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).