A Place Within (7 page)

In the other room the women are more relaxed and jovial. The bride appears in the front room once, can’t be more than twenty-two; she wears a red shalwar-kameez and is very beautiful. B.A., M.Sc., Krishan Chander tells me. He borrows ten Canadian dollars from me to give her as a present. She is his niece.

My last impressions of India, in New Delhi in the wedding season, are fleeting. I have seen so much in the last four weeks, I feel numbed. I visit the Gandhi memorial and the tombs of the great Sufi Nizamuddin Auliya and his disciple, the poet and musician Amir Khusrau. I walk through Old Delhi and realize that here is another world I have not seen. But I know I am going to return, India has taken me back.

At a reception given by the British Council, finally I meet that institution of a man, the writer Khushwant Singh, who had written glowingly and generously of my first novel when it appeared in India. He gives me a warm embrace. Here I also meet the writer
and journalist M. J. Akbar, who has written of these recent and previous occurrences of ethnic violence. He compares it to Bosnia. It is now that Krishan Chander becomes aware of the extent of what has been going on in Surat and Bombay. So busy has he been organizing Canadian-studies affairs, he has not had time to look at the papers. I didn’t know, he says. He tells me of an incident he witnessed on his street after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, when the Sikhs of Delhi were victimized. He saw a corner store belonging to a Sikh being torched. And it turns out, he himself is a refugee from some part of current Pakistan.

Krishan Chander and his wife drive me to the airport in their white Maruti. He tells me that he now awaits a relation of his who is coming from England on the express purpose of going to his village and having a twenty-year-old curse lifted from his daughter, also in England. Indians are tribal, says Krishan Chander’s wife, a school principal; all except the educated ones, she adds.

Ahead of us, a commercial vehicle. On its back a decorated sign: “Horn please!”

Delhi: The Burden of History

Think now

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors

And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,

Guides us by vanities. Think now

She gives when our attention is distracted

And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions

That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late

What’s not believed in, or if still believed,

In memory only, reconsidered passion.

T. S. ELIOT
, “Gerontion”

Enigmas to Uncover

Think, in this batter’d Caravanserai

Whose Doorways are alternate Night and Day,

How Sultan after Sultan with his Pomp

Abode his Hour or two, and went his way.

EDWARD FITZGERALD
,
The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

B
ECAUSE
D
ELHI WAS THE FIRST CITY
where I landed, I have always returned to it; from here I have departed for various places, and here I always return, before heading back to Canada. I am unsettled by nature, and yet I am a creature of habit. I abhor changes and moving, yet I long to get away. My continual returning to India through Delhi reflects perhaps, in some convoluted way, this dual nature.

Bombay, which was the traditional landing place for my people and synonymous with India in my childhood, and the setting of many a popular film and song, has an infectious rhythm and colour; it is a city cluttered with life and a pleasure to walk in; much is written about it. Delhi, on the other hand, more open and expansive, is not the stuff of movies; it is both older and newer, has been so for at least a thousand years. And the more recent newer Delhi has all the character of a suburban sprawl. But Delhi in its traditional sense, said the right way, evokes the mystique of history, and old poetry, reminders of empires rising and falling; it carries images of wars and marauding armies, echoes dimly with the clash of steel, the roll of cannon, the thunder of horses. It was the seat
of the so-called Muslim rule in India and, recently, of a modern right-wing nationalist government drawing much rhetorical strength, if not the poison of communal hatred, from allusions to that rule. Not only were the last Mughals defeated here by the British, the last emperor exiled ignominiously to faraway Burma and his family destined to live in poverty, but thousands of Muslims fled Delhi during the partition of India (called, simply, “Partition,” all its horrors implied), headed for the newly formed nation of Pakistan. Hindus travelled the opposite way, bringing the bitterness of exile and loss and violence with them into the new developments of Delhi. Up to half a million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs are said to have perished in the slaughter that accompanied Partition. Every monument here therefore gives pause for thought, a squirm of the mind: How does one respond? Does that put a label on one? Isn’t there a neutral, intellectual, dispassionate way to respond to the history? Delhi, for me, always raises questions. Once, upon telling a taxi driver to take me to the Mughal emperor Humayun’s tomb, a grand monument amidst a splendid garden, all of it recently renovated, he lied, “Why go there, there’s nothing there but an empty roundabout.” Immediately I craned my neck to identify the telltale markers of his faith in the stickers on his dashboard, the hangings on his mirror. And felt guilty afterwards for my suspicion.

Within the area now called Delhi, many an old Delhi (the canonical number is seven) rose and fell into neglect and ruin, a monument to a ruler’s ambition, a lesson in the transience of empire and dynasty. The heroes of the great Indian epic the
Mahabharata
, the five Pandava brothers, are thought to have held court here, some three thousand years ago, in a city they had built called Indraprastha. The city is described in great detail in the
Mahabharata
, as grand and wonderful, with “well-planned streets, magnificent white buildings,
pavilions, pleasure hillocks, ponds, lakes, and tanks [reservoirs]. It was surrounded by beautiful gardens where trees of many kinds blossomed and bore fruit and where the air resounded with the call of peacocks and cuckoos…. From here Yudhisthira [the eldest of the Pandavas] ruled over his realm, cultivating among his subjects
dharma
(righteousness),
artha
(material well-being), and
kama
(the satisfaction of sensual pleasure).” Among the magnificent buildings was a great hall which had golden pillars and was studded with precious stones. The details seem fantastical, but that might well be poetic licence. Did the descriptions have a basis in fact? Apparently not. A covered archaeological dig at Purana Qila, the Old Fort, is perhaps the site of ancient Indraprastha. Archaeologists who have dug at this site and at others connected with or mentioned in the epic have indeed found ancient artifacts—shards of fine pottery called Painted Grey Ware—dating to about 1000
BC
, but nothing so exotically wonderful as to have belonged to the Indraprastha of the
Mahabharata
. But then, what inspired the poet who described Indraprastha so opulently, and when did he write?

Lying alongside the Jumna river, at the end of a corridor between the Himalayan range to the north and the Rajasthan desert to the south and west, Delhi became the prize of many an invader from the north and west. The rest of India lay before it, so to speak, inviting conquest and plunder. In Delhi, the Turks from Central Asia began the long era of Muslim rule over India, the great Mughal empire reached its zenith, declined, and fell, and the British ruled over the jewel of an empire over which the sun finally set. Here Mahatma Gandhi, still grieving the breakup of the country in the horror of Partition following the country’s independence from Britain, was assassinated; and from here the charismatic public-school and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru presided as India’s first prime minister during the heyday of Nonalignment and the Cold War.

A growing metropolis of increasing millions, streets packed with buses, auto-rickshaws, Marutis, and other, newer car models, the air heavily polluted, immense hoardings looming over the traffic, advertising the two competing colas, Bollywood films, computers, wireless providers, the focus here is on the now and the future. And so if one came expecting history to leap out from the sidewalks, as I did first, as one might in London or Paris—where history is organized and preserved and documented for the visitor not only in the public buildings but also in the grand museums—one is disappointed. I recall my visit to the Jantar Mantar observatory on my first day in Delhi and coming out feeling empty. Monuments there are in plenty, a thousand years’ worth of them, a few of them prized and showcased, but most decaying or lost or known only to a few, and all surrounded with an ironic sense of detachment from much of the populace.

Perhaps this is because Delhi has always been seen as a city invaded, in wave after wave of conquest, and built over and extended and moved over time; perhaps also because it is a city of recent refugees—and one could argue that the most recent invasion of Delhi was by the Punjabi refugees who bitterly left their ancestral homes in the land that became Pakistan and arrived in train-loads in this city and radically changed its nature. So Delhi’s past is not what everyone takes pride in, claims as his or her own. History is selective, discontinuous. If you see the city as having been invaded by foreign Muslim conquerors whose descendants are now Pakistanis, then its monuments, if they don’t bring up bile, mean nothing to you.

“We’re living off an inheritance,” a well-respected restoration architect tells me. “We’ve inherited many buildings but built few ourselves.” An unfair assessment, perhaps, and dated, in this rapidly
changing city. But as if to illustrate that statement, during my first visit I was driven through the “New Delhi” built by the British, in an area of lush lawns and gardens and wide tree-lined avenues, past Rashtrapati Bhavan, the once viceregal now presidential palace, the parliament buildings (“gift of the Britishers,” a guidebook explained), Claridges Hotel, and residences of the ruling elite. “In this area Indians were not allowed once,” my host, Krishan Chander, smiled. I wondered if there was any method in his choice of only these sites for me to see. None of the Mughal monuments, nothing pre-British, apparently, excited him. This was his fixed itinerary for visitors from abroad, what he thought would impress them. He was, as I later learned, one of the refugees of Partition. For his pièce de résistance he took me to the Diplomatic Enclave, in the posh area called Chanakya Puri, containing broad leafy streets named after grand rulers of the past and grand philosophies, and showed me the Canadian High Commission. “Home!” he announced with a wide grin. It could be a touch of irony, cruel, but it wasn’t. He seemed sincere in his belief that the place would remind me of home. If only home were such a simple matter. During my second day in the country, as I recall, he had taken me for a returned Indian and left me to negotiate on my own the vast, bewildering New Delhi railway station.

On a train to Shimla, once, I sat across from two young women very diligently eating chappati and daal with their hands, from a package bought at a station. Something in their accent, something in their reserve, suggested they could only be Canadian. Yet they did not have that ubiquitous badge that many Canadian travellers carry, a Canadian flag, a red maple leaf sewn prominently on their luggage somewhere. A family of Gujarati tourists with two very indulged kids tried to convince one of the girls that it was all right to throw trash out the window, and she, after hesitating for some time, finally chucked her refuse out. I am not used to it, she explained, we are taught to throw garbage only in bins. The Gujarati
woman smiled. We have a lot to learn from you, she said. The girl came from Canada, she said. Only then, I, who am usually reticent with strangers, felt I had a claim to them. I spoke to them about where they came from, where I lived. They were students in Kingston, in fact, which city I had to visit immediately after my return. But I was right in another respect also: very soon the girls produced Canadian pins, with the maple leaf at the head, and handed them out. They were eagerly accepted by all the passengers around.

But here in Delhi, excepting the monuments and the size of the city, so much actually reminds me of another home, in East Africa, across the Indian Ocean. The residential streets in many areas look exactly like those in the Indian areas of the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam of my childhood: the flower bushes in bungalow gardens, the mango trees giving wide shade; the two-storey apartment blocks of brick and cement, painted a simple white or light colour; the people outside them, vegetable sellers and their customers, the school kids. The pace of life, the background sounds. And inside the houses, the one-or two-bedroom cluttered interiors, the photo of a deceased family elder in prime place, objects displayed in glass cabinets, the essentially modest furniture and facilities. All this, so familiar as to take the breath away.

I recall a scene in suburban Delhi; this was later, during a family visit to India. We had taken a bus from our guest house in South Delhi to go to Connaught Circus, the heart of New Delhi. On the way we passed certain residential areas of the city, and glancing at my wife I saw a sudden emotion come over her face. She, who had not been back to Dar es Salaam in over twenty years, was reminded of it by the neighbourhoods we passed through. Such is the meaning of home. How could I possibly explain this to Krishan Chander, whose one ambition seems to be to send at least one of his children “there”? And if he succeeds, would he then go and stare nostalgically at the Canadian High Commission or the American Embassy?