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While I waited to be certified fit for service, I decided to visit my tenants and see how the house—I bought it fifteen years ago and more or less rebuilt it—was bearing up. At least that’s what I told myself. When I got here I found myself avoiding the main entrance and going all the way to the end of the road and around to the back, to take the gate that opens on to the service lane that runs behind the row of townhouses.
It was a quiet, pretty lane once. Now it’s like a construction site. Building material—steel reinforcement rods, slabs of stone and heaps of sand—occupies what little space parked cars do not. Two open manholes give off a stench that doesn’t quite complement the soaring price of property here. Most of the older houses have been torn down and plush new developers’ flats are coming up in their place. Some are on stilts, the ground floors given over to parking. It’s a good idea in this car-maddened city, but somehow it saddens me. I’m not sure why. Nostalgia for an older, quieter time perhaps.
A posse of dusty children, some carrying infants on their hips, amuse themselves by ringing doorbells and skittering away hiccuping with delight. Their emaciated parents, hauling cement and bricks around in the deep pits dug for new basements, would not look out of place on a construction site in ancient Egypt, heaving stones for a pharaoh’s pyramid. A small donkey with kind eyes walks past me carrying bricks in its saddlebags. The post-blast announcements being made in English and Hindi on the loudspeaker in the police booth in the market are fainter here: “Please report any unidentified baggage or suspicious-looking person to the nearest police post…”
Even in the few months since I was last here, the number of cars parked in the back lane has grown—and most are bigger, swisher. My neighbor Mrs. Mehra’s new driver, his whole head wrapped in a brown muffler with a slit for his eyes, is hosing down a new cream Toyota Corolla as though it’s a buffalo. It has a small saffron OM painted on its bonnet. Only a year ago Mrs. Mehra was flinging her garbage straight from her first-floor balcony on to the street. I wonder whether owning a Toyota has improved her sense of community hygiene.
I can see that most of the apartments on the second and third floors have been smartened up, glassed in.
The black bulls that lived around the concrete lamp post opposite my back gate for many years, fed and spoiled by Mrs. Mehra and her cow-worshipping cohorts, aren’t around. Maybe they’ve gone for a jog.
Two young women in smart winter coats and clicking high heels walk past, both smoking cigarettes. They look like Russian or Ukrainian whores, the kind you can dial up for farmhouse parties. There were a few at my old friend Bobby Singh’s stag party in Mehrauli last week. One of them, who walked around with a plate of tacos, was actually a Dip—she was topless, more or less—with hummus all over her chest. I thought it was a bit much, but the other guests seemed to enjoy it. The girl gave that impression too—although that may have been part of the job description. Hard to say.
Servants wearing their employers’ expensive cast-offs are being walked by even better-dressed dogs—Labradors, German shepherds, Dobermans, beagles, dachshunds, cocker spaniels—with wool coats that say things like Superman and Woof! Even some of the street mongrels have coats and show traces of pedigreed lineage. Trickledown. Ha! Ha!
Two men—one white, one Indian—go past, holding hands. Their plump black Labrador is dressed in a red-and-blue jersey that says No. 7 Manchester United. Like a genial holy man distributing his blessings, he bestows a little squirt of piss on to the tires of the cars he waddles past.
The sheet-metal gate of the Municipal Primary School that abuts the deer park is new. It’s painted over with a dreadful rendition of a happy baby in its happy mother’s arms being given a polio vaccination by a happy nurse in a white dress and white stockings. The syringe is roughly the size of a cricket bat. I can hear children’s voices in their classrooms, shouting Baa baa black sheep, rising to a shriek on Wool! and Full!
Compared to Kabul, or anywhere else in Afghanistan or Pakistan, or for that matter any other country in our neighborhood (Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Burma, Iran, Iraq, Syria—Good God!) this foggy little back lane, with its everyday humdrumness, its vulgarity, its unfortunate but tolerable inequities, its donkeys and its minor cruelties, is like a small corner of Paradise. The shops in the market sell food and flowers and clothes and mobile phones, not grenades and machine guns. Children play at ringing doorbells, not at being suicide bombers. We have our troubles, our terrible moments, yes, but these are only aberrations.
I feel a rush of anger at those grumbling intellectuals and professional dissenters who constantly carp about this great country. Frankly, they can only do it because they are allowed to. And they are allowed to because, for all our imperfections, we are a genuine democracy. I would not be crass enough to say this too often in public, but the truth is that it gives me great pride to be a servant of the Government of India.
The back gate was open, as I expected it to be. (The ground-floor tenants have painted it lavender.) I went straight up the stairs to the second floor. The door was locked. The extent of my disappointment unsettled me. The landing looked deserted. There was mail and old newspapers piled up against the door. I noticed a dog’s paw-prints in the dust.
On my way down, the plump, pretty wife of my ground-floor tenant, who runs some sort of video production company, came out of her kitchen and accosted me on the stairs. She invited me in for a cup of tea (to what used to be my home when my wife and I were both posted in Delhi).
“I’m Ankita,” she said over her shoulder as she led me in. Her long, chemically straightened hair streaked with blonde highlights was damp and I could smell her tangy shampoo. She wore solitaires in her ears and a fuzzy white wool sweater. The back pockets of her tight blue jeans—“jeggings,” my daughters say they’re called—stretched over her generous behind were embroidered with colorful forked-tongued Chinese dragons. My mother would have approved, if not of the clothes, then certainly of the plumpness. Dekhte besh Rolypoly, she’d have said. My poor mother, who spent all of her married life in Delhi, dreaming of her childhood in Calcutta.
The word set up an annoying buzz in my head. Rolypolyrolypolyrolypoly.
Three of the four walls in the room were painted watermelon pink. All the furniture including the dining table was a sort of flecked—distressed, I believe is the right word—rind green. The door and window frames were black (the seeds, I suppose). I began to regret having given them a free hand with the interior. Ankita and I sat facing each other, separated by the length of the sofa (my old sofa, re-upholstered now). At one point we had to clasp our knees and lift our feet off the floor while her maid passed below us, shuffling on her haunches like a small duck, swabbing the floor with something that smelled sharp, like citronella. Would it have been so difficult for Rolypoly to have had that section of her floor swabbed a little later? When will our people learn some basic etiquette?