Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  Caricature artists at a festival in South Delhi’s Garden of Five Senses.

  A vendor sharpens knives on his cleverly adapted bicycle.

  A peacock emerges on Jenny’s arm after a visit to Hauz Khas Market’s sidewalk hennawallah.

  Domestic tourists relaxing inside the Red Fort.

  Old Delhi at night. Walk fifty yards and turn left to find Karim’s.

  The Land Before Trademark.

  Nehru Place, Delhi’s IT market, where global technology becomes local business.

  Shops in Hauz Khas Market, including the store where we bought our mobile phone minutes.

  Commuters skirt a flooded Aurobindo Marg in the aftermath of a monsoon rain.

  A rainy day in an upscale Delhi market.

  An Old Delhi juice vendor preps for the day’s customers.

  In the southern state of Kerala, Jenny encounters the spirit that defined all of India for us.

  Stumbling upon this mosque made me realize that I never knew what I’d find in Old Delhi. I only knew that I’d never probably find it again.

  Visit deliriousdelhi.com to see even more pictures.

  7

  Shopping: Markets, Malls and More For Less

  On Sundays, Nehru Place is closed. Its shops are tightly shuttered. And the main plaza is empty except for what appears to be two groups of beggars engaged in a turf war.

  While the women slapping each other at the periphery of the plaza first catch our eyes, our attention soon focuses at the center of the otherwise empty expanse, where two stick-thin men writhe and slap and flail in their attempts to pin the other to the ground. They’re both oblivious in their efforts to the police officer in his khaki uniform who, with the patience and deliberation of a man who has beaten beggars a hundred times before and will beat beggars a hundred times after, pulls a nice long stick off a nearby tree, saunters casually up to the two struggling men, and whacks them and whacks them and whacks them until Jenny and I decide that maybe it’s better if we come back to Nehru Place on any other day.

  On any other day, Nehru Place is Delhi’s main computer market.

  Nehru Place is a collection of concrete 1960s-style skyscrapers clustered around a couple of broad plazas on the eastern side of south Delhi. The buildings themselves contain a number of very established corporations with very attractive offices in which they conduct very legitimate business. But on the ground level, Nehru Place is India’s IT boom in populist practice: an explosion of technology brands, a cacophony of shouting vendors, waves of young men in button-down shirts, and ancient diesel generators that rattle into action every time the power goes out. It’s a landscape of laptop repair specialists next to competing laptop repair specialists, hardware shops next to competing hardware shops, and printer cartridge vendors as far as the eye can see.

  Unlike the handshakes and cappuccino machines in the offices above, everything happening at ground level seems vaguely illegitimate, most likely because of the brazenness in which the unmistakably illegitimate business in conducted. A grinning teenager in a yellow shirt waves a laminated inventory of pirated software at us, promising Microsoft products at McDonald’s prices. Though he stands a few deliberate paces away from the nearest shop, his attitude and sales approach are indistinguishable from those of the vendors selling and shouting from inside the establishment, which makes us suspect everything we see on sale: Were the boxes of printer paper yanked off the back of an idling truck? Are the ten-dollar computer speakers built using two-dollar parts? Are the dirt-cheap HP ink cartridges filled with genuine HP ink—or, indeed, any ink at all?

  All levels of retail sophistication have a presence at Nehru Place, from mom-and-pop closets stuffed with boxy VGA monitors to gleaming showrooms with spotlit laptops. The shop where I once took my fraying Apple power adapter for repairs was a shadowy explosion of wires and motherboards and empty cases, with a salesman at a desk by the door and the guy who actually did the work hunched in a wooden loft built above the sales floor, surrounded by tools and parts, his head mere inches from the ceiling. His services set me back three dollars, and they extended the life of my power adapter exactly one week before it failed for good.

  We can’t imagine that Nehru Place once didn’t exist. The ancient man screw-driving logic boards must have learned the trade from his grandfather. The overstuffed cubicles must contain computers dating back to the Raj. In Nehru Place, the greatest advances of humankind compete in a shopping environment that feels centuries unchanged. Although there are a few sari houses tucked into far corners of the complex—holdovers from Delhi’s 1962 Master Plan, in which Nehru Place was planned as one of fifteen “District Centers” that would usher in a new urban Indian shopping aesthetic1—Nehru Place consists almost entirely of ITrelated vendors.

  And while we were surprised that so many business owners would choose to locate themselves so close to the competition, Nehru Place isn’t unique in being a hub for a particular trade. Delhi’s retail topography features many of these trade-specific markets: a spice market, a gold market, a fabric market, an auto parts market, a plant seeds market, a wiring market, a scientific equipment market, a cheap housewares market, an expensive housewares market, a wooden furniture market, a rope market, and a television parts market in which some vendors sell screens, some sell cases, some sell remotes and nobody seems to offer a complete set.

  These trade hubs exist in Delhi’s economic geography to serve those who prioritize savings over convenience. In these trade-specific markets, the competitive leverage lies with the consumer: when a dozen vendors are selling the same Toshiba laptop, savvy shoppers know they can play each store off the next, bargaining neighbor against neighbor until they arrive at the best deal. If stall number seventeen doesn’t offer his absolute lowest price, stall number eighteen will.

  Trade hubs like this exist in New York as well. There’s the diamond district, the flower district, and there was even an Indian restaurant district on East 6th Street for a while. But what made Delhi’s clusters unusual to us was that we had difficulty buying the stuff they sold anywhere else. New York has its trade districts, but it also has jewelry stores and Indian restaurants in every other neighborhood. But in Delhi, we could only find reasonably priced computer parts in Nehru Place. (It’s true that I could have ordered RAM for my laptop from some of the stores in the mall, but the savings I found at Nehru Place far outweighed the hassle incurred by traveling there.)

  There was even a trade hub for used books. It was Delhi’s Brigadoon: it appeared like a mirage once a week on Sundays to transform the commercial chaos of the Old City into a literary paradise.

  The Sunday book market originated near Delhi Gate, an ancient stone arch that stands proud as the high-water point of the British colonial government’s urban renewal. (North of Delhi Gate, it’s all alleys and shouting and cows and puddles until Old Delhi gives way to the Civil Lines, where the British revved up their well-bred Victorian bulldozers again.) The sidewalk book market stretched westward from Delhi Gate along Asaf Ali Road (the southern border of Old Delhi) and northward on Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg (which bisects Old Delhi and Daryaganj, a neighborhood of art deco architecture that’s not on the tourist track but one day will be). The booksellers commandeered the sidewalk every Sunday, spreading their wares before them in neat rows, or in crazy piles, or in towering stacks that threaten to topple and bury unattended children. The selection ranged from the sublime (The Phantom Tollbooth!) to the bizarre (Bob Uecker wrote a book?); from the obsolete (manuals for Windows 3.1) to the obscure (guides to indigenous water management techniques in Gujarat). Some books were almost new, some were almost crumbling, and almost all were stepped upon by barefoot salespeople, shouting “dasrupaiyedasrupaiyedasrupaiye” as they took the quickest path between two customers. The ambient pulp smell brought back memories of my dad’s childhood books that I found in my grandparents’ house when I was a teen, and I always half-expected to stumble upon a red canvas hardcover edition of Danny Dunn and t
he Homework Machine with J-E-F-F P-R-A-G-E-R, G-R-A-D-E F-IV-E scrawled across the title page.

  The Sunday book market showcased the wonders of the global economy: who would have expected the paperback novelization of The Empire Strikes Back to make it all the way to India? Who would have thought there was so much demand for romance novels with the covers torn off? And seriously, Bob Uecker wrote a book?

  Within the chaos, patterns emerged. One guy sold only hardcover copies of Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Harry Potter, all of them missing their dust jackets. Yet another specialized in 1970s spy novels featuring every James Bond wannabe the world never heard of (Johnny Fedora? Harry Palmer? Duff?). And good news for students of programming languages nobody uses any more: we found more crumbling manuals than we could shake a SPARC station keyboard at.

  On one trip, one of the elderly booksellers standing near the Delhi Stock Exchange on Asaf Ali Road overheard me practising my Hindi on a nearby vendor. “You know Hindi?” he demanded, striding across his pile of thin nonfiction paperbacks to look me in the eye.

  “Main Hindi sihkraha hai,” I agreed eagerly, my accent and conjugation bringing a grimace to his face.

  “Then I have something for you.” He walked purposefully across his pile and began rummaging, tossing volumes left and right as he burrowed deeper, carving a path this way and that, retracing his steps to toss books he’d tossed once already in case they’d landed on the one he wanted. His purposeful search made me anticipate some enigmatic tome that would unlock the secrets of Hindi to me; I imagined that if I practiced diligently enough he’d invite me to sit at his feet in his family’s forgotten haveli where, with dried rose petals fluttering around us, he would teach me mystical practices of meditation and telekinesis and sexual prowess that Westerners expect all Indian wise men to possess.

  I stood and waited a few pregnant minutes while he searched, wondering what he’d come up with and hoping that my training would involve fighting monkeys with my bare hands. Then he finally picked up a book of Urdu– English poem translations. He skimmed through it, muttered, scowled, and tossed it aside.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Can’t find it.” Then he walked across his books to another customer.

  If the Sunday book market was Delhi’s Brigadoon, Palika Bazaar was Delhi’s Biltmore Hotel garage: when it came to a little harmless lawbreaking, Palika Bazaar was the spot.

  Palika Bazaar is an underground market located between the inner and outer circles of Connaught Place. Descending down its stairs, we’d enter a strange and fetid labyrinth created by hundreds of vendor stalls and far too many people for such a small space. Palika Bazaar defied every other shopping experience in Delhi. Elsewhere, shopkeepers seemed to have some sort of gentlemanly agreement as to how vigorously they’d solicit passers-by. In Palika, it was a free-for-all. Young men would shout at us and pull at our shirts and follow us around to cajole our patronage, and they’d shoot us looks of disgust when we’d decline. Eternal puddles added to the chaos, as did the stained ceilings and the overwhelming essence of sticky corruption. The layout was a confusion of concentric passages and repetitive storefronts, a muddied echo of Connaught Place’s circular layout above, a bewildering maze that seemed purposefully designed to ensure as many people as possible would get trampled should a panicked stampede ever break out.

  Palika Bazaar sold, with a thin veneer of subtlety, anything that could be pirated, bootlegged, or frowned upon in the daylight above. This included DVDs, video games, clothes, bags, shoes, electronics and sex toys. We’d walk past T-shirt vendors (“Real Gucci! Real Gucci!”) and porn pushers (“You want sexy Indian movie?”) before stopping at the DVD guys, who would make a cursory effort to interest us in their handful of legitimate shrink-wrapped discs before pulling out spiral notebooks filled with every title we could imagine watching, both Western and Hindi. We learned the wisdom of checking the quality of the disc before we bought it; the copy of Nacho Libre we asked one vendor to test couldn’t have been any worse if it had been thrice dubbed off of a decades-old videotape.

  The government has its eyes on Palika Bazaar. Not just in the proclamation they made to redevelop it in time for the 2010 Commonwealth Games. (Such proclamations must be taken with an ocean of salt, because the “reparation” of this and the “upgradation” of that were proclaimed a dozen times a week by smiling politicians who never seemed available for comment a year later when the newspapers followed up on the total lack of progress.) More tangible proof of government interest in Palika were the raids that were staged with increasing frequency and consequences. On our final visit to the bazaar, which came after a particularly well-publicized police action, every vendor we spoke to glanced around suspiciously when we asked about “cheaper” DVDs and then denied that they had any idea of what we were talking about.

  The fact that the police were doing anything at all about piracy surprised us. Intellectual property enforcement seemed to be lower on the police’s priority list than stopping drunk driving. We once bought a bag of mango candies from a sidewalk vendor in the Old City so we had something to hand to beggar children besides money; they’d look at these candies with a kind of suspicion they never showed when we gave them unlabeled bags of leftover food from restaurants. Only when a co-worker burst out laughing upon seeing me eat a piece of my own did we discover why: these candies were bootlegged versions of a popular brand, with the brand name purposefully misspelled and the logo shifted just enough to look completely illegitimate to everybody but us. It’s not like we’d bought them from an illicit candy market full of Kat Kits and Cudbary’s and Mirs Bars, though—the vendor had just been standing on the street, selling them in the open, seemingly unconcerned about getting caught.

  Because he almost certainly wouldn’t. Everywhere we turned, we saw violations of all the rules of trademark and copyright I learned at college in my requisite semester of Communications Law 507. Even on TV: one commercial for a line of men’s clothing showed a handsome man in a tight button-down shirt walk past a gorgeous lady on the street; the lady, upon seeing his shirt, broke into a sultry dance that sent men all over India rushing to buy his magical sex shirt. The commercial opened with a brief snippet of Frank Sinatra singing “Strangers in the Night”—a song so coveted by advertisers that there’s no way this local brand could have afforded the licensing fees, and no way they would have made its use so subtle if they had legally secured the rights. Similarly, our friend Scott spotted an ad for a Gurgaon optician’s shop featuring a picture of the famously bespectacled politician Sarah Palin who, for all the twists in her career, probably hadn’t cut any endorsement deals with local Indian eyeglasses shops. And a new frozen yogurt shop in Defence Colony called CocoBerry sold fruit-covered desserts that were identical to those sold by PinkBerry, a rapidly growing yogurt chain in the US. The New York Times even mentioned CocoBerry in an article about retail knockoffs in India,2 also pointing to India’s Financial Times newspaper, which has since 1984 copied London’s Financial Times down to the pink hue of its newsprint.

  Not that Sarah Palin’s career is necessarily suffering from this unapproved endorsement. There’s a broader issue here: if Frank Sinatra and PinkBerry and the Financial Times can’t get justice, what hope do Delhi’s small businessmen have? Every businessman knows he might wake up one morning to discover his carefully built brand pasted onto someone else’s letterhead. In Karol Bagh, there’s a famous store called Roopak that specializes in spices, nuts and dried fruit. Right next door to it, there’s a store that’s also called Roopak that also specializes in spices, nuts and dried fruit. We don’t know which is the famous Roopak and which is the impostor. Maybe this is nothing more malicious than a family schism, but it could very well be capitalism at its most brazen, with the upstart Roopak calling out the veteran Roopak like two gunslingers facing off in a dusty Western town. Except it turns out that Karol Bagh is big enough for both of them, so every morning the two angry owners must open their shutters with all the ritual stomping,
preening and chest puffing of the India–Pakistan flag ceremony at Wagah.

  Such tensions must also thicken the air at a set of competing storefront kebab stands near Nizamuddin, where we went with the Eating Out in Delhi crew on one of our last nights in the city. Two sets of grills were assembled in front of two sets of closed metal garage doors, flanked by stacks of tires in front of driveways that were used by day for car repair. (A third garage door was open to reveal someone’s living room, with a shirtless man stroking a massive black dog in front of a blaring television and glaring at anyone who stepped over the threshold demarcating where kebab stands ended and his home began.)

  Above each of the kebab stands were vinyl signs. The one on the left named the stand below it as “Aap Ki Khatir,” with the inexplicable and delightful tagline, “The Musical Drive-Fun.” On the right, the identical-looking shop boasted an identical-looking sign that said “Sab Ke Khatir”—an identical-looking name too coincidental to be an accident.

  A few months after we visited the stand, our friend Sam Dolnick, a fellow New Yorker working in Delhi for the Associated Press, published a terrific article that got to the bottom of this mystery.3 He discovered that a former customer of Aap Ki Khatir thought it was such a good idea for a business that, taking advantage of the city’s open attitude towards intellectual property, he duplicated its name and menu and opened up right next door.

  “He is a friend-enemy,” the waiter at Aap Ki Khatir says in Sam’s article, describing the owner of Sab Ke Khatir. “We no longer talk. But this is what happens in business.”