#Scurf126: Missing Delhi in 2020
Where time looses its bearings and my mind comes apart thinking about what all I missed about the city during the covid lockdowns
One a dull April afternoon, while recovering from the COVID-19 virus I’m listening to the song Yeh Delhi Hai Mere Yaar from the 2009 Delhi-6, and apart from the gently soothing cadence of the song, what I love is the lyrics.
Bass Ishq Mohabbat Pyaar, the playfully stylish, only slightly seductive chorus sings. They take me right back to New Delhi, where I almost grew up, and where I have been living for the last four years. Benny Dayal’s voice is slightly old fashioned, in that urban, Anglo-Indian, slightly modern kind of way, but mostly he sounds like home.
As the song goes on about how the city hugs you tight, makes you listen to the heartbeat, abuses while in love and loves by giving abuses, the streets of New Delhi slide out of the diphthongs and suddenly I’m walking down the Connaught Place inner circle on my way to Hindustan Times’ office, or walking down the narrow lanes Majnu Ka Tila on a lukewarm winter noon, or meeting a bunch of former colleagues for a quick picnic in the Panchsheel Park. A.R. Rahman’s composition is my jalebi, and it carries me back not just to the New Delhi where I grew up amid a bustling extended family and played in the rains on Janpath with cousins, but the one with whom I have continued to have a love-hate relationship for the three decades of my life.
Intonations conjure up a whole world, an atmosphere, as much as the car fumes or the air pollution that so famously connote New Delhi. Hearing these almost home accents prise me open, fixing me in place, giving me that proverbial feeling of security even if what’s being hurled out is a clutch of selected Hindi language cuss words.
I hear them fleetingly, sitting inside an auto rickshaw, or placed in the comfort of an air-conditioned metro wagon, and suddenly a whole known universe throws itself open in my mind’s eye.
I wish I could transcribe, for instance, the exact shriek in a Delhiite’s voice I heard on a rainy afternoon at the Green Park metro station a few years ago, when she slipped on the staircase and promptly blamed the man walking at least twenty steps ahead of her. “Kameeenaayy” her mouth spread diagonally just like the metro line as her eyebrows furrowed into a crumple like her kurta.
She was drenched and seething, but I wanted to hug her.
During the lockdown in 2020, many (pseudo) Delhiites left the city in droves for their first homes, sheltering in the comfort of their parents’ moneys and houses. They scooted for locations that were deemed safer than the Capital, while my boyfriends and I decided to stay back. In doing this, we didn’t know then, that we’d be lodging ourselves deeper inside the city’s history. As I grew my roots tighter into the city, covid kept taking turns.
Situated inside a rather crummy two-bedroom apartment that I had rented in a hurry in 2019, I felt the pain of not being in a very comfortable place, but that was it. Yet, I would not leave Delhi. It felt like a dereliction of duty not to be present. I had to see Delhi turn this corner and live with it as it struggled under the siege of an unknown virus.
Locked down inside my top floor apartment, I participated in the visual and aural performance of clapping for the country’s health services, all the banging of utensils and cheering echoing down the abyss between the impossibly spread-out bungalows. I felt happy to be included, to be participating in something so singular, quirky and unprecedented with a crowd of such baffling numbers.
But until the pandemic was over, Delhi was not just Delhi, even for veritable Delhiites. And so even after changing houses, finding better comforts, bathing in the comforts that being in the capital brings along, I was still missing Delhi. My friend sitting far away, across the Atlantic, probably misses it just as much as I do.
What did I miss?
Going for extravagant movie trips. Stepping out into the June evening humidity. The specific rudeness of Delhi’s summer noons as the already fed-up asphalt oozed out heat as I made my way to my former office. Walking in the metastasised air pollution that cast a pall over the Capital every winter. That particular smell of the metro, not the phenol one but the warm smell of collective sweat and exasperation of hundreds of men and women who huddle underground waiting to be moved somewhere. The shrieking sound of the metro’s horns as it tunnelled its way inside the station, coming to a halt at the platform, haunted my days as I stared into the abyss of Zoom meetings.
I missed that particular greyish orange light of the late afternoon sky casting its ominous pall over the city, as viewed from inside the metro on the Lajpat Nagar line. Early Sunday mornings, taking the metro from east to south Delhi, just to grab an early show of a Hindi movie at Nehru Place’s Satyam Cinema, and afterwards huddling inside the downstairs booze shop to secure alcohol for the rest of the day.
The smell of an open drain down the street’s end wafting in as you take a sip of roadside chai in a Styrofoam cup, along with chana jor garam on a rainy winter morning. The flash of a thunderstorm, quickly followed by a meek drizzle that is only ever enough to wet the scalp of a bald man, that suddenly sends the entire city huddling for cover as if the sky will come bucketing down. And, yes, amid that fury and rush, the angry voice of a Lajpat Nagar aunty who is waiting in the shade and a man tries to take even a tiny millimetre of extra space than absolutely necessary.
I missed all this and so much more. But soon 2021 was over and Delhi came back. And hurtling-ly so. Back into our lives and senses. And this time with a heat wave…
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