01 May 2013, 11:07 AM IST
So, under my new name – 'Mr Jagdish' instead of the suspiciously minority-sounding 'Jug Suraiya' – I resumed my flat-hunting in Delhi, with property dealer Anil Makhijani as my friend, philosopher and guide in my quest.
The name change worked. 'Mr Jagdish' did the trick at the next place. Anil Makhijani took us to a second-floor barsati in Lajpat Nagar II, or LPN II as we began calling it.
Lajpat Nagar I and II had started life as a resettlement colony for refugees from West Pakistan. The plots were small, less than 200 square yards each, and meant for small, low-income housing. However, with land prices spiralling upwards in south Delhi, many of the original allottees had sold their plots to wealthier buyers who, in flagrant violation of municipal norms, had used every available inch of land to put up teetering, two- and three-storey tenements that looked and felt as rickety and precarious as so many houses of cards.
The two-storey structure that Anil Makhijani brought us to seemed particularly gawky and overbuilt, like an adolescent suddenly grown too tall for his years. The landlord, whose family occupied the ground and first floors, was Mr Bali. Bunny and I were introduced as Mr and Mrs Jagdish.
"Unauthorised. Every square foot of new construction is totally unauthorised," said Mr Bali, chortling with delight. He appeared to find the unauthorised nature of the house he had built to be a matter of both diversion and pride, like the unexpected achievement of an eccentric child who, against all odds, managed to get admission into an American Ivy League college. I got the sense that congratulations were in order, so I felicitated him on his unauthorised enterprise.
"Thank you," said Mr Bali, without irony.
Mr Bali himself showed us around the second-floor barsati that was for rent. Living room, kitchen, two bedrooms, three bathrooms. For four thousand a month. Our budget.
"We'll take it," I said, thereby becoming an accomplice in Mr Bali's unauthorised scheme of things.
Bunny and I didn't know it then, but LPN II was quintessentially Delhi – or rather, Dilli – and in that sense was the best introduction – or at least, the most typical introduction – that we could have had to the new life we were about to start in a new city.
Though not officially designated as such, LPN II and I comprised what are known as 'urban villages', enclaves of rural Bharat in the heart of the capital city of modern India. Facing Mr Bali's house was a tiny, dusty square where, under the illusory shade of a single, scraggy and leafless tree, the elders of neighbouring families would sit or lie on charpoys, while their grandchildren scampered in and out of the motorised traffic that snarled past on the potholed road that demarked the boundary of their pastoral world.
Compared with Calcutta, whose genealogy went back only as far as the British raj, Delhi was a much older city. Like a cat, it had had nine lives: there were said to have been eight previous Delhi's where this one now stood. The city was an open graveyard, scattered with the skeletal ruins of its several pasts. But Delhi, contemporary Delhi, seemed to have scant regard for history – its own or anyone else's – which it treated as an inconsequential has-been; many, if not most, of its crumbling monuments had been turned by common usage into public lavatories and were smothered in tangles of weeds and graffiti: RAKESH © PINKY.
But if Delhi was carelessly contemptuous of its past – like a profligate who, having inherited vast wealth, can afford to treat money like dirt and throw it away – it appeared to us to be equally cavalier in its attitude to what might be called modernity.
For all its economic backwardness – largely a result of years of communist misrule aided and abetted by so-called 'stepmotherly' treatment meted out by the central government – Calcutta prided itself, rightly or wrongly, on its liberal mindset. The Marxists had not been able to eradicate class, but they seemed to have erased caste. Politics was – or at least pretended to be – about ideas, and not about feudal dynasties. In public places, women enjoyed a semblance of respect, if not that of equal opportunity; there were relatively few cases of overt sexual harassment, what is perniciously euphemised as 'eve-teasing'.
Despite its broad roads, its well-maintained parks and public buildings, and its general air of sleek safari-suited smugness, Delhi's claim to modernity was a masquerade; a cover-up job, like cheap, badly laid linoleum which reveals the stains and cracks below. Beneath its thin veneer of modernism, Delhi showed its stigmata of caste oppression, and violence against women, and its ingrained and institutionalised corruption and sycophancy.
For me, this unfamiliar city that I'd come to seemed to be an arena where Bharat and Mother India were locked in mortal struggle. Or was it not a struggle at all, but a mutually supportive embrace? Whichever it was, from our balcony in LPN II, Bunny and I had a ringside view of it.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com
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