Machinegun Etiquette

I wake in the pitch darkness of my windowless room, fumble for my alarm and silence it; the sound of rickshaws, taxis and humanity streaming along the Main Bazar filters through the air vent above the bed, a ceaseless hum that seeps into the subconscious.
I order coffee in the restaurant, light a Wills Classic and open Trains At A Glance. I have three days in Delhi before my flight, one of which I will use to visit Agra; train 2002 – the New Delhi-Bhopal Shatabdi Express – leaves at 6.15am, and I can combine this with train 2617 for the return journey, arriving back at 9pm. I drop my key at the front desk and walk out into the hammering heat and seething crowds of the Main Bazar. As my introduction to India, Pahar Ganj had prepared me for the possibility that my entire trip might be a jostling, filthy, choking, squalid and seedy test of endurance; after three months, I now see it for what it is: a conflicting and uncomfortable mix of hawkers, travellers, pimps, hippies, drug pushers, immigrants, beggars, pickpockets and opportunists, crushed together in the narrow lanes and warren of back alleys behind New Delhi station, fighting like cats in a bag. It had been cold enough then for a jumper and scarf under my fleece; now the intense heat ferments the drifts of garbage that piles up in doorways and around footstalls, the whole area stinking like a giant vat of pig swill. At the security checkpoint on the corner of Basant Road, I walk through the rickety wooden frame of the metal detector, while everyone else streams unchecked through the open police barrier; the steel and aluminum of my Maglite and Leatherman fails to register, the circuitry and Lithium Ion batteries of my camera and MP3 player go unnoticed. It’s a charade; the policemen completely ignore me. Even the nasty looking QRF – Quick Reaction Force – troops that have appeared alongside the Riot Police since I was last here barely give me a second look. After the bombs that killed more than 60 passengers were placed on the Atari Express, security around New Delhi station, where the devices were smuggled onboard, has been stepped up, and extended into Pahar Ganj. QRF soldiers are everywhere, their blue camouflage combat pants tucked into their jump boots, bristling with riot guns and assault rifles; they stand in small groups, smoking cigarettes, staring down anyone who dares look at them. Their AK-47s have transparent plastic ammunition clips, the curve of gleaming bullets clearly visible, as sharp and deadly as a row of shark’s teeth; they are obviously real, and unquestionably lethal – a simple expedient to disabuse any doubting onlooker. The atmosphere crackles and fizzes with tension, a volatile mixture of menace and desperation, threat and fear, hovering on the brink of flashpoint. It is like walking through the occupied zone of a disputed territory, where the pretense of normal life is faltering under the burden of its protectors; it is impossible to feel comfortable or relaxed in this place, with the weight of all these watcher’s eyes bearing down on you.
I push through the crowds outside New Delhi station and climb the stairs to the Foreign Tourist’s Reservation Centre. Before the clerk will even check the availability of my Reservation Requisition, he demands my passport; some of the Atari bomb victims, thought to be Pakistani nationals, had managed to buy tickets in this booking office without producing their passports – nobody knows who they were, and they may never be identified because of the laxity of an Indian Railways booking clerk. There are Chair Car tickets available for train 2002, but train 2617 – the Ernakulam-Nizamuddin Mangala Lakshadweep Express – is booked solid for the next four days; the alternative is the return Bhopal Shatabdi, but it doesn’t leave Agra until 9pm – thirteen hours after I arrive.
Ticketless, I go downstairs and walk unhindered through the RPF cordon to platform one; there is an immense amount of security on the station, but nobody challenges me – not even an officious Inspector asks for a platform ticket. I stand between a chai stall and a wall of cloth-wrapped bales that are waiting to be loaded into a Luggage-Cum-Guards Van and quickly take a forbidden photograph of the passengers on the opposite platform; surely my behavior is suspicious enough to attract some attention? Seemingly not: I walk back out of the station, right under the noses of the massed ranks of RPF and QRF guards, the evidence of my crime flashed into the camera’s memory for any of them to examine.
I weave my way through the throng of pushy rickshaw wallahs on Chelmsford Road, sidestep the metal detector and join the flow of hand carts, cows and pedestrians trapped between the clamor of shops and stalls along the Bazar, bolts of cloth and fake CDs spilling into the narrow lane, piles of poor wood carvings and cheap holdalls resting on plastic groundsheets. I find the Sonu Chaat House, take a seat at the back, order a coffee and light a Wills Classic. The dhaba is hot, cramped and filthy; exhaust from the endless passage of auto-rickshaws and Ambassadors drifts through the open frontage and mixes with the smell of hot cooking oil, onions and tobacco, all of which is stirred up and then wafted down at the customers by two slowly rotating ceiling fans. A couple of hippies who look as if they just got off the plane at Indira Gandhi Airport are pretending to be cool at one of the other tables, but there’s no mistaking their shocked expressions at finding themselves in Pahar Ganj, and not the mystical paradise they had imagined was waiting for them. The service is slow, haphazard and offhand; I redirect two glasses of chai before my coffee arrives. A Dutch man opposite me loses his temper with the indolent waiter, slamming his fist on the table before tearing up the check and storming out, a trail of tiny squares of paper floating to the greasy floor in his wake. The waiter shrugs and moves on to the next table: business as usual. It is easy to see how the abrasive nature of New Delhi has a way of wearing down the visitor, how quickly the seedy dhabas and fleapit hotels, the clinging hawkers and loitering militias whittle away every ounce of patience and pleasure. I try to ignore it, but there’s no getting away from the fact that I’m here for the next three days. I drop a 10 Rupee note on the table, nod to the disinterested waiter, and catch an auto-rickshaw to Connaught Place.
I walk in circles around the colonnaded ring of shops, crossing the same radial roads again and again; only when I pass KFC for the third time, with its queue of waiting customers held at bay by an armed guard, do I give up and sit on a bench in the central park, surrounded by picnicking Indians lounging over the irregular grassy hump that hides the subterranean Palika Bazar. Within five minutes I am asked whether I would like a shoeshine, a map of Delhi, some cannabis, an ear clean, some postcards, someone’s daughter, a plastic model of an auto-rickshaw, an Indian drum, and most bizarrely of all, a black leather whip. When it comes to making money, it seems India’s moral superiority takes a back seat. I get a taxi out to the National Railway Museum and wander around the grounds, poking at the rusted shells and peeling paintwork of the country’s neglected railway heritage; nothing has changed since I visited in January – it’s just hotter, drier and looks even more defeated than before. In the back corner of the park is the rotting carcass of a WDM diesel, the maroon livery flaking and pitted, the bonnet doors gaping to reveal a black space that once resounded to the chug-chug-CHUG-chug-chug of an ALCO engine, the empty space now filled with the faint tick and snap of termites eating away the wood sleepers beneath its last stretch of slowly rusting track. Even the skeletal frames of the wheel sets are bare: they have been stripped of their motors and the valuable copper wire of their traction cables. The cab windows are broken, and the driving stand is wrecked – every dial and lever either missing or smashed; it is fit for a scrap yard, not a national museum. Unlike the museums in York or Budapest, there is nothing here that will ever pull a train again - no groups of enthusiasts to restore and maintain the WDM like the M61 in Hungary, no commitment to running it on the mainline like a preserved British Deltic. It such a depressing sight after travelling so far behind these charismatic and idiosyncratic machines, so sad to see it dumped here in this undignified and uncared for state that I leave quickly to find an auto-rickshaw back to Connaught Place.
I sit in a plush seat at The Standard Coffee House while the waiter pours an ice cold Kingfisher into a tall, frosted glass and sets it on the linen tablecloth in front of me; the beer is almost twice as expensive as The Gold Regency Bar, the food at the surrounding tables completely unaffordable, but the comfort and coolness of the air-conditioning and the discreet whisper of background conversation is a sublime pleasure after the noise and super-heated pollution of the city. I light a Wills Classic, take my notebook from my bag, and sip my Kingfisher in tiny increments, drawing it out until, an hour later, it is so warm and flat that I feel justified in signaling the waiter for another. It is dark when I get out of the auto-rickshaw back in Pahar Ganj, the night air weighted with heat, smoke and the smell of tons of decaying rubbish, shot through with gaudy coloured light, the flash of QRF torches and the misty flare of cooking fires. I push my way through the jostling, shoving crowds, slipping in piles of cow dung, kicking up dust, crunching over chicken bones and broken glass; faces push out of the gloom all around me – Chinese, Tibetan, Bangladeshi, Eurasian, European – deformed and distorted in bursts of purple and green neon, bulging and contracting with flickering firelight; a cacophony of alien languages rings in my ears, guttural, high-pitched, hard, aggressive.
Two more days of this: it is a waking nightmare.
I spend the evening sitting in a darkened booth in The Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, which at 8 o’clock suddenly becomes Temptation Bar. There is no announcement, or magical, chameleon like shift in the décor or lighting; the waiters simply collect the old menus from the tables and replace them with Temptation versions, and the change is complete. The bar is so dimly lit that I have to hold my cigarette lighter up to the new pricelist to find that the Kingfisher has just acquired a 20 Rupee premium. There are no windows, and no ventilation; ceiling fans move the stale atmosphere in slow eddies, struggling to make it breathable. The walls are an unbroken run of brown-tinted, marble effect mirrors, so that wherever you look, you catch your own, or someone else’s eye; or see yourself sitting on the plastic, leather-effect seat in your booth and disappearing into reflected infinity with a half-empty bottle of overpriced Kingfisher. The back page of the Temptation pricelist orders me to visit the Nightly Disco Dance; it is quite unequivocal in this – the words an explicit instruction, rather than a friendly invitation. What can I do? I carry my drink through the passageway behind the kitchen and follow the thump of over-amplified bass to a hall at the back of the hotel.
I lean against a wall just inside the door and try to make sense of the surreal scene before me.
Rows of Indians are sitting in plastic chairs that are lined up to face a stage at the far end of the hall; on the stage are perhaps six men and women, sitting behind Formica topped desks, surrounded by boxes of CDs and cassettes. In one corner, a sound system churns out some Indian folk/fusion music with enough decibels to silence a jet engine. Every few minutes, one of the panel on stage gets up, changes the cassette or CD to one of their choice, and then sits back down behind their desk and stares out at the audience, as if looking for any signs of disapproval or dissent, or perhaps the flicker of any thought of dancing behind a particularly decadent pair of eyes. The others examine their fingernails or shuffle bits of paper around their desks until it is their turn. There is no dance floor in the Nightly Disco Dance, and the hall is starkly lit with fluorescent strip-lights; if anyone wanted to dance, why on earth would they want to do it here? It is about as exciting as a public debate about sewage reprocessing, as much fun as being tried for murder. If it wasn’t for the ear-splitting Hindi music, you would think you were watching a council meeting in some provincial town hall. The audience stares up at the panel seated behind the line of desks on the stage; immobile in their stackable plastic chairs, they have the slumped and resigned body language of hopelessly delayed passengers in an airport lounge; there is no applause, no reaction whatsoever between one song ending and another one beginning, just a strange, keening silence punctuated by the odd phlegmy cough and the rattle of the cassette drawer falling open.
I drain the last of my Kingfisher, place the empty bottle on a folding table by the door and turn to leave; swinging my bag onto my shoulder, it catches the lip of the bottle which tips and slowly rolls off the table. Timed to the precise instant, the music fades into silence just as the bottle hits the floor and shatters. With the sickening clarity of a slow motion film, the entire hall turns around to look at me with horrified, accusing eyes; this is what it must feel like to be caught in the act of sneaking into a church service to steal the collection box. I slide around the corner and walk quickly back to my room, the thump of distant music following me up the stairs, creeping through the air vent and sliding under the door.
I hadn’t noticed the distant beat last night, but now I can’t help straining my ears to pick it out from the murmur of the somnambulant Main Bazar. I pick up the rhythm, and out of nowhere the lyrics of a trashy, irritating, 1970s pop song invade my mind:
“Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-Dancing!”