Sometime last month, I was in the Delhi metro when a woman of African origin entered the compartment. She walked in – tall, lithe, dressed in a printed long top and a pair of jeans, headphones wedged firmly into her ears, and stood just inside the door, leaning on the silver pole. A hundred pairs of unblinking eyes in the compartment were lodged on her, some mouths hanging a little open, some noses crinkled in disgust.

The girl, perhaps a veteran of many such rides, kept her eyes on her phone and did not look up once. At the next station, when a seat became available, she walked over and sat down. Immediately, the two people on either side of her sprang up and walked away to another corner. People nodded at them, companionably, sympathetically and squeezed themselves and eked out some place on the seat to accommodate the two. The black girl sat on, looking emptily in front of her. As the train stopped and started, many people got on. Most would race to the two empty seats and, on seeing the girl, slink away. Finally, a woman who looked to be in her 60s, simply couldn’t bear the thought of letting a seat go waste. She perched herself right at the edge of the seat, in a corner farthest away from the girl, her whole body turned away from her. I can’t be sure but it looked like she was holding her breath. When at last the girl alighted, you could feel the very air in the compartment heave a sigh of relief. Strangers looked at each other and smiled. It felt like we’d survived a gunman. Or the plague.

Living in Delhi, it is inevitable that you end up making a significantly long list of things you are grateful for every day. A typical one would involve thanks for not being run over by a public bus that jumped a signal and thundered down the wrong direction in a one-way street, the fact that you could go to a restaurant where no guns went off, that no one killed you because of road rage, robbed you because it was dark and the streetlights were predictably off, or raped you because well, you happened to be there. While these are all events that have a fairly reasonable statistical probability, the one thing I find myself constantly being grateful for is the fact that I am not a black person riding the metro. The abject and unapologetic racism the city demonstrates every day is so disturbing that it is impossible to do anything but swallow the potent anger rising in you.

When the middle-class, educated, employed occupants of the metro compartment lock their eyes with each other over the alarming presence of a black person in the compartment, it is with an utter lack of self-consciousness. I have, in the past, tried to make a point by getting off my seat and going and sitting at the vacant spot next to the person, but it only gets people scampering for the seat I vacated, making it even more obvious and hurtful to the person they are shunning purely on the basis of the colour of skin.

I write about the metro because it seems to me that if there is ever any place in this city where people seem to be able to leave behind their prejudices and bad habits, it is in the air-conditioned coach of a metro compartment. No one spits, there is very little litter, people willingly and smilingly accommodate the elderly, the disabled and the delicate. Kids — however unruly — are indulged. Pregnant women are given seats. In the metro at least, the average Delhi-ite aspires to be a better person. But, not only does this not extend to racism, it seems to me that people make the most of their collective strength in order to behave worse than they otherwise would. If they are so bad here, how would they be as neighbours or employers of black people?

What contrasts this abhorrence Delhiites openly demonstrate to the black community is their veneration of white skin. There once was a notice in my building advertising an apartment to let. After listing the size, the views and the beauty of its woodwork, the landlord had used a large, bold font to add, “Past tenants were all foreigners”. At a dinner with a neighbour that week, I mentioned the note and laughed at the notion that someone would rent a place purely for the privilege of using the same loos that a foreigner has previously used. One person at the party quipped, “For all you know, the foreigner might have been a negro!” Everyone laughed. He spotted the odd unsmiling, discomfited face and explained, “Arre, because they are also ‘foreigners’ no?” making elaborate air quotes around the word foreigner.

All of this is the reason I was baffled last week at the outrage that people felt when a video showed Giriraj Singh, BJP’s minister for micro, small and medium enterprises, saying, “if Rajiv Gandhi had married a Nigerian lady, someone not white-skinned, would the Congress have her as its leader?” Because the answer is no, forget any political party, no one in this country would have her as leader. And we all know that very well. With our gasps of disbelief and calls for the minister’s head, who are we kidding?

Veena Venugopal is editor BLink and author of The Mother-in-Law

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