Delirious Delhi

by Dave Prager

  Pardada Pardadi was Jenny’s second job in Delhi. It was far more rewarding than her first one, which was a brief stint at an advertising agency. During her interview, the boss had said he wanted to hire her because “as a foreigner, you would have a lot of insights and unique suggestions that would help us increase our professionalism.” Left unsaid was what turned out to be a more accurate reason: as a blond, female American, her presence alone would give the agency some clout with the client. Still, she enjoyed her brief time there, where she was inspired by the number of women in positions of responsibility and entertained by the office boys who would spy on her throughout the day, peeking at her from around corners and softly singing love songs to each other. And she was engrossed—in both senses of the word—by the smell from the basement.

  The smell would billow up the office stairwell every two or three weeks. Each time it made Jenny think something had gone terribly wrong and that evacuation of the office was imminent. It was a terrible odor for which she had no frame of reference within an office environment. It was far worse than a refrigerator opened after weeks of forgotten festering lunches, and it saturated all four floors of the building, crawled underneath the closed office door, and made it impossible for Jenny to work.

  But only Jenny was bothered by it. While she coughed and choked, everyone else just went stoically about their business, enduring without complaint something that would drive every American office worker out of their minds.

  One day, fed up with mouth breathing, Jenny made some inquiries. While the aboveground floors of the building were home to one of India’s best-known new media companies, its basement housed a distributor of raw and processed meat products. Among their clients, one coworker reported, were many of the Subway franchises that had sprung up all around Delhi.

  Whether the smell was meat being cooked, strips of flesh curing in the basement heat, or blood being burned off a killing floor, nobody knew; all anybody knew was that it was meat. Which made it all the more surprising that an office half-full of vegetarian Hindus would be so silent about the awful airborne particles polluting their bodies by way of their nasal passages.

  And there is a lesson in this: that discomfort does not supersede responsibility. This lesson mirrors the lesson that I learned during my commute: no matter how tough a workplace may be, and no matter how heavily the work environment might bear upon those toiling in it, the only ones who complained were the ones who were ignorant about how bad things could otherwise be.

  Or, to be more direct: we foreigners had no idea what “hard work” actually meant.

  My company worked out of three different office buildings during my time in Delhi. For my first month, we were located in the collection of low-rise offices known as Okhla Industrial Estates Phase III. Although there were a few dozen buildings in the complex, there was just a single entrance, and it was accessible to southbound commuters only by taking a U-turn under a major flyover. So every morning, four lanes of cars jammed up as they fought to funnel into a two-lane entrance. I couldn’t believe that the businesses paying rent in Okhla hadn’t agitated for a widening of this entrance, because it essentially functioned as a fifteen-minute tax levied against every single worker in the complex.

  But I soon found out that traffic at Okhla was nothing to complain about. Because then our office shifted to Gurgaon.

  Delhi’s great corporate exodus to Gurgaon seemed to reach critical mass during our stay in the city. The rents were cheaper in Gurgaon; but more importantly, business after business watched their clients move there, saw their competitors follow, and realized that they had no other choice. Sometimes it seemed like every professional I met either worked in Gurgaon or was preparing for an imminent move. And usually it seemed like every single one was driving on M.G. Road at the exact same time.

  There was nothing I hated worse than Mehrauli–Gurgaon Road. It was a six-mile stretch of pain upon which I would stop-and-go and stop-and-go for three hours of every working day. M.G. Road was one of only two routes that led from Delhi to Gurgaon, and this bottleneck was just the first of many failures of urban planning that should have deterred companies from moving to Gurgaon, but didn’t.

  The other road was NH-8, the national highway, which fully opened two months after we arrived in Delhi. For weeks prior to the scheduled December 31 inauguration, my co-workers and I eagerly anticipated completion of the final flyovers that would let cars zip from Haryana’s border straight to Delhi’s Ring Roads and take the pressure off of M.G. Road. But December 31 came and went, and the road remained closed—even though, as the newspapers reported, construction was completely finished.

  As the days turned into weeks with no green light, the newspapers grew increasingly agitated. Their populist indignation decried two conspiracies that were denying the people their improved commute: first, that the corporation running the toll plaza wasn’t yet prepared to charge tolls but wouldn’t allow the road to be opened for free; and second, that the area’s politicians and dignitaries were mired in a squabble about the road’s inaugural photo-op, agreeing only that it should remain closed until they decided who should hold the giant ribbon-cutting scissors or whatever it was they were arguing about. By the third week of January, the newspapers were publicly calling for a commuter revolution. This inspired a number of people to ignore the “road closed” signs and drive along the overpass anyway, which in turn inspired the newspapers to publicly congratulate themselves for single-handedly kick-starting the grand bourgeoisie revolution. The newspapers also gleefully gossiped about the political scuffles that followed as ministers and muckety-mucks jostled over the details of the increasingly unnecessary inaugural celebration until, finally, nearly four weeks after the road was ready for cars, the people in power gathered and posed and elbowed each other out of the pictures, and the road was officially open.

  At that point, NH-8 became a high-speed gateway between Delhi and Gurgaon. And it was a genuine showpiece of modern infrastructure. It was rarely jammed except for near the airport runways, where the slow lanes were often blocked by parked cars watching the planes land. But for the first six months, any time one gained on the highway was immediately snatched back by the bureaucracy at the toll plaza on the Haryana state border, where twentyminute queues generated scores of angry editorials for months until the toll plaza management finally added the signs, lane markers and staff they should have had from the opening day.

  (Growing pains. By the time we moved out of Delhi, the toll plaza was far more impressive to behold. Its collectors would snatch outstretched money and return exact change in a single swipe, screaming “Jaldi, bhai, jaldi!” to any driver who might try to count his change or ask the time or dawdle in any way. The plaza soon shrunk to the status of minor inconvenience for everyone except those poor drivers who invested in automated toll tags—because their lines were always longer and slower than the lines for those who were paying cash.)

  But NH-8 didn’t improve my commute. Even after they got the toll plaza functional, any time I gained on the highway was lost once I exited on to the Outer Ring Road, where construction on a series of flyovers remained stalled for almost our entire duration in Delhi. The first half-mile after the highway was lined by massive steel support beams that had been placed on the sidewalk in preparation for construction that only finally started in our last month in the city. For a few miles beyond that, the center lanes had been closed off to accommodate the frozen worksite. Commuters had been routed on to now-crumbling dirt shoulders that were creating jams so miserable that M.G. Road actually became the better choice.

  Still, for those continuing on NH-8 directly into central or north Delhi, the highway was a godsend. And while it reduced the pressure on M.G. Road, it did so just as M.G. Road itself narrowed like a bacon lover’s arteries. Giant cement pylons began sprouting in the center of the road, protected on either side by metal dividers that lopped off three of the road’s six lanes. This was construction for the southern portion of the D
elhi Metro.

  At least these jams represented progress. They had a purpose. It was still miserable to be stuck in traffic, but it was genuinely satisfying to watch the pylons sprout and then see the massive launching machine hang cement track segments between them, creating an elegantly modern sculpture that now stretches from Qutub Minar onwards until it and M.G. Road part ways in Gurgaon.

  The Metro is now the pride of Delhi, and justifiably so. In its massive spotless stations, polite riders queue patiently and give ample space for departing passengers to exit. Its cars are air-conditioned and their windows are wide enough to admire the 108-foot tall statue of the monkey god Hanuman that we’d pass on our way to Roshan Di Kulfi in Karol Bagh. Each time we rode the Metro, I felt a nostalgia for a Delhi that did not yet exist, the Delhi-to-come in which the aboveground city is as modern and functional as the one below.

  But to prepare M.G. Road for Delhi’s most conspicuous symbol of modernity, the government besmirched M.G. Road with an equally conspicuous symbol of incompetence. Before we’d moved to Delhi, M.G. Road had apparently bustled with fashion malls and furniture stores. But in 2006, the government decided that almost all of them were “illegal constructions” that needed to be “sealed.”1 And “sealing,” as it turned out, is a bureaucratic term for a practice that is better defined as half-hearted bulldozing: the city sent in a fleet of wreckers to knock down just enough ground-level columns on the condemned buildings that their facades would collapse. It was destruction on a level sufficient to discourage retail inhabitation but not enough to incur municipal responsibility for cleaning up the buildings.

  And it transformed M.G. Road into a post-apocalyptic commute, like driving to Gurgaon by way of Baghdad. Shattered and deserted buildings lined the road in long stretches, empty but for the cows and ragpickers who wandered the broken windows and strewn cement. On some buildings, four floors of bare concrete rested precariously on columns that had been chewed by jackhammers down to the bare rebar, just a minor earthquake away from collapsing into traffic. On one building, a twohundred-square-foot chunk of roof dangled over three collapsed floors below, held in place only by a few bent strands of steel. For the first months of my commute, the only sign of life was a hundred-meter stretch of singlestory ruins where a few brave vendors had built a thriving beanbag chair market.

  But one day I realized that commerce had begun to trickle back. My workward slogs began revealing new sights: first, men with sledgehammers gnawing at the piles of concrete; and then men shoring up supports, laying new marble, and fitting plate glass over the freshly rebuilt interiors; and finally, bored salesgirls from northeast India staring glumly out of brightly lit showrooms, surrounded by lamps and couches and shoes and upscale religious handicrafts and no customers at all. Wicker World and Twinkle Sofa Mall had returned to M.G. Road, but their customers had not. That’s because the Metro construction had shifted traffic on top of the sidewalks; there was nowhere to park.

  I don’t think these shops were there to make immediate sales. They were claims being staked on the future of M.G. Road: a day when the Metro was complete, the traffic was reduced, the government was supportive, the shops were legal, and the customers existed once again. And when this day arrives, the M.G. Road of the past will re-emerge as one of Future Delhi’s showcase boulevards.

  My commute, unfortunately, took place on the M.G. Road of the present. Stuck in the queue of cars merging with the overhead tracks at the vanishing point, watching the minutes tick down on my life, my cab felt like a jail cell. I was trapped in a private hell.

  But in this, I soon grew to realize, I was lucky. For at least my hell was private.

  As with most of the miseries I experienced in India, I only needed to stop wallowing for a moment to realize how good I actually had it. I’d sit there in M.G. Road’s traffic, wondering why God would curse me with such suffering without providing any good movies to watch on my laptop. And then I’d look to the car next to me and see a five-seat Tata Indica identical to my own with six guys in the back seat and three more in the front.

  With the Metro a distant future gleam, the state of public transit between Delhi and Gurgaon was dismal. The Haryana bureaucracy put incentives in place that deterred most mass transportation, such as tolls for taxis but not private cars and, until about halfway through our stay in Delhi, prohibitions against autorickshaws from crossing state boundaries altogether. The market response to this shortfall was an informal fleet of private cars that would pick up young men at various points along M.G. Road. A crowd would rush to squeeze into any car that stopped near them, each person eager to pay a handful of rupees for a ride into the Millennium City. On the days when I’d give Dipankar a lift to work, I’d pick him up at one of those corners where everyone gathered, and he’d have to swat the other commuters away from the door and gesture at my foreign skin as proof that this car wasn’t for hire. They’d stare in bald envy as he slammed the door behind him.

  I don’t believe that the fleet of private cars was organized. Rather, I think it was made up of individual entrepreneurs who each spotted the same profit potential. These were car owners, taxi drivers making a few rupees when the boss thought they were on a call, or salaried drivers making illicit runs while their employers sipped lattes at the mall. Regardless of their provenance, each driver’s goal was the same: to maximize profit by squeezing in as many passengers as possible.

  The lucky passengers were the two or sometimes three guys in the front seat, because at least the air conditioning there would blow on them directly; in the back, four guys would sit on the seat and two more would sit on their laps—on strangers’ laps—with their necks crooked uncomfortably against the roof of the car and their faces pressing grease stains against the windows. They’d stare without expression at me in all my air-conditioned misery, with my feet stretched glumly across the length of my car, my bag wretchedly strewn on one of my three empty seats, my face a grimace of unhappiness wholly at odds with my luxurious surroundings.

  And yet nobody in these cars ever looked as miserable as I felt. It’s just as one of the characters in Shantaram says about the capacity of Indians to cope: “If there were a billion Frenchmen living in such a crowded space, there would be rivers of blood.”

  I was spoiled. I knew it. And I was reminded how spoiled I was every time I’d whine about how hot the office was, or every time I’d lose my concentration because I was hungry for lunch, or every time I’d walk out of the office to escape the generator exhaust that was saturating our floor. Because I’d be the only one without the will to endure. When I’d be stuck in traffic because some stupid truck had spilled stupid cattle fodder all over stupid M.G. Road, I’d scream and holler and shake my fist when we finally passed the accident that had stolen an hour of my life—and then I’d notice my driver staring at me in the mirror, clearly wondering why I was so upset when I was stuck so much more comfortably than everyone else.

  This was the thing: I had no perspective. I was unable to imagine anything worse than how uncomfortable my knees were pressed into the seat in front of me. But the guys in the identical Indica a few feet over knew they had it better than anyone riding the bus, which would have a hundred men packed armpit-to-armpit in a vehicle that had no air conditioning because it had no windows. Traffic jams were as hot as they were long in those buses, and it was not uncommon to see riders vomiting out of the windows. Still, every guy in the bus showed the same patience on their faces as the guys in the cars, because each of them knew they had it better than the flatbed trucks that carried dozens of villagers to their construction site for the day, the sun beating down on them as they crouched on the hot corrugated metal, knowing they’d soon be stacking bricks on their head and carrying them up a tenstory ramp to the top of Gurgaon’s next skyscraper. The women in the flatbed were grateful for their jobs, the guys in the bus were grateful for the roof, the guys in the Indica were grateful for its air conditioning, and the guy writing this book was whining because the road wa
s too bouncy for him to read the Batman comic he’d downloaded to his laptop.

  Who is throwing up their hands and cursing the gods? Only I, the one without perspective. The only one who has no real problems anyway.

  I believe that Delhiites’ dignity in hardship stems from their understanding that the universe can change any circumstance at any time. A traffic jam can pop up on even the quietest road. Power can fail on even the coolest afternoon. One day the finance director quits after a week on the job. The next day the new copywriter quits after just a few hours. One day a steam shovel pulls up to your paan stand and destroys it while a crowd watches and the American who catches a drive-by glimpse is emotional only because he wishes he had his camera. One day you’re suddenly getting married to someone you’ve never met. One day your country is partitioned and you’re on the wrong side of the new border. Life should be expected to throw anything at you at any time. Joy. Misery. An out-of-control bull.

  Maybe this explains why so many foreigners complain about a lack of long-term planning in Indian culture. They don’t realize that Indians know better than anyone that by the time the long-term rolls around, everything will have changed anyway.

  For Americans like me, all suffering is eternal; all happiness, meanwhile, is forgotten even before I’ve finished experiencing it.

  Eventually, I learned from those around me. When stuck in traffic, I no longer gave in to my anger. I adopted the patience of everyone else trapped in the jam. Traffic, I grew to understand, like the sun, can only be silently endured. Fate should not be bemoaned, because what is the point? Like weather, it either passes, or it doesn’t.