Delhi, the city that wasn't meant to be

Part 1 of the city chronicles

I first visited Delhi in the autumn of 2014. My aunt and her family had recently relocated to Gurgaon from Kolkata. My parents weren’t big on travel. Before 2014, our last time travelling out of our home state has been around seven years ago. We had been visiting this same aunt and her family in Mumbai then. For the past almost-decade, they had been living in the same city as us; and travel out of it had seemed redundant. Writing this down, I am aware of the bizarre nature of our family (travel is a favourite of upper middle class Bengali domesticity to the point of being a cliche). But this post isn’t about my family. It’s about me and the city of Delhi.

Last year, I realised I loved cities and Delhi was crucial to this epiphany. I had moved to Sonepat, Haryana for a year as a PhD student in a private university there. (I would eventually find the set-up quite excruciating. At the time of writing, I am no longer a student there and have no designs of returning to Sonepat in the near future). Delhi was a forty-five minute ride away from campus, by the university-operated shuttle buses that dropped us off at the Jahangirpuri metro station. The time I moved to Sonepat was also a time when Jahangirpuri was in the news back home, because the government had been demolishing homes of Bengali migrant workers living there. In the campus space, Bengal was much talked about. Jahangirpuri was not. It was as if the fragments of Bengal that ended up under the bulldozer there did not have a space in the imagination that contained Bengal here. “Not only religion,” someone told me afterwards, “but also language.” The person who told me this would never visit Delhi voluntarily.

In the autumn of 2014 (or maybe it was our next trip to Delhi, in the winter of 2015), we visited Chittaranjan Park. C.R. Park is the part of Delhi where the Bengalis like us (but more posh) live. These are largely Bengalis who, like my father’s family fled or otherwise left East Bengal around the time of Partition if not later. These are the refugees who are initiated into full citizenship because they have the right last names. In C.R Park, we ate chicken kathi rolls (Kolkata-style, but far more expensive than in the hometown) and I took photos of my parents at the local Kalibari.

We visited Delhi every year between 2014 and 2017. Every year the pattern was near-identical. We stayed at my aunt’s place in Gurgaon, and were driven to Delhi for purposes of sight-seeing. Every year, I was tipped off a little more about the possibilities of the city. These were possibilities I could glimpse, sense but not grasp yet. Not while my forays into the city remained circumscribed by the conditions under which they occurred. But I dreamt of Delhi. In 2014, college was a year away. My aunt would tell me when we were passing by the campus paras of Delhi, and my mind bristled in anticipation.

I had the grades to apply to the best of Delhi University colleges, but the charms of Delhi were far from uncontested in my mind. As an undergraduate, I ended up in the one department I had wanted to be in more than anything else, more than I had wanted the freedom of relocating to Delhi. I was ecstatic the day results of the entrance examination came out, I was convinced that my life would turn around for the better. I was, however going to a university campus fifteen minutes away from home. I briefly contemplated Delhi again when looking up M.A. programmes, but ultimately decided against it. I did not so much as apply to other places. Instead, I stayed on in the department where I had done my undergrad. If my undergraduate years had been quite underwhelming, the two years of getting a Master’s were quite the opposite. My social circle had dwindled, but I found myself getting re-enchanted with everything academia had to offer after a long period of disaffection.

In 2020, after we had graduated from that programme in the middle of the pandemic, I found myself thinking of Delhi yet again. This was more by necessity than anything else. The pandemic had made space unreal, and the only thing that registered as such was the laptop screen. It would take me two more years to find my way back to Delhi, but it was in the same roundabout way I used to take as a teenager traveling with family. And the city I encountered was a diminished city, almost unrecognisable from the city I had dreamt of all those years back.

Delhi had been in the news in the winter of 2019- the streets alight with protest. The terms of rebellion were different there than in Kolkata at the same time. They had been more civil yes, but in many ways also more willing to negotiate with the boundaries of who got to claim humanity and who did not. If this was disappointing, it was nothing compared to the crackdown that the protests were met with. Even the “apolitical” witnesses spoke in hushed voices about the violence they witnessed. Then they would shrug and say, but some forms of violence you know. They don’t really count as such. I never figured out what to do with the strange, contradictory legacies of the city. I also did not know what to with the anger it incited in me, because the consequences of acting on it are not something I have the courage to face.

I went to Sonepat quite unwillingly. I had accepted the offer of admission when class was still online, not quite having reckoned with what signing up to move there entailed. I reckoned neither with the isolated locale of campus, nor with its proximity to the city. And the thought of the capital left me with a rather wistful aftertaste, because in the meanwhile I had taken and failed to clear the entrance examinations of the two central universities where I would have otherwise wanted to pursue further studies. One of these examinations was pervaded so thoroughly by questions regarding Sanskrit texts (I am a student of English) that I came home in quite the depressive stupor.

It is somewhat ironic however that Delhi, the big bad city known for its high crime rate would come to be the first one that I, an alarmingly sheltered girl from Kolkata got to explore by myself. At first, the long journey exhausted me. Eventually, I came to love the sights and sounds of the city. The affection came by a little too late, because I started exploring Delhi in earnest only after I had already decided to leave. There is so much I still have not seen, and that I hope to find my way back to in time. (If you are reading this and you are one of the people who took me around the city in some capacity, thank you.) I loved the hustle and bustle of Sarojini, I loved Connaught Place because it reminded me of Park Street in Kolkata, I loved Humayunpur because it was one of the few places in Delhi where I did not feel a niggling sense of lack. (But lack underpins city life and endears it to us in some capacity.) A couple of days before I left, I paused at Jahangirpuri and took in the very mediocre view, thankful for what the city had given me in passing.

But there was much I did not love about Delhi. It is not just that it wears its politics (fascist) on its sleeve and frowns upon you. The Delhi I saw was one where the status quo absorbed everything, drew everyone into its fabric in some way or the other. I hope there are other Delhis, pockets of resistance and living differently that I was not witness to. My gaze is a fleeting one, that of a passer by. This article is not critical commentary, but a montage of disparate memories. An afternoon here, an evening there strung together to mean something.

As things stand now, I would want to return to Delhi every now and then but not to live in. But in the past year, I got a glimpse of the life I had once dreamt of living there; and am richer, better for it. The residential quarters in which the university puts its graduate students was a life-world in itself. Never before had I lived in such close proximity to people my own age. And the freedom of late night walks with friends, even if we stayed within the confines of the apartment complex!

A day or so before I left, I visited a friend in North Campus and ended up stranded at her P.G. for the night thanks to Delhi rains. We spent the night walking around the moonlit rooftop and talking. P.G. rules would not let us out after a certain time, indeed it had barely let me in. At another corner of the rooftop, undergraduate-aged girls sat studying- maybe for an exam the next day. If this had been my life at one point, it would have been a deeply flawed one. Maybe one that pushed me close to the edge. But in a way different from my years as a student in my hometown, living with my parents. The lives we don’t end up living are just as formative as the lives we do. And then we walk into them, fully formed but belonging to someone else. It startles us just a bit. And then we fall back into the rhythm of the life that we are living, that are ours in this moment.