Everything is So Finite (and so is my love for Dilli)

Delhi is such a moody bitch. Just when I think I've finally pinned down a method in the madness of this city, she does a quick, rhisomatic flip and leaves me feeling so very silly and so very enamoured. Like this September. This strange, strange September when she's wearing a slithery black gown of rain, instead of her wispy crown of fragrant harshringar, the memory of which makes me wait all year. I'm torn between my twin experiences: The thrill of this late monsoon breeze's wet shiver, and the urgent desire to encounter that pale, dry expectancy of the approaching autumn I love. Sometimes I gaze out of the window at a gorgeously rainy morning, and feel this incredible twin rush. It knocks me about, topples me over, like a favourite new song. And I don't like it. No I don't, because it means my city is going from mystery to paradox. She's changing inside me. Or maybe I'm changing with her.



I'm half Bengali, half Punjabi, married to a Malyali. People love to ask me 'So what are you, finally?'. I love to answer 'Dilliwali', even though I get that 'but that's a non-answer' look in return. But Dilli is home. In a way that it's banal and special, beautiful and dysfunctional all at the same time. Dilli is home, because in the tangle of growing up, I've used Dilli as an external hard drive. It's a trick that still works. Everytime the world becomes a swirling dense madness, I pluck the most tormenting, pulsating parts and hide them away in a pocket of Delhi. They lie there, crouching feline-like, waiting for me to pass by so they can grab me, plug me into their Matrix and start throbbing again, throwing me off the scent of life-as-I-thought-it-finally-was. That bit of pavement you walked over today? That was a Horcrux with a tiny bit of my soul in it.


But don't ask 'So what does it mean to be a Dilliwali?' I can never quite answer that cocky question. Because then I'd have to let you strangers into my shoebox-full of vulnerabilia. Because I can't explain 'being a Dilliwali' without my motley assortment of embarassingly personal memorabilia that has no logical, visible connections with the city: Stray snatches from gushing adolescent diary entries; lyrics from songs that refuse to fade away; unpublished blogposts about being on the edge of an epiphany (tweaked in my head for years). All these thoughts, that I've dreamt, lived, hated, and obsessed about while moving around in this mad, sprawling, chaos-tied-in-spidersilk city. Perhaps it's enough to tell you that I can't drive through Dilli without feeling a silly adolescent rush. And I can’t talk about Delhi without getting autobiographical.


The thing about Delhi has always been that it's shamelessly Love Me or Leave Me. But now I wonder if I should replace the 'or' with an 'and'. Perhaps I'm finally acknowledging that cruel underside of loving something too much - after a point you want to either kill-consume it or run away from the heartachingly gorgeous, shimmering hold it has on you. I have felt the weight of this guilt over many months; I've let this note languish in Drafts all this while. But this September, I've been a good editor. I've let go of some major chunks of Dilli sweet-talk I wrote in the past. I've let myself type out loud: Sometimes, I crave to get away from Dilli. Maybe just so that I can grab hold of random people in a city that is not Delhi, and tell them how it's not easy to love my city; but once you do, it's just so difficult to leave. Maybe I want to realise, when I'm reconfiguring my life-coordinates in another city, just how uncomplicatedly luscious it is to be a Dilliwali. Maybe it's a silly longing to feel that horrid line from a pre-pubescent Valentine's Day card come rushing back like a hot blush: 'Distance makes the hearts grow fonder'. Whatever it is, my Dilli, I love you so much I want to leave. (And what an awesome break-up line that would make in the real world). True, my Dilli, if you and I had ever met in real-time, we could've summed up this mess in a pithy Facebook relationship status: It's Complicated.