Back in the city of my birth and misspent first 28 years, tongue-in-check humour is the way to go, I'm told. But then I rarely if ever listen to well-meaning advice.
So, it struck me that the reason for the proliferation of phallus-shaped architectural monstrosities in the south-western suburb of the Capital where I made a pit-stop with family en route to New Delhi is the same as that of the success of a subaltern dhongi baba now cooling his well-heeled clogs in the cooler as a sarkari mehmaan… who, hate to admit it as I do, is very much an undesired by-product of the Indic civilisational ethos so no can blame the fundoo Kitaabiwallahs for all such. (Just so that you know and for future reference, I have been banned from using the following phrase at home by my loved ones in any conversation whatsoever, even when I plead it is necessary to establish positional clarity and demarcate clear blue water between self and the loonies ~ Indic civilisational ethos rooted secular-feminist, muscular liberal.)
Where was IIJ Yeah, the soaring perversions of — or should it be on — our bodypolitic. Okay, so I finally made it across the border from suburbia and into Delhi proper. To be immediately confronted by the existentialist question: What is it about Khan Market that sends even non-twits into such paroxysms of gushIJ It used to be a place where my maternal grandfather would take me aged about three plonked on the standing place of his Vespa in the mid-1970s to buy fresh fruit. Bureaucratic squatters were always in the vicinity, though, I now recall, and their fruitcake off-spring and sundry basketcases have obviously done the dirty/tony.
What happened here, for crying out loudIJ Now before PhD scholars from JU/JNU take the question literally — always assuming they read The Pioneer where those two arch-imperialists Rudyard Kipling and Chandan Mitra still rule the roost — and fire in something incendiary about spatial fascism, I promise to think about it and let you know. Just as soon as I dip into my daughter’s Oxbridge fund to pay for a couple of coffees at Café Hurtle to financial disaster, as it were. But I’m that much ahead of the game — clearing dues at what pass for dives in these parts probably requires a re-mortgage.
Moving on and due East I realised that there is no such thing as the Delhi I knew anymore. I had this grand plan of reliving the sights and sounds that lulled me to sleep as a kid in the abovementioned grandfather’s house in Nizamuddin East. Sight: Humayun’s Tomb. Sound: Roars from the big cats’ enclosure at the Delhi zoo. Ha! Idiot, I.
Expats with pension-linked dollar salaries gainfully employed with multinational agencies across lutyens’ Delhi have colonised the few Sunder Nagar barsaatis left on the market to let and a class of peoplewho made their money post-1991, let's leave it at that, have bought “builder floors” in Niz East. God bless them all.
literature is, of course, the last refuge of the student of history so I quoted the Brothers Waugh (don’t go there, it's not a cricketing reference) to the partner and took her to eat chaat at Sunder Nagar Market and then further afield to Bengali Market. I was asked what the *&#! (that's hell, btw) was I thinkingIJ These were not phuchkas. These were crap. The water was all wrong, both content and temperature; ditto, the filling. I called my daughter for help, then remembered she grew up in Cal. I’m done.
(The writer, Consulting Editor, The Pioneer, spent the past five years in Goa and shock is his primary emotion having experienced his hometown for a prolonged period after a longish time.)
