Delhi

A city my own yet stranger still.

I don’t have a quintessential Delhi memory. I don’t remember your gol gappes, your bylanes or the knife sharpeners. I don’t have a mithai from childhood , stories of banta or my grandmother’s lingering scent in a corner room. My childhood brims with whiffs of Kerala, a tuft of Delhi and later, a flood of Kuwait.

All this because i grew up in a Cantonment much like any other defence Cantonment in India; but this was a period where I could clutch onto only a dozen meandering memories. Then, I shifted to Dwarka, a sub-city unlike any other i have seen, a stone’s throw away from the quintessential chaos of west Delhi and bordering the glitz of a promise called Gurgaon.

In fact while your nostalgia might be hinged to the essence of Delhi, mine goes haywire because of the amalgamation of two day train journeys, Lays and a bottle of Pepsi and Nasik kishmishes and a plate of Ethekka Pazham. My nostalgia whooshes through cut scenes of snacks that my grandma used to make, snacks that Delhi won’t understand; it snakes through low hills amidst vanilla, coconut, rubber plantations, chickens, cows and copra that Delhi won’t care to relate to. And then, my nostalgia does a rude u-turn and shows a canvas stretched wide that teases me the quintessential Delhi memory made possible with childhood cricket and a convent school. But, this is a lugubrious cul de sac. Maybe, because vacations were synonymous with Kerala and drab confirmation anchored in school uniform were associated with Delhi.

So, do I love Delhi? Well, the answer lies in ambivalence. Is Delhi home to me? My geographical compass thinks so, but somehow my kernel feels alien to it.

To answer the latter first, because why stick to a linear order when all else that they taught at school has turned out to be wrong.

I grew up like Delhi, in dichotomy. But while Delhi is lucky that delhites take special care to not defile the sanctity of its contradictions, my friends were not even aware of the dichotomy. So, while everyone knew Smriti Irani from her tele-serial days, my first tryst with her was when she joined the BJP because I used to watch kadamathathe kathanar and swami Ayyappan while my classmates used to watch Kum kum bhagya (I beg your pardon if I got this wrong, I didn’t try and verify it on google) and discuss it in class. The analogies of hindi pop fiction were lost on me, bred on a steady diet of suryaTv and Asianet. Vacations to hill stations, a middle class North Indian staple was the other thing I never had until Appa returned from Kuwait for good.

In essence, by the time I reached high school, the analogies of pop fiction, the corruption of hindi due to the confluence of linguistic roots and of course skin colour (somehow it crops up everywhere, it is like the Ganges of contributory factors) had already made Delhi less of a home and more a ten month ordeal coinciding with the academic calendar.

So, enter the penultimate school year, appa comes back for good and I set out along with my family to finally make Delhi home. Vacations at hill stations, intermittent visits to malls, passing off yesterday as nostalgia and going out to movies. We even decided that Pind Baluchi would be our ‘family’ restaurant and ‘metro foods’ our takeaway restaurant. Thus began a journey of discovering what William Dalrymple calls so lovingly as the ‘City of Djinns’. I ate my way through nostalgia because I created them in real times in Chandni Chowk, Paharganj, daryaganj, Okhla, khan market, CP and the countless edifices left behind the desi Ozymandiases.

Slowly, I melted into Delhi (appa says I drive like a delhite; with scant regard for the world). I made peace with the fact that a part of me would feel it familiar here in the neat lay of Dwarka.

Delhi is a mood really, it doesn’t have that one quintessential element that Bollywood is fond of capturing. Delhi is not CP or Chandni Chowk, it’s not the Hanuman statute that you see in the movies or Lajpat Nagar or CR Park. Delhi is an amalgamation, a living entity that grows disorganised one day in one direction and decides to be disciplined on the next day and grows in another direction (read DDA discipline in Dwarka). It takes the mood of people and moulds it, bursts out in flames when pressured and fans out in a cacophony of colours when revealed. It’s polluted, tarred like a smoker’s innards, the edges are fraying and the weather should have an essay in itself. Delhi might not be a mooring but I have celebrated my birthdays in chilly Octobers, and missed Christmas mass in zero visibility Decembers. There have been warm Decembers and torrential Julys. But there have also been mild summers and half a decade later, scorching sun throughout the vacation days when I used to hide in Kerala.

But through all this Delhi taught me that a pockmarked, scarred skin has a story to tell. The scorching heat followed by the rains of respite and the pictures of kids jumping in the pools at India Gate featured in ‘Hindustan Times’ a decade back is perhaps my own nostalgia. Today, I have made an island for Malayalam so that I can stir the alcoves in my heart, enclaves for English to express and an expanse in Hindi to taste the grass underneath my bare feet.

So, do I love Delhi? Not really. If given a choice like what they give at the start of an online role playing strategy game, I would choose a different place on the map. But, almost a quarter century of Delhi later, I am dyed in Delhi.

Is it home? Travelling to other cities have taught me that I would always be a tourist there. Delhi has made me feel alien far too many times to call it home and it offers meagre little in terms of relativity. But, it is what Tortuga is for Captain Jack Sparrow, the first call of port; this is the city that I am still at most ease with.

But, maybe this is the destiny of those who are from many worlds and yet belong to none. Tumbleweed in a gorge.

Written by Joel Joseph