturizer. And a facial peel. And an eyebrow tweeze. And—' This is a generational shift: the Indian state is still dominated by comfortable paunches, straining under white shirts. But the pressure applies to both men and women.

As ever, Bollywood was ahead of the curve. Though earlier stars had already begun a trend for male cleavage, curls of hair licking out from low-cut shirts, in the early 1990s Shahrukh Khan could still be lean and boyish. Salman Khan ushered in a whole new era of exhibitionist ab shots and toplessness. Fluffy hair was out(ish), bad boys in wifebeaters were in. Never mind six-packs: the best of them have
eight-
packs. By the end of the decade SRK had muscles; even effigies of the god Ram were bulking up. The stars' exercise regimes are now discussed in India's vibrant and increasingly raunchy gossip magazines—Pilates, celebrity trainers, protein shakes, steroid abuse—and actresses' post-pregnancy weight gain is treated as a national scandal. India opened economically to the world, and the Hollywood physique swaggered in. Its neuroses scuttled in behind.

Gyms have sprouted over the country like muscular mushrooms in the last decade. Previously working out was a niche activity, largely confined to the macho wrestling of young male nationalists. Now it's aspirational. In our distant suburb of Bangalore in 2010, the brand-new local gym was proudly advertised on the local high street. Its proximity to Electronic City meant groups of IT workers graced it at odd hours, tubby and miserable in their shirts. Despite this, sign-in was manual, in a thick penciled ledger. My coworker Alicia and I were the first women to join, much to the undisguised creepy joy of certain older members. It was a novel experience, fiendishly humid, and prone to power cuts that hurled leg-pumping patrons from the suddenly stalled machines. But it was inspiring, too: soon other women could be seen trailing their saris dangerously over the treadmills.

Forget power cuts and sari workouts. Although local gyms dominated as late as 2008, Delhi now boasts an array of options, from the nostalgically cheap and sweaty to sleek multinationals. No mall is complete without a gleamingly expensive gym complex, priced like London. They have juice bars and Western soundtracks and rows of Apple desktops for checking your emails. Their clientele wear designer sports brands and play golf. India might still be plagued by malnutrition–one in every three malnourished children in the world lives in India, says Unicef—but Delhi does everything fast. Already, and in the face of endemic poverty, thinness is becoming a status symbol.