Dearly beloved Dilli

William Dalrymple sums it up neatly when he calls Malvika Singh’s portrait of Delhi — Perpetual City (Aleph) — “a heartfelt love letter to Delhi that is part family memoir, and part indignant call to arms”.

For me, this delightful book is all about yearning and heartbreak… nostalgia for a wonderful, glorious past which can never return. Essentially, Malvika’s book is about the transformation of Dilli into New Delhi and then what she calls the ‘New New Delhi’.

Daughter of Romesh and Raj Thapar, “who were lefties in those early years” and edited the tabloid Crossroads from Bombay, the young Malvika was as distressed as her mother when they shifted from cosmopolitan Bombay to the “conservative town” of Delhi in the 1950s. Earlier, when visiting her grandfather as a child, she remembers how from the Delhi airport, located at the edge of Safdargunj’s tomb, it was a less than five-minute drive to his official army residence at 7 Safdarjung Road. “What a change from Santa Cruz and the bustle of Bombay to this calm and serene island of New Delhi”!

“Home” was a Lutyen’s sprawling bungalow, with old Persian carpets, colonial furniture, bedrooms, and dark, cool corridors. In the ample, deep verandas that surrounded the house “everyday activities happened — where the darzi sat to stitch our clothes”, and the phalwala and other vendors came to sell their wares. Eating ice cream from the thelas at the India Gate was part of the children’s evening entertainment.

When Malvika’s family landed in Delhi, a special house was built on Kautilya Marg, at “the edge of the Ridge, the green untouched lung of Delhi. It felt lonely, as though we were living outside the town, in the wild, in a sterile habitat with no friendly or intrusive neighbours, no bazaars, no vendors of fruits and vegetables, no flower sellers, no nomadic minstrels, no baluwallahs, kalaiwallahs or kabuliwallahs.” During the long power cuts in summer months, they would stretch out on charpais , wrapped with wet cloth, fall asleep in the heady fragrance of raat ki rani and wake up to the chirping of birds. “If there was a cobra in the garden it was left alone and never killed. Snakes were a part of life... jackals cried at the gate each night.”

This Delhi is a far cry from the megapolis of today, “restrictive and suspicious”, a city drunk with the “arrogance” of power and wealth. The author says that after Indira Gandhi’s return to power in 1970 and through the Seventies and Eighties, Delhi transformed “from the sunny open capital that I had come to as a young girl, grown up in and married into”. During Indira’s second regime as prime minister, “money began to speak and a new breed of land developer and contractor began to alter the contours of the city.”

 The darkness of the Eighties included the death of Sanjay and Indira Gandhi and the massacre of Sikhs. Married to one, she and her husband, “the family of Sir Sobha Singh, the man who had built New Delhi”, had to be sheltered in the house of her parents, who were born Hindus but atheists. “Dilli had changed for ever. A dreadful polarization between communities that were, till recently, considered to be the same, was planted in the soil of this ancient city”.

But to savour the essence of this book, you have to keep returning, along with the author, to the treasures of Old Delhi, which in the Fifties was a vibrant, even though decaying Shahjahanabad. While the new city slept at 10, “Old Delhi rocked through the night”. It was an enchanting place with its “crowded streets, its familiar faces, its narrow lanes, its sounds and smells, its food and traditional wares, its places of worship, temples, mosques and gurudwaras, its iconic buildings and layers of history”. The place was magical with local traders marketing organic produce, musicians playing, acrobats performing; kite festivals, ram- and cockfights, and a hospital for injured birds run by the Jain community completed the picture. Bazaars, says Malvika, were community “clubs” where people met and gossiped. Some of that ambience still remains. “Kinari Bazaar continues to sell silk threads, gota in gold and silver, ribbons and parandis , sehras and talwars and everything we need for festivals and weddings”.

Next the narrative takes readers on an unforgettable culinary journey… to the delectable, heavenly food that brings celebrities and foreigners, locals and tourist, scurrying to the streets of Old Delhi, around Jama Masjid, for those delicious kebabs and more. The Paranthewali Gali with its hot, stuffed parathas for hungry passersby as well as local shopkeepers continues to be a hit.

“At the base of Asia’s largest mosque, the Jama Masjid, used to sit the best ever kebab shop, Masita, that would draw us to eat indescribably exquisite seekh and kakori kebabs that no other vendor has been able to match. Then one day, the bulldozers of the ‘beautification of Delhi scheme’ ordered by thoughtless politicians and rootless babus, with the help of the municipal corporation pretending to ‘clean up’ the area, killed a treasure of the palate, an intangible legacy left to us by the Mughals. Other shops selling bits and bobs were all demolished, as were the myriad Dilliwallahs who energized the steps of the masjid.”

In this dirge for the ruthless destruction of a priceless legacy, Malvika describes how an organic cultural hub of the old Muslim quarter of the city was slowly transformed into an urban slum. “Any other country with an iota of pride in its heritage would have conserved and nurtured its ancient roots, not worked to maul and hurt them,” she sighs.

And yet, “the idiocy of our politicians and bureaucrats notwithstanding, life around the Jama Masjid continues to flourish through the night”. And you still have Karim’s with its mouth-watering fare: kebabs, raan , bheja fry and more!

One is grateful for the equitable mix of memoir, which adds an interesting personal touch, with brief nuggets on the city’s beautiful ancient monuments such as the Jama Masjid and Red Fort built by Shah Jahan, the gurudwaras around Chandni Chowk, and Tees Hazari, where the law courts of modern Delhi are located.

Through a brief sketch of Delhi beginning in the 8th century with Suraj Pal, a Tomar Rajput, Prithviraj Chauhan inheriting in the 12th century the capitals of Ajmer and Delhi, the author walks us through its capture by Mohammed of Ghor and the subsequent Muslim domination over a Rajput and Hindu period. In 1911, the British laid in Delhi the foundation stone of the imperial capital of India, which was shifted from Calcutta. We also get a brief sketch of how Lutyen’s Delhi was built and which is in stark contrast to the ugly, narrow hi-rise structures of today.

  But more than anything else, foodies — hardcore non-vegetarians — will love the book for the epicurean journey through old Delhi’s traditional delicacies. And what can match Karim’s fare? A must-visit eatery during my infrequent visits to Delhi, I salivated at the author’s description of the yet untried, famous and unmatched delicacy… the early morning breakfast of Nihari , “a marrow and meat stew, cooked overnight in fragrant spices, warm and delicious when scooped up with a roti and heartily devoured”.

Having devoured Nihari at dawn, she comes down scathingly on those who have it not as breakfast but as a dinner ‘dish’. This has “become its new avatar, served up at weddings in impersonal five star hotels that are now trying to ape an Indian past, getting it wrong”.

Read this book for its easy and flowing narrative, packed with interesting anecdotes, and take a quick chakkar of Dilli, which in more ways than one has been the dil of India through centuries, before a new breed of politicians and babus, powerbrokers and contractors, took hold of it.