Notes on a week in Delhi and Mumbai:
Oct. 30th, 2013 10:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenNotes on a week in Delhi and Mumbai:
-So this time I flew into Mumbai from London, to visit friends for a couple of days, and it's lovely. Unlike Delhi, it has reasonable weather all year round rather than two months out of twelve, and although it has its problems, it doesn't have Delhi's perennial issues with water. (Lately, in Delhi, you just want to cry watching water go down the drain; it's like throwing away gold dust.) Anyway, so I went to the beach and ate street pav bhaji and saw the Gateway of India (which you can't go in, any more; there was the beautiful open lit empty space inside, occupied only by a police dog having a snooze) and had tea at the Taj and generally was quite, quite useless. It was great. My mental health hasn't been the best, lately, but I think a dose of warmth and sun is never bad. Delhi, once I got there, is in the smoothing-off period, the pre-Diwali time where the shops and businesses are beginning to turn off the air conditioning. It lingered around a pleasant, dry thirty degrees, which was nice.
-Since I was last in India about eighteen months ago, my parents have sold their old house in Delhi, which was by New Delhi Railway Station, and given that it was my father's ancestral house and he did to a greater and lesser extent grow up in it, and also, it was where I spent the little time I did with my paternal grandfather, a deeply formidable gentleman who was kinder and gentler to me than he had ever been to anyone, given all of those things, god, I hated that house. When my father was young it was a nice house in a residential district, running on the rhythms of the railway station (one of the things I did like about it was the brief moment, halfway between wakefulness and sleep, every morning at five am: this is the night mail / crossing the border, in this case, the Kalka Mail), but now it's surrounded by developments, hotels and construction work, and to make things just that little bit worse, the water pressure in the area has long since fallen to basically nothing. We spent four months there the summer I was four, and it was forty-eight degrees in Delhi with no air conditioning or running water, and those days, you had to ring up Emirates to confirm your flights the day before travelling. (Did you know that? I've never met anyone who knew that. We were bumped to standby. I missed my first two months of school. I was put off my ancient and magnificent homeland for not-quite life.)
-(A related note, also: I occasionally see non-South-Asians refer to us as "desi", which is just, beyond not on, from my perspective. "Desh" means, homeland; "desi" means someone from that homeland. To presume to give that word, because it is a gift, is rank imperialism.)
-The new place, oddly enough, is very close to my mother's family. It's in CR Park, the Bengali colony which my maternal grandfather, my Dadu, was instrumental in creating in the seventies, and it's beautiful – it's a second-floor flat with two actual bedrooms (which, in south Delhi, is positively palatial) and trees in leaf brushing up against the windows. I adore it – partly for itself, because it's quiet and clean and comfortable, and as part of my family's continual quest towards non-Western modernity, it's outfitted with Indian-style bathrooms and kitchen, all cool, smooth granite and rattan and ridiculous drapes from Fabindia, and Ikea's finest in the kitchen drawers – and partly because, well. Last night I couldn't sleep, and it was maybe three or four in the morning and I got up, went to the kitchen and got myself an apple and rasmalai from the fridge, and cut the apple and put the rasmalai in the bowl, and sat for half an hour with my laptop, and ate them, then washed up the bowl, spoon and knife and put them in the rack to dry. I think maybe you have to be me to understand the significance of that. But I have my keys to the place. It's my home, too.
CR Park, too, is a good place to live. It was created as a gated community before the phrase acquired the connotations it has now – that is to say, the emphasis is on the second word. It's large and getting larger all the time – we are a short walk from the CR Park police station, CR Park Market No. 4 and the CR Park Kali Mandir Society – but all with that dusty-tree, homely feeling. Annoyingly, it's equidistant between two metro stations, Nehru Place and Kailash Colony, and thus not really walking distance from either, but just as I was complaining about that someone reminded me about the Phase III Metro work, which will build a third radial station closer than either of the others, so really, I'm very happy. I kind of want to take Shim there for a week one winter without telling any of my relatives I'm in town, and just hang out and explore.
-Speaking of which. I can't put my finger on it, and it's kind of frightening, but this kind of middle-class Delhi life has become a lot easier for me to navigate, just recently. I've been married five weeks and those five weeks have done more for my social capital than my previous decade of adult life. And it doesn't matter that Shim wasn't with me, or even that Shim isn't desi; somehow, something has changed. It's deeply insulting, of course, but that's maybe epiphenomenal? I picked up a book in the airport called Lady, you're not a man, which I liked mostly because it's basically a slim Indian feminist tract masquerading as a self-help book, and rule one is, never apologise for being a woman. This is the sort of self-help advice I can get behind. Anyway, so it is insulting, and maybe it is psychologically destructive to be a woman in a society that demands such apology (I applied to get the natural gas pipeline connected; the gas company wanted to know my husband's name before I could apply), but I don't know, I think the best way out is to carry on living the life I do. After all, India is an idea – a grand, ancient idea, for sure, but a thousand dialects and cultures, old states, new states, rural and urban and mixed, 1.1 billion people, one in six of all the people that there are, all pushed together like they fit, like it's possible for them to be one noisy nation, under no god. If there's no room for me in India, then what the hell's the point of it. (One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, ever, was said by my second-year institutional politics tutor, herself a desi: "She is the argumentative Indian.")
(Rule number whatever in the book is addressed to single women, living in a society that believes they need to be married before they're complete: remember all the other women who support you, cheer you, admire you, are you.. It keeps telling you there's nothing wrong with you and you don't need help, it's the worst self-help book ever.)
-Wedding stuff. Ah. I trailed my female relatives around Greater Kailash and Sakhet and South Ex, and I now have a wedding sari, a lehnga, a Rajasthani ghagra which my mother assures me will look fine despite the fact that I am a) not Rajasthani and b) five feet and one inch tall, three pairs of shoes and enough bangles to melt down and recast the Titanic. We went to get my blouses sewn and were only able to get in to see Masterji the tailor because my great-aunt babysat him when he was six years old. December and January are wedding season in Delhi and right now you can tell.
-Actually, I am in equal parts terrified and petrified about this wedding. My cousin was married in Assam last January – and is not coming to my wedding because, and I'm still amazed by this on so many levels, it's on her due date – and although I didn't get to hers for various reasons, mostly the two-day trek out to Assam, I have since been told all about it, and… well. I'm sure she loved her wedding (and, believe me, I admire her – she has an effortless charm and extroversion that I've never quite mastered), but I don't think I will make the grand success of it that she did. I strongly suspect I may be an abject failure, in fact. Next to my across-the-board beautiful family, I am argumentative, but not elegant.
Anyway. It can't be helped. I am back now for seven weeks (wouldn't it be nice if I got a job in those seven weeks, gosh), peeling off the jet-lag, and listening to Jiya Re on repeat this morning, if anyone needs something cheerful to help them out of bed, and going on.
-So this time I flew into Mumbai from London, to visit friends for a couple of days, and it's lovely. Unlike Delhi, it has reasonable weather all year round rather than two months out of twelve, and although it has its problems, it doesn't have Delhi's perennial issues with water. (Lately, in Delhi, you just want to cry watching water go down the drain; it's like throwing away gold dust.) Anyway, so I went to the beach and ate street pav bhaji and saw the Gateway of India (which you can't go in, any more; there was the beautiful open lit empty space inside, occupied only by a police dog having a snooze) and had tea at the Taj and generally was quite, quite useless. It was great. My mental health hasn't been the best, lately, but I think a dose of warmth and sun is never bad. Delhi, once I got there, is in the smoothing-off period, the pre-Diwali time where the shops and businesses are beginning to turn off the air conditioning. It lingered around a pleasant, dry thirty degrees, which was nice.
-Since I was last in India about eighteen months ago, my parents have sold their old house in Delhi, which was by New Delhi Railway Station, and given that it was my father's ancestral house and he did to a greater and lesser extent grow up in it, and also, it was where I spent the little time I did with my paternal grandfather, a deeply formidable gentleman who was kinder and gentler to me than he had ever been to anyone, given all of those things, god, I hated that house. When my father was young it was a nice house in a residential district, running on the rhythms of the railway station (one of the things I did like about it was the brief moment, halfway between wakefulness and sleep, every morning at five am: this is the night mail / crossing the border, in this case, the Kalka Mail), but now it's surrounded by developments, hotels and construction work, and to make things just that little bit worse, the water pressure in the area has long since fallen to basically nothing. We spent four months there the summer I was four, and it was forty-eight degrees in Delhi with no air conditioning or running water, and those days, you had to ring up Emirates to confirm your flights the day before travelling. (Did you know that? I've never met anyone who knew that. We were bumped to standby. I missed my first two months of school. I was put off my ancient and magnificent homeland for not-quite life.)
-(A related note, also: I occasionally see non-South-Asians refer to us as "desi", which is just, beyond not on, from my perspective. "Desh" means, homeland; "desi" means someone from that homeland. To presume to give that word, because it is a gift, is rank imperialism.)
-The new place, oddly enough, is very close to my mother's family. It's in CR Park, the Bengali colony which my maternal grandfather, my Dadu, was instrumental in creating in the seventies, and it's beautiful – it's a second-floor flat with two actual bedrooms (which, in south Delhi, is positively palatial) and trees in leaf brushing up against the windows. I adore it – partly for itself, because it's quiet and clean and comfortable, and as part of my family's continual quest towards non-Western modernity, it's outfitted with Indian-style bathrooms and kitchen, all cool, smooth granite and rattan and ridiculous drapes from Fabindia, and Ikea's finest in the kitchen drawers – and partly because, well. Last night I couldn't sleep, and it was maybe three or four in the morning and I got up, went to the kitchen and got myself an apple and rasmalai from the fridge, and cut the apple and put the rasmalai in the bowl, and sat for half an hour with my laptop, and ate them, then washed up the bowl, spoon and knife and put them in the rack to dry. I think maybe you have to be me to understand the significance of that. But I have my keys to the place. It's my home, too.
CR Park, too, is a good place to live. It was created as a gated community before the phrase acquired the connotations it has now – that is to say, the emphasis is on the second word. It's large and getting larger all the time – we are a short walk from the CR Park police station, CR Park Market No. 4 and the CR Park Kali Mandir Society – but all with that dusty-tree, homely feeling. Annoyingly, it's equidistant between two metro stations, Nehru Place and Kailash Colony, and thus not really walking distance from either, but just as I was complaining about that someone reminded me about the Phase III Metro work, which will build a third radial station closer than either of the others, so really, I'm very happy. I kind of want to take Shim there for a week one winter without telling any of my relatives I'm in town, and just hang out and explore.
-Speaking of which. I can't put my finger on it, and it's kind of frightening, but this kind of middle-class Delhi life has become a lot easier for me to navigate, just recently. I've been married five weeks and those five weeks have done more for my social capital than my previous decade of adult life. And it doesn't matter that Shim wasn't with me, or even that Shim isn't desi; somehow, something has changed. It's deeply insulting, of course, but that's maybe epiphenomenal? I picked up a book in the airport called Lady, you're not a man, which I liked mostly because it's basically a slim Indian feminist tract masquerading as a self-help book, and rule one is, never apologise for being a woman. This is the sort of self-help advice I can get behind. Anyway, so it is insulting, and maybe it is psychologically destructive to be a woman in a society that demands such apology (I applied to get the natural gas pipeline connected; the gas company wanted to know my husband's name before I could apply), but I don't know, I think the best way out is to carry on living the life I do. After all, India is an idea – a grand, ancient idea, for sure, but a thousand dialects and cultures, old states, new states, rural and urban and mixed, 1.1 billion people, one in six of all the people that there are, all pushed together like they fit, like it's possible for them to be one noisy nation, under no god. If there's no room for me in India, then what the hell's the point of it. (One of the nicest things anyone has ever said about me, ever, was said by my second-year institutional politics tutor, herself a desi: "She is the argumentative Indian.")
(Rule number whatever in the book is addressed to single women, living in a society that believes they need to be married before they're complete: remember all the other women who support you, cheer you, admire you, are you.. It keeps telling you there's nothing wrong with you and you don't need help, it's the worst self-help book ever.)
-Wedding stuff. Ah. I trailed my female relatives around Greater Kailash and Sakhet and South Ex, and I now have a wedding sari, a lehnga, a Rajasthani ghagra which my mother assures me will look fine despite the fact that I am a) not Rajasthani and b) five feet and one inch tall, three pairs of shoes and enough bangles to melt down and recast the Titanic. We went to get my blouses sewn and were only able to get in to see Masterji the tailor because my great-aunt babysat him when he was six years old. December and January are wedding season in Delhi and right now you can tell.
-Actually, I am in equal parts terrified and petrified about this wedding. My cousin was married in Assam last January – and is not coming to my wedding because, and I'm still amazed by this on so many levels, it's on her due date – and although I didn't get to hers for various reasons, mostly the two-day trek out to Assam, I have since been told all about it, and… well. I'm sure she loved her wedding (and, believe me, I admire her – she has an effortless charm and extroversion that I've never quite mastered), but I don't think I will make the grand success of it that she did. I strongly suspect I may be an abject failure, in fact. Next to my across-the-board beautiful family, I am argumentative, but not elegant.
Anyway. It can't be helped. I am back now for seven weeks (wouldn't it be nice if I got a job in those seven weeks, gosh), peeling off the jet-lag, and listening to Jiya Re on repeat this morning, if anyone needs something cheerful to help them out of bed, and going on.
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no subject
on 2013-10-30 01:38 pm (UTC)Anyway, I'm glad the house you disliked is gone and has been replaced by a lovely apartment, and I'm glad the wedding is coming along :)
no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-10-30 03:22 pm (UTC)And if it helps, you may not think you have elegance, but I think that if that's true, it's only so because you have replaced it with something arguably much better: an incredible presence, a sense of you-ness.
(Good luck, you.)
no subject
on 2013-10-30 06:59 pm (UTC)Also I am quite certain you will have a wonderful wedding, because you are a wonderful you.
no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:28 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-01 02:37 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-01 03:10 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-01 04:25 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:27 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-10-30 11:03 pm (UTC)What an excellent thing to be called.
That's such a shame that the previous house, despite the nice things associated with it, was unpleasant. The new place sounds lovely! I'm glad you have a nice new home in Delhi.
I strongly suspect I may be an abject failure, in fact. Next to my across-the-board beautiful family, I am argumentative, but not elegant. But you are excellent! So I do not doubt that your wedding will be too. (Out of interest, are you still considering having an elephant?)
To hell with the gas company. But yes, carrying on with the life you live sounds like a good choice (because, as I said, you are excellent).
I love the reason for your getting to see the tailor.
no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:26 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 08:12 pm (UTC)It is a rare opportunity. And elephants are great (I am completely on board with that fellow of Simon Illyan's who wanted one), but I suppose also expensive and coming along with lots of tricky logistics.
no subject
on 2013-11-17 07:21 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-10-31 09:54 am (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:24 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-03 12:45 am (UTC)By the way, I saw your tweet the other day about Indian chicklit! Have you any recommendations? Amazon suggested _Cold Feet_ by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan last week, and I thought why not, and I liked it very much. Queer characters and all! I don't know how many others will be available on UK Kindle, but if you've any suggestions for good books or authors I would like to have a look!
no subject
on 2013-11-03 02:23 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2013-11-17 07:29 pm (UTC)It keeps telling you there's nothing wrong with you and you don't need help, it's the worst self-help book ever.)
This book sounds amazing. *g*
no subject
on 2013-11-17 07:32 pm (UTC)