Lado Sarai, Monday 7th Feb 2011
WM: Yesterday was a day of contrast here in Delhi. Sunday means WD is at home for ‘quality family time’ - we’re not lacking in the quantity of family time here, though the quality of it can be variable -and we’d planned to go out early and beat the crowds to the Qutb complex.
L and W resist any sort of outing at the moment, as they are ‘much too busy’ and we have to fight to get them out of the door. Then they inevitably say, “This is great! Can we come here again?” when we get somewhere, except when they say, “I’m bored. Can we go?” It’s a bit exhausting, particularly when the WPs are feeling weary but know that it is for our ‘General and Greater Good’ to step outside our front door for some gentle liver and brain shaking…I am wondering if waiting until they’re begging me to take them out might be a worthwhile alternative strategy, but I think I’d crack first.
The day before, it had taken until tea time to make it out to Haus Khas, another park in South Delhi, set about with crumbling monuments and lurking teens smoking in the bushes. The area, similarly to Lado Sarai, was once a village, but has been thoroughly and completely gentrified over the last 20 years. We found a deer park and lots of surrounding chi-chi boutiques selling concept saris, dodgy contemporary art or vintage film posters and called things like, “Oh Layla” (ohhhh, Leila!). I had a very embarrassing moment when asked by a couple romancing by the lake for ‘just one photo’: I assumed they meant one of my ‘cute’ children (on the basis of the last few months here) – but no, they were asking me to take a photo of them… and then I couldn’t get the hang of their fancy mobile phone camera. Armies of South Delhi aunties were out powerwalking - we don’t see so many of them round Lado Sarai.
The Qutb Minar (a monumental victory tower, built c.1200 by one of the first Muslim rulers of Delhi) is visible from our roof top and is on every tour group’s itinerary, as a major symbol of Delhi’s past. We’d assumed it to be a bit of a hike from Lado Sarai, and hailed an auto who must have seen us coming – charging 50 rupees to go across the main road and 100 yards…so much closer than it looked! It felt astonishing to be so near to Lado Sarai and yet in a sea of tourists, but plenty of Indian families on Sunday outings too. WD teaches his undergraduates a session on the Qutb so we had the benefit of a fantastic tour guide, much better than the others we eaves-dropped on, but I’m biased. Great to be seeing Islamic art – this is very disloyal to my husband, but I much prefer the aesthetic – the beautiful arches, amazing jalis, the geometry and abstracted pattern... The children, however, were a bit gutted not to be able to ‘god-spot’. Monotheism is much less appealing to them currently. L ‘knows all about’ Islam, ‘as we’ve done it at school’. Anyway, we’re trying to learn a bit more now we’re back in Delhi with a local mosque. Hard though, as the comics they’ve learned so much from have a strong Hindu-flavour. Muslims appear in them only as brave Moghuls.
I got W a baseball cap branded ‘Preserve your heritage’, courtesy of the ASI, as he seems to have lost his sunhat. We were all a bit hot, thirsty but mostly dusty by mid-morning so walked up the road to Mehrauli, another local ‘village’, larger and somewhere between Lado Sarai and Haus Khas in the gentrification stakes, becoming much hotter, thirstier and even dustier in the process. (‘Oh the heat! The dust!’ L was definitely having a Merchant Ivory/Jewel in the Crown moment - but we lack the essential starched white linen to carry it off…) We eventually reached a bus depot, drank reviving Cokes watching ice blocks being unloaded off the back of a lorry – refrigeration hasn’t replaced this practice completely. Then we explored Mehrauli bazaar – a buzzing mix of authentic village shops selling everything from plastic kitchenware, fruit and veg, padlocks and keys, underwear and hankies, religious prints - and bought tea towels and a Sunday paper.
We’d planned to go for Sunday Lunch to a restaurant called ‘Olive’, behind the Qutb Complex, as recommended by an Indian friend. The rows of shiny BMWs in the car park, the high level security and the air of exclusive wealth should have given us a clue – but it wasn’t until we reached the inside (a very tasteful courtyard) and found out that a buffet lunch was 2195 rupees (over £30) a head, that we ran fast… A lunch that would have cost over a hundred pounds (there was a small discount for the children) just seemed obscene, let alone unaffordable for us. There are some very wealthy people and a large economically enfranchised middle-class in Delhi, but the majority still live very poorly. The newspaper today had an article examining middle-class complacency - 75% of the population still live on 20 rupees (=26p) or less a day. So the vast majority of Indians live for a whole week on what I paid for a bottle of not very fancy shampoo today, or less. The children got it completely and nobody had a fit when we had jumped in an auto to go to Saket for lunch instead. They see the beggars and the street children and the people living in plastic tents on the other side of the main road and just the ordinary folk who live round here without much.
Our rescuing auto driver was a Good Man: he wasn’t sure exactly where we wanted to go, so agreed to use his meter (a first for us in India) so the fare ultimately (32 rupees) was about half of what we normally pay and then undercharged (30 rupees) as he didn’t have change and wouldn’t take a further 5 rupees. Imagine that in London.
However Saket DFL was a different sort of nightmare. The DFL stands for something, but we don’t know what. South Delhi geography is an alphabet soup of letters and odd abbreviations – Saket VPL, N block market versus M block market, GK 1 and GK 2, DefCol, LK… We’d been told we might find a supermarket there but found a mutant offspring of the Oracle Mall in Reading, only doubled, tripled, quadrupled in size and hoards of consumers with bags galore. We were all staggered to see branches of Next, M&S, Lush, Body Shop, Mothercare, Swatch, Clinique – unadulterated Western capitalism served up hot and with double cream, ice-cream and kulfi for good measure. We were definitely standing at the New Frontier of global markets.
WD: Nehru described India as a palimpsest (a rather lovely word, which we can put with serendipity in our ‘lovely-words-coming-from-Asia’ list): whenever something new comes to the region, it never replaces what was here before but is transformed and absorbed by the encounter. Historically it’s the case with, for example, Islam or indeed the colonial European powers. I was trying to think of an analogy for ‘palimpsest’ and, visually immersed as I am, came up with the multiple layers in Photoshop that never obscure what’s underneath but add another dimension to the whole. So we come to the latest encounter of India with global commodity culture. Pizza in the mall: but the paneer tikka masala pizza isn’t something you could buy outside India - or perhaps would wish to. But will globalisation finally iron out the idiosyncrasies of the place? I think not, but WM is more sceptical.
WM (again): We found a shop selling imported foodstuffs at inflated prices (a packet of 5 mini Babybel cheeses for £7), but not really a supermarket as such. I think we’ll stick with what Lado Sarai has to offer in future – the kids are happy to live on porridge, pasta, eggs, fried rice, toast and pancakes with the odd chapatti and yoghurt thrown in for good measure - and a man comes down the lane, selling fruit and veg off his barrow to make sure we get our 5 a day. What they miss, what they really miss are pork products – sausages! ham! Salami! M was making a full English fry-up – bacon and sausages -out of glittery blue play-doh just now. You do see hairy pigs here and we always wonder who eats them; “What’s the point?” as W would say. Apparently Christians and some Hindu castes will eat pork. I’ve done my tapeworm talk (‘If pigs eat human poo – and they do round here – and the poo’s come from someone with a tapeworm, then the pig gets infected and then if you eat the pig and it’s not been cooked well, you end up with a tapeworm living in your gut, which then eats all your food…’) but it’s WD’s flourishes about the tapeworm dangling out of your bottom when it gets too big, that have really caught their imagination.
The absolute highlight of the Mall trip for me, however, was my close encounter with celebrity. We were sitting having a coffee (it sounds as if I spend my entire time going out for coffee in Delhi - not true) and in walked a woman in black and gold, all of it obviously and ostentatiously real (L was impressed by her blingy gold handbag) with HUGE hair, massive sunglasses, stacked shoes and heavy, heavy, non-enhancing make-up. I was thinking Bollywood starlet of yesteryear gone to the bad. In Tamil Nadu, they often enter politics at this stage in their careers (WD: hmm, just the one infamous example). She was accompanied by a brylcreemed man in black tie (her husband?) and another man in a black polo-neck (her slave or security?) whose role was to carry her gold handbag, plump crimson heart-shaped cushions and give out business cards to her admirers. The whole busy coffee shop literally stopped to stare. A young urban-cool couple at the next table, explained that she was ‘famous for hair and beauty’. WD’s coffee went down the wrong way as he wondered if he had heard correctly. I was double-donkey-daring the girls to go and ask for a photo with her, but they were both too shy (I’m not surprised but what a missed opportunity). It turns out (when we went home to read her website and blog), that she is an Ayurvedic beauty and health entrepreneur, who offers tips for dealing with acne and monsoon skin care but has also made lots of money from her beauty empire, a branch of which was in the mall. Think of the Indian lovechild begat by Anita Roddick, Jackie Collins, Barbara Cartland and Jon Bon Jovi and you’re getting close. Anyway, I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy her products, although L may have found a role model for her Unisexual Lagoon Beauty Saloon business career?
So back to Fortress Buffalo to reflect on the day… We may be living in an outpost, but we do feel reasonably secure once the metal shutters are down, doors bolted, moat filled and the crocodiles have been put out… N and his mum have had to go off at short notice to the hills as his great uncle died at the weekend and he won’t be back for a while. So really there are no intermediaries now – we have to deal with anything that crops up. We are under strict instructions from N not to leave the front door open, even for a few minutes, as just before we arrived here, a troop of hijras had invaded his downstairs and would not leave until he’d paid them off.
WD: Hmm, how can Hijras be explained? They are the groups of men dressed as women begging for money on the train or at the traffic lights. But more than that: a distinct South Asian transgender community. Oh, try Wikipedia won’t you? We did.
WM: I do feel a little like Rapunzel leaning over the balcony when the doorbell goes (a) so I don’t have to run down 3 flights of stairs if it’s only kids messing around, and (b) to see if it’s WD back from the archives or one of N’s staff who need the draw-bridge letting down. But you can’t keep India out – whether it’s the black crusty snot up my nose or the boys in the park’s cricket ball on our balcony or tonight the sudden, unexpected thunderstorm, complete with filmic fork lightening, blustery wind and downpour sending us running out into the street puddles to retrieve our washing - India gets in, and that’s fine because that’s what we want. Tomorrow the dust will have settled briefly, the air will be clear and clean, and spring will have arrived in Delhi.
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