Site of change

For three years, my daily commute from work to home covered 13km and seven centuries. Office stood near the 14th century Feroz Shah Kotla, a long-abandoned fortress, overrun by black cats and whispering djinns. Behind the glass and marble newspaper office rests a Muslim graveyard, visited by peacocks and barred to women. At ITO, the city’s busiest intersection, where the traffic light shines red for 15 minutes, conversations are struck up with passengers in adjacent vehicles — nothing like failed civic systems to rally crowds into comrades. En route, I would pass by the avenues of Lutyens’ Delhi, where bats hang upside down from mahua trees and white colonial mansions stretch out in the sun. As the autorickshaw charged towards the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, patients hobbling on crutches and pushed in wheelchairs emerge from darkened subways. That is the thing about Delhi, it packs centuries within miles, and multitudes between milestones.

But this isn’t an easy city to love. On its streets, only its apathy can match its aggression. Empathy is altogether absent and suspicion the default attitude. Importance is judged by the muscle and money you flaunt, and politeness is seen as cowardice. Last December Delhi gang raped a young woman, this January it hounded a black community and most recently it beat to death a 19-year-old student with blonde hair. “Love thy neighbour,” is a saying which is so commonplace that it has become banal. But Delhi spits and hisses at all such civic reminders that tell us to treat people right and treat them well, even if we share nothing in common with them, other than a physical proximity.

A city is defined by how it caters to those who look different, those who have come from outside, those who have travelled distances to make it home.

And Delhi often has an abysmal record on all these fronts. Colleagues have abandoned plush jobs in the Capital for the famously better-behaved city of Mumbai. Girls change their travel plans to ensure that this behemoth doesn’t fall into their itinerary. People work here but choose to retire elsewhere. Friends pick Bangalore over us because we treated them wrong. Those who could, applied for visas and moved abroad.

But people who believe in toil and labour continue to pour into the city. You arrive in Delhi in order to reinvent yourself, because you believe in your own agency. It is here that careers are chosen and professions cemented. Most people who are here, have left something behind, be it the safety of one’s parents or the comfort of hometowns. This leave-taking is a process of wish fulfilment. It is a belief that one’s future can be made and that it isn’t ordained at birth. But these departures, from the familiar, ensnare the people of Delhi in a constant nostalgia for what has been left behind and a reluctance to call this city home. Delhi is that odd creature, which no one wants to lay claim to. Most people who live here say they belong to elsewheres, which are kinder and gentler.

Even if it is not “home”, alchemy and transformations happens here. It is here that the UP auto rickshaw driver’s son finds a job with HCL, where the maali ’s son gets hired by an international BPO, where the daughter of the domestic worker from Darjeeling finds a seat in Modern School, Vasant Vihar. It is where your dreams for your children spread beyond your house. In relocating to Delhi we get to avail of choice and reinvent our circumscribed selves.

Delhi is the city where millions come of age. That unique campus city which is much more than just a campus. At Delhi University doughy minds — straight out of high school — realise, for the first time, how our choices come to define us. Over endless cups of chai and masala Maggi we meet people from different backgrounds, swap memories and share new experiences. Jawaharlal Nehru University has been the site of political and social awakening for generations of students. Delhi conjures up doctors and engineers, architects and lawyers, professors and bureaucrats from that amorphous body called youth.

We realise that we can never know this city in its entirety, yet we come to find joy in its small and frequent charms. We become addicted to the gulmohar and amaltas flowers that bloom in the height of summer, the pink silk cotton flowers in spring, the bhutta sellers who appear before the rains, the smell of baking nankhatai (butter biscuits) on cold evenings. We long for November’s mist that clings to tree branches, reminding us winter is around the corner. We wait for the afternoon stupor at the end of a Holi party. We look forward to commuting to work on the Metro, where we spy upon the Whatsapp conversations of our fellow passengers, who belong to a range of backgrounds. We revel in the green space, found in every neighbourhood, where boys play cricket, aunties dry their henna-coloured hair and dogs raise their puppies. We take pride that we can picnic in the company of ancient tombs. We come to rely upon the fleeting, yet strangely meaningful, networks we build in our neighbourhoods.

A long-time Chennai resident once said, “Delhi is like crack. It is no good for you, but all of you are addicted to it.” Maybe, that is true. Yes, Delhi’s air sags with dirt, its sky seldom relents to blue, it boils when hot, freezes when cold. But exiting is not an option. Delhi might make us cower, at times, but we must insist on fighting back; because it is ours and because it is worth owning.