"We came to Delhi, my girlfriend and I, like so many who migrate to cities to which they do not belong, to build a life in the comforting shelter and wide open spaces that are the gifts of anonymity. The coziness peddled in that
Cheers theme song was anathema. We wanted a place where nobody knew our names. I am perhaps making our motives sound murkier than they were; if we were fugutives, we were fugutives from law school, in her case, and, in my case, well, she was my reason to finally flee my chronic sloth, my fragile paperbacks, my taxing roundtrip from bed to couch, couch to bed.
In Delhi, we had no, in the language of American cop shows, priors. No family. No touchstones. No friends. No exes. I got a low-paying job at an afternoon paper. She worked for a proper newspaper. We lived in crummy 'barsatis,' first in GKII, then in Defence Colony, where the psoriatic walls shed paint like skin.
We worked; we argued; we read; we had sex; we went to the movies; we laughed; we at dinner. It was utterly mundane, utterly banal. I was terrified it would end. Through it all, Delhi mouldered magnificently. A city, like everything else, is transformed, lifted by love. Delhi, to me, was unutterably beautiful.
I cannot pretend we lived in this city in any meaningful way. I still don't know my way around it, despite having been here nearly four years. I cannot pretend to think this city great to live in. The restraunts are third rate; the movies in the shiny multiplexes are third rate; the infrastructure is third rate. And during the power cut five minutes before the end of the Italy-Germany World Cup semifinal, I cannot pretend the words loathing and disgust didn't accurately convey the strength of my feeling. But restraunts, culture and uninterrupted power (yes, the wound runs deep) are accoutrements, varnish.
People make a city. Sometimes just one person. The city you hold in your head has almost nothing to do with the physical entity around you.
None of Delhi's ugliness soils the simple, unanswerable truth that this is the city where for me a fledgling but unusually intense love turned into something real, with heft, something you wouldn't mess with in a downtown alley, something with the force and snap of a Zidane headbutt; that this is also the city where we made our last stand before the rest of a lifetime of dutiful middle class pottering. As this is a Capital Letter, I suppose I ought to say something about the grace of Delhi. The way it looks in the rain, like a once great beauty on the cusp of desuetude. But Delhi itself, its beauty, or its mephitic drains, is only incidental to the Delhi I'm talking about here, in a piece ostensibly, nominally about the city. My Delhi is the product of solipsism, my image of it a reflection not so much of the city as of myself.
Delhi, in these last days before we leave for New York City, has taken on the ectoplasmic aspect of an idea, a dream.
Bogart and Bergman can keep Paris, we'll always have Delhi."
- DasGupta,
Shougat. "Capital Letter," Outlook Magazine, Summer 2006
