#Scurf164: How January Closes in, Ghazalistic
The senses fuse and coalesce into an old place with a myriad new secrets
Delhi in January is grey. Delhi in January is always a snooty, snug, sooty grey. Except when there’s a burst of rain and the smog lifts. Then it’s bright green, even a pallid yellow. That lasts for maybe four or five hours on any given day, but we all know that that’s not really Delhi, that’s just a break from the gloom. I wouldn’t say say I like the grey because I have a tendency to become despondent and lean freakishly into those greyish human moods. But the Delhi grey during its peak winter inspires in me faith to plod on. With AQIs broaching various previous year’s records, and no amount of rum, whisky or brandy doing its work, Delhi does implore me to forge on. Forge on into the literal and metaphorical unknown of our futures. Its greys are the ones that seem to ooze a strange storybookish neo-noir atmosphere. The cold is obviously straight from the novels and short stories and essays of bone-chilling cold we all grew up reading. But there is something more to the patchy, greyish veneer that the city has come to assume this past decade. The sooty stillness, the slatey grey, it all imbues upon you a somewhat dull pall. You half-heartedly wait for it to lift, but you know you won’t be able to exist once the sun screams out. That creates a momentary respite, however breathless. A safe space emanates in the most horrible of corners. Had it not been for the sheer number of people, stalls and strays on the roadsides, and vehicles on the roads, this veneer of the city could somewhat be described as Kafkaesque. A sooty city filled with people clothed in all shades of middle- and lower-middle class blacks to comfort themselves. Ensconced on a roadside a chaiwalla pours you a cup with ilaichi and laung, Kumar Sanu croons from someone’s broken phone speaker “raah mein unse mulaqat ho gayi…”, a cigarette stall sees a surge in sales of loose ones even as the AQI touches an all time high, a ground floor veteran living alone in a south delhi neighbourhood nurses a whisky toddy as a stray cat purrs at her feet. Delhi is immensely potent around this time of the year. Whatever be your poison — the city, its air, the cigarettes, the alcohol, Kumar Sanu’s treacherous numbers or just your own company — you are sure to find some company, a common solace and a lingering malaise in Delhi’s pith in January.
I’ve been gathering old words (and selves, I guess?!?) these last few days. This brief-esque snatch on winters from the December 2017 (or was it 2018) made me pause and think about how self-involved I’ve been through the decades…
Each season a city. Winter was like being forever trapped inside the humming white background noise of life. Inside winter’s white noise, I found a bigger quiet. That which fell upon us after the cats went to sleep, the winds stop thrumming outside and the stillness of everything receded into the forefront. In this winter, the marble floor of my house like a long, unending slab of ice. A winter day of unnatural warmth. In the winter dark, the magnetic pull of the outside looms large, almost too large to contain itself in mere walks. The outdoors, a place of innumerable possibilities, was now an unbelievably cold, dark, foggy place where the winters did not end. Its three months to march now, and it feels like we never really folded the quilts and warmers and gloves and sweaters back in. In this longest winter that we have collectively lived through, there has been a dearth of so many kinds.
Listening to ghazals snug in my chair on this deep, dark, crisp winter night in the January of 2024 I feel a few quite a surge of emotional escapades. The return of an old form of living, in an old, known part of the city. The return of a familiar form of longing. The entry of a new ghazalistic form of anticipation. Or as Papon would say: “iske toh kya kehne… paida hi blessed hai….” I feel these suddenly, abruptly bone chilling nights as an interlude to the long summer of living in the trenches.
Ghutne-wutne dheele ho jaane wali sardi… that takes its full form with a cup of whisky toddy, a bludgeoned room heater, some badly lit cigarettes and the collective warmth of memories of some good (old) people. That’s what I find myself looking forward to on many grey mornings. I had come to know these simple pleasures a few winters ago, and they haven’t left me since. Childlike expressions of comfort. Almost pure. Wouldn’t you agree?
On the day of Christmas (or was it the day before?) I made a new memory in the neighbourhood DDA park that has been my stompin(i)g ground these last 4-5 years. A warmth gathered around my ankles, in that moment my eyes welled up as my thoughts traveled into a distant future and reminsced about this moment from there. The afternoon sun had felt like a scalding burn on my right cheek but there was comfort to be found in that. I had sat there, enveloped in the fleeting beauty of that moment, feeling precious. This was just about alright.
I don’t think I’ve changed much since I quit my last Connaught Place-based job in January 2020. I’m not sure if that’s necessarily a good thing or a bad one. I’m better read, traveled, informed but also more disconnected, more withdrawn and more fickle. I still eat as poorly. In the last few years I’ve cried more than I care to remember from the decades before. I’ve gotten angrier too. And more impulsive. Oh the impulsiveness! I’ve drank a lot of booze (good, bad, wine) in these interim weeks too. But now I do more of what moves me — to joy, to my limits, to danger, to love, to coldness. Connaught Place has also evolved, changed and altered in similar ways these few years. Earlier when I looked at it, it felt daunting, full of loneliness and imposing. Now, as I survey its surface it reflects back a gilded, if jilted side of the capital to me. The city that has been there to support those who were falling, flailing, fleeing who knows what in its arms.
The city’s topography and geography are certainly altered in ways that I’ve tried to capture earlier. But is it warmer, more welcoming? My privilege doesn’t allow me to answer that. The city does, however, assuage my apprehensions better than before. Much like Jaun Elia couplets that float into my life in various forms. On most winter mornings I wake up at a sublime six with a scratchy dry thorat induced cough. One of these mornings, recently, I heard a life altering ballad I caught a whiff of through another substack. Laden, emotional and so freaking scattered, I then rang up someone who meant the world to me. Their voice made me break into sublime sweet tears. All in that odd 6-7am window! The breathless heaviness of that moment has stayed with me, making my heart beat drop each time I listen to that song. But, I plod on. Much like the rest of you and all of Delhi. To what end, who knows! To what direction, who the fuck cares!
Loved reading this post on winters in Delhi. Exactly how it feels for me, especially that part of quietness amidst the white noise, long after the cats fall asleep. You've described it so well.