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).