Parts That Make A Hole

Yet nothing you experience today connects the city to its once historic greatness. Even the idea of the seven cities of Delhi seems just another myth of history. The tombs and rusticated walls that appear in new neighbourhoods only smell of damp and decay. All around them rise stylised houses of colonies and miles of housing schemes—Rajinder Nagar, New Rajinder Nagar, Paharganj, Patparganj, Dwarka and New Dwarka—disconnected enclaves without boundaries, sprawling endlessly, independent of each other and often independent of the city as well. They could be anywhere—Lucknow, Chennai or Delhi—indistinct places full of indistinct lives wholly indifferent to their city.

City Improbable is an honest title for a place that was once—in the depth of its own historic past—a city. Like the city, the book too remains as disjointed. Tracing a linear chronological path, it is an anthology of several unrelated ideas: records of the birth of the historic city, its culinary and artistic passions, the imposition of Lutyens’ colonial vision and the rise of the Indian bureaucracy, the city’s insular neighbourhoods after independence, and the guardians of its old and new money, among others. The collective of writers is certainly impressive—from Khushwant Singh’s own introduction of his love and loathing for Delhi, to Timur Lane’s account of his conquest, to Jan Morris’ fine essay Mrs Gupta Never Rang on the bureaucracy, ending finally in Rukmini Bhaya Nair’s poetic vision of the frustrations of modern city life. Part history, part biography, the book is largely about specific places and people that reside within the homogeneous mass called Delhi. Madhu Jain’s Sujan Singh Park, Bulbul Sharma’s Lodi Garden and Ranjana Sengupta’s Lodi Colony depict the anthropology of specific neighbourhoods and the idiosyncrasies of their residents, while Mrinal Pande’s Bitch and Renuka Narayanan’s One Long Party suggest the contrasting social rituals of the city’s labour and landed classes. Clubs, hijdas, flowersellers, defecators, kittypartygoers, ragpickers and Shopper’s Stop housewives are the central figures and features of today’s Delhi. These lie happily exposed in the writing. "The sight of men waddling off in pairs to water a wall," writes Manjula Padmanabhan in Public Relief, "is so common that I must conclude it is a feature of male bonding." Her piece draws upon her own flights of imagination to give extra weight to this simple yet socially complex public act. "I am always wildly curious to know what they talk about. Are they sharing output analyses? Personal measurements? Inflow-outflow data?" Like Padmanabhan’s, most pieces in the book paint a truly lurid portrait of the city—a city whose misshapen cartoon-like residents give it its uniquely Delhi character.

That the book does only so much, but doesn’t go far enough, only signals an editorial intention: collect a variety of authors, each with a precise interest or expertise on the city, and piece together the articles in the only sequence possible. In so doing, the anthology is a sort of Dim Sum platter for the reader. And like the Chinese meal, even after the tasty pickings, you are still left hungry and unsatisfied.

Sadly, there is hardly any hint in the book of the city as failed place and one whose residents—the very people portrayed in its fine vignettes—gave up on it a long time back, those who moved on to newer places with bleached Corinthian columns and smoked glass and names like Malibu Towne and Beverly Plaza. And turned their back on the city. In their departure was the tacit admission that yes, ‘Delhi is beyond redemption’. Maybe at one time it signified and encouraged a way of life but today its character as a living town with an urban focus and architectural landmarks lies buried under the dirt of corruption, greed and thoughtlessness. Like a patient in intensive care, the city needs its daily infusions: one more flyover, one more underground parking lot, a fresh roundabout full of winter chrysanthemums, it relies on picturebook images to reassure its citizens that it is still a garden city. But everyone knows it is a falsification, a falsification that hardly hides the condition of light. Delhi! O Delhi! once a great woman, now lying in an unmade bed painting her nails.

Little in the book suggests anything of this larger picture—the betrayal of the city and the idealism that had created it in the first place. Perhaps the fault lies in its conception as an informed but informal collection of articles. The biography of places is a little-known art in India and much of the writing on Indian cities has been done by foreigners—Jan Morris, Geoffery Morehouse, Diana Eck, among others. An anthology of good but meagre intentions can hardly be a substitute for a full-blooded biography of a place as beautiful, implausible, desperate and despicable as Delhi.