As the conversation ends, the waiter comes over and Anurag winds down the window. Hot food is passed inside. We begin to eat.
“So you know why I gave you the phone?” Anurag says. “I need your help. You have contacts in London. When I start making big money I will need to expand overseas. I’ll need your help to talk to those people. We’re going to lend this Indian money all over the world.”
I tell him I hope he takes me out when he gets rich. I’d like to see what it looks like. Half of me feels he will spend the rest of his life imagining his future windfall while living off the dwindling rent from his property. Another half believes he may be the kind of nondescript guy who, against all probability, lands something astonishing. It’s the kind of thing that can happen here.
We pay up and set off for Anurag’s house. As we pull up outside, six dogs come running to greet him. He gets out with the packages of meat, opens up the foil and lays them on the ground. The dogs set to eating, and he strokes them.
“Look at them,” he says. “They’re so innocent.”
I bid him goodbye. He enfolds me in his arms. I get back in the car, jerking the driver’s seat forward so I can reach the pedals, and set off for home. I have a vivid dream that night about enormous piles of dead dogs being incinerated in a Gurgaon corporate office.
The next morning, Anurag calls me.
“Did you really like my idea about the house?” he asks. “Or were you just saying that not to hurt me?”
“I don’t think it will ever work,” I say.
“No,” he says. “Maybe not.”
Abstract
Delhi has a hacked-off parentage, breeding orphans out of its baked land.
Uprooted from the maternal solace of history and tradition, it has grown to abhor its father figures — politicians, bureaucrats, and all those cynical patriarchs of money and the market — and even real-life parents have grown remote with the jolts and ruptures of break-neck change.
Like an orphanage, the city suffers from a bewilderment of origins and direction. It is shaken by tics and tantrums. It cries out for the relief, on its shoulder, of a tender parental hand.
But once in a while, an orphanage produces beings who are preternaturally free. Never having known the corrosion of parental authority and expectation, such individuals assemble a universe for themselves, and dazzle all around them with their originality, curiosity and wisdom. They do not accept the fossilised judgements of others, and they bring wondrous possibility to the staidest of systems.
In this respect, too, Delhi resembles an orphanage. It can spawn people who seem entirely unconstrained by how a particular problem has been dealt with before, people who can imagine a myriad of ways in which the world might be differently organised. People who transcend the general self-involvement and who see immediately, in the adjacent and particular, the planetary extension. It is in these people that I find Delhi’s utopian potential.
One of these resplendent individuals is Anupam Mishra,* with whom I now stand looking out over the Yamuna river.
It is a hot day and we both carry drinking water. I have a litre bottled for me by the Coca-Cola Company and purchased just now from a roadside stall. Anupam has brought a flask from home, which hangs on a strap around his neck. Seventy years old, with a shock of grey hair, he wears a brown kurta, which hangs loosely around his slender frame; on his feet are leather sandals.
We are on the stretch of land where there was, until its demolition before the Commonwealth Games, a large and vibrant township, home to a few hundred thousand people, among them the residents of Bhalswa Colony whom we met earlier. The area is dominated, now, by two enormous sports stadia — and by the new Delhi Secretariat building, which houses the city’s government. This building is in two wedge-shaped halves standing at an angle to each other, whose shining surfaces look out over the river like two glass eyes — and indeed the entire complex could not be more blind to the river estuary that sweeps before it. A few metres away, where the Yamuna’s flood plain begins, there is a hint of Delhi’s primordial landscape: tufted grasses line the water, some three metres high, and cormorants spread wet wings in the sun — but it is as if this suggestion of nature is abhorrent to those who have seized this land for their modern-day forts. High walls surround every building, and the enormous area has been paved with concrete paving bricks, as if someone were worried about some vegetable invasion; these bricks store so much heat on a day like this that pavement dwellers must pour bottled water on them just so they can sit.
The land between these showcase installations and the waterfront is an uncannily dead zone which the city’s managers seem to have designated as a dumping ground. Behind the Secretariat building is a graveyard for retired ambulances, which are piled unceremoniously by the side of the road. There is a huge amount of masonry waste: unused paving slabs, sections of concrete pipe, and entire walls removed from the destroyed township, which are lent against each other like files on a shelf. A few hundred rusting steel chairs have been piled up on one patch of ground, a couple of storeys high.
We are very close to the centre of the city but it as if its consciousness ends just short of the river. Delhi has its back to the water and only the roving underclass seems to come here, whose signs are everywhere: bedding in the bushes, discarded plastic bottles, human excrement, and the charred circles of cooking fires.
“The previous cities of Delhi were built so that rulers could look at the river,” says Anupam. “The Mughals loved the Yamuna, and built their Red Fort on its banks. A few hundred miles downstream they built more grand buildings looking over it: the Taj Mahal and the Agra Fort. But the British did not like to look at this river, and when they came they turned away from it. I think it’s because they found it unnerving. European rivers flow from gradual glacial melt, and they are the same all year round. You can build walls to contain them and put buildings right on the riverfront. But this is a monsoon river. You have to leave an enormous flood plain on both sides to accommodate the river’s expansion during the monsoon, and for the rest of the year this flood plain is muddy and empty. I think the British found it ugly. They found such a volatile river intimidating.”
I tell Anupam about an old woman I met in Civil Lines who remembered how the river ran along the end of her garden in the 1920s. There was a mud wall keeping the water out: every month the gardener would make a hole in the wall, the river would flow in, irrigating the garden, and the children would chase the enormous silver fish that flapped about on the lawn. She and her siblings learned to swim by jumping off the end of the lawn into the river.
“Civil Lines was the first British encampment,” Anupam says, “outside the walls of the existing Mughal city. But when they came to build their own city they moved away from the river, and for the first time the city had no aesthetic relationship to the Yamuna. It’s more important than it sounds. Looking at a river, swimming in a river — these are the first stages of cherishing it. The Seine can never be ruined as the Yamuna has been, because the whole of Paris is built for people to look at it. In Delhi, there used to be a great amount of life around the river — swimming, religious festivals, water games — but it has all come to an end. Think of religious immersion: it is not just superstition. It is a practice of water preservation. If our prime minister had to immerse himself in the Yamuna every year, it would be a lot cleaner than it is now. But everyone has turned their backs on the river in obedience to the modern city, and so it is filthy and forgotten.”
We walk down to the river’s edge. The water is black and chemically alive: it heaves muddily with bubbles erupting from its depths. Looking across its expanse, however, one can only see the mirror of the sky, and there is a satisfying feeling of riverine peace. Some twenty metres from the bank is a large statue of Shiva, submerged up to its shoulders. Egrets flit over the surface.