A Loving Nazar

In the autumn of this year, I decided to grow a garden.  A garden in concrete.

Like many Dilliwalas, I live in a DDA flat. In fact, the DDA flat must be some kind of bleak mis en scene of my stationary Dilli existence; it has stalked and enwrapped me all my life. I spent most of my adult life growing up in a DDA flat. I got married and moved into a DDA flat. I had a baby and moved into a new place closer to my parents who could be my babysitters, and it was again, a DDA flat. I can move around in any DDA flat with my eyes closed and brain on auto-pilot. I can maneouvre the light switches like touch finger typing; in the backlit-keypad-less dark even. In the afterlife, if I ever get into a hellish maze that remotely resembles a totally sealed DDA flat, I will swiftly pull of a Houdini and be out in a jiffy. 

The thing about a DDA flat is that it is a collection of concrete walls and perpendicular angles, stacked one on top of the other. A DDA flat is designed to exhibit the middle class lives of Delhi. Just like the city, a DDA flat allows you no privacy;  the walls and floors are designed to transmit even the tiniest pin-drop silences. The balconies are stacked so that you can see every inch of every dincharya splayed in panoramic detail. Just like the city, you learn to make space in the crush of bodies, breaths and gazes. A DDA colony is a collection of short stories of Chekovian detail. Whether you look out of the window or not, there is no escaping the information-overload of the Dilliwala’s dailyness.

Amidst all this, cross-hatching of gazes, there is only one thing that relieves: some kind of green.  If you are lucky, the community maali would have planted a thoughtful tree or two around your concrete lego block, hopefully 10 years back. Maybe a Saptaparini, or a Jamun even, would have grown high enough around your balcony, trying as hard to shield you from the reckless probing as an aunty at a Haridwar ghat, holding a makeshift dupatta-curtain for her daughter to change behind.

I have always found this the most striking thing about cities, the way the lives are worn, heard, felt, seen so openly on faces, balconies, bodies. Despite the hallowed ‘urban apathy’. When I was young, I found this intriguing, exciting even – the ease of being able to access other people’s inner lives. But the more I traverse the city, and my own life now, the more I feel that this tremendous display of detail bogs me down. It inundates relentlessly like a persistent tsunami and does not recede from sight.

In literature, academia, party conversations, I’ve noticed how cities like Delhi are made out to be these starved places; concrete landscapes, profusion of bodies; island-like consciences; migratory memories and no belonging. Culture vs nature, in hackneyed intellectual parlance. An imagined place that grows only where nature has been cleared, like the very first mythical city of Delhi - Indraprastha - that was built over the burnt-down Khandav Van. We don’t grow anything here; things only ‘mushroom’, like concrete. We don’t really bend down and make things; we sit and watch, we consume.

But there is a garden of the heart in a city. How else, can any place survive hundreds of years of history? How can it still make sense? How can it function, whirl itself into shape while still looking like utter chaos? Sometimes this garden is only a memory of a place where you ‘actually’ are from. Sometimes it is a hope – of a good life. Sometimes it is just a survival trick – to secret away a part of you in a city full of hungry, wily eyes. Sometimes, maybe, it is a desperate attempt to romanticize in an atmosphere of apocalyptic, skeptic gloom.

How does this garden grow? I keep wondering. Our water is toxic. Our air is among the most poisonous in the world. The Dilli sun is relentless; its cold winds sadist. And yet, green grows in this city. Peepul sprouts out of cracks in broken pipes, unasked and uninvited. A Sadaabahaar with perfectly symmetrical pink pinwheel flowers has been living in a crevice of my balcony for a year, unwatered, uncared for. Hundreds of Amaltas trees burst in golden yellow plenitude and shower tarmac with zabardasti ka joy, every June, slaving under a sun that has been heatstroking everything it can find. Semal and Gulmohars and Pilkhans colour skylines red without being asked to. Jaruls and Jacarandas do the same with purple. And the Neems take care to keep their foliage painterly dense, whether on the branch, or in heaps of dry leaves lining the roads. Keekar spreads rampant. 

I decided to grow a garden in my abode of concrete.  I am, after all, I thought, a daughter of agricultural scientists. Two people who met because of the Green Revolution in full swing in the 1970s, and who spent four decades believing and telling farmers that you can grow a lot of green, whatever that might take. Green led to me and I am being led by some invisible force to growing green. It is destiny, I thought; not a revolution maybe, but an apt analogy. And as you can see, I dig analogy. (And limp puns too).

It was not easy, what did I think? The paucity of space (Can I possibly grow enough for a meal on a 1-foot wide ledge?). The problems of making strong personalities ‘adjist’ and not rub the wrong way (What grows with what? Will the basil get cross-polinated with my paalak? Can I forbid the bees, really?) The fatigue and shortcut-psychology that attacked after the initial euphoria had evaporated (So can any of these interesting edible greens grow without the labour-intensive need to grow saplings first?) The issues of survival (What will not be eaten up by dog and baby?) The actual shallowness of my intentions (What will look pretty?) And of course the terrible, niggling urgency. (Great sun! No smog! Chill in the air! Leave everything; the baby, the house, the To Do. Sow the chard, sow the chard!) I gave up trying to curate this garden after a point. I will just sit on my bench, sip my tea or beer, and watch this motley collection survive, I decided. I’ll let them know that I’ll just be around, you know, for water or food or a good ‘wassup!’ stare. Let them bloom up, or clamber down, or spread sideways. Let them rub against each other and manage their emotions while jostling, like we Dilliwalas do. I will watch them like I love to do in the disco; watching people dance.

And the darn garden grew. Tiny green newborn leaves appeared, fluorescent almost, against the chocolate soil. There were tiny hairy buds that bell-fanned into translucent-skinned yellow flowers. Leaves shot upwards, without wasting time to shake of the seed that germinated into them. Stalks appeared in unregulated sequence within the same pot, waking up only when they felt the need to. There was a little choreography happening in this whack garden.

Clearly, I had been forgiven for my treachery, while the garden worked up a party, a rhythm. I’d been the most illiterate maali ever. I left the paalak seeds so exposed, pigeons began pecking in my trough, thinking I’m offering birdfood. When I had to be out and about the whole day, I just overwatered to compensate for my impending absence. Was too lazy to open the manure bag when the flowers appeared (the scissors were in the kitchen, such a long walk away). What then, really makes these grow? Was it the all-pervading sun, the freak water showers (that I thought were not about climate change, but green gods punishing the world for my negligent garden-watering habits), or the belated khaad that I did finally sprinkle over some of the well-performing pots? Or maybe all that green needs to grow, is a passing glance, a moment taken aside for empathy, a loving nazar even. When one of the millions in the city is able to set aside himself, and take a stroke of a second to really look at another. At a living being trying to grow roots and leaves, giving a spot of land a sense of place. It must be the loving nazar, I decide. Mine, or the neighbour’s.

Today I made the first harvest from my patchy garden, this motley collection of creatures brought together with the loving nazar. I plucked the basil leaves by the handful, washed them well. I made a pesto, which I thought was apt for this edible analogy. Pesto comes from the word pestare; ‘to pound’. Apt for this city and its life. A pesto is both gourmet and rustic. It is versatile, and not at all a purist. A motley collection: make it with whatever you have at hand. Don’t have pine nuts? Use the almonds. No parmesan? Cheddar will do. Not enough basil? Even a tomato pesto is possible. It’s the pounding that brings them all together, crushes the ras out, blends them all together and makes them worth something. Like your daily slice of bread. And that moment you take out from your maddening day, to throw a loving nazar on what you just devoured.

Season of the Senses

(Published in First City magazine, October 2013. Last in the Dilliwali series, since First City shuts down after this issue.)

Of all the moments in the year when we Dilliwaley concur emphatically upon the utter cruelty of Dilli’s weather, there is only one when we’re all ready to eat our words. It’s the moment when one fine morning, without clues, hints or warnings, the air begins to caress rather than slap, the skies gleam painterly, and the mysterious fragrance trailing each one of us is absolutely undeniable. It momentarily softens us all - stoic, hippo-skinned long-sufferers of a city with unbearable weather-emotions. It gives us the gift we never did expect from our cruel lover-city: a thoughtful surprise.

This is my favourite time of the year; beginning from that surprise morning that arrives each year and yet, is always a surprise. September ends, October begins, and this large swathe of time arrives with an immovable sense of certitude, its experience so vivid and yet so delicate. After a monsoon that submerges with memories, steam and sweat, this moment is like being pulled out just when you’re about to drown – the sun is blinding sharp, the air is crisp and palpable against your arm, all the sounds of the world separate from one another and begin jolting you with the vividness of their crackle. The nights turn epidermal: dense and textured. The days are unbearably vivid: as if the sun has a million eyes, flooding every nook and crevice with ruthless probing.  

This must be what all the oldies meant when they said Dilli has not four, but six seasons: the two extra ones being the most enchanting. One is the monsoon – the season of deluge, of never-quenched desire, of the meeting of lovers. The other is the one we all are experiencing now, and which the unfortunate Engligh language has never tasted and hence never worded  - the sharad ritu. Not autumn, not winter, not monsoon: not contemplation, not intimacy, not desire. Perhaps a collection of the telescoped time between all three: the space ‘in-between’ that is not signified by an emotion, but more by the awareness of emotion. It’s like that from-out-of-time moment when you experience someone’s beauty, rather than just notice that they are beautiful.

Kalidas described this season as a beautiful river-woman in his ode to the Indian seasons, Ritusamhara: Sharad ritu is wide-hipped, languorous, luminescent. Unlike her show-offy spring sister, her beauty is quiet and thoughtful. A row of white cranes girdle her waist, she ambles through breezily swaying wheat fronds, wrapped in the enchanting rays of a spotless, clear-skied moon.

Of all the seasons he describes, this seems to me, the most wispy and myth-like. Which is fitting, because unlike the full-bodied thaw of March, the oppressing personality of June, and the seep-in-your-skin surreptitiousness of January, this is a season that can be experienced only fleetingly. It escapes more than it embodies; its experience is like the everlasting gap between desire and desire fulfilled. Unlike the other seasons, it has no peak; its anticipation is its experience. If monsoon is the season of caressing memories, this is the season of associations.

Every year I look forward to this – the delicious taste of anticipation and association over two whole months, arriving suddenly in September and fading out mysteriously sometime in November: Crushed supaari scent of the innocuous Saptaparani trees, which make themselves visible suddenly, in pista-green leafy bloom. The maddening story of the orange-stemmed Parijat flowers - secret tears of a lover that fade as her love, the sun, appears. As the weeks amble on, intoxicating strains of the Durga Puja’s dhaak rhythm aren’t too faint anymore; the bamboo skeletons of pandaals aspire for a larger-than-last-year avatar; the goddess’s huge eyes glow down on me amidst a smoke-cloud of sugandhi; there is khichuri bhog, ghughni, jhaalmuri, chop, and the smell and crackle of new taant sarees worn in innumerably exhibitionist ways. When the goddess departs, blessing the sindoor-smeared ladies and caressing the monsoon-fed trees on her way to the Yamuna, I can feel another pulse brimming - the distant tinsel clamour of local markets dressed up in golden-squared chaadar-awnings for Diwali shopping. Chinese fairy lights, crackers, clothes, kitchen splurges. Jigsaw-edged, glitter-coated oval hoardings, proclaiming the best discounts. Mountains of ‘kheel’, puffed rice that I always thought rather very funnily and aptly sounded like the Hindi word for ‘nails’ they resemble. Bataashas as luminous and beauty-spotted as the low-hanging autumn moon, and just as tempting to gobble. Lakshmi-Ganesh-Lakshmi-Ganesh-Lakshmi-Ganesh cast in sugar, mud, metal; sitting patiently, waiting to be taken home, loved for a day, abandoned under peepal trees a week later.  

Sometimes like a galloping pulse, sometimes like a rushed embrace, these flitting images, fragrances and cadences perfume this entire season; there is a quickening of the heartbeat; a humming bird trapped in my chest. I feel alive and restless, I feel gratitude and wonder. I am thankful that Dilli has not just a climate, but seasons that replace the petty, humdrum chatter of my monkey mind with vivid, expansive experiences of the weather-universe. I’m ever-enchanted by the compelling ways in which Dilli’s seasons of the senses create moments of encounter with emotion, as experience, as mood.

So enchanted, that like a lover watching his beloved’s leaving, I’m already smiling and looking forward to waiting a whole year of the return of this time, this season, this absent presence that will haunt for another five Dilli seasons to come.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

When she’s not behaving like a ghost-enchanted Bollywood hero, seduced by this invisible season, the Dilliwali is busy shopping. Not in the tinsel-spangled markets (those are for watching, and penning column notes), but in the jostle-free environs of the internet. Diwali gifts? Indie sellers are still the coolest, you just need the right recommendations. One of the Dilliwali’s favourite is EnthuCutlets, two Bangalore-based ladies who make the niftiest upcycled stuff: decoupaged towel-pegs made with repurposed wood, pompom-adorned banana fibre boxes, patchwork memo boards that double up as chalkboard-plus-softboard.

An absolute hit from the Dilliwali home has been their chai-themed magnetic chalkboard: stick it up on the side of the fridge, and chalk up a daily thought, a to-buy veggies list, a deadly reminder. Or let the kids in the house lay waste to it and draw abstract ephemeral art for your morning musing.  

And uff, yes, they customise! Check them out at www.facebook.com/Enthucutlets, or as their contact email advises, writetoenthucutlets@gmail.com.

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com). 

This Thing Called Rakhi

(Published in First City magazine, September 2013). 

As the tinsel clamour of Dilli’s markets reaches astoundingly stampede-ready proportions in preparation for Rakshabandhan, I’m compelled to wonder: Rakhi must mean a lot to many women. Like money. Clothes. Jewellery. Money. Bhaiyya ka pyaar. Money.

For the longest time, it meant none of the above for me. While growing up, it always meant one of the two days in a year when my relatives would descend on my family’s happy little asocial rabbit hole. It meant having pesky little cousins in my hair; it meant being overwhelmed with the desire to zap them into maggots as I helplessly watched them perform third degree torture on my stuffed toys and run amok while knocking my Dilli Haat curios over with mighty abandon. It meant a preparatory week of holding my head in my hands as parents brainstormed over the Rakhi Lunch Menu in a pitched up version of their usual rugby-field-cheering-decibel-level argument. It meant trying not to look dead bored when the result was the yearly staple Matar Paneer.

What Rakhi really meant to me then, was that annual routine of home improvement and forced socialisation: dusting-plateswabbing-playacting-foodheating-PRtalking (the sequence varies mindbogglingly). And of course that horrible, horrible job next day, of climbing on the dining table to keep the cleaned and swabbed glass plates and cups and bowls back in the wall-mounted 'showcase' – that singular proof of our Dilli middle-class belonging (And invariably hitting my butt against the sharp edge of the dining chair's back while getting off the table. Butt-clutched hopping dances were also annual, hence.) Bhaiyya ka pyaar? Like, who cares.

I belong to a family that could tantalise all of Haryana with its army of daughters; family gatherings begin to resemble the Delhi Metro Ladies Coach very quickly. Each of us strong-willed, can-do-anything, ‘men?-what-men?’ ladies, can get together and make such incredible volcanic volumes of conversation, that it’s the menfolk who often need saving (especially when a Mars vs Venus type debate is underway). And so I never quite got the point of Rakhi (especially during my years of militant teenage feminism); I didn’t much get why my two male cousins were so prized this one day in the year. No, I didn’t quite get how the little devils could be of any use really, especially since the 'raksha' part of Rakshabandhan was more for me to execute, especially in case they caught hold of my phone and began announcing all the male names in contacts, or ruined my hair-do for the day (because men don’t ever get over the pull-hairband-and-run prank).

But then, one fine day Dilli changed it all for me. Because for the first time, I actually stepped out of the house on Rakhi, in full-full married avatar, trekking across the breadth of the city to reach our family’s Rakhi rendezvous home. And that day, I saw what Rakhi really meant to my Dilli. It was frightfully early in the morning, and men with big fat shiny tikaas and wrists loaded with spongy golden 3D rakhis, were revving the gears on their scooters - worshipped and robbed already. Riding pillion on each of the scooters and bikes I hate so much on Delhi roads (flitting in and out of my line of vision like flies, making me want to swat them), was a tip-top lady, holding a kid, or a bag stuffed with a gift, or both. The Ladies Coach of the Delhi Metro was like watching the colourful glass bits in a kaleidoscope: with each shift of bodies, the ladies made new mica-edged rainbow patterns.

And they were all shiny-sari-clad. If clothes were a song, theirs would be called Badan Pe Sitare Lapetey Huay. Rani-colour magenta, gerua peach, paalak green, kaccha peela, newbride-red: all colours of saris star-spangled with sequins and zari and mirrors and shiny threadwork. Accessorised with a golden paraandi, or a fake-stone-studded juda phool, or a earring that hangs like a heavily laden ornamental clothesline from ear to plait. I saw these shiny decked-up women everywhere. Dangling a foot from the back of a scooter hurtling at breakneck speed. Nursing a baby on a pavement next to her auto that broke down. Crossing the road like an experiment in solar refraction.

And I loved them. I imagined the planning that must have gone into their looks - incredible bargaining talent, trips to local tailors, wistful staring at plastic-wrapped outfits, mirror-frowning as they decided how much sindoor to load on their hair partings. In their slight leaning-balancing stances, their heavily liplined smiles, in their tight clutching of kids and bags, I imagined a quiet satisfaction - of having looked the way they wanted, of feeling pampered enough to last a year. Of feeling like a new self, other than their daily existence: something akin to glamorous, special. Woman-ly.

Strange are the ways in which Dilli softens the bits even I didn’t know were starchy stiff. Looking at these ladies softened my jaded heart towards this inane festival I've loved to hate all my life. To know that this day makes so many women feel like a million bucks; and gives them a chance to impossibly combine a homeward daytrip to their families with out-of-ordinary solaah shringar (and return with enough gifted moolah to finance some more dream looks). To know that there are big blocks of boredom being fashioned into fun on this day. To know that the protection this day really gives us ladies, is from forgetting we’re too good to be true. I almost forgave the world for the yearly drudgery of plate-swabbing. I almost began loving my stupid cousins for being my brothers.

Well. Almost.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

Testing the limits of her arachibutyrophobia, that’s what. In plain, non show-offy speak, ‘the fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth’. Lately, the Dilliwali’s been vowing to quit pretending that Nutella and banana chips a good lunch maketh. Turns out not many things with happy weight-loss-inducing, wrinkle-reducing, bone-thickening, cancer-fighting ingredients are delicious. But one thing surely is: Pri’s All Organic HomeMade Peanut Butter. Made by Mumbai-wali Priya Pereira, this smooth, not-too-sweet, not-at-all oily peanut butter is almost like Snickers-in-a-Tub, minus the tyres around the belly. Comes to you home delivered via mail, in two varieties: chunky and smooth. Choose your sweetner options too with sugar/ sugarless or fancy-schmancy organic honey/ agave nectar variations!

Dilliwali ordered herself a 150 gm sugar & smooth pack and has been slapping dollops onto anything she can imagine: slathered on crisp toast, mixed into coconut chutney, sandwiched between crackers. It smells like yummy peanut burfi made by the nani-s of yore, and tastes almost as good as Nutella!

Priya makes the peanuty goodness (she calls in POPB) in various sizes (100 to 700 gms, Rs. 150 to 850), and ships it across in a well-sealed plastic box via courier (charges extra). You can buy it off her superbly accessible Facebook page, like the Dilliwali did: https://www.facebook.com/PrisOrganicPeanutButter.

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com). 

City of Chai

(Published in First City magazine, August 2013)

There was a time I was no darn Dilliwali. I was just another girl-in-the-city and Dilli was just Delhi to me, appearing like a Qutub Minar silhouette in the mind every time its name was called. If I ever had to explain Delhi to someone in a garish-coloured, hard-outlined chart like the 25-paise ones I bought for holiday homework projects as a kid, I’d draw India Gate, Lal Quila, Nehru Planetarium, Palika Bazaar, Hanuman Mandir. When adolescence hit, I replaced these with Priya cinema, golguppe, packed Blueline buses, groping hands, and toilet-like bus stops. 

I don’t remember when Delhi became Dilli for me – this city that is my autobiography of sorts – but there one thing in my life that will always signify that transition.

Chai.

I’m told it’s some kind of character-building thing: when the avalanche of life crashes over you, to choose one enduring addiction and organise the chaos around it. Like a tether of sorts, to cling to when the current is wild, scary, overwhelming, too gorgeous even. So while working as journalist for the very magazine you read, when I really fell in love with this swirling madness called Dilli, there was only one thing to come back to - my corner desk, and a hot mug of chai on it. Chai was like hot glue to seal all the contrasting seen-and-heard stories of the day exploding in my head. It was a galvanising agent for all the tiny, ephemeral realisations poking their heads amidst the large, brick-like experiences of the day. On an about-to-rain August day as sweltering and restless as a heart on the verge of a good cry, a sip of lip-burning milkier-than-the-Milky-way tea was like a taste of Dilli: scalding-sweet pleasurable torture.  

“Fight fire with fire,” the old Bard said. So did my mother (“garmi hi garmi ko kaat-ti hai”), while sipping her lava-hot cup of tea, feet up after a dog’s day at work. I grew up in utter incomprehension of her, who can drink tea every waking moment of her day, if only acidity wasn’t the curse of the chai-devotee. She’ll never say no to a cup of tea, even if she’s given her assent while drinking her zillionth since morning. I never understood it, this undying addiction of the otherwise world-renouncing she; I never got that excess-kills-excess logic of hers. Until I displayed my genetic code by falling for said beverage myself. Now I totally get it – when Dilli blows dragon fire at you, line your insides with fire-hot chai, and find the elusive fellow feeling, if only for a brief moment. Overwhelm the overwhelming, and you have a brief moment of status quo.

And so over the years of wild Dilli loving, I have clung to chai like one would to a brutal lover. It has been the dangling carrot careening me through the daily To Do list. It has been the inspiration to get out of the razaai on iceberg January mornings. It has been Muse and Reward, all boiled into one. It has even been the progenitor of countless random theories I conjure to make sense of the world. One of my favourites from that basket, goes something like this: Of the things I learnt from the countless interviews I did with classical dancers, one was that in the traditional philosophy of enjoying art, for which Hindi has a beautiful, ripe word (rasanubhuti, literally, the “taste of experience”), there are two medians. There is the sthaayi bhaav, or the constant essential nature of the thing you are experiencing - its very stuff, its primal character. And to sculpt this dense, complex mass of emotion, there are the sahachaari bhaav, literally, the “friend-assistant feelings”. These are airy, brief emotions that flit about the sthaayi bhaav like fireflies, illuminating its various moods and contours.

To steal the philosophy like a typical ‘writer-type’, in my daily quest for lush discoveries, Dilli became my sthaayi bhaav and chai, my sahchaari bhaav. There is a cup of tea for every emotional contour of Dilli; all the moments both sad and breathtaking, all the memories buried and exhibitionist, all the chaos and the lucidity.

The khade chamach ki chai, literally, a chai-shot loaded with so much sweetness that a spoon could stand in the sugar-silt. Made famous in Khari Baoli, where it is the fuel for men who carry sackfuls of your favourite spice from godaam to shop. When June loo winds leech off all happiness and make you walk with head bent low, exactly as if you were carrying a sackful of something yourself, this one makes total sense.

A mini kettle of Darjeeling gold at Cha bar, the only thing that can calm you down to the required dandy levels when you’re wrapped up in an AC cocoon of book-lined shelves and corner couches. Calm you down, because schadenfraude is a luscious, pulse-racing thing: while you fall facedown into a good book, the Connaught Place vortex outside sears with countless people dragging their feet about crazy lives in a city of relentless weather.

The ricocheting thrill of watching a herd of monsoon clouds turn afternoon to velvet night in seconds, heaving so low it could caress you lying on your favourite chair, and take a sip off that huge mug of elaichi-dalchini chai cupped in your hands.

The shotglass dhaba chai when you need to muster courage on-the-go. And be reassured that the many Dilliwaley doing the same around you are all grappling with the exact loss of fortitude and other warm fuzzy feelings to a cruel Dilli winter.

The chai to chase the good cup of chai that preceded it (because too much of a good thing is never bad in a city of excess). The so-bad-it’s-good cuppa thrust into your hands while visiting some godforsaken relative’s house. The kulladh chai at Rajasthan stall of Dilli Haat, best enjoyed with fervent ‘phooo!’s, a plate of pyaaz kachori, and lots of chit-chat. The perfect cuppa with your own precise secret recipe, which you’re going to make right after you finish reading this page.

While you dream of the ek pyaali chai to go with your mood right now, I will gather my many chattering chai-moods and quieten them down for a bit: with a cup of strong, black coffee.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

When Dilli chai moods are not enough, Dilliwali walks into The Mad Teapot and loses herself to old world charm of Enid Blyton tea-whimsy. In this quaint, tucked-into-a-corner café inside a store called The Wishing Chair, there are kettle-stencilled pastel walls, a handful of tables, and a menu that’ll make you smile all the way back to the summer afternoons you spent salivating over high tea feasts in Enid Blyton books.

An Enchanted Forest Salad (perfect summer salad with arugula, fennel and orange), Pockets of Suprises (pita pockets with yummy pesto filling) and Dilliwali’s favourites, the Whatzizname Sandwich – an open-faced bite-sized sandwich with a dreamy creamy pesto spread and cheese-tomato-lettuce topping. Goes fabulously with their teas (of course, the tea!), of the warm-and-dainty variety (Darjeeling, ginseng, jasmine, green, oolong - they have ‘em all) as well as the nice-on-ice type (the cranberry iced tea has the power to dissolve all thoughts temporarily). The best bit? Prices are all very ‘what you see is what you get’ as they say: the menu prices (the upper limit of which is Rs. 310) includes all taxes.

And if on your way out via the store full of what the owners call “scavenged oddities”, you can walk without going ‘aww’ under a tsunami of want-it-now greed, Dilliwali shall treat you to a all-hail bow and a cup of chai (hopefully to test you on the way out again)!

The Mad Teapot is open everyday from 11 am to 7.30 pm

THE MAD TEAPOT The Wishing Chair, 86A, Shahpur Jat, Ph: 46572121

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).

Dilli, Before Sunrise

(Published in First City magazine, July 2013)

When the five days of the year when Delhi has nice weather arrive one after the other in mid-June, and the Dilliwali’s house becomes a zone for her infamous mythopoeia, she often wonders: how does it, happen, that a great piece of music can fill you up to the brim, a book can soak you in quietly, a movie becomes a lot more real than your waking life? How does it happen, she twirls the thought; that when the last page is turned, the credits roll, the notes fade out, our lives lie superimposed on a complete stranger’s creation? How does a mere virtual thing enter the realm of the mind and transform our way of looking, even in the quieter moments of dailyness; while alone and roaming the streets of one’s city, soaking in a cloud-ploughed morning sky, watching that rare perfect sunset, we experience strange, virtual company? How does it happen that a favourite piece of art that chooses us, stays with us, finds a life of its own in the realm of the mind, becomes ours; how padfooted-ly it travels all moments, banal and grand.

And why does it happen then, that said creative stranger decides to make a darn sequel, and throw such analogies out of the window, make everything topsy-turvy? This July I will be immersed deep in that thought and a pool of anxiety, because slated to release this month is Before Midnight, the second sequel to the one movie that chose me: Before Sunrise. A zillion viewings later, this movie is now almost like something of my own doing, a person whom I invent as much as I remember: the one who has his finger on my 90s-romance-junkie button, one who sings of the shimmering excitement of possibilities; the one whose dreams are sunlit and life, poetic. As long as Celine and Jesse are impervious to time, so am I, and their conversation like an island of time that I carry along with me. In my head, this movie never ends and neither does their talk; it simply finds new mis en scene. 

Switch to the lurking teaser of Before Midnight, and the assumption that they didn’t just meet again in Before Sunset, but eventually married, had twins and mid-life crises. My imagination-cloud is suddenly, cruelly tethered; immortal beings are turned into roughly chiselled concrete. Very soon I will be in a theatre watching Celine and Jesse live the after-true-love life, have too much drink and powerful, shattering fights; we will all be aged, haggard, prosaic, all-too-real.

And so before the director Richard Linklater claims the film as his own with the spoilers in Before Midnight, I am compelled to do a Ctrl+S on my Before Sunrise. I must map it onto the only matrix I know: this maze of Dilli where I hide all my memories. Here, amidst the crush of bodies, the Celine and Jesse I know will lie anonymous, safe and unseen; wrapped inside the gauze of imagination, they will be impervious to the ravages of time and Richard Linklater. If I invent them both as my own fiction, make them spend one more night of intimacy that ends in sunrise, perhaps I will have stolen them forever.

We begin in a swaying coach of the Delhi Metro airport express. Expansive windows are filled with the curvy skyline of chuntey green Ridge, blending from Mahipalpur into Buddha Jayanti Park. She weaves an elaborate story about the “bleached dolphin” of a swimmer she had “first sexual feelings” for. As the train plunges into tubelit passage to New Delhi station, he embarks on the first of his theory of the fragmented reincarnated souls of the world, knowing very well that this is his signature “pseudo intellectual story”.   

Amidst the stone angels and dry leaf-laden Nicholson Cemetery - once near the banks of the voluptuous Yamuna, where so many from foreign lands washed up, hoping for a new life - they share small and enormous talk of “all the unknown people lost to the world”. 

In the little bubble of an autorickshaw that winds up a long, meter-ringing, cash-robbing route via the Barapulla flyover, moved by the sudden ascent from the traffic (like a mind cleared of thought), he says, “We’ve got, uh, a sunset here…” His arm drapes the edge of the seat behind her, “And we’ve got the Humayun’s Tomb …Seems like it would be, uh, you know…” She smiles that very small, old-woman’s-smile, “Are you trying to say you want to kiss me?”…

Meandering with other couples in bubbles on conversation at Dilli Haat, the perennial amusement park of low-expense, high-atmosphere dating, they talk Mars/Venus: their parents, the “passive-aggressive shit” of the 60s, how “feminism was invented by men”, and the “romantic projections” called marriage.

Inside the warm, crimson interior of Shaheed Sarmad’s Sufi dargah, along the steps of the Jami Masjid, he tells her a joke that pivots on a line like, “do you believe in god”, perhaps simply to muster courage. To muster courage, against this wave of stories they see and hear around them: foreheads held against cool marble jaalis tied with a thousand red threads of desire; prayers in solitude even when surrounded by a throng of people; strangely immense belief in the memory of a pir who was beheaded for being a disbeliever.

In the secret, bowery heart of Triveni Kala Sangam in Mandi House, while ambling across a grass-carpeted amphitheatre and shadow-patterned corridors, they come across a ‘daydream delusion’ of a dancer outside a class, dancing as if for them and not for her practice, a visual poem symbolic of what they’re about to have, or about as undefinable: Upon knowing that theirs was only one night of love, and in the real world Krishna is with another, Radha recedes into a world rich with memory, not unlike an unceasing river, them branches both. ‘I smile to myself,’ she says, almost to herself, ‘The one I love lives not in the world/ But within me.’  

So otherworldly, they muse aloud about “our time”, feeling like a fluttering kite above the droves, on the so-breezy-it-must-be-heaven terrace of Begumpuri Masjid. In a mythical city of their own, their Jahanpanah. “It’s like I’m in your dream, and you in mine,” she says, turning away from the four scores of full-breasted domes that surround them, tinted sienna by honeyed dusk, falling and rising in waves.

On a rain-smattered terrace lit by the light of a single, fluttering tea light, the pact is sealed, the handshake done, the goodbyes uttered in advance: this is going to “our one and only night”, and let the Hauz Khas lake be silent witness to it.

A bottle of wine snuggled into a backpack, a rule-flouting entry into JNU, a night both moonlit and lampblack. The view of an enchanted, gleaming Ridge; the backrest of a giant boulder amidst Parthasarthy rocks; her face textured in shadow. The odd blinking plane gliding across a velvet sky: a foreboding. “I have to say something stupid,” she says.

Sunrise on a mile-long bougainvillea bush; a magenta heartache. “I want to take a photograph of you,” he says, hands on her bare shoulders.

The years run like rabbits, as he strokes her hair, under Nehru’s iconic statue in eponymous university, feeling the familiar heartache she is unaware of, when she says, “I think I can really fall in love when I know everything about someone. The way he's gonna part his hair...which shirt he's gonna wear that day...”

And so it’s done, this morning will not end. Before Midnight or not, Celine and Jesse will now forever roam “in that space between”, in a city of their own doing; only he and she, suspended in endless conversation and infinite time. A little behind them, the Dilliwali will follow-wander, eavesdrop, smile, and say, ‘Beat that, Linklater!’

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

When she’s not being terribly Work From Home types and looking up the monsoon from tree-shaded windows? She’s hoping that every day is an alternate Tuesday of the month. ‘Cuz that’s when she can sprint over to Nirvaaha, a store for all things organic, which turns into an evening café: they call this pop-up café event ‘Happy Tuesdays’. Think rattan tables, low seating, cosy alfresco spaces. Thing yummy hot pakodas, sprout bowls, honey potatoes, steaming chai - all organic and homemade. Think a network of friends running the show (all of whom make lively, spirited impromptu attempts at the lone acoustic guitar), and the strange enjoyment of being alone in a crowd of known people. Best part: Getting home with a full tummy and fuller bagful of modestly-priced organic grocery shopping!

Happy Tuesdays are on the second and last Tuesday of every month, from 5 to 8 pm. Call the store and check (especially the menu!) before you make plans.

NIRVAAHA D-59, Defence Colony, Ph: 24656737

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com). 

The Good Reader

(Published in First City magazine, June 2013).

There was a time when the easiest way to spot me in a Dilli crowd, was by the size of my bag. The jibes I heard about it from my friends (“large enough to pitch a tent for two”), dug deeper than the bag-strap did into my shoulder. I sulked, I carried on, I had no choice, because amongst other Just in Case I Need It rubble inside my bag, was the essential heavyweight: my little private survival kit, my bean bag to lean on, my teleporter, my big fat book (sometimes two; three on mood-swing PMS days). You see, I lived in two godforsaken corners of the city all my life – getting to any place cool and reasonably exciting took at least an hour of travel, and I survived that large time-swathe called pre-Metro era of Dilli travel by falling facedown into a good book. It was the perfect way to escape the weather, the stares, the eveteasing, the filth, the shabbiness, the waiting, the waiting along the way. It made the bumpy rickshaw ride, the sidling-up-type uncle in the DTC bus, the cruel slap of Dilli ki loo from the window, the overcharging autowallah seem like mere mosquitoes to briefly look up at while I lived elsewhere in time. 

Back then I read a lot, and not necessarily the greats, not the prescribed reading lists. Choosing my reads was a space of utter freedom from ‘should’-s in life; sort of like the impossible dream of a party where you choose invitees and time their entrances and exits, the chatter and the pauses, to a perfect musical tempo. It was a party and I didn’t want it to end. There were exciting, intimate conversations with perfect strangers. There was amusement of watching two guests argue and contradict each other completely. There was the utter joy of kicking a stupid guest out of the door on a whim - all I needed to do was shut a book midway somewhere in my waking life. It was all very wack yes, as insane as Matrix-meets-Inception. As a journalist and book reviewer, the parties just got madder and madder. I could rave and bitch about my guests, I could have deep and insightful conversations with their makers even. Whatever time wasn’t spent reading, was lived in the afterglow of a good book, or the hangover of a bad one.

Fiction was my great escape, especially when I had to shut the book and face life. With the fiction-reader’s tools on full charge, life’s drudgeries could be but the ‘situations’ in a book that I was watching rather than reading. A dire situation doesn’t seem so dire if you make it a chapter in a book that by rule must end in some sort of significant denouement. Turn that exasperating, finger-on-your-panic-button person into fictional character, and you’ve got your breath back. He’s now an object of dissection, subject to the fiction-reader’s tool set: context analysis, psychological origins, personal history, benefit of doubt. I felt airy, once-removed from myself, I kept even my enemies close; I could have any number of conversations with that exasperating person without letting him get under my skin. I could nurse that little smirk and walk away with the perverse pleasure of knowing that he, my ‘character’, had no idea of what I’d done to him; it was sweet, sweet cruelty that didn’t hurt anybody in realtime, and as a consequence, was guiltless.

And then one fine day last year, I stopped reading books.

It wasn’t as if the world ran dry of good books to read. It was more like, the world was too painful a place to return to every time there was a tear in my fictional universe. I was always living inside words, inside my head, always obsessively translating, translating. I could see people’s emotions type themselves into text as they talked. The anticipation of this had its toll eventually; reading had begun to terrify me.

So I shut my book, and looked up. For a while I didn’t know what to do, how to cope. My only skill set - the fiction-reader’s tools - became redundant when I applied it to myself. I tried tying the ends; I imposed genres; I failed. I wanted to be Romance; all I got was Absurd. I tried High Melodrama; alas, it turned rather Neo-Realism. I wanted to be fiction; I was repeatedly, life in all its weirdness. 

And then like a character straight out of fiction (a melancholic alcoholic, most of the time), I got up and I walked out into the city, into the blinding sun. And strangely, I now felt readerly epiphany, reverberating like a tolling bell: there were sights, there were moments, there were beautiful stories in perfect balance that had me staring eyes wide, ears cottonwoolly, the back of my throat aching with strange, crazy desire. I had shut my books, but I was still reading, this time myself, in a nebulous book-in-the-making called Dilli, full of false starts and sudden, joyful discoveries. Here I realised that pathetic fallacy isn’t just a trope; the world makes so much sense when we feel our emotions and our selves extend into the weather, into the very texture that our living spaces are made of.  I realised that cities are like good literature: they don’t talk, we merely overhear them. I realised that even in life, the real talking is silent, between dialogues and words; as long as I know when to close the quotes and hear them open, there is richness in conversation. I realised that the city of Dilli gives me exactly that which I enjoy in a book: anonymity in a crowd of known people. Perhaps some day I would also be gifted that rare sliver of perfect God-like detachment: when in the middle of a completely fictional universe, the reader gets a glimpse of the writer at his desk, penning in wet ink, the very words that she is reading.

And so, I began writing non-fiction, this column - this strange chronicled consequence of an experiment in fiction gone very wonky. I’m dying to hurtle towards the end just so I can own this story, but I’m also terrified that there never will be another as enticing-beautiful, so I slow myself down and savour every lush moment. Meanwhile, I ignore all thoughts of being read like a story, a character, by a reader like you.

A friend who could live on reading if the world ever ran out of food, stoked that thought with a question lately.

‘Would you dare to read the book till the end, if you realise it’s about you?’

Without hesitation, the Reader and Writer in me typed in unison, ‘No. I’d shut the book as soon as I found out.’  

WHAT KEEPS THE DILLIWALI SANE

When words have wrung her brain dry, the Dilliwali resorts to playing picture-picture. Her latest addiction is illustration, by a certain artist otherwise known as co-founder of the world-famous-in-India brand Chumbak (she parted ways two years ago and is now a freelancer). Alicia Souza is every bit the Dilliwali’s nemesis: she’s a happy Bangalorewali, is mad about her dogs, understands words by blowing them into images, lives by chocolate and coffee. But both women are essentially doing the same thing: collecting life-vignettes like little pebbles and shells, colouring them anecdotal, sharing with whoever cares, and chuckling at it all. A daily gift of Alicia’s adorable doodles will make your Facebook wall a much nicer place. She’ll tell you all about Old Wives’ tales, the perils of doing Surya Namaskar in the company of two puzzled canine pets, the things you can’t do with a face pack on, and how the snooze button is a woman’s best friend. Even better: she’ll show you all of that until you’re sniggering loud enough to make the colleagues jealous.

Get hooked to our lady of the giggles at www.facebook.com/the.aliciasouza

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com)

The F-World

(Published in First City magazine, May 2013)

There was a time not so long ago, when I became a Facebook widow. ‘What was it like?’, you ask. 
Brief, I say. 

All it took for my Husband-in-FB-rehab to come back from the dead, was a quick click on ‘Get Back’, and lo behold, I was saubhagyawati again.

My husband has a healthy relationship with his Facebook addiction. He hurtles through regular cycles that go from ‘FB-Overdose’ to ‘Only 3 Minutes FB per day’ and back. I, on the other hand, am a Facebook junkie, especially when deadlines for this column are whooshing past. I treat it like an extra limb, my finger forever poised over the f key, my password autofed and my access as easy as two quick stabs at Enter. When I’m not on FB, I experience typical de-addiction moments: restlessness of the insane order, itching need to give into just-one-more-time cravings, super remorse at spending an entire day sniffing up my addiction again.

You know how the foundation of our past has always been about before and after? Before Christ and After Christ. Before Puberty and After Puberty. Before Cable TV and After MTV. Then came Google and the history of our memory function was written anew as Pre Google and Post Google. And even though I meet at least person per fortnight who says, ‘I’m not on Facebook ya,’ we all know that in this tiny world of Dilli, conversations are going from Pre-Facebook to Post-Facebook. We are pre-empting, posing, pretending, parading, perhaps sometimes wondering why we can’t simply end a conversation with a Like button, post a comment and run away, own anything quickly by posting a smug, head-tilted, hand-on-waist photograph clicked in front of it. 

In a post-Facebook world, everything is overlapping so quickly, I’m wondering if a couple of years later I’ll be telling my kids bedtime fables about how once upon a time Facebook was just a website. It’s the hard, persistent truth: some little twiggy bits of my DNA have forever been altered in the FB aftermath. It’s happening to me even as I type and snoop around Facebook for the gazillionth time since I started. For one, earthshattering import is recording on my language and brain functions; innocuous words such as ‘Like’, ‘Friends’, ‘Privacy’, ‘Complicated’ have been altered forever in meaning. Other words are rapidly losing their previous reading-resonance: ossam has nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, nyc nothing to do with New York City, anything greater than 3 can be love. Neighbour aunties are losing the battle to Facebook when it comes to wheedling out juicy gossip (‘How are you feeling today?’), insecurity-inducing tactics ('You added 2 friends this month.' 'Your friends added 1066 friends.' ‘Your Husband added friends you may know’), and engineering misgivings (when clicking on ‘Help a Friend’ leads to your mother’s profile page). 


My online life is more often than not, like a rotten party I go to all the time, because I have a thing for masochism. Here, one engages, converses, observes, circulates with the following personality types: 

The Serial Liker: One fine morning you wake up and realise that a random stranger on your Friends List has liked 23,90,483 post/ photos of you and is one Like away from officially being your stalker. The PetLove-poster: The reason why suddenly, by osmosis almost, you know too much about how furry creatures snuggle, how vegans will change the world, and how heroic quadrupleds have been saving the world many times over all this while. 

The Sleuth of Janaani: The silent tomb that watches all the drama unfold and meticulously stores the details for making offline conversation embarassing as hell. Most lethal when from the relative clan.

The I-Was-Here Check-in Freak: The one whose dincharya reads like a leisurely trawl through the Food & Nightlife pages of this magazine, while all you’re chained to your desk with a mile-long To Do list that has only ‘Facebook Break’ struck off it. 


The Inspirational Quote-Monger: All she ever does is post photos of sunsets with quotes that remind you of Paulo Coelho in his worst passages. 


The Conspiracy Theorist: Paranoid sharer of all stories about all the wild, invisible, toxic secrets in your food, in your potty, in your government, in your Facebook Privacy settings. 


The Opinion Regurgitator: The one who has Breaking News on one tab, and the Facebook wall one the other. He scans headlines, fits them into predesignated files under ‘Issues and Opinion’, combs his wall for related and unresearched photo-stories, shares them as his own. Sometimes he also adds an emotional liner in the style of a certain news presenter we all know, who has more flair for Bengali English Drama than the truth. This one is in an Its-Complicated relationship with The Conspiracy Theorist. 


The Typo Emperor: The one whose preposition-less, all-small-letters, typo-riddled status updates makes every grammar-loving, punctuation-crazy, English Hons types want to smash the computer and jump off the window. Sometimes co-incides with the Check-in Freak. 

The Wily Columnist-Anthropologist: Erm, we all know who that is. 

Shocking, I know. But perhaps what is more shocking, is what FB is doing to my offline life. It’s self-reckoning at its nastiest joke. A sick déjà vu follows me around everywhere offline - which is what happens to an ex-journo with elephantine memory, robust appetite for bottom-of-the-barrel masala, and all the time to comb her FB wall. I revel in the horrid silent moments of knowing that stranger’s name the second before he introduces himself. I live with the perpetual dread of meeting the person whose Friend Request I deleted 1,000 times. In a sometimes relieving, sometimes sick sort of way, I don’t really miss people anymore. 

Ever since I’ve bitten the apple, fallen from innocence, my pristine and naïve pre-Facebook imagination is corrupting slowly but surely. Big planks are being unscrewed in my forever-floating, melodramatic anguish-boat – the one that loves to wail about how the most beautiful love stories are the most tragic. In a post-Facebook world, they needn't be tragic. They can just be complicated. Comedies can now be rendered untangled, and mistaken identities sorted with the click of a button (Shakespeare would’ve been out of a job today). There would be no Before Sunset to my Before Sunrise, because no one can be anonymous for 10 years anymore. Of all the gin joints in all the towns, in all the world, of course she could’ve walked into Rick’s. 

Surely, the new tragedy is Facebook itself. I sigh, I whine, I cry for help (but I never leave); my audience ‘Like’s it and demands an encore. Of course, I always oblige. 

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

Addiction to beat addiction. By the time a typical May day ends its fire-spitting and you can step out, it’s time to go to sleep. On nights like these, a drive-search for the perfect paan totally bantaa hai. Dilliwali’s favourite spot is – no, not outside Claridges – but a little hidden pocketed-away shop in the MP mohalla of North Avenue, just off the RML Hospital roundabout. Pandey ji – who happens to be, incidentally, the official supplier of paan to the Rashtrapati Bhawan - has been making stellar paan for the last seven decades, and charming everybody from Obama to Birju Maharaj. MF Husain was so happy with his paan that he made him a painting, with Hanuman flying in with Mount Dronagiri that has paan leaves growing on it!

There are about 35 paans to choose from (think Pina Colada, BlackBerry, Choco Caramel, and something called 4th Idiot, for the chronically adventurous), but my favourite is the ‘Madhuri Dixit’ sweet paan. It comes chilled, in a size that doesn’t make you look like you could star in a Jaws sequel, has a leaf that melts in your mouth, and a filling that has absolutely no sookhi supaari landmines. Just like Madhuri would say, ‘Purrrfect’.

PANDEY’S PAAN Shop No. 3, New MP’s Market, North Avenue, Ph: 23094043, 9013447404, 9871414218

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).

Cities Within

(Published in First City magazine, April 2013).

Dilliwali is in Istanbul, and she is feeling odd deja vu. As if wrapped in the absent-present memories of a phantom lost lover, her gaze is always turned inward, to Dilli. She looks for the same face, and finds it in fragments all over this crowd called Istanbul: a glimpse here, a flutter there, a resemblance so fleeting-tormenting that sometimes she forgets to breathe.

There are those ancient domes that emerge suddenly, adamantly, from amidst concrete jungles: smooth and gentle, curving so perfectly into painterly skies at dusk, invoking strange and beautiful sorrow. There are packs of dogs running tail-waggingly all over the street cats sunning themselves on car roofs. There is that melange of faces on the Metro; the weatherbeaten male faces, the ponderous female gazes, the same inwardness, the same strife, the same secret staring, the aversion of eye contact. There is the same potent crush of stories splayed momentarily into coaches, gathered hurriedly when the gates open, rushed along platforms like unwilling children.

There are snatches of words that float off from the thick, viscous Turkish and create ripples of Urdu-memory: chayi, peynir, bakshish, sheker. There are a thousand stop-and-snack temptations in every direction of any walk, and the street vendor's call, the same aggressive-persuasive jolt. There are aunties peeping, leaning their torsos as far as their lace-curtained windows will allow, feasting eyes on passers-by, and ears on neighbourhood gossip. There are kabaadiwalas with pushcarts, yelling the Turkish equivalent of 'kabaadiyaaayyy' with similar long drawls, only what they gather are not messy newspaper stacks, but old computers. There are old uncles with walking sticks and scruffy white stubbles, gassing away against sidewalk ledges. There are cherry-lipped schoolboys bunking school and fiddling with their cellphones in hideaway staircases.

There are dramatic scalloped grey skies when it's about to rain: layers upon layers of waves upon waves of soft charcoal cream, poignantly contrasted against bare-branched stark trees waiting for spring. Late winter afternoons render even the filth poetic: slanting rays of honeyed light tints the houses lemon and sienna, a gold-skinned expanse against the slick, black Bosphorous waters. Night rain drapes the streets in a shimmering black gown right out of a dark and thrilling noir movie.  

And here I saunter, Mrs. Dalloway-like, tempted to buy flowers from the profusion of florists at every street corner (yellow tuberoses, wildflower bunches, pink tulips, lemony-white orchids), exploring a new city, but in fact, simultaneously walking through the lanes of Dilli, rediscovering them.

Wandering through Istanbul's numerous and incredible mosques, I experience soaring moments of power and sorrow, like the ones I experienced on looking up at the heart-wrenching beauty of Humayun's Tomb. I feel under these lofty roofs, their cosmos-like circular domes representing the perfect beauty of god, their loping silences, a strange refuge that I felt inside the Jami Masjid. I see from afar, that strange and powerful sense of community that arises when in a moment of prayer, solitude speaks to other solitudes.

I have often wanted to write about the landscape of Delhi, but rendered utterly incapable of translating the nebulous cloud of feeling into words. Walking in Istanbul, lost on the map but at home in my heart, I have realised that the landscape of a city is not in its skyline, in the colours of its houses and buildings, but somewhere in the intangible interior landscape it evokes. Istanbul and Delhi evoke the same interior landscape inside me, their varied histories and cultures notwithstanding. Like their people, they are impenetrable at first, puzzling and cryptic; they yield upon evidence of smiling perseverance in good faith. They are draped in the twin gauze of beauty and sadness; behind the foreground teeming with strife, rot and mess. They never let you be mere insider or outsider, but always somewhere tantalisingly, frustratingly in the middle. They are easy to imagine, impossible to belong to. They evoke strong desire, because they can never be fully known, nor owned.

And so it happens that precisely one year since my conflicted self presumed a non de plume that loudly proclaims (as if to myself) my absolute and utter belonging to the only city I have ever really lived in, I have discovered who Dilliwali really is, and why I write these insane letters of Dilli love to you every month. Dilliwali is my impossible desire, the insider who belongs to Delhi without a shadow of doubt; she is me, complete and beautiful, no fissures, no cracks. The woman who drafts these words is the outsider me, the one whom I cultivate along a Sisyphian task of loving a cruel city; she makes cold and mercilessly precise notes all day, crochets them into delusions. The one who brings them both on the page every month is the one who hopes, that her words will fall upon the ears of that reader who has been rendered like me, in any city: insider and outsider both, uneasy and yet unwilling to leave.

Thankyou for reading this far, for listening with heart. As long as you and I mirror our amused smiles, there is hope in the world, in words, in Dilli.

WHAT'S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE
When she's not writing dramatic and petulant and cryptic columns? She's reading letters. Snooping in, with guilty thrill, on the most intimate pieces that should never have been literature, but now are. Letters of Note, the website is called, and it is a vortex of potent emotions and moments that can only spill in epistolary glory. Here, Henry Miller speaks to Anais Nin, possessed by jealousy and desire at the helm of their extra-marital affair, "I saw you as the mistress of your home, a Moor with a heavy face, a negress with a white body, eyes all over your skin, woman, woman, woman." Socialist politician Milada Horakova writes a letter full of pain, wisdom and motherly worry to her 16-year-old daughter on the night before her execution by the Czech Communist regime. Harper Lee kills all Kindle-logic while writing to Oprah, "...can you imagine curling up in bed to read a computer? Weeping for Anna Karenina and being terrified by Hannibal Lecter, entering the heart of darkness with Mistah Kurtz, having Holden Caulfield ring you up - some things should happen on soft pages, not cold metal." Mathematician Charles Babbage offers factual correction to poet Tennyson ("I would suggest that in the next edition of your poem you have it read - 'Every moment dies a man, Every moment 1 1/16 is born.'") And a young Fiji schoolboy tells Rolling Stones firmly, "Your road manager needs a POKE. If you dare to set foot in Suva, me and my friends will tell some of the MEN of Fiji (Suva), to come and SPIT on you, and go do the TOILET on you."

Tip of the iceberg, that. Plunge into the archives of www.lettersofnote.com, if you want to live a lifetime in a few hours, and like me, don't mind looking very loony while alternating between emotion-swelled-teary and laughing-like-she-needs-artificial-respiration.
 

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).

Delhi a la Fleur

(Published in First City magazine, March 2013)

March makes me giddy with mush. I thaw with the weather; my moods stir, yawn and face the shiny sun. And before I know it, the days are suprise-full with moody madness: one moment I'm melting and sighing and throwing innumberable 'awwww!s' at the drop of a hat, the next I'm raging with some kind of inexplicable, phantasmagoric frenzy. It's high wattage, this month. And I am in love with it.

And my city mirrors me this month. Driving through Delhi in March is like winding your way through a Ragamala miniature painting series, in random order. The landscape periodically turns into moodscape; everything is invested with feeling. And if you're lucky enough, the car stereo will mindread and throw up the perfect song to go with the scene.

This is the point where I allow you to interject and say, 'Whaddafugg, you live in Mughal Gardens or something? Cuz Delhi is just...grey'. Hmm, it is, but there are little pockets of surprise and colour - you just need to look. (If you're me, that's all you will do, and delete/ spam all the grey bits). Don't believe me yet? Okay, so have you driven down Race Course Road and met the randomly coloured, big bouncy dahlias at the Ashok hotel roundabout? (I swear, they bob their heads in funky 'yo!' type rhythm). Have you seen the four back-to-back Semul silk-cotton trees at the messiest point of the Naraina nightmare, and rediscovered that particular sensation of 'heart-stopped-for-a-nanosec' at the sight of their lavish, flamboyant display of big, waxy, blood-red flowers? What about the kilometres of lush fuscia explosion otherwise known as the bougainvillea, and the heartachingly sexy bed of magenta underneath it? The languorous droop of the bottlebrush, and the pretty petulance of the shaving brush tree. And if you’ve seen the poetry of a single Floss Silk Tree - that was until last month in full, towering February bloom - left with none but one delicate pink flower on a high branch in March, I'd totally believe you if you claim that you’ve been swept and stunned and suddenly inhabited by the ghost of Mir Taqi Mir. 

I'm looking at the innocuous anaar tree that has suddenly made itself visible with its little budding anarkalis, and smiling away, reminded of that Nasikh poem, dripping with typical fleshy Lucknowi decadence and wit:

I am a lover of breasts
Like pomegranates;
Plant then no other trees
On my grave but these.

I wish I could be as sure as Nasikh about my favourite tree (no no, neatly gendered equivalents don't work here; dreaming of banana trees just isn't as much poetic, or hell, even as much fun). What tree gives me the most sukoon? Which tree would I rather stare at, even in death? I have no bloody clue. I am equally seduced by the March bounty I just described, as I am by the awaited April lavender grace of the Jamrul (four of these trees in quick floral succession make for a sight to behold, from the terrace of Triveni Kala Sangam), the vermillion burst of the gulmohar, the thin-waisted smell of the yellow-mouthed Champa. And in May and June, the miracle of hot loo making the Amaltas flowers bunches (in a frozen animation of drop-drop-still petals) turn a more ferocious florescent shade of yummy yellow (I have my own secret patch of amaltas heartbreak, on a narrow road called Kama Koti Marg in RK Puram, lined as it is, by about 30 full-blown amaltas trees on both sides.) And in August, there's the luminescent pile of mogra gajraa to be soaked in wistfully from the car window, as I get heady on its surround-smell fragrance and wonder if its reasonably sane to buy the entire pile, stuff into a pillow, and hug it to sleep. And when September ends, it'll bring with it, the faint dhaak sounds of the Durga Puja, heralded by the early morning nippiness that's inseparable from the intoxication of the harshringar flowers. A haunting fragrance so ironic and short-lived, that it seems apt that its other names are as phonetically brief (parijat, shiuli), as they are poetically infinite (the night jasmine, the tree of sadness).   

I can't decide, and I can't bear it, all this floral glory that my moody Delhi is throwing at me in one big rush this month. So am just going to do what I do to let off the steam, to bleach the love, to sober myself up. I’ll drive through a shower of pale yellow dry neem leaves on Aurangzeb Road, nodding at the neem trees leaning-bending in a question mark over the road, letting my whizzing car rake up a mini storm through the voluptuous heaps of dry neem lining the road-side. It's a feeling that's pale and bland and yet alluring, like the faint strains of a half-remembered tune. And it sufficiently brings me back to myself, just so I can steady myself before being blown away by yet another cunniving March flower.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

When she’s not gawking at trees while driving and making the Jat fellow in the car behind her scream ‘Ladiej driverrrr!!’? Making an edible garden in her balcony, that’s what. No I’m no tree-hugger yet, but nothing tastes better than a pasta with organic baby spinach you harvested off your balcony 15 mins ago, I tell ya. And no you don’t need to read up gardening manuals or stock up sacks of manure for this. No, you don’t need to monitor them sunrise, noon and sunset. All you need is a few pots - bequeathed by your previous tenants, perhaps. If you want floral inspiration (or have a dog like mine who eats anything in nose-distance), GreenEssence’s balcony planters are ideal, shaped like long troughs in yummy, bright colours.

Then you’d need a few vials of good seeds, preferably organic. Dilliwali bought hers from Beej Bachao Andolan, who regularly puts up stalls at Dilli Haat: they have pahaadi paalak and dhania, matar, rai, methre, matar, cholai, mooli, and even cherry tomatoes, all organic! Some of these are superbly easy to grow, especially the first two. For tips on when to sow, best to post on their Facebook page by the name of Vividhara; Ajay Mahajan and his gang of friends will guide you most enthusiastically.

There are fewer things in the world that produce more pop-pop squeals of hearwarming delight seeing a tiny-tiny bright green sprout appear amidst the chocolate mud, by sheer force of some water, some sun, and some of your loving nazar.

Get messy, get started:

www.facebook.com/Vividhara

http://www.quirkoshop.com/Rectangle_Railing_Planter    

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).

Anger and Amnesia

(Published in First City magazine, February 2013).

“Toh beta, agar kisi aadmi ki backbone todhni ho, toh aise karna hai...” She was a loud but sweet, shaaka-polaa-wearing lady. She could be my neighbour eating moongphali in the winter sun; no I wouldn’t bat an eyelid at that. But when she hurled that opening line from a loudspeaker at a groggy me stifling an 8 am yawn, It Was a Moment. Something snapped; I uttered rather with an eloquence most unbecoming of my writerly conceits: ‘Hain?’

That was just the first day. 10 days later, I didn’t bat an eyelid when she ordered me, 'Aadmi ke paet ka maalpani bahar nikaal ke laana hai', while I practiced the Fingertip Short Punch. I didn’t flinch when she told me how to identify the effectiveness of my thwack by the length of the man's big, heaving, breathless gulp. No, I didn’t at all think it odd when she told me that what a man deserves for getting closer than I'd like, is a swift, dagger-sharp yanking of his elbow joint. I didn’t even think it was odd to practice my homework on the unsuspecting Husband. At the Delhi Police Self Defence camp for women that I was attending, there was a thin line between self-defence and goondi-gardi. Clearly, I had no complaints about that little fact.

Here I was, standing in a playground, along with 300 girls and women (among them, inexplicably, my mother-in-law). Some still in frocks; others wearing their hair grey. Here, I was not pretending to do my daily self-flagellator-style writerly activities: I was not engaging in compulsive note-making, I was not indulging in amicable self-scrutiny and wound-fingering, no. I was not blowing my large, combustible, spillage-prone emotions into word-balloons, or neck-wringing them into sentence-shapes. I was not taking it all in by slow, silent osmosis; I was not patiently engaging with the world so I could find a way to engage with myself in a civilised, intellectual, controlled manner. I was doing the opposite. I was no friggin’ writer. I was part of a near-mob of women who were not the usual sweet, loving, peacemaking, 'adjisting' type. We were jaw-snapping, fire-spitting, hot-fiery-lava-bursting angry. So angry, we could kill a man who'd wronged us. Pierce our nails into his eyes, dig our elbows into his temples, shatter his nose, batter his chin with our knuckles, make him writhe in agony with a precise, effective, swift kick in the groin.

'APNA GUSSAA NIKAALO!', my instructor bellowed. I suffered a tiny, silent, momentuous second of shock. Because I instinctively knew that no one had ever said those words to me. Despite my three decades and more of copious note-taking from conversations. Despite my loving parents who gave me a liberal upbringing full of encouragement to express myself, even wildly; to experience everything, even the nasty things (as long I didn't tell them, that is). My mentors, my lovers, my role models. Nobody ever asked me to let my anger out (hell, not even Madonna, I'm thinking, hurt, in retrospect). To think that it was this unfaced, pent-up anger I'd carried with me all these years: rotting, pulsing, lashing under its growing, groaning weight. That this was that muffled stab I felt every time my rational self told me to 'not create a scene', every time I read about 18-month-old girls being raped, every time I looked at a man backpacking alone, unobserved, unassaulted.

It was a moment of recognition, that my life in this city hasn’t at all been what I imagine it to be. I imagine that I am a remember-er. The writer in the city, going about her self-appointed, self-righteous task of collecting all the little details in sweet little memory-jars. But living one’s image of oneself is not easy; perhaps it is impossible, in my city Dilli. What I really do in this city, this grand template that throws so many notes at me all day - flowers, thorns, nails, warts and all – is live between the two oscillatory worlds of anger and amnesia. They both taught me the survival trick to wade through a day in this city. It goes like this: Dilli provokes, I feel imploding anger, I forget to breathe, life becomes intolerable, cruel, incomprehensible, unbearable. A safety valve clicks into action; I inhale; I forget for some time; I remember selectively and write sweet columns celebrating irony; I resolve it all momentarily. Until a man with perfectly clear vision walks out of the Metro station and right into my chest. I stand there, staring, mute, my careful writerly eloquence buried under a thousand bricks of red-hot, lead-heavy anger. Safety valve clicks; I breathe; I walk. The embers throb under layers of calm.

What I'd needed all along, was for a Delhi Police aunty inspector to tell me, grinning, as she demonstrated a crisp, whack-away chin-elbow punch, “Scream, ‘HEY!’ The loudest you can!.” What I needed was that kind, stern aunty to yell at me 'Gussaa nikaalo!!' in ear-stinging, angry, Caps Lock mode while I was trying to jog my memory through half a dozen previous lives and countless virtual nightmares, wondering if I could remember how to do it, how to push the 'reasonable' limits. I needed her electric shock of a bellow to hit me hard, so I could yell back an undiluted reaction, without chasing even that split-second of thinking.

I screamed. That guttural ‘hey!!' came out so angry, so red, so trembling-pulsing with emotional release. She screamed, I screamed. So hard I had to dam up the involuntary tears, the terrifying inexplicable sadness I always feel, underneath it all. I punched the air with more screams; for once, I didn’t care to stop and take notes. I felt a rush of indescribably happy relief and blink-blink surprise-shock at how so many volatile memories were coming tumbling out of nowhere, finding form, and dissipating into thin air. And perhaps only for that one moment in my life, I felt no regret that I could not collect any of them, that I had failed as a writer during those brief and enormous moments - larger than me, or this city, than me in this city.

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE
When she’s not hollering randomly? Plotting world domination. Fancying herself The Bride on a Kill Bill rampage. Making things; chasing catharsis of the silly DIY kind, with make-it-at-home pepper spray. Don’t believe me? Then do it yourself, on the ItsHandMade blog. The feisty ladies who run this ecommerce site are crafty divas in their own right, and post free DIYs on the website’s blog. Among them are the DIY Pepper spray, and whole lot of other fun peacetime things such as cereal box diaries, chalkboard placemats, magic jars and photo holders made out of old paperbacks. Best thing: Lotsa photos of the step-by-step kind, which makes everything look so unintimidatingly easy. Better than the best thing: They give the cutest tips along with the directions. My favourite from the Pepper Spray post: “Don’t practice on anyone. Just have trust in your potion. It is at its best for two weeks. After that, you might want to change the solution. If you feel it’s a waste, then you can spray it on some omelettes before you change into a new batch.”

Just do it at www.itshandmade.in/blog.

(Swaati Chattopadhyay is a writer, dancer, compulsive analogy-weaver, who has a happily complicated relationship with her frog-in-a-Delhi-well life. There’s nothing she’d love more than a piece of your mind in her inbox, at delusionaldilliwali@gmail.com).