Delirious Delhi: Inside India's Incredible Capital

DELIRIOUS DELHI*

*The cover from this book was inspired first by the movie Om Shanit Om. The songs from that movie blared from passing autorickshaws and tinny mobile pjhone speakers for six months straight, which is why we chose to recreate the poster.

But the cover is also a tribute to the custom-made, six-foot-tall Bollywood poster we commissioned from a nearly out-of-work poster painter whose studio was hidden near Old Delhi. That's quite a story - you can read it here.

ALSO BY DAVE PRAGER

Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by Its Grossest National

Product, Feral House, 2007 (as Dave Praeger)

DELIRIOUS DELHI

Inside India’s Incredible Capital

Dave Prager

ARCADE PUBLISHING • NEW YORK

Copyright © 2011, 2013 by Dave Prager

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Visit our website at www.arcadepub.com.

For extra pictures, essays about Delhi, and more, visit the author’s website at deliriousdelhi.com

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-832-9

Printed in the United States of America

To Jenny, with great love, deep gratitude

and grudging respect for your Mario Kart skills.

If you are told ‘they are all this’ or ‘they do this’ or ‘their opinions are these,’ withhold your judgement until facts are upon you. Because that land they call ‘India’ goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst the multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.

—Zadie Smith, White Teeth

CONTENTS

1 The First Morning and Other Mysteries

2 Delhi: The Sprawled City

3 Transportation: How to Get Stuck in Traffic

4 Culture: The Inscrutable Indians

5 The Food: Oh My God, the Food

6 Health: That Which Didn’t Kill Us

Photo Insert

7 Shopping: Markets, Malls and More for Less

8 Working (Late, Again)

9 Challenges of a Megacity

10 Cheap Labor: Their Delhi Struggle

11 Expat Issues: We’ll Complain Anyway

12 The Change We Wish to See

Acknowledgments

Index

1

The First Morning and

Other Mysteries

We knew we would love living in Delhi the moment we heard the door-to-door paella salesman.

Ah, paella! The national dish of Spain. A sumptuous fusion of saffron rice, scallops, prawns, peas, sausage and cuttlefish. We’d expected Delhi to be cosmopolitan, but never did we imagine men would be riding around with giant canvas sacks of paella strapped to their bicycles. In our eight years in New York City, the most exotic street food we ever found was the guy selling gyros on 47th Street. But we had to go to him—nobody ever rode around Brooklyn shouting fa-laaaaaaa-fel! and dispensing hummus by the scoop. But after just fifteen hours in our new flat in the Hauz Khas market neighborhood of south Delhi, we already had a guy selling Valencian delicacies right outside our bedroom window.

Lying in our new bed, Jenny and I listened to the cry that was to fill our ears every subsequent morning for the next eighteen months. Pie-ehhhhhhh-AH! he hollered, riding slowly by three stories below. Pie-ehhhhhhh-AH!

We were already half-awake. Our restless morning had begun at sunrise, when the mosque across Aurobindo Marg cranked up its call to prayer through crackling speakers that were loud enough for Muhammad himself to make no mistake about how reverent they were. Soon after that came the honking, as every vehicle began saying ‘good morning’ to every other vehicle on the road, a call-andresponse that would end with goodnight honks only around 11 p.m. And just as we began to wonder if renting a bedroom that overlooked a busy road was a bad idea, the paella man rode by and put all our fears to rest. ‘Pieehhhhhhh-AH!’

We peeked out the window on his third pass and saw him: thin, wiry, dressed in clothes that had long since been sun-bleached out of whatever shade of beige he’d bought them at, riding a colorless bike with one rag-wrapped bundle strapped behind the seat and another to the handlebars.

Ah, I said. That back bundle must be where he keeps the paella. We wondered what the front bundle contained: thyme and saffron shakers? Bottles of 2006 Baron de Barbon Oak-Aged Rioja to pair with the meal? Extra cuttlefish for preferred customers?

And what other culinary delights were to be peddled by? We salivated in anticipation of the crêpe guy. We wondered if the sushi salesman could get fresh ahi this far inland. Oh! Maybe a gazpachowallah would come around during the hottest months!

That morning, our first morning in our new flat but our sixth in the country (we’d stayed in my company’s flat in Gurgaon, the tech hub south of Delhi, five days beyond our realization that we didn’t want to live in Gurgaon), Jenny and I lay in bed and listened to the sounds of the city outside our window. We were neophytes in Delhi, and the struggles that would soon confound us—where do we go to buy a wireless router? why does every third car have a sticker promoting Fun ’N Food Village in its rear window? how do we call an ambulance at two in the morning?—were still waiting beyond our bedroom walls. We would soon explore the streets of a city we’d never imagined we’d actually live in. We would soon see the full gamut of the human experience on those streets, from joy in the most despairing of circumstances to cruelty perpetrated by those who have everything in the world. We would soon watch dogs get beaten. We would soon see children get saved. We would soon meet holy men and unnoticed women who should be saints. We would soon stumble upon hidden treasures and walk past transcendent sights without noticing a thing. We would soon explore as much as we could manage. We would soon learn as much as we could absorb.

But we would barely scratch the surface. Every time we left our Delhi flat, we’d return home with more questions than answers. Which means we never became Delhi experts. We’ll never be Delhi experts. Even if the city wasn’t constantly changing—even if the Delhi we experienced could be frozen in time so that we could explore every inch before its next iteration came along—our grasp of the city would always be limited by the cultural filters through which we can’t help but view things. All we know about Delhi is what we saw, what people told us, and what we think we’ve figured out. No matter how much we would try to immerse ourselves, our Delhi would remain a rarefied one: we were comparatively rich and unmistakably foreign, and the only Delhi we could possibly experience was the one that aligned itself in reaction to us.

This was the third Delhi flat in which we’d woken up, but the first in which the morning symphony was this audible. In the Gurgaon apartment, the only soundtrack had been the howls of wild dogs and the pounding of construction machinery that could induce headaches even from twenty-three stories up. And in the apartment I’d stayed in during the month of August, in a neighborhood called Greater Kailash-II, the morning’s sounds were muted, distant and almost tranquil. (That apartment, obviously, did not face the road.)

My August in GK-II had been a test: for my soon-to-be employer, to see if they’d want to commit to me on a longterm basis; and for me, to see if I’d have the cojones to leave the city in which I’d lived for eight years and the country in which I’d lived for thirty. They did, and so did I. And just two days after first landing in the country, I called Jenny in New York from a yellow STD kiosk in the GK-II M Block market and gushed, I think I could live here forever. I love it here!

Five months later, I hated it.

Most books about India written by Westerners document an obligatory personal journey: at first they hate India, but then they learn to love it. At first they’re overwhelmed by the chaos, but then the soul of the people shines through. At first they’re horrified by the poverty, but then they find spirituality in every speck of dirt.

Our trajectory in India was different. We loved it instantly and intensely, every bit of it, as frightening and overwhelming and incomprehensible as it was. But then, as novelty turned into routine, we grew disgusted with it all: first the pollution, then the traffic, then the poverty, then the constant fear of getting swindled, and then just about everything that wasn’t what we knew back home.

But that wasn’t our journey’s end. Instead, we were to vacillate back and forth between the two extremes—love India, hate India, love India, hate India—until we found equilibrium. We learned to love the things that should be loved, and to hate the things there are to hate. Most of all, we learned that both these aspects of India—the good and the bad—must be taken together.

We would never describe India as spiritual, like so many do, because that would mean ignoring all the misery. Nor would we call it disgusting, like so many do, because that would mean ignoring all its beauty. Our attitude towards India now mirrors our attitude towards our own United States: some aspects turn our stomachs, but others make us soar with joy. India—like all countries—offers both.

But all these emotions were ahead of us. The love and the hate, the heat and the cold, the sickness and the worry—all these were still to come. We were still aurally innocent as we awoke in our new flat; and as we listened to these sounds without meaning, our only context was the sounds that we’d left back in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City, where we’d lived the previous four years.

That bedroom also overlooked a busy road. Which meant that mornings there also had a soundtrack. Thursdays began with a garbage truck roaring down the street, inching from house to house on its fifteen-minute journey in and out of earshot while one worker drove and the other two trailed behind on foot, lifting and dumping curbside garbage cans into the back of the truck. When the truck was full, they would pull a lever to compact the trash; and on those unlucky mornings when they did so directly in front of our window, the truck’s volume would double—and our sleep would be shattered—as its pneumatic presses ground into action. Monday mornings were worse: the twice-weekly garbage trucks were joined by once-weekly recycling collection trucks as well as by entrepreneurial bottle collectors who raced to collect the weekend’s empties before the city could pick them up. They rattled stolen shopping carts down the sidewalk, and the bottles they’d already collected knocked together at every crack in the cement.

The song of municipal sanitation was a biweekly performance. But it came on top of a daily morning soundtrack. Neighborhood cars with poor mufflers roared to life. The guy across the street assured himself that masculinity was both equated with and demonstrated by how loud he could rev his motorcycle. The radio station’s traffic copter hovered overhead to visually confirm that, yes, the Gowanus Expressway was jammed once again. In winters, the ancient steam pipes in our hundred-year-old brownstone would shriek and bang as the heat kicked in. Summer weekends often began with our neighbor Hector shouting at Sherlock, his tenant and ex-wife’s sister’s husband, who possessed the loudest laugh we’d ever heard. (You know what? Hector hollered during one memorable morning row, You’re an asshole! Hector slammed his front door, Sherlock’s laugh rattled our windows, and our hopes for sleeping past nine were dashed once again.)

We cursed these sounds at first. Hector and Johnny Motorcycle and the New York City Department of Environmental Protection made us pledge to forever avoid front-facing bedrooms. But we soon learned to sleep through it. And we eventually learned to sleep through Delhi’s dawn din.

Not that Delhi’s night had been that much quieter. The warbling horns of the trucks on Aurobindo Marg (which were banned from city streets during daytime but free to terrorize after dark) were loud enough to invade our dreams. Worse was when the truckers with knowledge of local streets took the shortcut past our flat. Our window was positioned exactly where they’d switch into second gear; the roar of the high end of first gear rattled the house. And if a single truck could bounce our floors, you can imagine how badly we were jolted by the earthquake that hit a few weeks after we moved in, just as we were growing accustomed to sleeping through the truck noise. It was our first earthquake: a gargantuan fright that began as a distant roar before engulfing our whole building in its terrible vibrating grasp. Jenny and I clutched impotently at each other and whimpered.

In retrospect, there are probably better earthquake-survival strategies than just lying in bed and hoping the building doesn’t collapse.

(In the half-hour following the quake, too scared to sleep, I resolved to learn the walking route to the American embassy, in case we ever had to make our way on foot through a post-apocalyptic Delhi to the safety of the embassy’s hamburgers, Budweiser, and swift repatriation. But the embassy is in a neighborhood of streets and roundabouts that are indistinguishable and bewildering even when the ground isn’t spewing lava, so the route proved unlearnable. If the Day of Reckoning had arrived while we lived in Delhi, we’d have just hoped that autorickshaw drivers couldn’t distinguish it from Delhi’s everyday apocalyptic traffic.)

Delhi’s night had other noises we’d learn to sleep through. Dogs, for instance: not as loud as trucks or earthquakes, but far more frequent. Every square inch of Delhi is claimed by gangs of stray dogs who vociferously defend their turf. There is a whole political structure to their world: the Hauz Khas Howlers guard the market against territory incursions by the Aurobindo Maulers while maintaining a dumpster-sharing agreement with the Green Park Greyhounds; the former are allowed access to the discarded chapattis on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and alternating Saturdays, during which time the latter take over to ensure that no passing autorickshaw goes un-barked at. The stray dogs live, love and lie on the street; but their docile daytime trotting gives way to snarls and warfare at night, and the evening streets echo with their power struggles.

Most stray dogs are ragged and haggard, with patchy fur and the vacant look of the perennially hunted. An exception was the gang of three who lived outside our building: Bruno, Signal and Snoopy, who were stray in name only. They’d been adopted by our neighbor Anya, a single woman in her thirties who lived in her late grandfather’s flat on the floor below ours. The only difference between being adopted and owned was that they weren’t allowed inside the building at night. The three were fussed over and fed far too much. Fat from their lavish life, they spent their days napping, waddling from one nap to another, and biting the tires of passing cars. By night, though, the envy of strays who actually had to work for a living meant that their territory was constantly being encroached. So their vocal cords got the workout their scavenging muscles never did, inevitably right below our bedroom window.

But nighttime was serene as compared to morning, starting at sunrise with the mosque, followed closely by car horns and bicycle bells and paellawallahs. After that came less delicious sounds, like the pigeons who had regular sex on our air conditioner, their claws scratching the metal surface of the window unit, the male cooing pigeon poetry while desperately flapping himself into the mounting position. Or like the workers at the ICICI Bank depository across the street who dropped metal boxes out of armoured cars and threw other boxes inside, their hollow booms observed by a dozen guards who stood around fingering ancient rifles. The sweepers then joined the chorus, pushing a day’s accumulation of dust into the gutters so that passing cars and passers-by throughout the day would kick it up to coat the sidewalks and driveways, ensuring the sweepers would have something to sweep again the next morning.

A school bell chimes at nine with the sound of an air-raid siren. Doorbells begin ringing as maids begin arriving for their daily chores, and neighbors begin shouting at maids for being late. One of them clatters up metal stairs outside our kitchen to the servants’ toilet on the roof above our heads; soon we hear splashing as he comes back down to bathe with unheated water drawn from the outdoor tap. (You’ve spoiled your servants, we heard Anya’s mother tell her once, by letting them wash the dishes with hot water.)

The sound of the servant washing finally roused us out of bed and into the shower. Fortunately, we’d known from our Gurgaon flat to turn on the hot water geyser a half-hour beforehand. We also knew that geyser was pronounced geezer in Delhi, bringing to mind the image of a grumpy old man complaining from his perch on the wall above our toilet about the electricity we were wasting for the extravagance of a hot shower. It was awkward to bathe with the sound of the servant washing himself on the other side of the wall, but it was clear at that point in our first morning that soundproofing had not been the priority in the construction of our building. It was designed primarily for the summer heat: no insulation, loosely fitted window frames, gaps under doors big enough to allow chipmunks to invade, and exhaust fans open to the outside air—all to create that elusive cross-breeze. It’s a lovely feature in the spring and fall. In the summer, though, it lets out our air conditioning; and in the winter, it lets in the smell.

The first time we smelled it was during our first night in Gurgaon. We were jet-lagged and bedraggled when we entered Hamilton Court, a massive apartment complex built for the kings and queens of the new Indian economy, where my company had rented a flat to house Jenny and me and all the other expat employees they expected to imminently hire. We dragged our suitcases past the children running about the walled compound and the couples walking laps around the building, through the featureless lobby and up the elevator to the four-bedroom, 4,500-square-foot duplex on the very top floor. The master bedroom, which had been earmarked for Jenny and me, was a 700-squarefoot concrete echo chamber. It was bigger than our entire apartment in Brooklyn. And it was completely empty except for a bed, two chairs, a small television and the smell.

The smell got worse as the evening wore on. It was so bad that I woke in the middle of the night convinced that poison gases were leaking from the pipes. This is no exaggeration: I actually shook Jenny awake and hissed, That smell! Do you smell it?! I think there’s some sort of gas leak! We were the first people ever to sleep in this brand-new bedroom, and I had visions of Ratan, the apartment’s live-in servant, finding us choked to death as he came to deliver our morning mangoes. What else but some sort of terrible plumbing malfunction could explain that enveloping odor of rot and death?

It was two in the morning, but I nevertheless forced Jenny out of bed and into one of the other empty bedrooms in the flat. The smell was there, too, but not quite as asphyxiating. And that was where Ratan was surprised to find us the next morning: Jenny grumpy, but both of us alive.

As it turned out, there was nothing wrong with the pipes. That was just how winter smelled. And we learned that the smell comes on every fall, ushered in by Diwali fireworks that create a haze of smoke that seems thick enough to choke out a city-wide infestation of flying insects—which, during the second Diwali we celebrated, actually happened. The smell is the aroma of cow-dung cooking fires, of coal-fired power plants, of brick kilns that almost outnumber cows in rural Uttar Pradesh, of the dead leaves and plastic chai cups that tent-dwellers and security guards burn to keep warm, and of Delhi’s millions of cars, trucks and motorcycles that haven’t yet been converted to run on natural gas. The smell comes at night; daytime provides a respite. And every day as dusk would fall, we would hope that maybe the weather had finally shifted, that maybe the smell had finally moved on to Rajasthan or something. But then the sun would set and the smell would rise, permeating every corner of the city just like those flying insects did, except the smell couldn’t be dissipated by swatting at it. When morning came, the cycle would repeat, much to the dismay of the city’s sixteen million lungs.

Until the seasons changed. And the heat began.

Delhi’s winter surprised us by existing. Packing our suitcases back in Brooklyn, we anticipated eleven months of unbroken heat and one month of unbroken rain. But by the midpoint of our first December we’d purchased two electric heaters and two thick wool blankets to wrap around our shoulders during those moments when we’d exit the narrow arc of air that the electric heaters kept warm. And still the drafts radiated through our windows and wrapped icily around our souls. Walking upon the marble floor—which was intended to echo the air conditioning in the summer—was a barefoot trek across an icy lake, despite the three pairs of socks I would be wearing. (I couldn’t find any slippers my size in the market.) Going to the bathroom made us wish our flat had a squat toilet—anything other than sitting on that icy seat.

The dropping temperature had been a gradual revelation. At first, we only needed a comforter for our bed. Then we only needed a sweater around the house. Before long, we were buying hats, and then scarves, and then gloves, and then jackets, and then those electric heaters that we’d also use to thaw our bathroom—without the heater, the bathroom was more useful as a walk-in freezer. Late night rides in open-air autorickshaws made us regret not leasing a car. Huddled together in the back seat, staring at the driver’s back through our own fogged breath, we’d envy the surreptitious warming sips he’d take from the small bottle in his breast pocket, no matter the impact they had on his driving.

But winter also brought splendor to Delhi. Driving down M.G. Road on the coldest mornings, segments of the Metro would disappear into the vanishing point, majestically suspended in the sky, more massive and beautiful than they ever seemed on a clear day. The air, thick and still, would be broken only by brilliant flashes of blue as kingfishers flitted across the road. Passing through Gurgaon, the skyscrapers would be hidden behind gray clouds, an invisible presence somewhere beyond the black silhouettes of the electrical towers.

Beautiful as it was, though, this fog was trouble. Every winter morning the newspapers told of canceled trains and flights forced to land in Jaipur and wait on the tarmac for half a day until conditions improved. To combat this smog, Delhi had by 2003 forced nearly all its buses, autorickshaws and taxis to convert to compressed natural gas, reducing air pollution considerably—except that Delhiites added 1,000 new vehicles to the road every day, increasing the total from 3.6 million vehicles in 2001 to 4.8 million in 2006.¹ The benefits of CNG were lost in the volume of new traffic.

And worse than travel delays was the toll this pollution took on health: India Today said that Delhi was India’s asthma capital. By New Year’s, it seemed like all of Delhi was coughing at once. The rattling hacks of drivers in desperate need of antibiotics shattered the serenity of our foggy rides home.

The weather never went below freezing in Delhi. So it never snowed. Which meant Delhi had all of the misery of winter but none of the fun. But winter was relatively short; so by February the nights were comfortable, the days were pleasant, the winter fog was no longer delaying midnight flights until 6 a.m., and the air was slightly more breathable. With the April heat just around the corner, spring was a frantic rush to squeeze in as many outdoor activities as possible: walks in parks, rooftop barbeques, trips to desert cities in Rajasthan.

The heat began on schedule. And it ushered in a series of dust storms that blew into our house through the same loosely fitted doors and windows that the winter drafts found so conducive to making our refrigerator redundant. A series of springtime storms washed the dust off the trees, quickly transforming the roads into mud that would just as quickly dry in the sun and turn back into tree-coating dust—but not before hopelessly snarling traffic.

And then the spring rains stopped, and only the heat remained.

That was when both my mother and Jenny’s father began reading to us from the global weather forecasts printed in their local newspapers, each independently conniving to convince us to move back home. I see it’ll be 110 degrees for you today, they would both say, but gee, you know, it’s only seventy-three in Brooklyn . . .

By their numbers, April, May and June appeared to be the hottest months. But July and August were worse. Because that’s when the humidity kicked in. I couldn’t complain too much, as my daily exposure was limited to those moments I’d leave my air-conditioned taxi to dash into my air-conditioned home or air-conditioned office. Jenny had it worse: she commuted by autorickshaw, so reaching her air-conditioned office necessitated a sweaty crawl through unmoving traffic, with her scarf draped around her mouth to filter the dust as well as draped over her arm to block the sun and below her neck to dissuade the driver from trying to ogle cleavage she wasn’t revealing anyway.

Still, we complained about the heat much less than we complained about the cold. That’s because we knew we were among the fortunate few in Delhi who were never far from an air conditioner, and also because we were even more fortunate to live in Hauz Khas, which had fairly reliable electricity. Power in our neighborhood failed relatively infrequently and then only for an hour or two at a time, and our flat’s backup power was sufficient to keep our fans whirring until power returned. As long as we didn’t turn on too many lights. Compare that to our friends Scott and Sally, an American couple from Chicago who lived in Shanti Niketan, a few miles and a whole infrastructure west of us: they spent many of their summer nights staring at silent air-conditioners as the (batterypowered) bedside clock ticked slowly towards morning.

But while the heat and humidity wilted us expats, making us pine for a return to the British tradition of moving the capital’s business to cool mountain towns for the summer, native Delhiites endured with proud stoicism. That’s because they knew something about the humidity that we didn’t: it meant the monsoon was on its way.

The monsoon is storied in both ancient and modern Indian culture. It’s a giver of life. It brings the rains that feed the crops that feed the nation. The monsoon begins in Kerala in June and meanders its way across the subcontinent, a beloved air mass that’s bounced around the country by ocean currents or winds off the Himalayas or whatever other global weather patterns magically ensure it touches every part of the country. The newspapers predict its arrival, debate its strength, and warn of a disappointment for farmers; and the whole of the city scans the skies in the mornings, hope rising with every cloud, every breeze stirring anticipation and joy in Delhi hearts.

Our friend Penny said it best: I didn’t realize why people here loved rain so much until the first summer the rains refused to come.

But eventually, they did come. For us, the first rain brought water spilling into our living room, thanks to the clogged drain on our terrace; we plugged the gaps under the sliding wooden door with our clean towels and sacrificed a few paperbacks to lift the air-conditioners’ power stabilizers off the soggy floor. And we were so engrossed in mourning the laundry (which we didn’t do ourselves anyway) that we nearly missed noticing that the rest of the city had turned joyful eyes to the sky. We looked out the window, beheld the scene, and then pulled out our umbrellas and went down to the street to watch. Children ran merrily through the puddles. Men held babies in the downpour. Laughing women adjusted soaked saris that clung to their curves like Bollywood song numbers come to life. Motorcycle riders smiled despite their soaking, enjoying the coolness with the knowledge that the sun would soon return to make everything too hot again.

The monsoon delighted all: the adults, the children, the farmers, the mosquitoes and the foliage. Unfortunately, the pavement in the streets also wanted to get in on the action: like a boy tilting his face into the rain, the roads would crack wide open to absorb as much water as they could. But while the boy would eventually close his mouth and move on to school, the roads didn’t stop: cracks widened into potholes that swelled into chasms. Water collected in puddles that became ponds and then lakes. Sinkholes transformed whole stretches of road into impromptu Indian Oceans.

This had a negative effect on traffic. And this effect was compounded by the apparent fact that the city saw it as futile to repair its infrastructure while there were still more rains to come.

But potholes weren’t the worst of it. When the run-off would overwhelm the drainage, roadside gutters would overflow two lanes beyond their banks. Sometimes entire roads would be cut off by floodwater, as was the case with Aurobindo Marg during one downpour, when a flood stretched from the far end of the street all the way to our building’s