CONSIDERING how much I now detest the city, my first memories of Delhi are actually quite amiable. In the early ’60s, visiting Delhi as a ten year old to attend a cousin’s wedding, I remember the city as a quaint diversion from the relentless urban hustle bustle of my home in Calcutta. The streets were wide and empty and the lack of clatter of trams and buses was a pleasant surprise. Even more surprising was the predominance of bicycles on the road, many of them mounted by ladies wearing strange tight-fitting outfits which I later learnt were Sadhna style salwar kameez suits. For a Calcutta boy who had never before seen Indian women wear anything else but saris or ride bicycles, it was the highlight of my first encounter with the capital of the country.

I returned to the city nearly a decade later, only to find that its old world charm was fast fading. This time I was more than a boy attending a wedding. As an undergraduate at St. Stephen’s College, I had enough time to discover that Delhi, by the start of the ’70s, had become rough and unruly, far removed from my boyhood memories. The streets were still wide but the clatter of traffic had increased by leaps and bounds. There were no trams but the buses were mobile monsters which held unimaginable terrors for those on the roads as well the passengers within.

Apart from engaging in a race to death with cars, auto-rickshaws, cycles and sundry pedestrians, Delhi buses provided a remarkable ritual celebrating the horrors of bus travel. It was not just overcrowding – buses in Calcutta carried far more numbers. The first problem here was that buses usually halted way beyond the bus stop, provoking a mad stampede of passengers. Second, by design or accident, doors of Delhi buses in the ’70s were tortuously narrow, almost half the width of their Calcutta counterparts. Most importantly, there was still no notion of a queue which was invented in Delhi only during the Emergency (perhaps one of the few gains of those 19 months). It was an amazing spectacle to see passengers hurling themselves simultaneously at narrow doors with the conductor trying his best to push them out.

The damsels in salwar kameez suits riding bicycles, who had so caught my boyish imagination, had completely disappeared from the roads of Delhi. They were trapped inside Delhi buses suffering a fate worse than death. I was used to Calcutta buses where the conductor, when ladies got in or out, led a chorus crying ‘ladies are coming’, which warned male passengers to press back, however crowded the space, to avoid any physical contact with feminine flesh. To my horror I found that on a Delhi bus, exactly the opposite happened. Most male passengers as well as the conductor seemed determined to have close encounters with the feminine kind. Indeed, such was my Calcutta upbringing and so crude were the advances made on the hapless lady passengers that I had repeated physical scraps on my first few bus journeys in Delhi, much to the surprise of both victims and perpetrators.

Meanwhile, the stately architecture of St. Stephen’s College with its academic elegance (or was it elegant academics?) offered a sanctuary away from the rest of the city. Even the unfamiliar and wholly obnoxious ritual of ragging could not mar the brunches of mince and scrambled eggs at the cafeteria or lolling around the quadrangle lawns in front of the residential blocks. Behind the back gate of the college lay Miranda House, inviting fantasies involving women who never had to board Delhi buses.

 

 

At St. Stephen’s the rest of the city, including adjoining colleges except Miranda House, simply did not exist. My friendship with a leading wrestler from the college across the road (though it did save me from ragging) was openly frowned upon by my peers in Stephen’s. Coming from Calcutta where snobs were considered a lowly species, this was my first encounter with social snobbery. On the other hand, when the riff-raff outside did impose themselves on college life, I found Stephanians strangely submissive. I still remember in my very first fortnight in Stephen’s a fellow student being dragged out by the scruff of his neck from the packed college dining hall by just three hoods from a college across the road. The absence of protest or resistance from the more than 300 Stephanians present left me completely baffled.

I was sent for my undergraduate studies to St. Stephen’s to escape the Naxalite turmoil in the colleges of Calcutta. Having rejected ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in my precocious reading bouts in school and regarding myself more of a liberal than an extremist, I very much doubt that I would have displayed any inclination towards Naxalism had I stayed on in Calcutta. But the culture shock in Delhi, whether on its buses or within the ivory towers of Stephen’s, may well have triggered off unknown impulses inside me. Moreover, the few peers in college I did like belonged to the minority Naxalite group in Stephen’s and it did not take me long to embrace the romance of the extreme Left. I have happy memories of marching down Mall Road singing revolutionary songs with my newfound comrades on our way to eat bun makhan at the dhaba in Khyber Pass. However, a series of outrageous escapades in college culminating in a fight with a RSS goon (my first encounter with the organization) finally provoked the college authorities to clamp a lock on my hostel room, cutting short my stint at St. Stephen’s as well my university studies.

I left Delhi shortly afterwards to make revolution in the Bihar countryside but not before an educative stop-over in a city slum. This was my first experience of living in a slum although there was a large slum colony right next to my house in North Calcutta. There were five of us from St. Stephen’s cramped inside a tiny airless room whose only ventilation came from the open door. Fortunately, it was winter and in any case we were much too fired up with fresh revolutionary zeal to care about our sordid surroundings. The only serious problem lay in conducting our morning ablutions in a ditch outside – yet another first for all of us.

 

 

The problem became particularly vexatious if one got the urge at night when stray dogs prowled the slum colony. One night, a comrade who considered himself superior to others because of his supposedly better grasp of Marxist dialectics (he is now a bigwig in some international agency abroad), was desperate enough to venture out. A few minutes later we could hear the barking of dogs in the distance. We could not but speculate on the plight of our senior comrade if set upon by the slum dogs. True enough, the barking got louder and louder till suddenly he burst through the door frothing at the mouth and naked from the waist downwards. Close behind him was a pack of snarling dogs straight out of a scene in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Our gusts of laughter as we rolled on the floor got even louder when our hapless dialectical expert complained bitterly about the lack of comradely sympathy. Many months later in Bihar as the revolution collapsed around our heads, recalling this ludicrous episode of our life in a Delhi slum would still evoke considerable mirth.

 

 

I was back in Delhi less than three years later, recruited from a failed revolution by Aruna Asaf Ali, a revolutionary firebrand in the days of the freedom struggle and widow of the capital’s first mayor. Arunaji, who published a pro-Soviet leftwing newspaper, Patriot and a magazine, Link, magnanimously offered a college dropout like me the position of a trainee reporter. My monthly stipend was just three hundred rupees but I had seen enough hard times by then to live in Delhi on this pathetic sum. I was fortunate to find at eighty rupees a month, accommodation up on the roof of a government quarter in Lodhi Colony. The room was fairly large with three walls, the fourth made of wooden planks (government regulations did not allow the construction of a full fledged pucca barsati room). The roof was completely private surrounded by high walls. One could have a bath, smoke dope and even fornicate out in the open. The only problem was that on winter nights, it did get somewhat chilly with the wind whistling through the large gaps on the wooden planked wall. To my misfortune, my first winter in Lodhi Colony saw temperatures plummet to near zero degree centigrade for several nights running, mercilessly exposing my lack of a proper bed or bedding. After three sleepless nights, I turned in wearing every stitch of clothing that I owned, and slept like a log.

 

 

Food was provided by Jolly Mess, a local Bengali chummery which served fish twice a day and special mutton or chicken lunches on Sundays for an incredible hundred rupees a month. Which meant that after paying for my room and food, I was still left with more than a hundred rupees – enough for bus journeys and Charminar fags. I was all set to discover the world of journalism on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Delhi’s Fleet Street. My chief editor was Edatata Narayanan, an eccentric genius who obsessively combatted the forces of American capitalism and its minions in India. The newspaper’s editorial policy was unabashedly partisan, supporting the CPI and Left Congress at a time when Indira Gandhi was still in the pro-Soviet mode. But the newspaper’s approach to international and domestic politics did not concern me. I was far too busy pursuing the crime beat which each day introduced me to a fresh facet of the city.

The squalid shanty towns of East and Outer Delhi, paunchy crooked cops in betel juice stained police stations, social angularities of the Muslim ghetto around Jama Masjid, Tihar Jail with its cons and dope pushers, call girl rackets in public sector hotels – an endless kaleidoscope of new faces and places provided me writing material. My peers were hardboiled investigative city reporters, poorly paid and shabbily dressed. Most were men and the few women in the profession shared the same single-minded hunger for news. There was little glamour in Delhi journalism those days and the brief advent of a chauffeur driven lady reporter wearing diamonds and lipstick, I remember, created quite a diversion.

Then came the summer of 1975 and everything changed. The day before Emergency was imposed, I had been assigned my first major political story – a public rally at the Ramlila Maidan addressed by Jayaprakash Narayan. Next morning, much to my disappointment, no newspapers were at the doorstep. On my way to Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, I had no inkling what had happened till I entered the newspaper office and a grim-faced colleague warned, ‘Keep your mouth shut, Emergency has been declared.’ Inside the darkened office which was without electricity, it took some time for me to grasp the enormity of events sweeping the capital, including the arrest of thousands of politicians and the imposition of censorship heralded by the snapping of power lines to newspaper offices. As we sat devastated in the dark only the chief editor seemed happy, cackling about how the rightwing had got its comeuppance. Later we went to Indira Gandhi’s residence where vast rented crowds, including a large band of eunuchs, shouted slogans supporting the Emergency.

 

 

It is amazing to recall in these days of VVIP security that even the day after the government had put the entire Opposition behind bars, anyone could walk right up to the gates of the prime minister’s house without being checked. The days, weeks and months that followed were indeed a nightmare. There was so much to report but not a word appeared in newspapers. Homes smashed by bulldozers, old people and teenagers castrated in sterilization camps, the bloodbath at Turkman Gate, student leaders abducted by policemen from the JNU campus. It is difficult to describe the frustration of not being able to see a single line in print even as my notebooks kept filling up with sensational news.

I was relegated to covering boring functions organised by embassies and cultural organisations belonging to the socialist bloc, where apart from disseminating the usual communist propaganda, sycophant Congress ministers were given an opportunity to drone on about the gains of the Emergency. The North Koreans were particularly active and before long I was sick at the very mention of the great leader Kim Il Sung and the Juche idea. The audience at these functions mainly consisted of hired crowds from Delhi slums brought by Congress leaders at piecemeal rates. I remember one North Korean function when a last minute wrangling over rates caused a commotion in the hall. It was difficult to explain to anxious North Korean diplomats asking whether the protests were against their great leader and the Juche idea that the fuss was about money and not ideology.

 

 

Meanwhile, my chief editor was getting increasingly eccentric and paranoid. One winter night, he announced to me that a trained CIA agent had sneaked into the office and I was to immediately ask the authorities to have him arrested. I rushed out to find a wretched homeless fellow taking shelter from the cold outside and had to shoo him away quickly before he could be charged with espionage. The chief editor soon fell out with the Emergency regime in a fit of characteristic truculence. Having been the only editor to openly support the Emergency, he now went to the opposite extreme, blacking out Sanjay Gandhi’s photographs and actively encouraging us to break censorship laws. One night a frenzied mob of Congress goons arrived to burn down the office and it took a combination of bluster and negotiating skills to get rid of them.

 

 

The nightmare vanished as suddenly as it had emerged. The denouement and collapse of the Emergency regime ushered in a period of rejoicing and hope overnight. My notebooks of unprinted news blossomed into a book on Delhi under Emergency released by none other than the hero of the Emergency, George Fernandes. It was a good time to be a political journalist in Delhi. The dictatorship had been replaced by a circus of squabbling politicians who leaked news like the monsoon skies. My new job as the Delhi bureau chief of the country’s largest weekly, Sunday, as well as India correspondent for the London Guardian, took me to ministerial chambers, political party offices and of course, Parliament, where polemical debate had resurfaced after a long gap.

In those heady days, I also found true love. We courted intensely alternating between the café at Triveni theatre and the open air Rambles restaurant in Connaught Place. Soon we were married and ensconced in a wonderful Defence Colony barsati with living cum dining room, bedroom, lovely terrace and a servant’s quarter, all for seven hundred and fifty rupees. We even had a full time khansama who came for a mere three hundred rupee monthly salary. Oh, those happy evenings, as we downed rum after rum sitting out on the roof and listening to the Rolling Stones. Occasionally, we would stroll down to Moet’s restaurant in the market and share a plate of seekh kebabs, one dal makhni and two naans for exactly ten rupees, including a rupee tip for the waiter.

The ’80s marked the return of the Congress. Soon after the Gandhis came back to power, our Defence Colony barsati was burgled. It had to be coincidence but my friends were convinced that it was a return compliment from Sanjay and his friends for my book. Anyway, he himself was gone within a few months, starting the tragic jinx of violent deaths in the family. We moved from the barsati to a bungalow on Amrita Shergill Marg owned by my wife’s parents who were abroad. With diplomats and business magnates as our neighbours, I was left wondering about the distance I had travelled from my room at the top in Lodhi Colony in less than a decade. Our first daughter was soon born amidst some drama since the doctor who was supposed to deliver her vanished at the most critical moment to keep a hair-dresser’s appointment. After rushing back at the last minute with shampoo in her hair, she appalled my wife by apologising that she had delivered a girl and enquiring whether I would be really disappointed. Perambulating our daughter in a pram around the adjoining Lodhi Gardens, we initiated a morning relationship with the picturesque gardens which has continued to this day, two decades later.

 

 

Indira Gandhi’s assassination and the carnage afterwards jolted my domesticated idyll on Amrita Shergill Marg. Near my favourite taxi stand at Press Club, I watched helplessly as one of the drivers was tossed alive into a bonfire. The goons who went on rampage were of a different species than the ones I knew during the Emergency. Spawned in the deconstructed world of resettlement colonies dotting the borders of Delhi, they were not only much meaner but also completely apolitical. The city was changing and getting even uglier.

I returned in the early ’90s to live in Defence Colony and found that the ’80s consumerist boom had changed the place beyond recognition. My old panwala now owned a general provisions store and two cars as well. Fancy restaurants with even fancier prices and shops bursting with foreign goods swamped the market. In its narrow confines, teenage louts raced their cars at breakneck speed playing loud music to impress girls wearing lots of lipstick and little else. In the decade that has followed, all these trends have magnified manifold. As has the number of five star hotels, shopping malls and page three parties elsewhere in the city.

 

 

If, despite all this, we still built our house in Delhi some years ago, this was not by choice but compulsion. Anand Lok, where we live, has barely a hundred houses, no market and the gates remain closed most of the time. Yet even within this sanctuary, the city has a way of springing nasty surprises. A couple of years back, the house next door was pulled down to be replaced with a luxurious centrally air-conditioned edifice complete with jacuzzi and gymnasium. The owners, surprisingly, were not business people. The husband was a senior finance manager of a company and the wife a postgraduate in mathematics. They were not only softspoken and polite but even showed rare courtesy in Delhi by removing the debris after their house had been constructed. We could not help wondering how such nice people had so much money. Some months ago, our neighbours disappeared into thin air. Enquiries revealed that the man had been caught embezzling as much as a hundred million rupees from his company which had now seized all his assets including, of course, the house.

It is this unpredictability of life in Delhi that still makes me, after all these years, feel a stranger in the city.