In 1990, a few days after moving across the Yamuna, I walked early one morning to the bridge over the wide nala that separated our swathe of Mayur Vihar from the river’s floodplain, and took, with some trepidation, what seemed to be a reasonable position on it, thereby bringing into existence a stop for the bus route that carried all my East Delhi schoolmates to distant RK Puram. Tinged with the freshness of early morning in my memory, lit by the pink hue of a rising sun and redolent of the sewage that flowed under the bridge, this moment became, a decade later, a point of departure for my first novel. This novel was a semi-autobiographical work whose long and difficult gestation had brought me to the realisation that my solitary walk up the sloping road to the bridge, inevitable once my father’s retirement from government service and our consequent externment from the protected enclaves of Lutyens’ Delhi had brought my family to what was then the periphery of the city, had been emblematic, encapsulating as it did the themes of a bildungsroman starring a son of the Indian salaried class coming of age in the early years of a significant economic and historical shift in our nation’s life.

The bus stop I had created stood on a corner formed by two roads, one parallel to the nala that I walked up every morning and another that came across the nala from the Noida road and burrowed deep into Mayur Vihar Phase 1 and, further, to Trilokpuri, where, I am reliably informed by someone who lived there in 1984, the stench of corpses hung in the air for days making it impossible for the living to eat their meals without retching. In the rectangular strip demarcated by the nala and the first of these roads there was a small cemented platform on which, the very first day, I spotted the remnants of some kind of religious observance. A few days later what I had initially taken to be litter took on a new life when I saw, at one corner of this platform, a white-bearded man in pants and a shirt, saffron cloth wrapped around his neck, lighting a lamp, a tableau whose impact was greatly heightened by the presence, in the background, of a squat red motorcycle parked at the edge of the road.

In the years to come this pujari would shed his polyester pants for more sadhu-like attire. He would slowly expand the platform into a double-storied mandir. He would build a wall enclosing DDA land on both sides of his mandir, creating a herb and vegetable garden on one side and using the other to house a menagerie that included goats, a cow and a flock of geese. He would be rumoured to sacrifice young homeless children at his altar and sometimes disappear for weeks on end leaving the temple locked and people saying that the police had picked him up. And he would finally leave never to return when the great inevitability of the Delhi Metro had obliterated his temple by building a station on this corner. But in those first days, before this history began to unfold, all I knew of him was that he had recently retired as a minor functionary in a government office, and on meeting an officer from his office who happened to be a colleague of a friend of the father of the girl who shared my bus stop, and on being asked what he was doing nowadays had replied: Ek mandir bana liya hai, aapki kripa se (Have made one temple with your blessings ) .

On summer afternoons when I got off the bus I would look at the saplings that were planted along the road that led home and urge them to grow quickly so that they could throw shade on this burning path for those such as myself who had only ever walked home from bus stops through the bowered streets of Lutyens’ Delhi. This silent prayer would be comprehensively answered, years after I had graduated from school, by the Delhi Metro that would build an elevated line over the nala , drowning this road in permanent shadow, arresting the smell of sewage that had always made me feel like I was home, and raising property values and rental incomes in this now coveted neighbourhood.

Three-novels-old now, and myself the father of a child who is about to enter school, I drove by my old bus stop the other day, navigating slowly through a crowd of Grameen sewa vehicles waiting for the next train to bring the next round of customers. The nala is not visible anymore, obscured by a gaggle of cycle rickshaws that jostle where the pujari’s geese had once flocked — under the shade of a row of tall trees that had once been saplings — hidden by the new concrete Parthenon of the Metro, but I sense that its waters continue to flow, serene and malodorous as ever, down to the sewage treatment plant near Noida, and then, cleansed, onward to the river.

In this monthly series, authors chronicle the cities they call home.

( Amitabha Bagchi’s novel This Place is out in stores )

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