Delhi and the Dark Arts

Elizabeth Chatterjee (2013) 

Delhi Mostly Harmless: One Woman’s Vision 
of the City 

Random House India, pp. 283

I began the year reading Liz Chatterjee’s portrait of Delhi based on the one year she spent collecting data as a doctoral student of the University of Oxford. There are many portraits of modern Delhi, beginning with the elegy written evocatively for the older courtly Delhi in 1940 (Twilight in Delhi by Ahmad Ali), to the modern project in the making that Delhi has become in the recent decades penned by academics (Unsettling Memories by anthropologist Emma Tarlo). My personal favourite books are those by that incorrigible breed of Flâneurs (City of Djinns by William Dalrymple) and novelists (Midnight’s Children and The White Tiger). There is also the attempt to know Delhi through its people (Capital by Rana Dasgupta) or visuals (Delhi: The Making of the City by Malavika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee).

Liz Chatterjee is part flâneur and part anthropologist. Her memory of the city, its people, and its stories come out not in anecdotes or metaphors but as disjointed parts of a person. She literally senses the city around her and her chapters are arranged in anatomical terms- eyes, noses, hearts, veins and so on. And sometimes she gropes the pragmatic old lady Dilli followed by rubbing shoulders off the new city of Delhi. The savvy that carries an Indian along, part oblivious and part accommodative to the paradoxes and contradictions of any part of India she resides in-with  boisterous openness to outsiders and cold conservatism that builds hierarchy, the invisible ropes of high morals and low traps of indignity, can be mind boggling.

The usual dilemmas of finding a safe perch, making friends, settling into a routine in a new city is there; but what makes Liz’s story poignant is the solitude of a researcher, a foreigner, a non-Delhite- who is both an insider and outsider to the story. Liz is an enterprising raconteur and this comes out best in her uncanny ability to get her analysis right- she calls jugaad, the dark art that requires ingenuity to fix things, to have savoir-faire and not such technical skills. She is blunt and direct when describing the hundred indignities a woman goes through in private and public space, some very specific to the city. Through every difficult experience, what remains intact is her sense of humour.

What make her book delightful are those parts where she tries to preserve the experience of being with someone who is hardly likeable. She uses her sense of olfaction to store a million things that is worth a thousand words or photographs of the city she has lived in for a year. In one of my favourite parts of the book, she says, of the faint coconut oil that scents a woman’s hair, to the stink of stolen cigarettes, the mixture of sweat and cheap cologne and names a number of such things that made this story her own, ending with the glorious fragrance of burnt flat in the first rain of the season. Then she finds the right words for such a nose for nostalgia- manvasanai in Tamil and petrichor in English for describing the Greeks God’s blood through the veins of rock.

And in the end, she concludes, ‘Delhi, the delirious city, city of the tense present, future imperfect’. Comparing her across the globe, New York  may be a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo, Berlin a wicked uncle and London an old lady- Delhi looks like an ageing Tsarina- ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid and like all grandes dames, jingles with theatricality, bling and the so –bad-it’s-good.  At the same time, the modern city of Delhi, built for rulers and administrators,   is a sophisticated cougar, modelling herself to the twenty first century with overconfidence and attempts at self assertion of an adolescent. This duality of a theatrical old-hand who has witnessed human history and a restless adolescent trying to seek attention and assert her presence, makes the city difficult to like or understand but hard to ignore.