DELHIGHTFUL
“I asked my soul: What is Delhi? She replied:
The world is the body and Delhi its life”
— Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib
How, if at all, does a city like Delhi find representation in fiction? How does the creative writer ‘see’ the city? As a prop to locate a story? As a feeling, or a lived experience? As a blank canvas to imagine, or re-imagine, to paint, or re-paint, the city of his or her dreams? Is the city central, or peripheral, to the writer’s concerns? Can the ‘spirit’ of Delhi, the sum total of its disparate and disarming parts, ever really be captured in words? These were some of the questions that bedeviled us when Ravi Singh, the publisher and editor of Speaking Tiger, and I first discussed this anthology — ‘Basti & Durbar’ — some years ago.
Long in the making, as we read and re-read, spoke to friends and colleagues, we found stories tumbling out in English, Hindi, Urdu, and Punjabi — the four languages spoken in Delhi and recognised as state languages. Soon, as Nazeef Mollah (also of Speaking Tiger) joined this collaborative enterprise, we found ourselves hard-pressed to make a choice from an embarrassment of riches. Much like the tombs and pavilions, dargahs and serais, parks and gardens, we found an abundance and rightly so, for Delhi is a “storied” city in every sense of the word. New Delhi, said to be the 11th city, is built upon the ruins of many past Delhis; and each city whispers tales from hidden nooks and crannies.
The sack of Delhi by Nadir Shah; the series of invasions by Ahmad Shah Abdali, the Marathas and Rohillas; the establishment of British control over Delhi in 1803; the Mutiny of 1857 or the First War of Independence as it is called, and the subsequent siege and slaughter that changed the spirit of Delhi irrevocably from a proud, noble city to one that was impoverished in every imaginable way; the re-imagining of the city as a seat of political power in the years leading up to Independence; the terrible communal carnages and exchange of population in 1947 that changed the demographics of this city and the creation of a new city of babus and baba log — all this and more makes Delhi the ‘city of stories’.
Apart from the many blood-stained chapters in its history, Delhi is synonymous with other things too for the rest of the country: the infamous bureaucracy, the piteous state of migrants brought to national attention during the dark days of the pandemic, the road rage that takes a daily cruel toll on the city’s ‘killer roads’, the many ancient monuments that dot the city, the ever-rising crimes against women that make Delhi the notorious ‘rape capital’ of India, the tree-lined avenues and stately sarkari mansions of Lutyens’ Delhi that cause other city-dwellers to sigh with envy, the liberals and bleeding hearts who have earned the moniker of the ‘Khan Market gang’, and much else besides. We wanted to bring in as many of these motifs and concerns in as many ways as we could: sometimes openly and brazenly, sometimes tangentially woven into larger narratives of love, loss and longing.
In this collection of 32 short stories and extracts from longer works, we make no distinction between well-known names and lesser-known or unknown writers. Sarkari Dilli, with all its hierarchies and nuances of rank, caste and unctuousness, is on ample display, as is the Delhi of old money in the lush greens of the Delhi Gymkhana Club and the enclaves of pomp and splendour that exist cheek by jowl with poverty, filth and stench. The migrant, unskilled labour who have built Delhi brick by brick, and in the process lost so much of themselves in this heartless city; the refuges who flocked to this city post-1947 looking for a safe haven after the Partition; the changing demographics and the heartless forces of urban renewal; inter-faith marriages in the bubbling, cosmopolitan melting pot that is Delhi; the communal tensions that simmer beneath a seemingly cordial surface of normalcy as was amply in evidence during the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and the sporadic Hindi-Muslim clashes — all this and more finds representation in this eclectic collection.
Delhi’s winter of discontent and the inglorious chapter of Emergency; the out-of-towners who come from distant parts of this magnificently diverse country and make Delhi their home; the tug between ‘Purani Dilli’ and the brash, bustling New Delhi; the monstrously large and impossibly smelly mounds of human filth and industrial waste that paint a grim picture of the human cost of the ongoing waste crisis; the heady cocktail of power, money and position that is best savoured amid the gilded corridors of gupp and gossip with an elan that only a true blue Delhiite possesses; the typically Delhi tropes of protest marches at Jantar Mantar; the gay sub-culture of cruising in Central Park and Lodhi Gardens; the plight and politics of the sex workers of GB Road; the abortive trip of a housewife from Faridabad who came for sair to Delhi in the early 1930s; the experiences of a young lecturer in an all-women’s college as she battles love and longing among its manicured lawns and pillared corridors; and a lot more can be found in the book.
All along in the assembling of this sprawling anthology, one has been mindful that in trying to capture the spirit of Delhi, one is trying to catch a mirage, a will-o’-the-wisp, an idea. No anthology is ever definitive; this one makes no pretence whatsoever for one is fully aware of the wisdom in these words by Percival Spear, Delhi’s pre-eminent historian: ‘Full understanding is granted to no one. For those who seek there are rewarding glimpses… but always Dilli dur ast, the Delhi of full knowledge is far off.’ Always.
— The Delhi-based writer is a translator and literary historian
