OLD Mr Gupta is resolute. ‘Down that road,’ he motions. ‘Past our godown. Jungle.’

I’m sitting in his lumber shop in Bhogal, where he holds court and dispenses advice. The wood is market price. Counsel is free.

I am, as are many people in this booming New Delhi, a supplicant at the altar of home improvement. My carpenter Irshad sits beside me as we suck down Guptaji’s tea and memories. The old gentleman arrived in Bhogal pre-independence. The earliest papers he still has on a property here date from 1952. His son, who sits beside him, his own white hair a nice contrast to his daddy’s steadfastly black mop, nods. ‘Delhi’s first rehabilitation colony,’ he says proudly. I don’t know enough to contest that, so I nod along. ‘Partition refugees, right,’ I ask.

A dismissive shake of the head from old Mr Gupta. This area, he remembers, was earmarked for people from Aliganj, who were displaced by the building of the airport at Safdarjang. ‘These Punjabis may have bought these plots after they came, like we did. But this most definitely isn’t a refugee colony.’

‘Not like Lajpat Nagar,’ I venture. ‘Exactly,’ he concurs. ‘And look at that. That was a jungle too when we got here.’

I’m here looking for board and veneer and what the boys around here refer to as margin. Kitchen cabinet laminate is on my shopping list, but Mr Gupta’s reminiscences are a happy bonus. He asks Irshad his name three times, calls him Irshad Muhammad, Irshad Khan and mostly just beta. He is a bania of Rajasthani extraction, was born in what was Punjab and is now Haryana and came to Delhi when it was still an imperial city to a place named after a British administrator – Capt. Young, Jangpura. Think of it as a vowel movement – to set up a store to cater to a trade that, while booming, isn’t sexy enough these days to pull in his grandsons. Young Mr Gupta nods his white head wryly. ‘Why would they come here? To listen to us?’

‘And what is it they do?’

‘Software.’

Old Mr Gupta is still talking. He speaks fluent Punjabi, tells me my contractor is a good and knowledgeable man and then proceeds to give me more gyaan, his son totting up the bill on my purchases and nodding his head beside him. ‘In the 1960s, after the Indo-China war, even after the war of 1965, there were such shortages. Forget food. Paper, clothes, even cycles; it was all rationed. Petrol? Who knew about its rationing? Who had cars?’

Irshad nods along beside me. He’s escaped a village outside Aligarh and is currently a resident of Sangam Vihar. His family are also here and he and his will be Dilliwalas forevermore, but even he remembers a time when, if a man brought a new cycle to the village he has left behind, the entire biradari would come to goggle at it.

‘In 1965,’ says young Mr Gupta, motioning down the old Church Road, where one of their godowns is situated, in the general direction of Ashram; ‘you’d be worried about walking down there by yourself. There was nothing there.’

‘There were shortages. People were hungry. There wasn’t enough to eat; people didn’t have enough to wear in winter. Anything could happen,’ says old Mr Gupta.

Irshad nods again, more vigorously. ‘People have only gotten money in the last fifteen-twenty years,’ he says. Our interlocutors across the table agree. A boy arrives with the news that my tempo is ready and full of A1 top-class best-of-the-bunch wood. I look at the bill and almost bring up my tea, while Gupta and son look at me benevolently.

Why so expensive?

‘Beta, all the wood comes from Malaysia. You know what’s happening to the dollar. If you find it cheaper anywhere else, tell us. We’ll take it off your bill.’

 

My parents arrived in Delhi roughly around the same time. It was the very early 1950s. My father was in residence in Delhi University, playing cricket, raising hell and working towards a bachelor’s. My mother was the daughter of a foreign diplomat, reportedly similarly occupied across the way as a day-scholar in Miranda. India was a freshly minted republic and New Delhi, as had been ordained under a different dispensation some four decades previously, was its capital.

I have read stories of foreign visitors commenting on the hordes of white-clothed refugees sleeping on the road into town from the airport. Contemporary accounts point towards a bustling, burgeoning city, stretched to the seams by an influx of people displaced by history’s implacability. Partition’s debris was washing up on the capital’s shores, looking for redress, compensation, new lives and homes. There were people sleeping on roads and under railway bridges and hand-carts doubled, then as now, as both livelihood and domicile.

 

Governmental types, their numbers swollen by the need to cope with the pressures of a suddenly independent country, strove to make sense of the new city and carved out new enclaves for their own kind. Refugees staked their own claims. Rural entrepreneurs and day labourers poured in, sensing opportunity and work. The new city, New Delhi, capital and centre, was in flux, shifting, changing, growing, mutating, stretching beyond the margins laid down for it by a generation of urban planners.

And yet my parents remember a quiet time. Perhaps it was just college, away in the quiet environs of DU: perhaps it was their commonality of background – so different on the face of it, and yet so similar, because of shared privilege – but they seem to have hardly noticed the eructations of the growing city, as it ingested bodies and dreams and threw up slums, colonies, PWD ‘improvements’ and the pedimented beginnings of Punjabi baroque. When they met in ‘town’, there were films at Regal and dinners at Embassy and a Delhi Golf Club where one hole actually obliged you to drive across what is now Zakir Hussain Road into what became Kaka Nagar. There was no question of hitting a car; as old Mr Gupta remembers, there weren’t any. And swarming hordes of the poor? In the New Delhi my parents remember, bounded roughly by the New Delhi Railway Station to the north, the river and Jhandewalan to the east and west and a very young and quiet Khan Market to the south? Never.

My parents got here when New Delhi was experiencing its first moment of real growth. But their New Delhi, which corresponds almost exactly to what is now the overly-fetishized ‘Lutyen’s zone’: that city of my parents’ memories is barely a city at all.

 

The move of the imperial capital from Calcutta had hastened that over-crowded eastern city’s decline, but New Delhi was far from being the unchallenged first city. What did it have to combat Calcutta’s locally-funded cultural scene and Bombay’s commercially-funded philanthropy? Aside from a few families, the Shrirams foremost among them, where were New Delhi’s seths to endow colleges and public hospitals and schools for girls in the new city? Where were the factories and the pujas and the public transport facilities? Where were the maidans and esplanades for the workers and middle-classes and the nightclubs for the sahibs and a public life that encompassed the entirety of the city’s inhabitants? Where, crucially, was the energy, the sort of buzz and bustle that marks a metropolis apart from the provincial pretenders?

The city my parents arrived in was provincial. It wasn’t Bombay. It wasn’t Calcutta. It wasn’t, tragically enough for the Gujral generation, even Lahore. It wasn’t as if Shahjahanabad was bubbling. The city Manucci had described, of gardens and bazaars and of water courses filled with fish wearing golden rings, had been wasted by the subsiding of the Mughals and the events around and pursuant to the Revolt of 1857. Frederick Treves’ disappointment in finally arriving in what he called ‘the Rome of the East’ was palpable, even in the first decade of the 20th century. Many Kayasthas that could had already moved to the Civil Lines in the time of the British hukumat. The other sheheris were also experiencing a period of flux. Ahmed Ali delineates a society in decline in Twilight in Delhi, menaced by changes beyond the comprehension, leave alone control, of its inhabitants. And that book was written before Partition. The flood of emigration to Pakistan was a body blow to the walled city from which it is still, 60-odd years on, trying to recover. Not even the famous public transport spine of Chandni Chowk, its trams, survived that rupture. They limped to their demise by the end of the 1950s.

 

Not that my parents remember much of Chandni Chowk back then. I know of it through the memories of other people. It would take twenty-odd years before the walled city made much of an impression on my family, by which time they were back in Delhi, after a long spell on the eastern edge of the country – planting tea and raising my sisters – and a shorter one in Punjab, making booze and having me.

The horrors that Turkman Gate will forever be associated with were at hand, the urban-planning descendants of Bhogal – rehabilitation colonies with improbable names like Welcome and Sunlight – were on their way to becoming part of Delhi maps and – in the dimly-glimpsed future – Metro schematics, and Dilliwalas were being moved from the centre of the old city to the margins of the new one. Citizens that were surplus to requirements, essentially, were told to bugger off to where the people that mattered wouldn’t see them. All of us saw that movie again in the run-up to the CWG.

Perhaps my earliest memory of Delhi is this, and it is an extremely clear one. I’m walking somewhere near India Gate. My ayah is naturally with me, and she is talking to someone whom I can’t remember. I may have an ice-cream. Tomorrow, says one of them, the boats will fall, and the other one agrees. I find this mystifying, and I ask my mother about it. Between her imperfect command of idiomatic Hindi and my youth, it will be a while before I realise that my ayah said votes – clearly, a word I didn’t know, and so I went with boats – and the elections that ended the Emergency were what they were discussing.

We still lived in Jor Bagh, which my father vividly remembered as a nursery, some 20-odd years before. The Safdarjang flyover was down the road, having been inaugurated a few years previously by our current Chief Minister’s father-in-law. A moment of tremendous importance was at hand, for the nation and its capital city, a moment freighted with the bitterness and cynicism of the previous two years and yet alive with hope and possibility. Yet I can’t, for the life of me, remember if my ayah was happy or not.

 

Things were changing, of course. My father’s old hunting ground was now Hauz Khas Enclave. In school, I met young scholars from Trilokpuri and Punjabi Bagh, places my father admitted to having heard of but had never seen. It wasn’t just the people on the ‘margins’ of the city that were intruding on my consciousness. I heard names like Def Col and South Ex from my sisters and connected them to places. They were still distant, but not irretrievably so. The Oberoi was still the Icon, from its connection to the Intercontinental group, and there was a disco that I heard about, in whispers and giggles, when my sisters thought I wasn’t listening. It was called the Ghunghroo.

Colour TV and flyovers, the legacy of the 1982 Asian Games, were on the horizon. I would watch the final of the soccer match that Iraq won, in a floodlit stadium that seemed as large as Delhi itself. I had gone with an elder cousin. I remember the walk back to our car, impossibly distant in a parking lot, surrounded by the happy murmurings of an urban population that seemed replete, that cool floodlit evening, with achieved possibility. This was what a city could offer its residents. Events everyone could share in, infrastructure that was world-class. Electricity. This was our city, our stage, and we’d seized our moment on it.

It seems so paltry, but we were happy that night. I know it now and I knew it then, even if I was only 10 years old. The bad feeling around last year’s CWG: mismanagement, malfeasance, an ex-minister in jail; what a difference three decades makes. I don’t think people made any less money out of the Asiad of 1982, or that it was any better managed. It’s just that Delhi’s citizens expect more now.

Maybe we’ve grown up. Maybe the Ghunghroo would be just another nightclub if it were to open today.

 

I am a sardar and I remember like it was yesterday the riots of 1984. The young Sikh in me shared the anger that Bluestar had engendered. But that boy enjoyed the rides around the city in our new Maruti 800, and even the plentiful police on the roads couldn’t dampen that for me, or the other families besides us outside Nirula’s. It was as if the city was finally ready for something like that little car, and everyone wondered what had taken the powers-that-be so long to give it to us. Then the riots came and everything was different. I remember the feeling then within the family and our friends; the thought, the apprehension that a boundary had been breached and the people on the geographic margins had run amuck amongst us, the sheltered, even cloistered denizens of the first city of the country. It would take longer in those pre-Twitter days for people to realize that the strings had been pulled from within the Ring Road, and that the worst outrages had been committed on the margins themselves. That the city had in fact escaped ‘people like us’ and was even then enveloping the ‘margins’ and swallowing them up – causing fissures, building bridges, screwing people and conceiving dreams – would take years to understand.

 

I know how long it took me. I took off to boarding school soon after the killing and escaped abroad for college straight after. When I’d return on my vacations as a young adult in the early ’90s, I was struck by the changes. Liberalization and its soldiers, sturdy enablers of a new world such as cable TV, wrought changes in months that would have taken decades otherwise. The democracy of readily available fashion asserted itself and levelled playing fields that mere ‘convent’ English never could. Young couples held hands in public. People who had waited for Ambassador allotments and entered their names in lotteries for Marutis could now actually choose their own cars. Telephone lines on demand: how to explain to a cranky adolescent of this age what a luxury that is?

The city of Chashme Buddoor, that quiet gentle place of chatty paanwalas, gardens in bloom and fantasizing perennial students, may never have existed, not outside a few pin codes of this New Delhi. But the brash milieu of Delhi Belly is everywhere. Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day has long been one of my favourite books for its evocation of time and place as it traces the decline into shabby gentility of a family in the sheher and in Civil Lines. Siddharth Chowdhury’s Dayscholar, set now and a matter of a few kilometres further up the road in Kamla Nagar and DU, is just as good, but in an entirely different way. Caste is a casual crutch, a matter of knowing who your friends are, and Eros and Thanatos walk hand in hand through the grimy, sweat-stained rooms of the characters, visiting ‘scholars’ from the hinterland. Casual sex and horrific violence define their experience of Delhi. This is India and this is its centre. The protagonist may be a navel-gazer himself, a bit of a milksop in a testosterone-charged world, but the man he ‘works’ for is possessed of a manic energy, a grasping drive that urges him on to new conquests. He is defiantly a man of the margins, half-Gujjar and half-Jat, born and raised in Chandrawal, but he is very much a part of New Delhi, that city that spreads like a virus beyond even his ambition.

 

The ‘New’ Delhi of my parents’ memory is just that. A memory. It grew and expanded beyond the shopkeepers in Karol Bagh and the retired generals in Defence Colony. It defeated the planning of civil servants raised to respect the hierarchy of central Delhi’s official residences. It beggared the ambitions of the quasi-genteel ‘old’ families of the city, as if a city that’s less than a hundred years old can even have such a thing. It has grown to encompass the margins, the places that my father had heard of but had never seen, and the descendants of the residents of those places now live above and below us in the builders flats of this city.

Perhaps the moment a town, a city, an urban agglomeration becomes a metropolis, is simply this: when it escapes the imaginations of the people who think they control it. People have aspirations, whether you and I like the word or not, and their drive and ambition fuels our city and propels it forward. New Delhi took flight because it had to, not because a clutch of men – and some women – who shared English, the Delhi Gymkhana and the IIC between them, willed it so.

 

About fifty years ago, when my grandfather retired, he bought himself a place in what was still Punjab, where he could live out the rest of his life on the produce of his own fields, orchards and buffaloes. I remember the drive there in the late-’70s, a quick affair past the posh new Polish embassy, over a bridge before Moti Bagh, a nod towards Vasant Vihar where empty lots still outnumbered built-up ones, and then the quiet run past Palam and across the state line. In the evening, there was Krishi Darshan and millions of stars and perhaps, twice at night, the horn of a passing truck on its way to the distant port in Bombay. The view from our terrace was a bucolic one as far as the eye could see. Our mail was delivered to the only factory around, and we’d walk down of an evening to collect it. The factory was empty and produced nothing, despite the best efforts of the men who ran it, and the road outside it was empty of traffic save for tractors, occasional trucks and the odd herder walking his buffaloes home. That factory’s name is Maruti.