And in New Delhi station the red-jacketed coolies dance among the crowds, piling luggage in their private rhythm, their teak-hard bodies absurd beneath the colour of their uniforms.
We are standing on the concourse beneath the white of the station light and the old ticking clock, Aunty uncomfortable in the crowd. We’re sweating, waiting for Uncle to appear. He’s corralled some coolies, now he’s leading us over the footbridge, through a thousand bodies, until we’ve reached the end of it and climbed down to the earth, spat out at the rear of the station where whole villages sit with sacks and boxes, chain-linked together amid the rubble, waiting for something to come.
The sun has squeezed its last light into the sky. There is an overwhelming darkness that carries no breeze, which traps the city in an avalanche of heat.
Uncle leads us through the wreckage of the car park towards the car that is gleaming and beautiful save for the dent in its side and the young man with the sly body leering there. Uncle barks at him, he doesn’t move at first, then he slides himself into the driver’s seat and settles with a smirk. We climb in, the luggage is packed away, Uncle dismisses the coolies with some notes. The driver’s eyes move over me as he reverses and I shift myself out of his gaze.
Past Delhi Gate, consuming blackness, splintered headlights through the scratched glass screen. The whine of monstrous buses pulling across the lanes. On the horizon factories ink their smoke into the deepening sky. Then driving out over the shrouded Yamuna, a demented pastoral scene in the river beneath, of medieval huts within the reeds.
We reach the other side, cross a busy junction. The first line of buildings gives way to a million more, the road lined with shops of all kinds, white lights selling kitchen appliances, clothing, sweets. The glow of hanging bulbs that crowd the pavement casts strange shadows on faces. A crowd throngs around a temple; many hands surge up to reach the bell.
In east Delhi, through the thicket maze of streets, we turn to come to a road with a security booth and a guard holding a barrier attached to a rope.
In the colony, the houses press in on all sides, big blocks of Punjabi wealth, three storeys high, gilded with business money inside. The narrow road ahead is heaped with piles of sand where construction carries on. The car slaloms through to an open space where three faded tower blocks rise. At the foot of one, a gang of kids play with sticks. A mound of rotting garbage is dumped further to the side.
Inside the tower, the doors of the lift close, its thin metal walls pop and groan. On the walls lewd graffiti is scrawled in marker pen, on the floor paan stains look like giant mosquito kills. The lift doors quiver open on the tower’s seventh floor. From the vacant square in the hallway wall the city shimmers north-east, the houses and slums forming a causeway out past Moradabad, running all the way out to Nepal.
Aunty’s apartment is just like her body. Lacquered. The air inside barely stirs. Statues of gods everywhere, in brass, gold, wood, furniture of the darkest kind, thick red carpets on marble floors. Uncle pours himself a whisky and strolls into his room. The maid is frying onions in the kitchen, singing film songs. Outside you can feel that it’s going to rain, a thunderstorm is coming, rattling the AC, making the pigeons babble nervously on the ledge.
She shows me to my room. It is long and thin, lined on one side with white plastic wardrobes. There is a desk and a bed and an old lamp, and just beside the bed a door into a bathroom of my own.
I sit on the bed for a long time. I press my palm against the window, try to connect it to the sleeping oven outside.
In the end I go into the bathroom, lock the door and close my eyes. Open them again in the weird medicinal light. When I look inside the mirror I see myself almost for the first time. Almost adult, almost there. On this monsoon evening all the electricity of the universe is in the sky. The storm outside is building very slowly, it won’t break for hours. And the muezzins start their call to prayer, minaret to minaret, erupting in faith, along with the bleat of a train somewhere else.
The city is close to me now, I think I know it. Millions of lives, hearts, lungs, arms flailing and stabbing, begging, beating, pleading, praying, pushing gums against teeth, teeth against flesh, tongues lolling, bodies rubbing in the dark, drunk, fraying, frayed hems on clothing, loose stitches, goats, chickens, one great cry, the scent of it, the red dust and diesel in my nostrils and my mouth. I think I know it all. Then it ends.
Aunty walks through the door with the tea that’s always cold. She says to hurry, the neighbours are coming, coming to meet me so put on my good clothes, pull my hair back off my face. There are so many people she wants me to meet. There’s no time to lose.
Later that night, at dinner, she talks about the girl in the window, in the tower block across the way. She says she’s locked up for days sometimes. That father of hers, he’s a beastly man, he drinks and locks her away, the mother died of course, the son ran off and won’t come back. He sends boys to get his liquor for him, gives them ten rupees to fetch it, it’s shameful, they come back with those bottles, the little ones.
Uncle shakes his head in silent disgust.
Quarter bottles, domestic.
Did you ever hear of such a thing? I say drink is a curse, I really do. I tell Ranjan to take water with his whisky, but does he listen to me? No he does not, it’s my fate to be ignored. It’s a real shame, but it’s how the world is these days, the modern world of course, the lack of morals. Well … just look at this city, look at him across the way, he’s a drunk, that’s very clear. His daughter too, no good will come of her. The way she stands in that window looking out at the sky with that moon-face of hers. Who wants to see a face like that? Better to keep your blinds down, don’t pay any attention to her. But all in all, yes, it’s a nice set of people here, a decent society, there’s only this one black mark against character. But what to do? We’re good people after all, and we don’t like to complain.
Things I remember from the first year in Delhi:
Someone is saying his morning prayers, his voice is echoing off the tiles, as if he’s in a bathroom, but he can’t be. I don’t know if he’s above or below me, in the same building or not. Monotony, it lasts twenty minutes or more. I use each one of them. As long as his prayers continue I allow myself to sleep.
From another direction, every morning without fail, a man retching, dry-heaving, putting his fingers down his throat to remove the blackness that blows across the city at night; pranayama maybe, three or four times, regular spaces. Twenty seconds only.
I hear the horns of the trains in the deepness of night, but when the light comes up they’re different, callous and shrill like cheap army bugles. Their noises collapse into the day. There’s no pleasure on a train after sunrise.
The same car reverses at the same time in the morning, always around 6 a.m. The reverse gear plays a song: Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, happy birthday, happy birthday, happy birthday to you. Over and over and over. Amplified around the towers.
I went to a tarot reader too, went with the college girls. This lady had set up in one of the bookstores in Khan, people had heard about her, they started to talk, saying she was the real deal, not a fake at all. She didn’t just tell you the good things, she told misfortune too. This is what caught my ear.