Phir Milenge India

It is my last day in Delhi. It’s sad to be leaving India, but I can’t get out of Pahar Ganj too soon – the last three days have drawn my patience out to its very limit. I walk down the narrow jumble of the Main Bazar, past the cheap bookshops that sell nothing more interesting than guide books and paperback thrillers; past chai stalls and shady looking forex counters, shops crammed with piles of gaudy, un-saleable souvenirs; past endless displays of badly faked designer clothes, awful tie-and-dye hippy gear, and all the absurd New Age paraphernalia anyone could want. The Sonu Chaat House is open but in darkness, the mass of twisted and snaking electricity cables and wires that coil around every post and sag from every shop front dead, the whole tangled mess overloaded to the point of collapse. It is staggeringly hot inside the bhavan without even the half-hearted ceiling fans to create the illusion of a faint breeze, but there is nowhere else to go for the next hour until I can get online and check-in for my flight – if the power comes back on, of course. The waiter appears out of the darkness, picks up the Wills Classic I balance on the edge of the table and sets down a tall glass of black coffee, the whole transaction accomplished without a word being spoken, just the reciprocal nods of our heads signaling our satisfaction. An Indian woman is sitting at a table near the front of the bhavan with her young daughter. She was there when I came in, and ten minutes later is still holding the menu and waiting for someone to take her order; the waiters ignore her completely, until finally one of them stands over her table, looking down at his shoes, and quietly says something only she can hear. I’ve seen this before: the Sonu Chaat House doesn’t serve Indian women. Humiliated but defiant, she gathers her shopping bags and her little girl and walks out into dirty street with unshakeable dignity; the corrosive look she gives the waiter as he backs away could have eaten through a block of concrete. I sit at my gloomy table, smoking Wills Classics and drinking coffee for an hour and a half before the power flashes back on, sweat slowly trickling down the back of my neck, seething about the injustice meted out to the Indian woman: These people will happily take a European man’s cigarettes in exchange for effortless service, but they wouldn’t even entertain giving a tired little girl so much as a glass of water. I leave precisely enough to cover my bill, take all of my Wills Classics and leave the Sonu Chaat House for the last time.
The airline’s website sends an error message back to the screen every time I try to check in – there is no record of my booking – and in a state of rising panic, I ask to use one of the plywood partitioned phone booths lined up along the far wall. If I’m stuck in this place any longer, I will go mad – literally insane. I get through to the airline’s Delhi office and listen to the agent’s disconcerting “Hhmmms” and “Ehhmmms” as her fingers rattle over her keyboard, my heart in my mouth. The power shorts out again, plunging the internet café into pitch blackness; concerned chatter rises from the blinded surfers, someone with an Australian accent swears loudly, but thankfully, the phone’s connection holds.
“Sir?” The agents voice has the tone of finality about it that suggests that she has never heard of me and is about to cut me off as a prank caller. “You are now checked in, have a nice flight.”
I walk through the grotty, stinking back alleys to the Metropolis Hotel with the lightness and cheer of someone who has just received news of some unexpected good fortune, take a table in the shade and order a Kingfisher. In twenty hours, Pahar Ganj can continue its descent into a swamp of squalor and decay without me; until then, I am going to sit on this rooftop terrace - which at least is high enough above the pollution and mayhem of the street to be able to think and breathe - read, write and listen to music on my MP3 player.
But even here, in perhaps the very place where ‘Silvia from Slovakia’ once actually sat, there is no escape from the unpleasantness that hangs like a cloud over New Delhi. There’s some sort of altercation going on between one of the houseboys and a cook – raised voices, accusations, and then suddenly the crack! of a vicious, open handed slap that knocks the skinny little houseboy off his feet. The cook towers over him, thick, meaty forearms swinging at his sides, breathing heavily, ready to lash out again. The houseboy crawls away from his attacker, gets to his feet and blunders into the kitchen’s open annex. The cook is on him in an instant. Another sickening slap sends him reeling past my table and down the stairs, tears of pain and humiliation welling in his eyes. I am so stunned by this ugly scene that I cannot react quickly enough to stop it unfolding. The waiters stand around and laugh as the young houseboy flees down the stairs; the cook struts around with the smug, self satisfied sneer of an accomplished bully. I get up from my table and walk over to the waiters.
“What the hell is going on?” I shout at them with barely controlled rage.
“No, no, everything is okay,” one of them says, smiling in encouragement.
“Get the manager up here immediately,” I order him. “Don’t make me have to go downstairs and find him,” I add as a warning.
The manager is dismissive about the whole incident, offering no apology or explanation, blithely assuring me that the houseboy is alright and that the cook will be dealt with. He then walks round the terrace, using a 12 inch metal ruler to sweep bottles and dirty cups off tabletops and counters where they fall and smash on the floor, smacking and poking the waiters, screaming instructions at them, throwing his weight around.
I take my bag and my Wills Classics and simply walk out, dead eyeing the bullying cook and the tyrannical manager, daring either of them to challenge me about the bill, which, after what I have just seen, I have no intention whatsoever of paying. They both stare at the floor and say nothing as I pass.
There is nowhere to go in Delhi that I haven’t already been, nowhere I want to go other than to the airport – but that’s not until tomorrow, so I walk back to my hotel.
Halfway to the Gold Regency a seedy looking man with a London accent angles out of a doorway and falls into step alongside me.
“Name’s Terry. Want some of this?” He takes a bag of something from his front pocket and is mildly shocked at the two short words I give him as an answer. A torrent of abuse follows me down the Main Bazar until Terry slowly realizes that he’s attracting the curiosity of a unit of QRF troops who’ve just rounded the corner of Sang Trasham Road behind him. He slithers back into his hiding place and I carry on walking towards the next encounter.
“You are a doctor!” This from a seemingly respectable middle-aged Indian man blocking my path, his hand outstretched in greeting. Quite what kind of scam this outlandish but strangely flattering line of introduction was to precede I never find out, as two very implicit words – which Terry would recognize – stop him dead in his tracks.
With less than a hundred metres to go to the Gold Regency I’m intercepted by the Bangladeshi woman who collects foreign signatures in a spiral-bound notebook, the one who professes to want no money, but still charges you 10 Rupees for entering your name in her book. I hide in the darkest booth I can find in the Gold Regency Bar And Restaurant, whiling away the hours until I might be able to sleep. I time an order for another Kingfisher to the exact moment the waiter appears at my table with the hiked-up Temptation pricelist. In a scene that could be straight out of a Laurel and Hardy film, we wrestle each other for the Gold Regency menu, a tug of war that ends in farce when it tears cleanly in half along its middle fold. The waiter crosses his arms and gives a satisfyingly Hardyesque “Hhumph!” looking down at me with comical disappointment. His half has the snacks, masalas and thalis, mine the IMFL – Indian made Foreign Liquor – and beers: I win my last cheap bottle of Gold Regency Kingfisher.
The Disco Dance grinds into life somewhere in the depths of the hotel with all the fanfare and excitement of the start of surgery hours at a health clinic; I light a Wills Classic and begin a study of the Temptation pricelist. Cock Tails – not cocktails – with 60ml of liquor come in at an enormous 575 Rupees, plus VAT, plus ‘service’ – pretty expensive, even with the sheer entertainment value of their misspelled, grammatically challenged, or downright ill-conceived names. How about a ‘Tom, Collins’, or maybe a ‘Bandy Balloon’? Or perhaps a ‘Lady Queen’, even though it sounds suspiciously close to a Lady Boy? There’s a ‘Midnight Beauty’, which, as the bar is ‘Open 24 hours’ is theoretically possible, but room service calls go unanswered after 11pm and the doors are firmly locked. The ‘Virgin Marry’ sounds interesting, if only for the opportunity to try and make some sort of connection between, say, the Immaculate Conception and getting hammered on a mixture of Frisky Bison and White Mischief vodka in downtown New Delhi. And whilst not homophobic in any way, the ‘Fruit In The Night’ does seem to have a faint whiff of irregularity about it, and would probably not be something you’d want to call down for late in the evening if the fictitious room service ever became reality.
The alarm catapults me out of a deep sleep in the morning, the tedium and lethargy of the pervious days vanished, a sense of urgency and purpose in their place, just the faint, dull ache of old Kingfisher to remind me of the last few days in Pahar Ganj. I pack the last few things into my bag, pay my bill and turn my back on the Gold Regency. A decrepit old Suzuki minivan drops me outside the departures hall at Indira Gandhi International Airport, where I sit on a bench under the casual stares of a QRF squad and smoke Wills Classic until my flight to Heathrow is called.
I watch the slums of outer Delhi drop away below the wings of the wide bodied Airbus and then fade into the haze of smog that stretches over the city. My last sight of India is the pristine whiteness of the snow-capped Himalayan peaks of Ladakh as we cross into Afghan airspace and turn west for London.
I stand in the early spring sunshine on Winchcombe station in the Cotswolds and watch the tourists climb into the old British Rail Mark One carriages that one of the preserved Class 37 diesels of the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway will take to Cheltenham Racecourse. My sister and her partner have gone to the garden centre over the road, so for half an hour, I’m alone again on another station.
The Class 37 seems so small, clean and quiet. It leaves with a meek toot of its horns, a thin blue mist of diesel drifting in the air behind it, a faint burble from its exhaust; not the deep chug of an ALCO engine, the deafening and sustained blast of air horns, a massive cloud of black smoke billowing above it like a WDM.
I light a cigarette from my last pack of Wills Classics and watch the train slide from view, turning the pre-independence Rupee coin I bought in Kolkata over and over in my fingers.
I’m home, I suppose; even if the only sense of that word is that home is now just another place in the world where I can catch a train to somewhere else.