From the wild heart of Delhi this lonely city stands. Intruded and built upon, abandoned. There are forgotten monuments here, lost dreams. We’ve parked awhile by their side. Look, he says, watch the trees. Murders happen all the time, people vanish, men, women and children, in such a barren spot, the desolation of madmen, mystics, whores. A place as wild as anywhere in the world. Isn’t it wonderful? He says he walks inside himself sometimes, there’s nowhere else like it in the world.
Each day, as if our time is running out, we drive and talk. From Vasant Kunj to the farmhouses of Chhatarpur, through ancient Mehrauli.
Back again, overlooking Nehru Place. He stops to park at the side of the road, lights a cigarette. The scars of the twentieth century, the brutal Soviet blocks brushed in fine, choking dust, the crowds swarming in the gaps, charging the black market of computers, hardware, software. I’m worn down by him. He says, Look at what we’ve built. How wonderful it is to be alive.
Crepuscular. Delhi creeps as we go, the sun sinks behind the earth once more, bathes in the rotten Yamuna, drowns there. The temples erupt, the mosques, the droning of men’s voices, the keening of every faith, the desperate plea for the sun to rise again, the bats and the birds, the great tambourine shake, a bedsheet shook over the balcony to the street. And the beasts of the Ridge are going wild, making a noise of pylons and wires, a cassette being rewound, unfurling tape against magnet, the madness of the dying sun, inducing ritual panic as old as the earth.
In a city such as this you still know the sun. You know the moment it appears, you hear the bells ringing madly in praise, hear the chanting and the call to prayer leaping into the sky, the wild dogs barking in the alleyways, rising from their beds of construction sand and dirt.
Driving to Vasant Vihar, where Baba Ganganath Road meets Nelson Mandela Marg, he stops the car at the high circle of rock that forms a roundabout there. Houses are built up there the way teeth grow from gums, hewn rock cemented on to ancient stone to make squat rooms painted in blue, pink, green, painted with advertising for soft drinks and petrol and butter. A cluster of families are living as if they’ve been shipwrecked, marooned. He says he goes and talks to them sometimes, spends hours sitting with them, telling them about the world, asking questions about their lives, making them laugh with his strangeness, with his wisdom, wandering in and out of them like a holy fool.
Further and further, more tangled in these lines, into the inferno night we go, into the reeling streets with the windows down, south past the pharmacies that leech on to AIIMS, past the families of patients waiting outside, past the narrow shopfronts and signboards of Green Park to the Qutb Minar, beyond the tombs and scrub into the desert, free of bodies and cars and rupee notes. Into the foundation emptiness of Gurgaon, to the construction sites that stretch monolithic, as far as the eye can see. He wants to show me the future. He wants to share the new world with me. We drive down these long, straight desert roads, built with nothing at their ends. They suddenly fall away around girders and steel poles. Construction appears, towering shells of concrete with sodium vapours illuminating the workers in the sky.
He gets off the road, turns the headlights out. Behind on the horizon Delhi is seething. And south, nothing but the vast nameless black of India exists. He says this is where the future lives. Apartment complexes, offices, townships, golf courses, malls, whole cityscapes not yet built, with names like Green Meadows and Marble Arch.
There’s barely a sound out here. Only the distant echo of hammered metal. He lights a cigarette and touches my hand.
Holi. Here and now, as I write this. It’s the end of winter, the beginning of spring. This morning the moon is the fullest it has been in eighteen years. The dogs are barking outside, going crazy. They’ve been barking since three in the morning without rest, echoing through the valley, in the courtyards, the front yards, the compounds, the jungle, the alleyways, the lanes.
Since three I’ve been awake.
I can feel my body being pulled skyward, or else the moon is about to fall on to me.
They play Holi in the morning, take the coloured powder and throw it about, smear it on your face. But I have nothing to do with that any more.
The Holi of my childhood, still laughing and running down the dry channels of the ditches, along the parched raised pathways between the fields, running with a paper windmill in my hand, colour scattered everywhere through the sky, laughing. But colour is used for revenge too, for spite and for power. For the lack of it. Under the cover of celebration a fistful of colour can smash against bone. Swarm upon a girl in an alleyway.
I’m remembering Holi in Delhi now. In the first year, a stubborn refusal to go outside as the men drink bhang and whip each other into a frenzy. The way trouble can start real fast. Semen dyed a dozen ways. All under the cover of colour. In the marketplace, hunting for prey, the spurned lover, the jilted heart. All under the cover of fun.
Holi just before him, Aunty is chastising me, cajoling me. Telling me I should be joining in, calling me difficult, saying it’s tradition, it’s who we are. But she’s afraid of me too. She can’t understand a person who doesn’t want to belong to anything.
Descending into the city, driving at its heart. He takes me into Paharganj, that ink blot on the consciousness of Delhi, the spot on the map obscuring it black. One of those places good Delhiites don’t go, a ghetto of backpacker foreigners and dirty liars, con men, beggars, cheats, a place of drugs, a place of adventure, a Disneyland of white skin, vacancy taped across the eyes, foreigners like film-set refugees waiting to be airlifted, and those who make a living of them, of their need and their fear, waiting for the new arrivals, picking out the weak from the strong.
This place in April, the touts and crooks, the toilet paper on sale. Israelis, Japanese, Germans, English, not many Americans, one or two with tousled, floppy hair and chinos, clutching guidebooks. And the Japanese boy whose face is on the wall of every guest house and café—missing eight months, last seen in Manali, presumed dead.
He knew this place well; he guided me through the alleys with ease. He took me to see a friend of his who is frozen in my mind even now. Franklin John.
Perhaps it’s because of the photograph. We had a camera with us that day, he carried his Pentax and took a picture of Franklin and it came out all blurred on black-and-white film, but somehow that suited him, it matched his face. Taken in the smeared room in the backstreets, junked to his eyeballs, full of grace. The patron saint of Paharganj.
We are walking away from the main bazaar, he knows where he’s going, he cuts in and out of the alleyways until he reaches a guest house full of travellers, climbs the stairs inside and raps on a door.
In the photograph of Franklin his face is obscured, his body too, though its outline says enough. It holds the spectre of his muscles, their graphitic blur. Though wasted away, they are still enough to kill a man.
He was in motion the moment the photo was shot, talking at us until the needle hit the vein. He moved around the room in anticipation of it the way a boxer moves around the ring, his mouth the jab, the needle the knockout punch. In his fifties, a body of hardship and experience, an Irishman from Galway, with a history of junk as long as his arm. His hair is cropped close to his head, a Caesar cut for a backstreet emperor. His eyes are blue. They fix on you, they don’t shy away. He could be dead now too, I’ll never know.