khuda hafiz

This blog has been dead for a while now. It was dying for a while before that, ten posts in six months, before the trickle died up completely, no posts for eight months.
Mostly because the things I want to say now, and the things I have said before on this blog, the things I used to write, seem too different. Incommensurable.

So Khuda Hafiz and Goodbye. So long, and thanks for all the fish. If you know what you're looking for, you will still find me.

the aftermath of holi

Three men sprawled in a room, clothes and faces dusted with a bizzare mix of colours, Nusrat playing on the computer.

- Dude, we're stoned and listening to qawwalis. This is such a desi cliche.

- Well, I'm not South Asian, said the Bosnian. And cliches are sometimes beautiful.

- Hmmmm. Said the man on the bed.

songs not to be sung on the staten island ferry

... especially if you're a brown man with a beard, include, on the top of the list,
White Flag by Dido...

I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I'm in love and always will be

I caught myself singing this on a sunny day on the Staten Island Ferry, and realized that given the orange Level 2 (orange) security of the operation, this was kind of inappropriate. Unfortunate song triggers have happened before. I can only laugh at myself when they happen. So I laughed. And looked at the show-off seagulls sailing over our chugging monster ferry with effortless disdain, wings as still as sculpture.

Two Lines

हम कुछ ऐसे तेरे दीदार में खो जाते हैं
जैसे बच्चे भरे बाज़ार में खो जाते हैं

Ham kuchh aise tere deedar maiN kho jaate haiN
Jaise bachche bhare bazaar maiN kho jaate haiN

- Munawwar Rana

I am as lost, in looking at you
As a child lost in a crowded bazaar

(I know the translation is slightly inaccurate, but it sounds better....)

confessions for the new year - the fake quiz

I write this a few days before I return to Delhi for a few days. It’s a confession a few months too late. It’s about a quiz that just before my leaving Delhi in end-August, K and Gogo and I jointly conducted at a small auditorium at IIT Delhi. This was courtesy the Kutub Quizzers, and some of the details of the quiz and its questions can be found on their blog. For all of you who enthusiastically participated in the quiz, (and even for all of you who don’t give a shit about the nerdy sub-culture that is the Delhi quizzing scene), here’s the confession – every single question in the quiz was a fake, a tall tale, a doozy. Yes, every single one. All the ninety odd of them in the prelims and finals.

Well, some of you might have figured that out already (the quiz was called 'Pornobgraphy'. Some of you have already been told. But in the shocked silence I imagine among the rest, however brief, let me intervene (before you start gathering the lynch mob, Bhatta) and try and tell you why we did it.

Honestly, I don’t quite know. It started as an idea after an impressive drinking spree. One of those when you wake up the morning and start drinking again, and continue into lunch. Over lunch, suddenly -

- Let’s do a quiz before you leave Delhi.

- Cool.

- Let’s do a Pornob tribute round and see if anyone notices.

- Why not?

(For those who don’t know about Parnab/Porno da, further reading is suggested. For those who don’t care enough to do that, a brief summary – Parnab Mukherjee is widely reputed to have a far more flexible and relativistic relation to what are generally called ‘facts’ – far more so even than the election manifestos of India’s major political parties. This is a bit of a problem because he is/was one of delhi’s most popular/notorious quiz masters, a profession which (supposedly) derives its legitimacy primarily from the mastery of facts, and nothing much else. [Though it could be argued that in the case of Derek O’Brien it comes from his collection of designer kurtas]. Parnab, of course, brings his flexible relationship to fact to his own biography/CV, and audacious barefaced lying in front of audiences full of impressionable young adults… you can tell I adore and idolize the man, can’t you?)

So while drinking and eating, over terrible kababs, we make a few ‘Pornob’ special questions. And nearly die laughing in the process. Our ‘facts’ were so much cooler than reality (whatever that is after eighteen hours of drinking). The idea doesn’t take too long to form. A whole ‘Pornob’ quiz? Why not?

The idea survives into sobriety. There’s three weeks to go before I leave Delhi. Calls are made. The venue is booked. The participants are enthused. No one (except us and a very few non quizzers, and the man who isn’t there) knows what’s coming. The quiz is to happen the day before I leave Delhi. In the middle of jobs, books and research, we met on a few frantic evenings to put together the quiz, for which the lion’s share of work is done by K. And then finally the quiz happens, and we have a getaway car waiting…

Why did we do it?

Partly because we could.

Partly because it was so much fun. Not just in the making fools out of people (which was part of the agenda) but in the construction of alternate universes.

For those of you who are beginning to think I’m sounding a little weird – a quiz question, a good quiz question always entails the creation of a little world. The elements of this little world are ‘facts’, usually pulled out of the real world. These facts are arranged in a narrative, like a micro ‘whodunit’, clues arranged to point towards an answer… a good quiz question has a certain elegance and beauty and narrative economy which points you towards the right answer even if you don’t ‘know’ it. If a quiz question doesn’t do this, it invites the insults of ‘Random’ and ‘Auction’… (Here are some more thoughts on quizzing, narrative and facts after the last quiz I had conducted before this).

In our quiz, the histories of the ‘real world’, its pasts were fictionalized – the facts from which one deduced the ‘answer’ were shifted and changed. I don’t know if our world was better than the real world, but it was certainly more psychedelic, more interesting. In this world, the Hindi phrase lakeer ka fakeer comes from a 16^th century Sufi geometer exiled to Mughal India from Ottoman Istanbul because of his belief that lines of perspective should be employed in contemporary painting. The ticker tape parades in New York started because the New York Stock exchange was trying to get rid of the excess paper strewn all over the trading floor at the same time as the Statue of Liberty was being inaugurated/dedicated. All Parveen Babi’s personal travails could be linked back to the fact that her father, the Nawab of Junagarh abandoned her mother, and flew his dogs to Pakistan instead.

Parveen Babi’s father was part of the Junagadh nobility, in real life, but wasn’t the Nawab, who did indeed leave his wives behind and flew off with the dogs. But bending the facts a little made the world more interesting, didn’t it? As did, for example the ‘fact’ that the immortal phrase tatti aur maut kisi ko bhi kisi waqt aa sakti hai (shit and death can happen to anyone at anytime) comes from a Vijaydan Detha story about a Rajput commander who falls from one of those weird Rajasthani dry-latrines hanging out high over the walls of desert forts, along with his shit. And yes, people did answer these questions, occasionally amidst much laughter, because the slightly fantastical world of our questions was made intelligible by the construction of the questions – pointing towards real world answers.

And so what? You might ask. Well, at one level, it was insane amounts of fun, and that’s all it needs to be, and we didn’t get lynched. So there. At another, well, we broke the tyranny of ‘facts’, drilled into us since Kindergarten. The sort that makes you feel ‘world capital games’ and feel studly for knowing that Antannarivo is the capital of Madagascar. (So maybe Pornob was always ahead of his time. Damn.)

At yet another, one might think that giving up on ‘facts’ might be kind of dangerous given how much the ‘invention of the past’ feeds into all sorts of dangerous, reactionary politics. Yes, the BJP. But I’m not so sure anymore. I’ve seen a lot of re-invention of the past happening, that’s part of what I work on as an anthropologist. Much of these re-inventions and the politics behind them I’m in sympathy with. All of these views of the past, unlike the BJP/Sangh Parivar’s, are quite complex. The BJP’s view of the past, on the other hand, is outrageously simplistic. Muslims=Bad, Hindus=Good, Myth=History. All of these histories, like the best ‘professional’ histories, do something we did a very poor approximation of as drunk quiz-makers - you change (reinterpret) the past to make the present more hopeful, or at least, more entertaining…

Maybe that’s too much fun for three lads having fun, being cheeky, and getting away with it, unapologetically.

Maybe that’s what it was all about.

Maybe we’re just full of shit. And tatti aur maut kisi ko bhi kisi bhi waqt aa sakti hai.

Aasamaan dekhi Dilli/Delhi seen from the sky

People do strange things when they miss cities. Kalidasa's Yaksha, exiled from fair Alkapuri and his love who lives there, asks a cloud to take his message to her. And perhaps to make the prospect attractive to the cloud, he tells him of diversions, fair cities to float over along the way. Go West over Ujjain, the yaksha tells the cloud, even though it's not quite on the way. It is a strange and lovely whimsy – though the yaksha is surely eager to get his message to his beloved, he does not want the cloud to miss the sight of the palace roofs of Ujjain.

Like the cloud messenger, I soar and swoop over Delhi, and look down at its rooftops and markets, its parks and gardens. I have Wikimapia, which makes my computer screen the window to home, while snow is falling outside my 'real' window here. How can I send these strange cold clouds over Delhi? But I can participate in another magic, no less wonderful – the transformation of surveillance technology into people's complex, multi-layered maps of home and longing.

Delhi on Wikimapia, seen by satellite, is sometimes strange. I never realized Delhi had so many swimming pools, reflecting blue back to the sky. I never realized Delhi had so many graveyards. Like the one at ITO, behind the Sales Tax office building. It's hard to make out even from top. A green space covered with trees, I would have thought it was a park, if Mohd Rashid hadn't marked it. Clicking on the bounded box with which he has marked the kabristan, you get to this poignant note, 'My all expired relatives are here. One day I will be also here... Rashid'. There are other graveyards too, that you may not see even when you pass them everyday, because they are hidden away behind modern buildings, with narrow, ill-marked paths leading to them. Like the Kabristan Kalu Sarai, behind Azad Apartments and Mother's International School. Or the one in Civil Lines, between Rajpur Road and Underhill Road. Wikimapia makes me ask, why is Delhi a city of reticent graveyards, keeping its dead hidden away?

But in Wikimapia's Delhi, the dead find their place in the city, along with the 'Patli Gali' in Begampur marked by Naresh and Atal; The 'Walia's (Canada, USA) Haweli' in Jangpura Extension and its wonderful K Block which 'is encircles a beautiful park where children and elgery have great fun'(this is true); and 'Rama Madam Office' in Chandni Chowk where 'U FIND THE WILLIAM HANDLER ACCOUNTS AND RUNING SCHOOL MAN IS SUPERCOMPUTER'. Delhi seen from Wikimapia, this Delhi of overlapping, intersecting boundaries of home and intimacy, seen from the sky, makes me smile, and makes me ache.

The most striking sight of Delhi I've seen on Wikimapia, is undoubtedly the Khirki Masjid,in Khirki Village off Press Enclave Road. Seen from the sky, this large fourteenth century mosque still has exquisitely perfect symmetry, its square courtyards and clusters of domes comparable to nothing else, really, except maybe a Pachisi board. Across the road rises the gigantic mall cluster of the Saket District Centre, ugly as only a group of malls can be. In Delhi seen from the sky, the irony is even starker.

manhole covers part 3

Manhole covers part 1, and part 2. So the meditation on manholes is still incomplete but now I guess is the time to put some more of the incomplete meditations (this part written back in May) out here on the blog... after this story carried by NYT, and forwarded to me by Elizabeth, Sashi and ES.

Manhole. Such a strange word. Almost as if it was an opening inviting men to fall into the netherworld. Like the urban legend of Calcutta streets in the monsoon, knee deep in water, where unsuspecting waders are said to suddenly vanish in a trail of bubbles because of careless workers forgetting to replace the covers.

But who are them men who use these holes? How many people have you met recently who have climbed down one into the land of shit and alligators? Except perhaps by accident, like Alice down the rabbit hole, like the hapless waders of Calcutta? Manholes are round and could seem inviting, like the doors of hobbit dwellings, but they are entrances to a forbidden world, a world driven deep underground, a world of shit and miasma.

"Paris has another Paris under herself," Victor Hugo wrote in Les Miserables, 182, "a Paris of sewers, which has its streets, its crossings, its squares, its blind alleys, its arteries, and its traffic, which is slime." Sewers, he added, were "the conscience of the city" - they tell all: "no more false appearances, no plastering over ... filth removes its shirt ... there is nothing more except what really exists." The modern metropolis, like Jean Valjean's Paris, is based on the separation of the world of shit and the world of men. This was not always the case.

London, 1858. The Houses of Parliament had to be closed because the stench from the river, receiving all the waste of the city from all the cesspits and open drains flowing into it. This was the London stalked by miasma, the foul reek and bad vapours present pretty much everywhere that were supposed to cause cholera, and a death rate unheard of since the Black Death.

The foul, killing reek of miasma was countered by Joseph Balzagette's building London's modern sewer system by laying 83 miles of brick lined tunnels. This was system of tunnels which enclosed the the ordure of the city, and flushed it far below the city and away downriver. The miasma was banned to the netherworld. One of Joseph Balzagette's main supporters was the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose father built the famous (and still used) tunnel under the Thames. It worked, though for all the wrong reasons. The brick line tunnels separated the shit from the water supply, and prevented further massive outbreaks of cholera.

Once the cholera bacillus was discovered in 1876 (11 years after the opening of the London sewer systems) cities without sewers, without the separation of shit and men, became unimaginable. In India, in Delhi, a city without a major history of epidemics, which functioned through a system of shallow, covered, sub-surface drains and 'nightsoil' collectors, the first sewer systems built in the late 1890's, proved to be inefficient and prone to clogging. Meanwhile in the Presidency Town of Calcutta, the capital of British India, its populace expanding rapidly as impoverished peasants came to work in the jute mills; a sewer sytem of tunnels with unprecedentedly large diameters, made with a technology for curving bricks which was later used (along with cast iron and concrete) in the digging of the 'deep cover' (as opposed to the cut and cover) lines of the London Underground.

Sewers were modernity. The collection of nightsoil, people carrying shit on their heads, became anathema. Gandhi campaigned against it systematically, considering it violative of human dignity; especially because those who carried the shit were of the lowest castes. But the sewers have not liberated the untouchables from dealing with shit. It's just that now no one else has to. In India, they are the ones whose lot it is, de facto, to go down the manholes and clear the sewers. One of the rarely told stories of Partition is how the Hindu sweepers of the city were not allowed to leave Karachi – even when the riots started. For who else would clean the sewers, running then with blood and God knows what else?



... The generalized miasma of the nineteenth century city exists in the sewers in concentrated form. Sewer gas is methane and sulphides and other inflammable and noxious gases, under pressure. Only those who have to enter the manholes now have to deal with the miasma. But sometimes on hot days, strange alchemy brews in those deep tunnels – sewer gas is known to occasionally blow off even the considerable weight of manhole covers. Passing by Lexington and 58th, I have seen liquid nitrogen being pumped into manholes.

Most of the iron for the manhole covers in New York now come from Durgapur, two hours to the west of Calcutta.

puns. winter.

Dasht-e Tanhai. The Wilderness of Solitude. Watching the leaves fall under a grey sky, eating my breakfast alone among the tops of trees, a branch fell on me today. New York, the New York of last night's forced gaiety and diffident lust so far away. Alone on a park bench, in the wind and under the sky, in the middle of Manhattan I might as well be in a Robert Frost poem. Or in that other cityscape of loneliness; the crumbling ruins of Mehrauli lost in thorn scrub and plastic bags, across the road from the radio playing the latest Hindi film song hits.

Dust-e Tanhai. Or what accumulates in a room not vacuumed, cause no one is expected. Books and papers strewn all over the desk, the rug, the bed, the floor. Books and quarters. Antidote to too wistful a gaze across the bar after a beer too many. The memory of a blazing afternoon at the Pyramids, as the wind from the desert blew sand into my eyes at the same moment as all the mosques in Giza began their afternoon azaan; rising into the wind the dust the sky. If only I could believe.

Dast-e Tanhai. The loose motions of loneliness. That dis-ease that makes me say too much, and always at the wrong time...

coincidental cities

'Everybody in Delhi seems to know everyone else.' I hear this often from people in New York when I tell them where I'm from. Among those who've been there, or know expat Dilliwallahs, it's said with a sense of awe. In the stories I'm told, Dilliwallahs meet not randomly, but are drawn to each other like magnets, lines of force that intersect, say on the corner of Bleecker and Sullivan. Then, to the consternation of their non desi friends who happen to be along; they meet like long lost friends (which they are), discover at least ten people they know in common currently in the city, and ....

Well, you know the rest. It probably happens to you in Delhi all the time. I know it happens to me. I've run into a friend at Humayun's Tomb, perched atop a ruined gateway. I've met friends while wandering in aimless circles in CP. In Def Col and Khan Markets, I am virtually assured of meeting people out of my little black book. And as my friend AK says, 'Manhattan is like Khan Market for five hundred blocks.'

It's a little disconcerting how easily the Khan Market janta (me included) fits into rapidly gentrifying Manhattan. Manhattan seems nearer than the back of Khan Market, where other Dilliwallas, other in all the valences of that term, live their lives in slums and shoddy government allotments. For a city of fourteen plus million people, Delhi is a very small place. If you're reading this issue of Time Out, I'll wager you're connected to every other reader by a maximum of say, two degrees of separation. That's how small the English speaking Delhi educated upper to upper-middle class elite is. Is it a wonder then, that it's the same few hundred people who keep meeting each other over and over again in Delhi, and at the same places? At book launches, at bars, in protest marches; occasionally even when slumming it in Nizamuddin or the Old City (but only after the Metro)? No wonder Delhi is the world capital of coincidence, but what is the value of the coincidence if it is not chance, but almost, in a sense, pre-ordained?

New York is a city of eight million, almost half Delhi, but the chances of meeting the same person twice, in just wandering the city, are infinitesimally less. Yes, that makes New York a lonely city, a city of 'missed connections' on Craigslist. But then the value of meeting someone again, on a subway line you wouldn't normally take, for example, feels like a sign from God.

One evening recently I was in Washington Square Park after many months, waiting for a friend, listening to wafting music and conversations being made by hundreds of strangers. Someone called my name, and it was another friend, a Nigerian writer I'd met only a week ago. He had no idea that I'd be there, or that I was meeting S, who we both knew. An evening of two then became and evening of four, and carried on well past midnight, and then into further evenings. At some point I remember saying, happy but disbelieving, 'This is just like being in Delhi.'

Written for Time Out, Delhi.

New York is always a film set

In New York, sunlight comes from strange directions. New York is always a film set, reflectors bouncing natural light at contrary angles. Except here the angles are random, not designed (unless, of course, there is a greater design than human agency); the sunlight bouncing off the mirrored surfaces of skyscrapers and the chrome of cars onto buses and people moving and the grime and the smoke of grilling kababs; all caught in the crossfire of ricocheting light.

When the sun sets behind the buildings of Central Park West, casting the trees in shadow, an October ray turns a window to flame (irrespective of the darkness of the life behind), and then finds its way onto one solitary branch amidst the deep green gloom, and in the gold light I can see the leaves, gold green, beginning to turn gold.

New York is always a film set and at moments like these, I wish to be with all my being a 70mm Panavision camera loaded with endless Ektachrome stock; running, running, running...