Delhi (31 page)

Outside, the show began with a spurt of violent lighting. A couple of oiled shirtless chaps with pectorals like unripe yellow Alphonsos shuffled sheepishly down the runway. Every now and then a female model stalked through wearing an expensive skirt made of teatowels and glared at the indifferent crowd. All proceeds to charity.

I hiccuped happily.

Next came the walking confirmation that the IPL is the heir of American sporting traditions: a cheerleading troupe. Called ‘White Mischief', it appeared to be composed of women from the former Soviet bloc in heavy tangerine makeup, the same group often associated with high-end prostitution. The IPL players perked up.

By this point we had well and truly sampled the delights of India's vineyards. The dancing began—alas, only for us, and with an attempt to dive into the VIP section. We managed precisely 24 glorious seconds of dancing with the beautiful people before the muscular security guards threw us back into the prole pen.

Finally, we danced with a bona fide dwarf. Just how I'd shoehorn this into my PhD I wasn't sure, but boy was I going to try.

Never fear: paddling in the murky pond of nighttime Delhi, every now and then I accidentally swallowed some Culture. The upmarket Delhi bars boasted Indo-Iranian fusion, sweaty house music, Congolese jamming, even a bad Serge Gainsbourg tribute band. But elite Delhi seemed to have another mission besides keeping up with the latest international fads/deceased French sleazebags: to reinvent Indian culture for the international stage.

Delhi may be developing the flashy nightlife of a megacity, but India is ambivalent about it. Alcohol, nightclubs and skimpily clad cheerleaders are immoral, the argument goes; they are not authentically Indian. Pressure from traditionalists and Hindu conservatives explains Bangalore's early closing times and the 2006 ban on Bombay's famous dance bars. The night, and especially the problem of women within it, is a key battleground for the conflict between ‘Indian tradition' and Westernized world city. Far better to stay at home, or to embrace instead a pristine classical Culture.

There are many areas of Delhi where the line between rural and urban feels blurred. Pigs roam the roadsides, dairy farms line the Yamuna river, and small farms encircle the city's densely urban core; their vegetables and flowers make it to Old Delhi's Chandni Chowk and North Delhi's Azadpur Sabzi Mandi. Middle-class entrepreneurs have got into the act as organic vegetable retailers, while the coupon website Groupon crashed under heavy traffic after it offered discounted onions.

But South Delhi's ‘farmhouses', though legally they are meant to be agricultural, have little of the farm about them. They are like fairytale woods, containing both the most surreally artsy of Delhi life and some of its most wolfish edges. The lanes of Chhattarpur and Ghitorni are quiet and green-lined. Privacy is all: the houses have guards, high walls, metal gates, chauffeured SUVs and CCTV cameras; their grounds and swimming pools are visible only on Google Earth (if you squint). US$50,000 might secure you one to host a wedding. Every now and then one of the capital's shadier success stories will be embroiled in a gunfight on such isolated properties.

Other farmhouses have begun to reinvent themselves as patrons of the arts. Surrounded by all burbling brooks and art-loving insects, I goggled at classical dances from across India. From North India,
Kathak
, a mixture of temple and Mughal court styles, which saw the dancers whirl like sobered-up dervishes. From eastern India,
Odissi
, a 2,000-year-old style that built from a sedate start to a frantic climax of vermillion-coated stomps, associated with
gotipuas
, young dancing boys who dressed as girls. From Kerala,
Mohiniyattam
, Vishnu's ‘dance of the enchantress', a frankly deranged mix of swooping arm movements and clownish facial expressions; and
Kathakali
, a tourist-friendly and drum-heavy flourish with a green-painted all-male cast. From its neighbour Tamil Nadu, the famous
Bharatanatyam
, a flouncy genitalia-obsessed Tamil style set to fluttering beats and syncopated religious chants; it was traditionally performed by
devadasis
, girls who were ‘married' off to deities and frequently ended up as high-end temple prostitutes.

To say Indian classical culture is enjoying a resurgence might be going too far—but Bollywood hits have not entirely vanquished their ancestors. Instead musical fusion, beat-heavy updates and elite evenings ensure it remains another resource for cultural pride. Washed down with
masala chai
in artfully traditional clay pots, of course, not Kingfisher. Such internationally recognizable cultural symbols—Bharatanatyam, sufi music, yoga—are ‘the software of their country's soft power', the
Times of India
argued in 2009.

Later that week I headed off again to gobble up culture—but in the polar opposite setting, a multi-faith mix that has yet to be fully disciplined and packaged up.

Nizamuddin is one of Delhi's more schizophrenic neighbourhoods. It is named after the great Sufi saint Nizamuddin Auliya, and simultaneously manages to host a urine-tinged railway station, a rather covetable residential area, and a series of grubby chattering alleys of staring eyes and pirate DVDs; I winced as I took off my shoes. At the end of these alleys is the saint's shrine, and a host of other tombs—including that of Inayat Khan, bearer of Sufism to London and the father of a glamorous British spy.

Sufism is a mystical, ascetic brand of Islam, which over the centuries fused bits and bobs of magic and other devotional traditions with Quranic meditation—to the extent that ‘un-Islamic' Sufi shrines are frequent targets for suicide bombings in Pakistan today. It welcomes all faiths; people of all religions visit to pray for favours.

Nizamuddin's Chishti order preached the power of music to bring believers closer to God. It it is for these hymns of devotion and remembrance, the sacred qawwalis, that clumps of tourists join the barefoot praying crowds. The
dargah
is an oddly welcoming mausoleum, an onion-domed and pillared shelter for the coloured tomb inside.

Two harmonium players struck up a dirge, two tabla players drummed, and another two joined in as they began to sing, a high throaty tremble. It was gritty rather than melodious, but oddly gripping—especially because the musicians were like a boyband inverted in a funhouse mirror, a motley collection of snouty, battered men with gnarled mouths dripping lurid red paan-juice onto the tiles. The music began to build with a clatter of tabla and a collective howl.

This evening, alas, devotees didn't fall into a trance and whirl like the famous Sufi dervishes. Fat drops of rain began to pelt the musicians. A rather impressive stripey roof whirred down—but alas, there was a tear just above the most senior wailer and the wads of devotional rupees were getting wet. God was packed up with the harmonium case for another day.

As a prophylactic measure against all that culture—it's terribly distracting for one's research—I turned from djinn to gin again. The months were getting on, and I was suddenly slightly homesick for the pub. I found myself sitting in another bar, in one of the ‘toniest' parts of town (a slang borrowing from nineteenth-century America).

Only two miles from Nizamuddin Dargah, Khan Market is an odd area, a U-shaped crack between dust and globalization. It lies ensconced within a sprawling hush of bungalows, nameplates at the entrance discreetly announcing the presence of ‘VVIPs'. The curved alleys are not immune to the syndrome afflicting most Indian streets—cracked pavements, sleeping dogs—and they seem to sweat, full of hot gusts and unsettling drips from AC units. But with typical perversity these alleys make up Delhi's most expensive shopping real estate, twenty-first dearest in the world. The crowd is rich, glossy, heavy on expats and Ladies Who Lunch. The shops cater to their whims: artisanal baguettes, big brands, caustic Anglophone non-fiction, canine treats, organic bruschetta. Every now and then I window-shopped, ogling European cheeses and insanely priced cushions.

I lingered over my not-quite-pint. As usual, the AC ethos was more is more: it was gooseflesh-cold. A fog of torpid American indie music descended.

Wherever there are bars and girls, there are guys talking big. A pause in conversation and
swoosh!
In swooped a white knight.

Lean, with cockroach-coloured hair, he had been all but waving at me from two tables over. I'd tried to dodge his gaze, but it was like trying to avoid a pair of black holes. He was one of those men who doesn't stare out of idle timepass habit, but out of an unshakable conviction that the ladies want to catch his eye.

His opening gambit was strong. ‘You're from UK.'

‘Well observed, my good man.' Unfortunately, the once wide-eyed newcomer had become a hardened old battle-axe, and this was a line of conversation designed to get my goat. ‘How did you know I'm not from Delhi?'

I had baited the trap, and took a sort of grim satisfaction when he toppled into it. The knight smiled and his head swaggered left and right. With a crinkled palm he gestured at my whiteness.

Forget the crush, forget the staring, forget my disturbing new smell. Forget the fact I was starting to feel homesick for what Wolfgang Tillmans calls Britain's ‘mix of damp carpet and apricot-scented potpourri, Marmite and repressed but omnipresent sexuality'. I felt depressed that no matter how long I live in Delhi, for all my Indian surname, I'll never belong. People will always look at me with $$$ or lechery or loathing in their eyes as a blank white cipher with blank white breasts. And when I say I'm doing a PhD—an entire blood-sweat-tears umpteen-year festival of geekery—on Indian politics, they'll still say things like, ‘There's this thing called the caste system, you probably haven't heard of it…'

I know it's greedy and quite possibly neo-imperialist to want to belong. But dang it, if Delhi really wants to be a world city, it needs to realize that the whole
point
of them is that they're fizzing cross-fertilizing kaleidoscopes of people.

Just to add insult to injury, while I was minding my own business with a bag of onions in the street a burqa-clad woman shouted at me, ‘Go back to where you came from!'

I'll check my privilege here of course: I know I have it easy. The Indian obsession with skin colour and good breeding has far worse repercussions for others. Whisper it: India is racist. Gandhi's non-violent civil disobedience inspired Martin Luther King; under Nehru India portrayed itself as an international moral force; the country stood up against South African apartheid when Thatcher's Britain despicably cowered.

But it's assumed that Indian
always
= brown, and the right kind of brown. In May 2013 the
Washington Post
, using World Values Survey data, revealed that India is the second-most racist country in the world (after Jordan) by a long way: 43.5 percent are
happy to declare
that they don't want a neighbour of a different race.

At a conference in Delhi I met a Nigerian who was studying in Pune (near Mumbai—even more famous for its intolerance to migrants). She spoke of insults in the street, of strangers touching her hair uninvited, and how no Indian student would be seen hanging out with her. Nepalis are stereotyped; Tibetan refugees are put in preventive detention; the government scowls at dual nationality.

Nor is racism confined to foreigners. Migrants from Bihar are mocked as crude, alien and endlessly breeding; even Delhi's chief minister got in on the act. Poor Muslims are accused of being ‘Bangladeshi infiltrators', Kashmiris suspected of being terrorists, and everyone is judged by how dark they are. All this is complicated by caste. It is no longer a rigid and inescapable system, its influence diminishing in the big cities, but still the fracture lines are real. Even British Hindu organizations have been accused of caste discrimination.

Northeasterners face particular discrimination, the beautiful Nagamese wife of a rugby player told me: constantly asked for ID, called ‘chinki'—an insult recently made punishable with imprisonment—and treated as outsiders. In 2007, the Delhi police produced the infamous
Security Tips for Northeast Students/Visitors in Delhi
. ‘Dress code: When in rooms do as Roman does,' it instructs, cryptically. It goes on to warn Northeasterners against ‘creating ruckus' by cooking their ‘smelly dishes'. Boy does New Delhi know how to win over the already disenchanted margins.