Postscript: Night Thoughts, Delhi

September 1, 2007

YMCA AT 2 A.M. and dead stillness outside; then a bevy of dogs barking; silence again. The faintest trace of the muezzin’s cry, the azaan—from a mosque in Shahjahanabad, perhaps, travelling across the unimpeded Delhi skyline. A lonely sound here, alien. The dogs again; a belch next door, someone’s not digested their curry. Then quiet.

The joys of jet-lag: time to meditate; listen to vagrant dogs barking, the muezzin’s cry, a belch.

The Samjhauta (meaning “understanding”) Express, Delhi, India, to Lahore, Pakistan, was bombed the other day near Panipat—where Babur won his decisive battle and began the Mughal dynasty. Sixty-eight people, mostly Pakistanis, died; one man lost five family members. The devices were crude pipe bombs placed in suitcases, but with sophisticated detonators—two suitcases were recovered when a passenger in a stupor threw them out, earning for himself much publicity.

According to a recent poll, 80 per cent of young Delhiites said they would like to go overseas. Of course they could mean they wished to go at least once; and the poll could include wishful thinking by the poorer classes who would never make it in any case. Many of the wealthy classes do go in and out of India. But there are frustrations that make people leave for good.

Walking at Connaught Place, I was stopped by a young man who wanted my help. Apparently he had been admitted to a hotel school in Switzerland and wanted me to draft him a letter. It was to—of all people—his employer, asking for permission to leave for a year. The whole thing sounded bizarre—the boy could barely speak English. I dictated a letter, and he gratefully took off.

It was at about this time in the night that I had arrived—nervous, excited, in a daze—from the airport during my first visit, fourteen years ago, and was dropped off at the sister institution, the YWCA, a block away, by Krishan Chander. He had not done his homework and assumed I was a returning Indian, and had me find my way through the utter chaos of New Delhi railway station. I still wonder at how I found my train, my compartment and seat…and began an adventure that brings me back here, now, many years later. Then, those who became my friends travelled second class by train and economized. There would be blackouts in the city, and water shortages. Now they casually fly in planes, use credit cards and ATMs, buy the latest electronics, eat expensively, invest; they have two cars in the family; and they all look more and more frazzled, existing on roller skates, as it were. All have at least one child overseas.

India has changed. The country brims with confidence, a refreshing contrast to the images of my youth (Life magazine) of starving, dying India. Embarrassing India. Now, on this sixtieth anniversary of Independence, the Times of India’s headline is “60 and getting sexier” tabloid language, unfortunately, is a marker of sophistication and coolness even in this Establishment newspaper. The media talk is endlessly of the economy and growth rates and “Chindia”—the superpowers on the threshold, China and India; film celebrities, cricket, and America are the obsessions. America is to be emulated, competed against, bettered. Everything on television (if in English) gives the appearance of a studied mimicry of America. Cool India (the phrase itself lifted from Tony Blair’s Cool Britannia) is to some degree Mimic India.

I love cricket. In Toronto I have sat up nights to watch it, as have others I know, from South Asia, South Africa, the West Indies. But here it is an obsession to dwarf all obsessions. Every series is analyzed in excruciating detail, as if a war, the Mahabharata, has been fought. A fallen wicket (an “out”) in a national-level match is announced in a news flash on every channel. On the sixtieth anniversary of Independence, one of the two editorials in the Times of India is on the recent victory over England. On cricket hangs the lajja, the honour, of the country. It is an emblem that cannot tarnish, for it represents the success of the country. And victory over Pakistan, above all else, represents the worth of the nation. Once, on my way to Delhi airport to pick up my family, my taxi was suddenly stopped. A dark, scruffy face appeared through the window and handed me a few sticky grapes—a sweet offering, mitho modho, for India had just beaten Pakistan in a match. But a more recent series, when India played in Pakistan, and Indian visitors were treated magnanimously by their hosts, put a wrench into this hysterical competitiveness. It touched a lot of people.

The media corniness, the naïveté and runaway enthusiasm, reminds one rather of a new country. Indeed there exists a double vision of India. In terms of economic achievements and development, India is seen as a young sixty-year-old, a dazzling over-achiever, statistics and indices trotted out like school grades, the nearest competitor, China, the role model, America; and in discussions of its many problems (“a billion people, a million problems,” someone memorably said in the papers) the nation is seen as a complex, ancient, and diverse culture that somehow always manages to stay on its feet.

This is India’s turn finally, and its people—the privileged classes, at least—know that. The world needs it, the world is theirs. Dignitaries arrive to sing its praises, sometimes in undignified, silly ways. Everywhere restoration and construction proceeds apace; new highways connect the cities, connect neighbourhoods within cities; neighbourhoods get renewed. (I visited Tughlaqabad again after many years, and what was a blackened collapsed ruin when I first saw it is now under repair and looks rather pink.) The new vision of India is that of an emerging economic, military, and cultural superpower. The enthusiasm is boundless, the euphoria catchy and undoubtedly built on substance. Nothing seems impossible—there are few other countries in the world that could feel this way.

But everywhere there is also the underclass which has no part of this shining Indian dream. Its lustre does not reach the inner cities, the smaller towns, the crowded gulleys with open drains where the poor and mutilated cry out. The girl who touches your feet in desperation after begging (and you squirm); the woman in burqa who runs after you holding up her baby (you squirm); the peon who presses himself against the wall when you pass (your heart sinks); the family at a shrine earning twenty-four dollars a month; the roadside chaiwallah who sells at two rupees a cup and rarely leaves the neighbourhood. The desperate resort to suicide, by immolation, by hanging: the school student, the techie, the farmer, the army cadre. Life is a constant battle, someone said to me, with all the emphasis he could muster, and he was not a chaiwallah but a teacher. Statistics are often skewed, he said. A few may get astronomical salaries touted by the media as comparable to those of the West, but the rest will make do with a thousand rupees, about twenty-five dollars, or less a day and struggle. Then there is the corruption, the inertia. A good number of parliamentarians are currently fighting criminal charges, but the cases will drag on till doomsday, I am assured. And the rapes, the gang rapes, and murders, even of minors. Perhaps they were always there, someone says, they only get reported more.

And what of Gandhi in this new India, you want to ask, but don’t, for you know that Gandhi has become an embarrassment.

Nevertheless, the progress is undeniable; India’s self-belief has paid off. Creatively, the movies once ridiculed are now a worldwide glamorous presence, a magical, alternative, and indeed welcome new aesthetic; Indian English, once mocked cruelly in the mother country, is now the voice of some of the world’s most admired writers. Intellectually, once possessing a glut of degreed people—in India, Ph.D.s sweep the roads, we used to hear as children—now its educated classes are the leaders of a new economy and technology. It is a military power to contend with, and there are plans to land an Indian on the moon. Once a Third World country, it is now exporting movies and software, teachers and doctors to its former colonial ruler. There is no stopping it. It’s as if a spring, long coiled up, has been set loose.

And surely those of us “wogs” who suffered slights due to our Indian origins can feel gratified, if also remain a bit wary.