Two afternoons in Delhi
Discovering a city might not always be pleasant
We search for the broadest part of the street to park our car. We should have turned off the air conditioner sooner. The moment we step out, the heat makes me sneeze.
Habituated to navigating through narrow lanes of old cities and small towns that open up mysteriously into wide colonies and grounds, we expect the sub-two feet gallery to broaden at some point. It constricts even further.
The terrain is bumpy like the skin of an over-sized radioactive potato. Troughs and mounds appear out of nowhere. I am certain potatoes grown here would become radioactive.
Wires hang overhead like disappointment in the air. They are of all sizes. Some as thick as my wrist. Some as thin as the legs of the first person we meet. His eyes are yellow. And red. He looks stoned. He isn’t stoned. He’s not even drunk. I am a little surprised at my preconceived notion not coming true. The wires are not as thick as I thought. Flies sit on every millimeter of space available and make the wires look doubly thick. As we proceed down the alley, we walk inside the cloud of flies. The flies look angry at being disturbed. They get back to their seats as we move on.
He is from Bengal. Not Bangladesh. His jhuggi (shanty) is smaller than the balcony of the house I call home these days. The door is absent. A cut up plastic sac is the curtain. Tattered, it hides nothing from the outside. There is little inside to hide. A whole lot of darkness. 5 people live here. All of them are pickers. There were six last year. His 11 year old son couldn’t make it in the last monsoons. When it rains, it doesn’t need to pour for the slum to flood. His son drowned last year. He becomes emotional telling us this. I am surprised again. He tells us he used to work at a garment factory until the municipality sealed it along with scores of other illegal units dotting the East Delhi ghetto. Instead of going back to a village where he had no land, he became a rag picker. He doesn’t sound like he feels it to be a demotion.
The hill behind the shanty grunts from time to time. Rubble, compressed by time and trucks, falls unwillingly. There are a hundred colours on the hill and all of them look brown. White plastic in all shapes protrudes like shrubs erupting on faces of hills. Some garbage sacks seem deposited for so long that plants have actually managed to grow on them.
Six hundred odd families live around here. The pickers live right on the edge of ‘the hill’. The scrap dealers have managed to move further inside the colony where brick houses have erupted like wild mushrooms with no sanctity for aesthetics. Hardly any of them own these though. Most are rented out. When the rains come, the picker families take up these places on rent for as long as four months before the water recedes.
I am bound to ask about the health problems they face. They know symptoms, not diseases. They tell me four people in the last six months collapsed without warning. Dead before looking sick. The water from the two hand pumps is yellower than their eyes. It is to be drunk on days when the tanker doesn’t arrive to sell less dirtier water. They vomit all night on those days.
None of the children I see wear any form of footwear. They look better than i expected. No swollen bellies or alien heads. Another person tells me about his daughter who fell ill last year. The scrap dealers are also the money lenders in this society, He took fifteen thousand rupees on loan. He pays a monthly interest of three thousand rupees. He has not been able to repay a single rupee from the principle amount. Twenty per cent interest per month. This time I shudder.
There is a woman who looks just like the others but wears a badge. It looks like just the kinds that everyone walking around Gurgaon’s Cyber City during lunch hour sports on their waist or neck. The NGO we arrived with had given it to her. They acknowledge her as a mini-leader of sorts. Community influencer. She tells us how she used to pick from the streets but then graduated to taking a wheel barrow to the middle class locality some ten kilometers away. Then she was attacked a few times So she now works closer home. We do not bother to ask her to explain. She tells us how the women have only half and hour window for ablutions each day in the evening — after sunset but before the swarms of mosquitoes descend.
The Bhalswa landfill is less than five miles from the Mayor’s residence and the state assembly. It is the biggest landmark on National Highway One before one steps out of Delhi into the richer lands of Punjab.
17th April 2013, 2:30 pm
We park our car in between an white Audi and a blue Mercedes. The uniformed guard at the parking lot bows and tips his hat in anticipation.
Green picket fences line the passage to the club-house. The course emerges beyond the silk cotton bushes. To the left is a once ornate dome with some thirty six pillars supporting it. To the right, the womb shaped swimming pool and the blue mosaic at its bottom dancing to the currents of water. Right in front of us, the club house.
A flight of stairs take us to the bar, There is the best view of the course from here. It is hard to imagine how, but many men and women brave the heat to play. The eighteenth hole is almost right below the terrace where smokers hide under canvas umbrellas. There is a contest on. ‘Bhatts’ and ‘Smacky’ are a few yards from the green. Their caddies bend at weird angles to get a view of the hole and discuss animatedly about the birdie shot. Gentlemen on the terrace smoking next to me offers free commentary and advice. Everyone apart from me seems to know each other. Half on them are from expensive boarding schools in the hills of north India.
The bar is full. More women than men. More elderly gents than youngsters. My friend, the member, shakes hands with lots of them. The white haired gentlemen behind him is chewing on a cigar. The waiters stick to him like flies. A smart looking man sits to our right in a red tee and beige shorts. He has a cap with a fancy golfing brand named on it that I find hard to pronounce. He says hi to my friend and talks in an accent that only those Indians who travel a lot outside have. It is not like the put on accent that the new money Indian takes up after his very first trip abroad. This is not a show off. The conversation ends in the guy telling my friend of his plans to spend the summer in Tokyo and praising the club for the food and drinks.
We pick up the menu. It seems cheaper than last time we were here. I remember having gin and tonic eight years back for less than thirty bucks. It felt guilty to be sitting in the most plush location of the city and paying peanuts for good alcohol. We order our favorite brand again. And some grilled fish and kebabs. He tells me how last year, when bacon wrapped prawns were removed from the menu, there was an uproar from members. That particular item sold more than everything else on the menu.
More than a few foreigners walk in and out of the bar. They are dressed significantly casually compared to the Indians in the room. They wear much less jewelry in general. We walk out to the terrace after a round. There are peacocks around the course lurching under the trees. The entire place sounds rich. Silence smells of luxury and old money.
After almost a couple of hours and three drinks each, we decide to leave. I ask my friend to direct me to the wash rooms. We take the steps down to emerge into a cafe at the ground floor right under the smoking terrace. Young parents are feeding their kids on fluffy sandwiches and pastries. We walk past them to enter the men’s changing room. There is a treadmill on one side and two massage chairs with a couple of pre-teens rolling on each of them with their wire controls in hand and giggles on their faces. The gel in their hair makes for rock solid spikes. They are facing the fifty five inch lcd television which seems eternally tuned to golf. The restrooms inside are cleaner than a lot of five star hotels I have seen.
We walk out going past the cafe and the ice cream stand. Two women in khadi cotton talk to a staff member. They gesture wildly about where to put the standees for the invitation golf tournament starting tomorrow. We notice the small billboard as we approach the parking — Invitation Golf Tournament in aid of a charity that works for betterment of street children.
The Delhi Golf Club is the heart of central Delhi’s old money. It is less than twenty miles from the Bhalswa landfill.
