Delhi (32 page)

Nagaland, close to the border with Myanmar, is India's frontier, and for decades it has been handled with more discreet brutality than Kashmir. In 2010 I visited, a nauseating potholed eleven-hour journey through lush green hills to a village half in India, half Myanmar. A watch-post glinted on the other side of the valley, although the villagers crossed the border with impunity. Old men, faces tattooed from old head-hunting wars, clutched self-made muskets and spent the evenings smoking opium, freshly plucked from individual bushes that the government tactfully ignored. We were shown the re-excavated skulls of old victims, dug from their respectful if bemused Catholic resting place under a tree. The younger people were slender, the men in neat tracksuits, the girls in vest tops that would outrage much of Delhi. The Nagas have become justly famous for their linguistic skills—‘the air is full of them!' a middle-aged man told me, glaring at the plane's stewardesses—and all spoke four or five languages. But in the village there was little employment, crap roads, no electricity—although wires stretched to the nearby army camp, home to battalions of the notorious Assam Rifles. The old insurgency bubbled just under the surface.

I said something tactful like all this to the white knight, who gave a neck-shrug. ‘Throughout our history India has been invaded. It is not a powerful country. So we cannot be racist.'

Then the white knight made a knight's move, something not unfamiliar but a little leftfield for lady-wooing: ‘UK is finished.' He steepled his fingers with an objective air. ‘It is a small island only. Nothing to offer to the twenty-first century.'

‘Oh,' I said, for it is fairly difficult—and certainly unBritish—to disagree. ‘And India?'

‘India is now a powerful country.'

‘But you just said—'

Another knight's move. This was like talking geopolitics with a goldfish. ‘India should take over Pakistan. It is a failed state. They should be happy to be part of us instead …'

Get me a stiff drink.

14

N
OSES

My genius is in my nostrils.

—Friedrich Nietzsche

T
he end of my quest was nigh. I'd laughed, cried, sweated, listened, scribbled and danced, and now only one task remained: to collect mementos. But my mind, addled with sweat and gin, seemed to be playing tricks.

I woke in the middle of the night with a strange unsettled feeling, sitting heavily in the pit of my belly like an unwanted meal. There was something wrong. Very, very wrong.

For days I had been twisting my neck in shops and on the metro. I discreetly cocked my head and flared my nostrils wide, unwary shell-pink interiors exposed to the outside world. And I murmured to myself, ‘What
is
that smell?'

The smell lurked everywhere, not entirely pleasant but not unpleasant either. It was like déjà vu, alien but oddly familiar. It lurked in my clothes, my books, hovered over my bed like a mosquito whine.

My treacherous nose did at least provide a brief distraction. A bad life decision, best discreetly whipped over, managed to knock out my nose piercing. I was embroiled in a race against time to find a new bit of metal to shove into my face before it healed. Surely it would be easy, given many Indians seem to love sticking things in the old
nak
, as is well evidenced on public transport.

‘Do you have a thing for my nose?' I asked jeweller after jeweller. Before the fateful knock, virtual strangers would advise me on whether my own stud was in the correct side (‘Your nose, it is wrong'). Now the sales assistants, who invariably had their own noses pierced, goggled at me as though I'd just proposed sticking a tiara in my mouth and calling myself Lil Wayne.

I was about to resort to gold wedding nose jewellery, most of which looked to weigh several kilograms and somehow chain your nose to your ear, when I finally found a nose stud—in an American chain store. Watched by a few curious children, I jammed one back into my flesh and breathed a slightly bloody sigh of relief.

Then I realized: the smell was back. It followed me east to the drab sprawl of Ghaziabad, where it mingled with my paanflavoured icecream. It followed me to the lavish Imperial Hotel, host of many discussions over independence and Partition, where it inspected the art deco flourishes and caressed the red-clad bellhops' noses. The smell followed me north to the Tibetan refugee colony of Majnu-ka-Tilla, where together we failed to enjoy yak-butter tea under posters of runners haloed in violent orange, young men who had burnt themselves in their nation's cause. Self-immolation is a cheap, imitable and media-savvy form of protest. The Arab Spring has made it newly fashionable, but India has long been a world leader: six weeks in 1990 saw a wave of at least 200 self-immolations by high-caste students protesting the increase in reserved places for lower castes.

With rising panic I searched for the smell's source. Perhaps I'd left a morsel of dinner under my pillow. Perhaps I'd sprayed so much mosquito repellent that it'd destroyed the ozone layer. Perhaps Kamala had stubbed out cigarettes in the laundry again.

Of course, the weird smell was
me
.

There is nothing more unsettling, nothing that can make you more suddenly aware of your own newfound foreignness, than being surprised by your own smell. It's even odder than being surprised by your own reflection—at least you can wave and see your mirror image do the same. I'd come to Delhi wanting a transformation, and got one: I felt body-snatched.

I must have missed something. India is meant to be all soul. Yet rather than firing the higher reaches of my spirit, Delhi seemed determined to make me live more in the body. The heat, the sizzle of spice on monoglot tongue, the oft-burbling intestines, the new smells seeping from my pores: my soul was overwhelmed and passive in the face of it all.

At the centre of all this sudden bodily experience was my nose. Formerly a passive (if rather substantial) outcropping, it was suddenly unleashed.

The capital has been called many things, but no unhappy moniker has stuck faster than the cruelly rhyming ‘smelly Delhi'.

That India smells is a motif almost as classic as its spirituality. Most Western books are unforthcoming on life's little reeks and whiffs. Indian books, though, not only explode with colours: they stink.
Midnight's Children
bubbles with simmering chutneys, the smell of the narrator's lover, and the famous encounter of his grandfather's proud schnozzle—in which dynasties are contained ‘like snot'—with a prayer mat. The protagonist of
Animal's People
crawls at waist height and notes the profusion of smells with a sort of masochistic glee: his is a world of farts and unwashed groins. Kiran Desai's Darjeeling district smells of mice, boiled vegetables, kerosene and the forest's rich dark humus; the scents of Arundhati Roy's beautiful Kerala are toxically evocative: yellow teeth, old urine, sourmetal handcuffs, blood. (The India of
Eat, Pray, Love
, of course, is pleasantly perfumed with incense and jasmine.)

This is alarming for the modern tourist. Blogs burst with horrified ramblings of travellers who have forgotten their nose pegs. They complain about the smell of urine-soaked walls and beaches covered in (human) turds. They complain about garlicky body odour on public transport and rotting garbage in the heat. They complain about the smell of cow dung, rivers of raw sewage, and offal around the Old Delhi butchers.

Young women apparently feel disgust particularly keenly (along with fear of flying, incidentally), so I am hardly immune to bad smells. But I think India's stinkiness is seriously overplayed.

First, we must be careful not to assume that our noses automatically sniff out the Truth. We are simple creatures. The same parts of our brain appear to handle physical and moral disgust, so when we feel repelled by strong or unfamiliar odours it is easy to react emotionally. We sometimes speak as though our nostrils are truth seekers—as though we can actually smell the stink of corruption or the maggoty rottenness of political villains in the air, just as Victorian aristocrats caught the dangerous anarchic whiff of ‘the great unwashed'.

But noses can be misled (perfume being the multi-billion-dollar example). Often they mix up Unfamiliar and
Evil
. It's notable that racist demonization of immigrants everywhere, from Singapore to Australia, heavily focuses on their smells. But Unfamiliar can be interesting. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot paraphrasing Rudyard Kipling, the first condition of understanding a foreign place is to smell it. You came wanting difference, and Delhi offers many olfactory experiences you don't get from visiting Edinburgh, say, or Mont Blanc.

Second, it's a thrill to finally smell
something
. The problem is that modernity is anti-smell. It might even be anti-nose entirely, if we consider that Michael Jackson was a modern icon. ‘Civilization' means freeing us from streams of shit in the street, oniony dinner-table burps, flatulent beasts and B.O. Instead the world is scrubbed clean and neutered. Our workspaces are chilled, food wrapped, flowers scentless, armpits deodorized, sewage safely sealed on the other side of the U-bend. Noses dormant, retired like old hound-dogs, we fall in thrall into our eyes. We goggle and sightsee (what an odd word), big glassy vein-lined eyeballs rolling unstoppably forth to hoover up the exotic through our gaping black retinas and camera lenses. Meanwhile our noses are ignored, except perhaps at mealtimes, and when they choose to dribble in the winter.

In India the nose is restored to its queenly place.

Third, and most importantly in my end-of-days state, the nose is the organ of nostalgia. Though none of us has read Proust, we know a picture is worth a thousand words and a scent a thousand pictures. As your memories fade, you risk overrelying on a few hasty snapshots. Your nose, however, contains multitudes.

Put down your camera, and this book, so you can close your eyes. Now: flare your nostrils. (Probably best to open your eyes again every now and then. Swiss Chick, international booty call of one of my language school housemates, plunged straight into a drain on her first day, reemerging monstrous and slimy from the neck down à la 1950s B-movie
The Blob.
)

Ah! Like a dreaming dog or a bee to nectar, my nose is twitching wistfully just thinking of it all:

And so many more, a whole theatre of memories. Traditionally, Indian odours form a whole series of languages. On one hand, bad smells play a potent role in upper-caste prejudice: traditional ‘untouchable' work often involved ‘unclean' substances with unpleasant smells, like blood, corpses, leatherwork or human waste. Once again, smell, disgust and bigotry appear closely linked.