In August Company

(Published in First City magazine, August 2012)

“How do you make god laugh?” My Greek literature professor in college loved to ask, nerdy spectacles glinting with shadows of slow-whirring classroom ceiling fans.

“Tell him your plans.”

Back then, such ‘veg’ jokes couldn’t tickle us twenty-somethings, but it’s amazing how this joke ripens after the first grey hair sprouts. Now I find it so funny that it’s the only joke I can remember. (Am perennially blacklisted from the joke soirees of all 20-somethings I know, alas.) What’s not so funny about this joke, however, is how it goes literal all of August. It acquires peculiarly vile proportions when placed adjacent to the well-proven Murphy’s law: It shall rain buckets the day Dilliwali is overcome by sudden, irrational urge to step out wearing white. Also see: It shall rain every time she whips herself up and plans an ironclad, ambitious bullet-point To Do list for the day. Clouds shall descend like a herd of elephants and transform any mundane moment of her day into a time between waking and dreaming. Banal evening park-walkthroughs to the sabzi-market will be transformed into a startling event by gold-skinned Roccocco skies. Memories that have so far been carefully whittled down and stashed away in imaginary shoebox, shall be plumped up and floated about, cloud-like.

I’ve been told that season of one’s birth determines one’s essential temperament. Perhaps then, the thing with monsoon-borns - such as the Dilliwali, and this magazine she writes for – is that memory-hoarding is their default setting. As is an affective disposition, revelling in all things rain-like: equal parts incredible joy and unnamed loss. Add to that, a fervent desire to transpose feelings onto spaces that envelope us. And so when in August it’s always raining longing – sometimes in torrential, hissing sheets and sometimes in quiet aftershowers – Dilliwali’s Dilli becomes a perfect landscape for her infamous mythopoeia.

Okay, this is the point where you poke me and say, ‘Ke bol ri se? Baawli ho gayi ke?’ Surely I don’t live in the Dilli you know. ‘Cuz here we stick our noses out and upwards to find the romance of rain, amidst all the clutter of pigeon-shat balconies, hooting bikes and traffic, the squelchy sounds of slush gaining volume. That is, when we’re not moving at 0.01 kmph in a snarling traffic jam draped all the way till eternity. Trust brain-splittingly incorrigible Dilliwali of the enviable WFH life, to turn this on its head and say, ‘Eggjactly’. ‘Tis the season to look outside. ‘Tis finally when we’re not busy saving our cheeks from the slap of Dilli-ki-loo and narak-ki-sardi. And so while you see crater-puddles and infrastructure-crises, I wander, revel in making iTunes playlists titled ‘rain’, and impulsive before-signal-goes-green Mogra gajra purchases. I look-look-look, drink up the Dilli landscape soaked-cool and blurry-edged, in tennis match style left-to-right swing of the head.

No? No. Okay, so you’re not me, you’re the one who does important things like play 24/7 office-office. But surely you’ve caught yourself having sneak-on-you soaring, out-of-body moments when the monsoon paints your daily view surreal, even in passing? Rainy rivulets snaking across your car’s windscreen, texturing you artistic when the streetlights shine from above. The buoyant wonder of a glistening wet, chutney-green Ridge emerging from the grey depths of the Metro tunnel just after you’ve left Saket. The sudden tear in skyline as Yamuna Bank station approaches, and the vast mirroring expanse of charcoal sky-river filling the ultra-wide coach windows for an entire minute.

But I digress (a monsoon hazard). The monsoon has this ToDo-list-derailing effect on me; perhaps because in this sudden transformation of mundane Delhi spots into Post-It notes waiting to spring open shoebox-fuls of associations, it talks to all my I-Will-Forget-and-be-Forgotten writerly anxieties. Monsoon, this season of memories, impervious to time or space or intent - it’s my annual affirmation that says, 'But how can I forget?'

And so this month I wiggle out of my WFH cocoon, and visit all the landmarks that have an umbilical relationship to events in my life - little parts of me stashed away in Dilli. I don't mean the tourist spots, but its most mundane landmarks: kiddie cycleshops, auto stands, flyover swivel-points, parking lots, pub facades. Literally, the landmarks we use to map our way through; the stuff where, you know, we all tend to lock away our stormy unresolved jawaani. Slam books and diaries-with-padlocks and My Document folders from old computers. Somehow during the tangle of growing up, I came up with a better hack-proof solution: I made Dilli my external hard drive. It's a trick that still works. Every time 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 teleporter with a tiny bit of my soul in it.

And so, every monsoon I discover that in some way the ‘megacity’ Dilli and I share an adolescence: the 1990s. That narrow swoosh between Chitrahaar and MTV, after which neither of us could tell the difference anymore, between the world we lived and the one we dreamed in. It was when both Dilli and I went from chaotic, open-faced, somewhat-shabby - to slick facades that hide secrets charmingly, and can beam and seduce, billboard-like. In a blink, almost, Delhi was not the sleepy city of top-heavy Corbusier buildings with honeycomb facades; of rattling ambassadors and buses that trundled on flyover-less roads once in a lightyear; that is, if it wasn’t Sunday Doordarshan matinee time when all roads went death-quiet. And neither was I anymore the girl who smudged-hid her lipstick, compulsively patted limp ‘blunt cuts’ into place, and was better-known for the morose ‘Rondumal’ nickname, but a young lady who’d been-there-done-that enough to think she knew what all the fuss in the world was about. That eclipsed, telescoped swathe of time in the middle, is perhaps my most tenacious link with this city; one that has me proclaim it ad nauseum; argue with Bangloreans until I label them wimps and they leave the room; pine for while I find my bearings in another city; return for big gulps of air and my vital dose of obsessive clinginess. 

Every August I forgive god for the monsoon air that’s feels like I’m breathing under water; for the un-prettifying flooding Brahmaputra-type sweat glands he planted so generously on my person; even for the electricity cuts that have ruined every budday-party of mine since I was old enough to remember. Because every August there will be low-lying clouds, there will be Dilli, there will be déjà vu. There will be rain on my windowpane, on a dark, dark night. There will be surreal sunsets and soulful rains; tsunamis of desire and impossible longing. I will be dizzy and sick with sweet-sad love for the world, and I will know what it’s like to personify ‘wishy-washy’; to be cloud-like brimful and lightning-alive. 

WHAT’S KEEPING THE DILLIWALI SANE

Chasing monsoon-picaresque around town, that’s what. I recommend meeting Connaught Place when it’s just about to get rain-drenched, like a chiffon-sari clad Neelam at the helm of a rainy song. And perhaps you should find yourself going up curving corridors and broken steps to emerge on the terrace of the Begumpur Masjid, its two dozen gently sloping full-breasted domes rising and falling like waves against a churning Turner-painting sky; and you shall know why they say that among the few embellishments in the heart of this mosque, one reads, “Allah o Hashi (god is enough for me)”.

And if you’re too posh to attempt the above, play safe with a delish Cappuccino (perfect with complimentary almond biscotti and market corner-views), nestled under the emerald green awnings at the rooftop Latitude, Khan Market. 200 bucks and a whole lotta slick-swish delirium.

(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).