Old New Delhi to Newer Delhi

IT should be the beginning of summer but the current weather has confused me. The mornings and evenings are so cool and breezy that it could still be that magical time of year when all the flowers are in bloom, and everyone is outside, admiring the display in public gardens and picnicking in parks. It isn’t just me, I feel, who is confused; so are the plants in my little garden. The poinsettia is holding out in bold defiance and waving its bright red foliage week after week. And, wonder of wonders, my parijat bush that flowers only in October, is covered with its delicate white flowers and orange stems. I pick them each morning and dunk them in a bowl of water to perfume the room. Often, I add a few mogra blossoms that are hesitating to flower in abundance, wondering if it’s summer or still the end of winter. However, the gulmohar is in full bloom and proud to defy the tricks that the weather is playing on all of us. Let’s see what the laburnum decides: it’s silent and bare, ignoring the mocking frangipani blooms running riot all over our colony.

Once upon a time, the world’s best jacaranda trees were in Dehradun. Their dainty, ethereal mauve flowers lined virtually each street. When I went there a few weeks ago, it was hard to spot even one. I had a glorious one in a shady corner of our garden in Delhi and planted a bed of irises beneath it. Both tree and irises bloomed together, and when they did, they lit up that corner with a luminous glow that is still imprinted in my mind’s eye. Sadly, like the vanished Doon jacarandas, that house was demolished and I think is part of the new BJP headquarters. That jacaranda tree must have been cut down to make way for a new occupant. That’s life: some are phased out so that a new crop can be planted.

As I hear the furious debates about the makeovers that Delhi has seen and is still conducting, I mourn the shabby gentility of those old, crumbling sarkari houses. Our house on Delhi’s Rouse Avenue (now Pt Deen Dayal Upadhyay Marg) was a relic built in 1933 for the team constructing a new capital. They were meant to be demolished when new housing was created for the government officers who would man the new capital of New Delhi, after the transfer of capital to Raisina from Calcutta. Yet, because they were so solidly built and next door to the Connaught Place, they were occupied till the end of the last century. We stayed there till 2003, I think. Visitors to that house would laugh when they saw the flush tank made of solid cast-iron, by some Scottish company, that had a long chain for pulling to release the water into the pot. The bathroom was larger than the kitchen (once a pantry) and the staff quarters were splendid little units with verandas and a private space for sitting out in summer. There was no garage because the sahib log probably rode horses when these were built, but the generous spread of the garden was an added bonus.

Naturally, since it was such an old house, there were pests crawling all over the garden. Bandicoots that lived under the lawn, once chewed up the tap root of a beautiful lemon tree that just keeled over and died. Rats and mice lived in colonies and had secret burrows where they hid during the day, only to nibble away at anything edible that may have been left out by night. One could hear them scurrying busily from room to room. Eventually, we got used to this menagerie but guests would scream in terror when they came face to face with a huge rat staring at them, as if to ask, ‘Who are you? I haven’t seen you here before.’

Then, I read ‘There’s a Frog in my Soup’ by Harry Miller, a famous naturalist, about his funny home in Tamil Nadu populated by wildlife that clearly outsmarted mine. So I gave up trying to place mousetraps to catch these aboriginals and, acknowledging this ceasefire, the mice and my family lived in harmony for close to 11 years. My grandchildren love the stories I tell them about the adventures of the Pande family in that funny old zoo. Maybe, one day, I’ll write a children’s storybook about that time.

Come now to the new New Delhi. It may need to be called Newer Delhi very soon as the old New Delhi is being rapidly rebuilt, with shining new concrete and glass, marble from Vietnam, kitchens with gizmos I haven’t even heard of and air-conditioned interiors that will discourage our neta log from ever stepping out of these oasis. Shocking figures of the costs that are borne by taxpayers like us, even if exaggerated, are shameful revelations of how far these rulers have removed themselves from the ordinary citizens they claim to represent.

The story is the same everywhere: from Srinagar to Thiruvananthapuram, the vulgarity of sarkari India is deeply troubling. Whatever happened to the promise to live modestly and set an example for others to follow? Forget Gandhiji’s austerity, even stalwarts of the Left led lives that adhered to certain principles. And now? Is anyone bothered about moral propriety? Find me some idealists before they vanish completely.