THE INFESTATION

One night, at the beginning of our course-work, we were studying, at around two in the night. Chayanika had Robi Ray’s class for which she had a presentation to make – the paper being historical sociology or more to the tune of philosophy of history. Certainly not a topic to be trifled with. Certain readings have the capacity to drive you to the verge of insanity, when their complexity gets to you or rather evades forming a clear enough picture in your head. Trying to make sense of Foucault’s Order of Things comes to mind. This was one such day for Chayanika. Suddenly she stopped and said, I hear something. I thought hearing things is the new level of insanity her reading was inducing. However, a little while later we did locate a physical source of that noise – it was a tiny mouse, poking its head in, through an unused iron door, which had a grill on top, a gap which the previous tenants had covered with a cloth, which we had not disturbed since. Now playing hide and seek from behind the cloth was this rodent, hell-bent on entering our house, despite the inhospitable yelling from our side. Brooms and mopping sticks were fetched to ward off the demon. It was like playing those erstwhile games of our childhood in the games-parlor, where you are handed a hammer to hit the popping and disappearing rubber animals. That night too, every time we hit the mouse from one corner, it would try entering from the other side a few moments later. Chayanika kept wondering how she would explain in class the next day, that she did not have time to grapple with any philosophical conundrum because she was striking a mouse with a broom most of the night! The absurdity of the situation was making us laugh, in between the moments of despair and panic attacks, both on account of class the next day and the fear of the rat nibbling away our wardrobe. Finally while one person kept up the broom-strike, another got a newly purchased scotch-tape, most of which we used up that night to secure the cloth to the door. Some left-over thermocol, from the soft-board we had made, was also used. Finally we slept off in the wee-hours of morning, and coming back from the university the next day, taped the door some more!

We were not so lucky, the second time round, when a more cunning one did mange to get in, and wreck a lot of havoc at that. Chayanika’s mom had come visiting. Like Aishwarya Rai, mothers are also on a mission – while hers is to save the world from hair-damage – the mothers are content saving their children from the pig sty they live in (and this has nothing to do with the actual amount of mess in the house). I think most young people living by themselves have been through this and will not find it too difficult to conjure up an image of their mother – doing a strut as purposeful as Ms Rai, if not more.

On one such mission, auntie rearranged the cupboards, and for some reason, instead of the normal newspapers that we use to spread, she used one of those flimsy white blanket-covers instead. It proved to be too cozy a set up for Mr. Rat to resist, and after a few days we found he had used the space to make himself at home. While he was enjoying the hospitality, he decided to nibble at one of Chayanika’s Dhakai saree, after all refusing to exploit the full extent of hospitality is impolite in our custom, isn’t it?

Chayanika unfortunately did not take a liking to our guest and the liberties he took. And drastic measures involving rat-poison had to be resorted to. The next thing I remember was being poked in the middle of the night, from a deep slumber, to witness the passing of the rat. To this day I have not figured why it could not wait till the next morning. Well, maybe the rat could seek solace in knowing that he did not go silently into the night! The next day we went and got a carpenter to come and install latches for our wardrobes and seal any gaps whatsoever to prevent such mishaps in the future.

Things did not get any better after that. Infact a calamity broke. When we had moved in we saw one stray termite-nest. My mother was there and she confirmed that there were no termites inside. We forgot about it soon. A few months into it, we realized that the mounds were spreading. There were lines in almost every piece of wood in the house, and the house did have a lot of shelves and cupboards. We started monitoring the progress nervously. I thing the way we all deal with problems is to initially deny it and think it will somehow disappear if only we close our eyes hard enough and make enough fake promises of pay-offs to whoever it is that has some super-natural control over our lives. Usually that does not work. Then you set more realistic goals and substitute the super-natural for Gulshan. When we called him and told him to come take a look, he turned up with his wife – and a paint-brush and some sort of termite-resistant paint! We did not know whether to laugh or cry. He was going to paint away our worries, literally! Even when he realized that the extent of infestation was too large to wish away with a brush, he hemmed and hawed and went away. His shiftiness in dealing with the entire problem was greatly aided by his wife – her gift for cunning or just plain sliminess would have easily qualifies her to make an aide to the dirtiest of politicians. She even tried to convince us that it was all just an attribute of the changing season.

We realized we had to take matters into our own hands. And meanwhile regularly source kerosene from baladidi. It was an insurgency problem. And till the day we left the house, we were strategizing against our insidious opponents. Since a good offensive requires good intelligence, our first task was to scout for exterminators on the internet. Through this wholly horrendous experience, the one thing we discovered was that there did exist in Delhi, that elusive category known as the professional service provider! And that entity went by the name of Burly’s pest control. Once we called them, they came and did a prospecting of the house, knocking on every piece of wood, to test the extent of damage. To our dismay we discovered that we lived in a pretty much hollow house – even things we did not think had termites were actually eaten up. He gave us an estimate for the procedure. It would involve them drilling holes in the wood and spraying some chemicals into them. And since it was both poisonous and messy, we would be expected to more or less pack up the entire house.

Now getting Gulshan to part with a few thousand rupees was never an easy proposition. He dragged his feet some more and almost scared away the exterminators, but finally gave in when he realized he couldn’t get out of it. Probably he too tried shutting his eyes tightly for some time, hoping it would all go away.

The fateful day came and on a given Sunday, sharp at 7.00 in the morning we found two men with huge cylinders with sprays attached to them standing at our door. We have spent time packing up previously, and were again aided by the presence of Chayanika’s mom. The men got to work. First they drilled holes. Then we were told, that if a wood was irretrievably infested it was best to chop it away. Initially it was bits of wood, and as the swarming sea of white termites were exposed, the bits soon turned to gaping holes! Soon there were two ways to get into our bathroom – either you open the door and enter, or you jump in through the part that was hacked away – wide enough for any average size person and then some. We were constantly asked what sort of idiots lived there before us who did not notice this earlier. We have asked that question to ourselves many times and never been able to answer that.

When finally after some 4-5 hours, the work-men left, the house looked like a war-zone. One could walk in and think we had been bombed. There were splinters of wood strewn around. Doors were hollow remnants of their previous matter. Places where the chemical had been sprayed much, appeared blackened and the house reeked of the smell of kerosene which was used as a solvent for the chemicals! I think, in retrospect, I am proud of the fact that we did not cry. Probably we were just too shocked to react.

Next day Chayanika’s father was in town. He went and got a carpenter to fix a plank over the bathroom door, and took great joy in painting it with a coat of white paint, himself. It was a very heartening sight at that time – some sort of symbolic gesture reaffirming the surmountabilty of all that comes to pass. The rest of the devastating mess, we cleaned up over time. The kerosene smell lingered in the air for a few months or more and even then probably never entirely went away.

The over-riding theme of our house had been kitsch to begin with. We had a dining table, over which was pasted this McDonalds flyer, usually put on the serving tray. It had Dharmendra and Sunny Deol cartoons, with the tag-line “I am lovin it…” ( the TV version had the Sunny Deol mimic, adding pappa in his characteristic drawl). The entry to the house also had a plastic neembu-mirchi which had “buri nazarwale tera mooh kala” written on it. It ensured that half the people entered our house doubling up with laughter. The other half did not get the joke. The soft board we had made to keep track of our deadlines had a plastic 10-headed Raavan, we got at a mela, at the bottom – and we wrote “face your demons” above it. Chayanika had also drawn up caricatures of the respective professors, with the date and nature of assignment next to it. There was an universal consensus that Robi Ray and Rita Brara looked the best (Robi who had spent his entire life smoking while pouring over Marx, looked like Gollum of LOTR, both in Chayanika’s representation and in the actual representation of her mental image; Brara when she got animated about Baudrillard, looked like a scary grand-mother narrating Thakuma’r Jhooli). Anyway the point is that the shiny papers we used to cover the holes of our termite-tragedy did not, in such a scenario, appear too out of place.

The termites never quite went away. However, because of that treatment, we never had cockroaches, ants or any such smaller fries in the house. We kept monitoring the one or two places where it was most likely to reappear. Baladidi, alongside the supply of kerosene also supplied morbid stories – about how the house was a hot-bed for termites, rats, cockroaches and all other rodents she could possibly think of, and how she was aware of this all along. The only mystery was how she had missed to tell us about it earlier. But then this was a woman who on a regular basis killed one relative or a neighbour atleast for all days that she skipped work, which was, on an average, once a week! Inspite of these minor glitches, no major calamity struck again, and we soon learnt to ignore the ladies ranting.

OUR NEIGHBOURS

A story is only as good as its characters, they say. By those parameters this story definitely is a super-hit. The assortment of characters in Indira Vihar, their colourfulness and eccentricities is something even the most creative of fiction writers will be hard pressed to match up to.

The Punjabi family living next to us are as good as any to start out on the description of our neighbours. They were a family of four – a fifty something uncle, his wife and their two teenage sons. Though uncle looked too young to retire, retired he was. Not that he was a professional to begin with. Most men in Indira Vihar are petty business men. This family too apparently had some pool parlour, which since the sons were running, uncle had all the day in his hand, and not a thing to do. And he did that quite well. He was the sunflower of the street. Since the first ray of the sun hit the street, he would be seen soaking it up – he and the plastic chair on which he sat. His position would change with the changing sun, now in front of one house, later almost up the wall of some other.

In a previous entry I have talked about the range of absurd things we caught on TV. Television for us was the epitome of the post-modern turn. Those who seek meaning, or a reflection of some value-structure or even a sense of narrative coherence, in this medium anymore are only in for deep disappointment. We thus only sought out the absurd – the more absurd the better. One such absurdity was the news on India TV, which we relished watching sometimes. There we learnt about some lama, in some corner of ladakh, whose body had been preserved, in his meditating pose, for more than 500 years. The village, the animated reporter let us know, was now a pilgrimage. We figured that there was a good possibility that 500 years from now, our elderly uncle might be found similarly preserved, on his favourite plastic chair! Since then we called him “Samadhi”. He lived up to his name, everyday. The occasional showers too could not get him off the street. And he always just sat there. Not even a magazine was seen on his person in the two years that we saw him. Nor was there any radio, and conversations with others too were perfunctory. Samadhi’s wife told my mom once that he had a medical condition, he couldn’t take the suffocating air within the house. We laughed it off when my mother, looking adequately concerned and sympathetic, relayed this information to us. Especially since his lungs were strong enough to endure the demolition of a house and its reconstruction and the resultant clouds of dust and cement which permeated the street for months together – while glued steadily to his chair in the middle of the lane!

The back end of our flat looked over the back end of the flat in the next lane. At some point two Bengali men came to stay there. Though we never really saw them closely, houses in Indira Vihar are built close enough for everyone to know everyone else’s business and – much to our horror – then some more. By the odd hours they kept, we figured they were call centre employees, atleast they seemed upstarts enough to fit the bill. One of them habitually sang in the bathroom – loud enough for us to hear. He had a good voice too, in which he sang all the rickshaw-walla type sentimental as well as the ‘changra’ 90s songs. In our perverted sense of humour, we are great fans of these songs! One day in hostel, a big group of us sat and realized that our similar affinity to the inadvertent quirkiness of bollywood led us to not only enjoy these gems of the gaudiest decade in bollywood history, but between us, we had quite a stock memorized too! At the dinner table we started singing songs like “sawan ka mahina…shaadi bina mushkil hai jeena” and “bholi-bhali ladki…khol tere dil ki…pyar-wali khidki” with much amusement to ourselves and annoyance to the others around. So it was not surprising that one day, I heard our neighbour starting to sing, ‘dil de diya hai…jaan tumhe denge”, in his bathroom… and Chayanika pitching in a duet, in our bathroom!

Somewhere down the line, the singer got married, and the side-kick moved out. We could hear much of the couple’s conversation, especially in winter, when the fans were off. We were witness to the change of tone, from the indulgent husband teaching the wife the ropes of running the household and the wife’s equally coy “kota maach khabe?” to their exasperated bickering, as time went by. They were typical Bengalis to begin with, who answered the phone with that drawl of “haaan bolo”, which people from all other communities dread. Being a bengali myself, I have heard no end about it from my friends. (If you have ever been around one, you will know what I am talking about). And you will also know that being around two excited Bengalis in conversation is not the most pleasant treatment you can mete out to your ears! The wife was so loud, that one day, we were studying in the night, in the front-end of our flat, and her shrill call of “kota baje” led all three of us (Swati was staying with us then), to literally jump out of our skins. Since the loudness of the query about the time, could not be justified, by any stretch of imagination, as being addressed to any one person, especially someone in close proximity, I thought it worthwhile to provide her an answer. I mean I quite liked the idea. Imagine if all of us were to throw all the questions that plague us, at the world in general – and get an answer. (I know, nowadays people use facebook and twitter for that, but still the romance of saying it literally, to an unknown audience!) Unfortunately the larger humanity talking back to her did not go down very well with her, and her queries got toned down, to our slight disappointment.

Well, they fitted the image of the caricatured Bengalis in ways other than their speech too. For example, a visit to the back balcony, gave us a view of husband and wife going about their chores – with the husband wearing nothing but a cheap underwear! For the uninitiated no other regional TV will have as many ads of chaddi-banyans, as Bengali TV, nor as many walls anywhere else be plastered with them. Perhaps our neighbour imagined himself as a hero of one of those ads – “aankh bandh karke bharosa kijiya: DD DD DD. (the brand name repeated thrice for emphasis!

Unfortunately, the story did not end there either. As I have written earlier, we were our behind tinkering with the motor-pump quite often, in the night. The bong man would have to have been really blind to not know that, considering that we did make some noise while doing so. One night as usual the water supply was erratic. So Chayanika went to check the pump. She opened the door of the balcony, went out – and came right back screaming Suchi…Suchi! I never imagined I would hear what I heard next – “the bong man is standing naked, outside his bathroom.” We were contemplating what to do next. Naked man or no naked man, we couldn’t forego filling water for it. So we made the greatest farce of going out again – we screamt out each other’s name, we banged on our own door – and whatever other ludicrous things we could do to give him a warning. When I ventured out, after all this ruckus – he was still there, all lights in his house blaring, his back to us, as naked as ever! The third time round, we didn’t have the courage to go out directly, and had to actually put a stool in out toilet and peep out of the small window, positioned high up the wall. That is one of the most ridiculous positions I have ever found myself in – on a stool, over a commode – thanks to the shamelessness or perhaps deafness of our neighbour. As a post script I have to add here that Chayanika thinks his ass was shinier and smoother than even the movie-stars. And to this day we ponder over the secret of his shiny derriere. My personal theory is that he was never put down on the ground, when he was a child. Others are free to reach their own conclusions.

The people who lived above the naked bong guy were in a league of their own. If there is a word to describe people who have a mania of hurling things down from their flat, then they were a family of that – throw-whatever-you find-at your neighbours-flat-mania – if you will. First it was the kids. They would play ball in their house and if the ball landed in our back-side balcony, they would throw more things at our door, to get our attention, so that we would go out and throw the ball back to them! Chayanika told them off once, firmly but politely, and then purposely threw the ball way off the mark, so the lazy kids would atleast have to come down to the back alley to reclaim their property! This was only the precursor for soon, instead of balls, it was raining debris. The parents were getting some construction done, and instead of paying the labourers to bring the rubble down the stairs, they were having them throw it down the terrace! First it was just some dust and one off pieces, which Bala didi complained about having to clean. Then for a few days it was boulders literally! It was war – this lady alone holding fort against all the other people who were up in arms against this physically hazardous situation. But she wouldn’t back down and infact tried to play the victim of un-cooperative neighbours. When we told her she was doing damage to our motor pump, she said hers was buried under the rubble. Then after some time we saw that she had thrown down card-board sheets which I guess were meant to protect our pump. How thoughtful. Delhi is not the politest of places and arguments can get really rough. Men feeling constrained to maintain some modicum of dignity insisted on wanting to talk to her husband, which she stoutly refused. One for the camp who talk about women’s strategies of negotiating with patriarchy. The aggression was displaced, and a threat was instead issued to the workers that one more load of rubble could cost them dearly led to a ceasefire, but only temporarily. we insisted that she send her bai to our house to clean up the mess she was creating, to which she agreed, but no one came that day. Exasperated next day I went out to call her. Since I did not know her name, I started with auntie. Not getting any response was pissing me off, so I was soon screaming for ‘kachda giranewalli auntie’. She responded to that and came to the window, as casually as if I had said pammy auntie or some such call of endearment! Chayanika’s aunt and cousin were visiting and they found the epithet I conferred on her hilarious. But it did worked, and a bai was sent. She spoke some tongue which we did not follow and was extremely shy to make matters worse. It took us sometime to figure that she was asking for a plastic bag to collect the debris. And when we gave her a big, strong one, she was so enthralled with it that we had to find another one innocuous enough to not catch her fancy. We asked if she wanted more such bags, but she was too shy and went out, as happy as if we had given her some precious gift.

THE WATER WOES

The saga which began on the day we moved in, continued for most of our stay in the flat. It is human tenacity, or perhaps as Samit Basu writes in his trilogy, it is human stupidity in being unable to fully comprehend the full implications of adversities that lets us adjust to most of what life throws at us. We too got used to the game of hide and seek that the water supply played with us.

The first level of explanation was that there was a problem with the supply itself, or in Indira Vihar lingo “peeche se pani nahi aa raha hai”. It was my greatest desire, during my stay to uncover this mythical place peeche, which seemed to have such an absolute control on the lever of our day to day existence. Delhi anyway had a water crisis, only we didn’t have a crisis, we had a catastrophe.

Thanks to our old rickety motor-pump, which was the most attention seeking machinery I have ever encountered; we struck up quite a friendship with our plumber – Anil Bhaiyya. It had to be, after all there was a point where we were calling him more regularly than we were calling our family! Hearing his Punjabi dialer tones of “jee karta bhai jee karta” or “” was music to our ears in those days. Like all other service providers in Indira Vihar he was also a ‘hature’, and his one hour could stretch to half a day without the slightest apology. Usually, Chayanika was deployed to do the entreating – as we soon realized that the damsel in distress call was the fastest way to get him to attend to our problems. (Those who know Chayanika will attest whole-heartedly to her talents in this regard. It is not for nothing that she has earned her epithet of being a nautanki)

So Anil Bhaiyya, driving his scooter into the back-alley at night and using his head-lights to tinker with the pipes, was something everybody in the lane was getting used to. In the meantime we were getting used to surviving with abysmally little quantities of water. We started likening ourselves to camels in a desert. Not taking a bath for a few days at a stretch was not unusual. If it reached a saturation point we went to the hostel to bathe. Our bai must have loved working at our place. On the days when the water supply was not coming, she could forgo the swabbing of the floor, which as her luck had it, was not too rare. To return the good turn, it was Bala didi, who would go scouting around the lane to gather news about who had been privileged to receive the supply and who hadn’t, on the days when we were sitting water-less. Even water used to wash clothes was recycled, either in flushing the toilet or in cleaning the floor. (My mother was aghast when she saw that we used soap-water to clean the floor and kept asking if we would slip and fall. Little did she know that because our floors got cleaned occasionally, it couldn’t offer that risk). We piled dishes and ate out if the problem was severe. We even bought paper plates at one point! Sheila Dikshit should have conferred some prize on us for water conservation. What if it was out of necessity, which after all is the mother of all inventions! We even watered our plant – the one measly aloe vera that had survived – with water used for washing vegetables. We were so used to the constant dearth, that when alarm cries of “aaj pani nahi aayega” would be heard in the lane, we would be the only ones who would be unperturbed.

As if only dearth of water was not enough, we had problems with overflow as well. When all the hammering and tinkering, and the numerous rakhis that he tied to the pipes and pump (which is what we called the threads Anil used to tie at the joints of pipes) did not work, he decided to take away the pump for closer inspection. So we had a pipeline leading upto our balcony in the back, and then nothing. When the water was supplied, peeche se, we had a nice fountain in the balcony! We tried in vain to shut the pipe. Plastic after plastic was wrapped with rubber band on it, with no avail. The only solution was bending over the pipe and holding it closed with ones hand. The resultant gymnastics was unfortunate not too comfortable an idea for us. Bucket after bucket was filled – one of the few times when we had more water than we could use. Every possible utensil had water stored and the poor aloe vera must have gone in shock with all the attention it was getting. Then water started running off into the alley. And we had neighbours coming and telling us to do something about the overflow. We were mildly indignant at all the concern at the excess of water we had, when no one bothered when we lived in scarcity! Well, they were not unjustified either. There was more than one occasion when the north-eastern folks on the third floor had left their motor switch on and water had seeped into the most unlikely places. One morning I had gone to the loo and found water dripping from the ceiling. For lack of immediate solution, I had to sit with a newspaper on my head and do the needful! Later we realized that the water was from the tank overflowing from the third floor, which had seeped into the walls and entered the ceiling of the loo, through the small ventilating window. We saw the folks taking their soaked mattress to the terrace to dry. So in this background, we had to actually take two neighbours who had come knocking, to the balcony to show them that the problem was beyond our control! And subsequently too, when there was an overflow from the forgotten tank above, an inevitable visit was also paid to our house to confirm our innocence.

Our poor old motor, could only pull water when the pressure was maximum and not too many other pumps were already sucking in the water. This auspicious time was usually in the middle of the night. One more reason for our nocturnal leanings! As the pump went from bad to worse, the timing went from 11.00pm to 12.00 and finally to 2.00am! Sometimes an alarm was set to get up and on the motor switch. Usually though we just stayed up and worked, or later when the course-work was over watched TV. Oh the range of absurd things we caught on TV as a result!

Well, if at this point anyone is wondering why we didn’t just replace the motor in the first place, I should clarify that it was not out of some emotional attachment or sense of positive discrimination for the incapacitated beast. We tried telling Gulshan, our miserly landlord to do so, at every possible opportunity. He shrugged it off saying, peeche se nahi aata and some story about him too sitting up till 2.00, to fill water at his place. The bills were deducted from the rent. But his miserly and slightly stupid heart could take the impact of small monthly losses, but dreaded a big one-time hole! Finally, when Chayanika’s dad was passing through town, he bought a new motor and had it fixed and also called Gulshan to inform him of his impending heart-ache at his next rent-collecting visit. It was also the time when uncle in his heavily Bengali-accented hindi told Gulshan that getting through on his phone was more difficult than getting through to “kaun banega crorepati”. The sarcasm hit Gulshan, but failed in the face of his Punjabi tenacity to make any lasting impact.

The catastrophe passed, but the crisis remained. Every time, the supply was irregular – peeche se – our heart-rate would increase. The problem with switching the motor on too many times when the supply wasn’t there was that soon it filled up with air and as a result it couldn’t draw water, even when the supply was restored. Unfortunately without switching it on, there was no way of knowing if there was supply or not. Listening in to the other motors and trying to gauge from the pitch of their drone whether the supply was normal or not, we realized, was not a perfectible science. Then the option was to prime the motor, which meant unscrewing it and pouring water “aage se”. At other times a tap going from the overhead tank in the balcony to the bathroom needed to be adjusted, depending on the pressure of water. The only catch was that all this had to be done in the pitch dark balcony, with the aid of a torch and stool, sometime around midnight! What other experiences this situation led to is fodder for a separate entry.

MOUNTAIN GOATS

This was the name Chayanika coined for our nocturnal north-eastern neigbours, who occupied the two floors above us. The context was their great proficiency in climbing down the stairs in the middle of the night, when it was absolutely pitch dark.

The staircase to our house needs special description. Great space was conserved in building it. Just one flight of stairs got you to the first floor – thus each stair was ten to twelve inches in height. Once when Chayanika’s aunt visited our place, she aptly named it Humayun’s stairways (the poor fellow had met his death falling off one such flight of stairs!). The name stuck. Much later, when Smriti had come to stay with us and was going out partying, in her high heels, she unfortunately became the famed staircase’s first casualty. We were closing the door behind her, when we heard a thud. When we rushed out, we could see her prostate on the street below! Calculating the time that elapsed between closing the door and the crash, one assumes that she managed to step only on the first few stairs, after which it was all downhill! Thankfully a guy came and sat her up straight before she could pass out. The lady downstairs got her some water. We went and bought some pain killers and neomycin. It was an immense relief and a matter of good kismet that she escaped with only a few bruises and swellings. The party of course was ruled out (Smriti was as distressed at her friends not being alarmed enough on being told of her misfortune, as she was about missing the event). And for sometime later, she couldn’t bend her knees, whish meant she couldn’t use our Indian-style loo and had to go outside the colony...to the hostel that is.

It was up and down this dastardly stair-case that our neighbours literally ran up and down, at all hours of the night. Indira Vihar would make for a very rich ethnography as a microcosm of the urban ‘melting pot’. Here was a middle class Punjabi community, which over the last decade perhaps, had started playing host to young college going students, from the rest of India, such that the settlement now had as many migrants as natives. The largest chunk of the ‘out-station’ students in Indira Vihar came from the north-eastern states. How they and the local community interact – maintain a distance and disdain for each other, sometimes openly squabble, yet provide indispensable economic services to each other, without which each of their day-to day existence would be in jeopardy, and somehow end up influencing and incorporating bits of the other’s lifestyle – perhaps hold a mirror to how India manages its diversity.

Now, here’s a phenomenological understanding of how the north-eastern community in DU looks like. They are by far the most well-dressed contingent on campus. All smart, with great figures and an immense sense of style. We were mostly overawed by their ability to always be fashionable and carry off any thing they wore with such élan, things which if we tried would probably look vulgar. So, some of us were perhaps honest enough to admit the slight jealousy this aspect invoked. But, unfortunately often the spin given was of the depletion of ‘our morality’. And this doesn’t make life very easy for north-eastern girls in Delhi, and often those entrusted with ensuring the safety of people in the city are the ones harbouring such prejudices. (that is why, one has so much respect for Jaideep Sahani, for writing that scene in Chak De India, where, the two north-eastern girls are being harassed by loafers making references to the flesh-trade and these girls go up and slap them! Chayanika and me were hooting during the scene, in our neighbourhood theatre, but found that the audience being made up of north Indian men, our sentiments found no resonance. Equally telling was the dialogue that ‘apne hi desh mein mehmaan honge toh kushi kaise hogi)

Most of these students, who come to study in DU, seem to come from rather well-off families, with lots of money to blow. They wear lots of branded clothes (that could be fake-Chinese ones, shipped across the border), keep high pedigree dogs and have been blamed, along with the foreign students for the disproportionately high rents we have to pay for living around the university. Our “pani-walle bhaiyya”,( who delivered us twenty litres packaged mineral water bottles and all the gossip of Indira Vihar) told us that he asked one of them in jest, the secret to them possessing all that money, which they seem to blow without much care in the world. The equally jestful answer, it seems, was that all one needed was to have tea-estates, and then money would be transferred to one’s bank account whenever one asked! So, the pani-walle bhaiyya would contrast them to the bihari IAS aspirants “jo chane khate hain aur padte rehte hain!”

The north-easterners were also an exceptionally nocturnal community. Often, at twelve or one at noon, if we were out in our balcony, we would see one of them, who stayed diagonally opposite us, getting up, opening their balcony and brushing. If sometimes we went to the shop buying some last-minute ingredient for lunch, some north-easterner was sure to be there buying milk and bread. Thus, equally at night, hearing a pressure-cooker whistle go off at twelve or one was not unusual at all. Neither was it a rare sight to be in the balcony around that time and see one of them putting their clothes to dry after a washing spree. DU mostly doesn’t make a fuss about attendance and hence, as I mentioned earlier, we were the anomalous students in our lane, who actually went to the university everyday. So this pattern marked weekdays and weekends alike. Every other day, some or the other person in their community had a party thrown in. So, loud music till wee hours of the night was routine. Infact, those above us, were given to this a little too often. (When we reported this to our landlord, he warned us not to say anything directly to “those people”, and said he would take it up with their landlord). On such days when the party was happening over our head literally, the “mountain-goatlike” upstream and downstream traffic was incessant. Some (too drunk probably to make the journey non-stop), even made halts midway. One such guy, more or less sitting outside our door, was heard calling his friend up and saying that he had broken up with his girl-friend and had sent her home. By then, thoroughly exasperated, Chayanika screamt from inside “toh main kya karoon?”. This had some effect and either he by himself or prompted by a friend took his conversation elsewhere.

They were also the only people who moved i.e shifted houses in the middle of the night. Till eight in the night, you could find them rooted in a place, as placid as a tree. It would seem that moving was not on their mind for years to come. But suddenly in the middle of the night, aided by hands from the community and a rickshaw puller, lock stock and barrel could be uprooted and transplanted into a new house – not only moved, but settled – in a matter of a few hours. And the lock stock and barrel would comprise of acquisitions ranging from televisions, washing machine, and refrigerator among other things. The next morning, you could visit the house, and find nothing but empty beer bottles and other assorted waste. It was as if they had been trained by some American secret service in clandestine relocations!

It was one such otherwise innocuous morning that baladidi reported to work for the tenants above and found it deserted to her utter dismay. In spite of having worked there just the previous day and being gifted as all women of a certain age frequenting our street were, in sniffing out all overt and covert activities happening or about to happen, she had come up against the wall of superior north-eastern discretion! She was distraught at not receiving her monthly payment. Unfortunately, all we were able to tell her was that the loaded rickshaw was last seen headed somewhere towards the front half of the colony. With close to five hundred houses with two to three flats each in Indira Vihar and half of them taken by north-easterners, she would probably have to request manpower from the RAW to track them down.

This disappearing into the night act had been done by the previous tenants of our apartment as well, with the result that for the first month we had hapless cable-wallas, doodh-wallas and other assorted service providers coming to ask for their dues. The newspaper was delivered by this middle-aged aunty, whose husband was incapacitated and she ran a small stationery shop to get by. They owed her two months money. She looked like she would break-down, when she saw us instead of her debtors. We guided her to our pani-walle bhaiyya, who was the rare person who knew where the previous tenants had shifted, who led her to them. Since then, aunty would always come to collect money from us with a big smile on her face and prasad in her hands!

The quirkiest thing however was that, Indira Vihar in general had imbibed some of this nocturnalness into its character. Few other residential colonies in Delhi could perhaps claim to coming alive in the night as this place did. Shops were open well past mid-night. In the atrocious, long summers, we would often, go and get ice creams from the vendors after studying, or watching a movie, at one in the night! When, at such times, one felt like taking a mid-night stroll, one would encounter atleast half a dozen people (not only north-easterners) who had been struck by the same idea. If we sometimes caught the last metro back from somewhere in town, and we took a rickshaw from the station back, it seemed like entering a different time zone, when it took the turn to enter the colony. Two years of hostel had altered our body clock quite a bit – and late nights and late mornings were a norm for us also. But Indira Vihar also, altered our norms of suitable work for suitable hours of the day. So, washing clothes at one in the night was a common activity. I remember after one mid-night walk, Chayanika and me were overcome by some cleaning frenzy and actually dusted the entire house, including the fans, before calling it a night! This sense of altered time has stayed on with us. We still feel more alive and active in the wee hours of the night and early mornings don’t find us at our agreeable best – making us feel like misfits in world other than Indira Vihar.

THE ANIMAL KINGDOM

Ranjit Lal could only be based in Delhi. In no other city in India, would you find such a menagerie of animals in such proximity of dense human settlements. Frequent encounters would spur many observant authors to make these non-human neighbours their muse. I will miss this about Delhi. I will miss being able to mark the arrival of spring by the number of strange birds that start making appearances around you – so many whose names you do not know. The red-bummed bulbul, a similar all-black one, who’s chirping was synchronized with a downward movement of its tail, the occasional kingfisher and even smaller birds in an assortment of colours.

One lazy afternoon, when Chayanika and I were sipping tea and watching television, we had a rather aristocratic guest call on us. Standing at not more than four inches tall, with shiny brown feathers, she ruled the room, her small stature not withstanding. What she lacked in height, she compensated in confidence. Unable to name her, we decided to call her chip-chip, to signify the sound she made. She coolly hopped into the house, through the balcony, and while she did notice us, deemed us too lowly to be taken notice of. So she went about her business, which it seemed to us was of surveying the house. Now, somebody who visited our house called it a long-house. The description was not off the mark. At this moment, Chayanika would be inserting a quip about my height too being perfect a fit with the Iban of Borneo. So, chip-chip did a thorough job of surveying out long-house, beginning with the front-room, coming on to our living area, where we were seated and progressing on into the bedroom and kitchen and the back-room. No corner of the house was left un-examined. One bows in the face of such authority – so we continued watching TV and let her do her job. After quite some time, she emerged, leaving the same way she had come. She seemed to us like a prospective buyer, who upon closer inspection, was so unimpressed by the property that she considered it unnecessary to say good-bye. We did not see chip-chip again.

Another morning, we had woken up, and were lazing around, not wanting to get out of bed. Till I noticed that, the fridge in the other room was being opened and shut. If it were night, both of us would have screamt ‘bhoot!’ and run out of the house surely. But daylight inspires more confidence. We thought it might be the tom-cat which roams the alleys, but such advanced motor skills as to open and shut a refrigerator door, was stretching it a bit too much. Venturing a little closer, we saw that it was a simian hand, which was capable of such maneuvering!

For some time, we just stood paralyzed, looking on, without being able to think of our next move. He, in the meanwhile, was feasting on the eggs in our fridge. He would climb on to the top, open the door, take an egg, and drop it down. Then he would climb down and eat it. The other cooked food did not appeal to his taste-buds. Both of us were not brave enough to try our combative skills with him as our opponent. It being a Sunday morning, the street seemed rather empty. Also, it was summer, and our clothes would be scandalously skimpy for any neighbour summoned for help. Panic makes you think of weird things. I, remembering the suggestion of a small boy some years back wanted to get crackers and burst it in the house to scare the monkey away! Chayanika was no better. Wanting to scare him off by throwing things at him, she picked something closest to her. It was a fancy candy-wrapper, something with had a plastic stem with the wrapper on top, where, the chocolate had been – the whole thing simulating a flower. I don’t know if it was meant to be an attack or appeasement. The monkey saw the thing being hurled, which missed him by quite a few inches. He stepped down, examined the offering and disdainfully turned away. The effect was of a courtesan haughtily rejecting a paramour’s offer. As this drama continued, at some point, with me still watching his activities Chayanika stepped out to the balcony, and I heard her saying “auntie, bandar!!” to our neighbour opposite. After her third plaintive cry, auntie finally understood and was summoning her teenage son - Chandar, to bhagao the bandar.

The Bandar in the meantime also hear the commotion in the balcony and perhaps decided to check out on its own. So , the next thing, in my defense happened in a split-second, though Chayanika still hold it against me. Seeing the monkey headed my way, I ran from it. The main door, leading out of the house comes before the balcony door. So I opened the main door and was out. I did scream a warning at Chayanika, but before she realized the monkey was near the balcony, so Chayanika was stranded there. Now, it’s a rather narrow balcony and certainly not one you should be sharing with someone you feel threatened by. As Chayanika tells it, she and the monkey had a few moments of a very close encounter, during which the prospect of it jumping onto her and her having to take some injections for a “monkey-bite” did cross her mind. And in a dramatic sequence, it did jump, but onto the railing of the balcony, giving Chayanika the opportunity to re-enter the house and close the door shut on our intruder!

NONU SINGHS

Though Chayanika’s dad was generous enough to buy us a TV, often the goings-on outside of our balcony, in the street, were more entertaining and riotous than anything any TV or movie writer could cook-up. Hours on end were often spent, at this ring-side view of ‘life’ – resplendent in all its quirky humour.

The leading characters of this drama were the Nonu Singhs – two almost identical looking sardar boys in size ‘small’ and ‘extra-small’. It took us some time to be able to tell them apart and figure their genealogy. They were first cousins, aged around four and two when we first started chronicling them. Only one of them was nonu – the younger and naughtier one. This probably explains why the call of ‘nonu’, uttered at different pitches, according to the degree of exasperation (proportional to his mischief) resounded in the street, leading this entry to be about ‘nonu singhs’. He was a pint-sized dynamo, fair-skinned, and a round face which was almost as delicate as a girls. The long hair, often tied up in a pony by his mother only added to the feminity. He obviously got his looks from her, a fair, slim and tall sardarni. But what stood out were his eyes – large and round, giving this impression of him being permanently surprised. The look conveyed part curiosity, which innately children have, though some, like him more than others, and part dumbness (at the cost of being lynched), in an endearing sardarly fashion. The elder kid was Jassi, who was all these, but in a toned down version. Both were co-conspirators nonetheless.

Nonu Singh walking behind his mother, or rather hopping and sprinting to keep pace with her, who on account of her spindly structure walked in long, purposeful strides, was a common enough feature in our lane. One find day Mama Singh, on these purposeful trips must have bought Nonu Singh a pair of shoes, which he entered the street carrying in his hands. Displaying his entrepreneurial skills at a very young age he soon opened the cover of the box, and displaying his wares for all to see started hawking ‘joote le lo…joote’. This enterprise was kept up, till he reached his house at the end of the lane. This incident was one of our introduction to the antics of Nonu Singh. Children, in their uninhibited imagination can inhabit a wondrous world of their own. One of the simple pleasures of life in Indira Vihar, was the access we had to some these fantastic places.

MOVING IN

The north-eastern gang was kind enough to give us a guided tour. We liked that the house had a lot of wall fittings and we wouldn’t have to invest in cupboards (when we moved out, both of us had a tough time trying to find space in our respective houses in Calcutta and Bombay for all the stuff we had collected and managed to store so easily in these numerous cupboards). The balcony was nice, and exclusively ours as compared to the common one accessible through the stair-case which was the norm in Indira Vihar.

This is a good time to insert a general description about houses in Indira Vihar and many other similar colonies in Delhi. The layout of the colony is like a series of row-houses, with parallel streets, interspersed with small parks. So, in a street, there are two rows of houses, facing each other, and all houses in a series share a wall with the next one. So ventilation is only possible from the front and back of a house, the sides being sealed off. The only problem is unlike row houses, these are not one storey houses, but can be upto a maximum of ground plus three floors. Compact living might have derived its meaning in these colonies of Delhi. Usually the front of the house has a staircase and open balcony, through which, anybody going to the next floor will pass. Inside, the flat has a hall, bedroom, kitchen and bathroom, with little scope for innovation by individual owners.

Within that little scope the makers of our building innovated by keeping the staircase separate from the balcony. So in this flat, one entered through a door, into a small sitting room. On the front side of this room was the balcony overlooking the street. On the other side, separated by floor to ceiling wooden shelves with a door-frame in the middle, was the hall. The shelves, some open and some closed, looked into the hall and thus provided space to keep a TV, tape recorder, books and an assortment of other things. There were two other wooded fittings, one an open rack for displaying small curios and another a built-in cupboard deep enough to keep a dead man or two is you so desire! From the hall you progressed onto the bedroom through one door, and the kitchen through another door adjacent to it. And similarly, you could exit the bedroom and kitchen again through parallel doors on the opposite side. This would bring you on to a vacant room with the bathroom and toilet placed at one side. Exiting this room would take you to a balcony overlooking the back-alley, and the backs-side of the flat in the next lane. This extra second balcony also made the flat more airy than others. If this draws up a mental picture of the house, you will realize that the bedroom and kitchen being at the centre of the house never received any sunlight. Sunlight crept only upto the front portion of the hall and into the spare space in front the bathroom, on good days. But then, having to use tube lights during the day was inescapable in all the localities where we were looking for houses in. A mouthful of sky is all one gets in Indira Vihar.

Having toured the house thus (with the exception of the loo, which someone was using when we went) we decided to say yes. The next step was haggling with our Pawan Malholtra a.k.a Kukreja. He epitomized the sly petty businessman of Delhi. By then Chayanika was getting really good at handling his types. We negotiated the rent and lots of “bhaiyya” and “two girls from decent family” pleas later managed to bring it down a bit.

The “good girls” card worked for us throughout our stay. We were not north-easterners, so we did not party late into the night, drink, wear skimpy clothes, and eat all sorts of meat! Moreover, though we were Hindus, we were not biharis! Unlike many other students who stayed in the area, we were seen going to the university every day, and to top it all men did not frequent our flat! (Lest I be considered a bigot, let me clarify that I am merely listing the hierarchy of prejudices that one encounters in Delhi and I do not personally subscribe to any of them). Sometime into our stay, when our parents visited, through them it was communicated to us that other landlords in the street were much eager to have “good girls” like us as their tenants. Thus if not us, we were requested to refer our friends, on the condition of course that they were “good girls”, to them. With such a viable market opening, we did consider starting a brokerage firm of our own – to be called “good girls” estate agency.

Coming back to the point, soon money changed hands, (on the street outside the flat!) and a date was fixed to move in. By then, we had little time in hand. Specifically, one weekend, before our M.Phil classes began. Our MA batch it seems was one of the laziest the department had seen (and our being one of the better scoring batches, by the end, only resulted in the concerned authorities being more miffed than ever). The fault if you ask me lies squarely with the department, which stipulated that lectures in the masters courses are not guided by any attendance rules. Thus it so happened that our discretion to attend or not attend classes just tilted towards the latter. So on being admitted to the M.Phil programme, we were sarcastically reminded that lectures in M.Phil are compulsory and require almost a 100% attendance. Not wanting to start off on the wrong foot, we were keen to move in by Saturday.

The deal was that the house would be cleaned and painted before we moved in. But what one soon learns about getting any work in Delhi is that there is an alternative linguistic system, which comes into operation when referring to time. Thus ‘now’ could mean anything between a few hours to a few days. ‘In a little while’ signifies a similarly elastic time frame. Thus, you can well imagine what ‘in a few days’ stands for. Kukreja’s excuse was that the previous tenants had not given over the keys and he had to finally break open the lock. So, on the Sunday when we were to move in, before the class on Monday, the house had not undergone any facelift. It was to be cleaned, our stuff was to be moved from the hostel (which is just opposite Indira Vihar), and the painting was to be done – all on the same day.

Through all our travails, we have had friends offering a helping hand, every time it seemed that the going was getting a little difficult to handle. So, since morning, Swati was with us, helping us shift. We got hold of a rickshaw-walla, to ferry our luggage. It wasn’t much – a few suitcases, buckets, mattresses and pillows. Swati was at the house, supervising the jamadar whom Kukreja had sent for cleaning the house – a royal mess it was too. We started dumping all that the guys had left back, in the balcony behind. This included, among other things, a sizable stock of beer-bottles and even included vegetable peels, which it seems they just stored in the kitchen while cooking! (Later when we were negotiating with the lady who collected garbage from all houses on the street, she said, “They didn’t pay me and didn’t want me to collect their garbage. Little did I know it is because they just collect all of it in the balcony”). The cleaning also required a stool to reach the higher places. Swati then borrowed one from the north-eastern guys who stayed on the floor above. That was the first encounter with the neighbours. And as Swati tells it, it was with a guy in boxer shorts, for whom obviously Sunday morning was an ungodly time for anyone to come knocking at his door. So the stool, or rather a chair with one of those wooden planks fitted over the arm-rests for writing, was passed on to her through what could be described as a crack in the door, grudgingly opened just wide enough to let the chair pass. Yes, and a broom was borrowed too.

Cutting corners to save a few bucks can sometimes backfire on the creatively industrious people – as it did for Kukreja with the painting job. He got hold of two workers who were working in the painting crew at a flat in the next building, thinking it would cost less. These guys were doing a costly distemper job on the fancy flat there. So, for us too, they did some semi-distemper job of polishing and smoothening the walls before applying paint. And by the time Kukreja realized what was happening, distraught and agitated as he was, it too late. While all the painting was happening, we camped with all our worldly possessions in the small room in front.

We must have done something right, sometime, because, that day, as a happy coincidence for us, Chayanika’s friend Neha was passing through town, and came over to tide us through the arduous day. Born and brought up in the rugged north, and fresh from the experience of supervising work at her newly-built house in Jaipur, she was most capable among us to deal with the labour force of Delhi.

The electric work was being done by one ‘happy bhaiyya’. Among bengalis we would call him a ‘haturé’ – meaning that he most probably never went to any trade school, and functions mainly by trial and error. Two of his assistants came over, to take down a fan, which was to be repaired at the shop. Deepu, a twenty something guy, who looked like an overgrown plump kid, was assigned the task of getting on our make-shift stool to dismantle the fan. One could see he was terror stricken at the prospect. Losing face in front of all these girls barely prevented him from bolting. Neha and Chayanika were assigned the task of holding the stool stable. Neha’s loud protestations that “Chayanika tera chair to gaya…yeh to gaya..” did little to boost his confidence and eventually it took well over a week before the fan was actually repaired and put up.

Soon, it was night. We ordered pizza and ate at our camp. Our main door was open, and we could see that the boys above seemed excited, thinking there were four girls moving in! They were going up and down the stairs a little more frequently than normal. Unfortunately for them, when they finally managed to get a word in, they found Neha, who is an extreme of the ‘no nonsense’ types and I think her glare scared them away for the next few months!

The painting was still going on. Swati had to get back and there were the three of us, sitting well into the night, all our doors and windows open, to let out the smell of fresh paint perforating every nook and corner of the house. When we had surveyed the house, we were told that there is a pump in the back balcony and whenever we needed all we had to do was switch it on. So, sometime after the painting was finished, and the workers had started washing the floors off the paint, the water stopped flowing from the tap. But, when we switched on the pump, there was no sign of any water either! So, we had a house with paint all over the floor, filthy with the proof of all the work that had been going on throughout the day, and not a drop of water to clean it, or ourselves for that matter (because we and our clothes bore equal witness of the labour that went into shifting). It was 12.00 am then.

Some sense of chivalry was awakened in the two painters, who were new in the city and hence not still hardened by it. They actually went out to a public tap at the gurudwara a few lanes away, and got us two buckets of water! And they left for us two sand-paper like thin metal sheets – to scrap off the paint when we have water the next day!

Barely managing to wash our face and hands, too tired to even unpack some clothes to change into, the three of us laid out the mattresses in the middle of the room, smelling to the high heavens of paint, and went off to sleep, still in our jeans, right in the middle of the mess!

Neha was the first to wake up the next morning, with the sound of water spewing out of the tap we had left open. She quickly bathed and went out to finish the light fixture-shopping for which she had come to Delhi. Chayanika and me washed the whole house, cleaning off as much paint as possible. Till now water was flowing from the tap and we also switched the pump on. Chayanika went in for a bath, after we cleaned up. And when it was my turn next, the water turned elusive again. There was enough water in the buckets for me to bathe, though not as luxuriously as I would have liked. We then got dressed, and were at the department by 8.30 am – to attend the first day of our M.Phil class!

THE HOUSE-HUNTING

It is a good thing that one doesn’t know what the future holds. If we had the capacity to peep into the future, perhaps we would be scared away from taking many of the chances we do take in life. The unknown instills fear. But I think in some cases not knowing also makes us brave. May be the other side of bravery is naiveté. I am glad that in our naiveté, we thought taking up a flat and staying by ourselves was not going to be too difficult. If considering all the obstacles would have scared us away from doing so, it would have been a major deprivation in terms of ‘life experience’ for us.

We had around fifteen days to look for a house – having secured seats in the M.Phil course and a fifteen days guest residence in our old hostel, after a series on entreating letters to our officious provost. Now, the Delhi University gets students from all over India and has a disproportionately measly hostel capacity, compared to this influx. So the areas around north campus have sprung up as student- residence areas, with every house having one or two floors let out to students. One would think that with such abundance of accommodation, one would find a house easily.

That was not to be. Most of the admissions in various courses having occurred a good one or two months before, most houses had already been let out for the year. Whatever was left was either highly unlivable or asked for unfairly high rents. Within the three to four localities, which we were looking within, there wasn’t a single estate agent we had not visited. (For a long time later, anyone looking for a house first came to us to ask for phone numbers of brokers).

We first began with looking for one or two rooms instead of a whole flat. Barsatis, they are called in Delhi. But one requirement was of a kitchen. Having had to often leave the dinner table, still hungry, because of the atrocious food served in our hostel, it was our strong desire to be able to have a whole meal, even it were just dal and rice. So, one broker took us to such a one-room arrangement. It was a furnished room, within a flat, which had a separate entrance. One problem was that the toilet was on the roof! Minor glitch, the broker would have us believe. Well, after all, climbing up a few flights of stairs was all one needed to do, in the middle of the night, if one wished to empty one’s bladder. Another problem was the lack of a kitchen. The owner was so generous as to not have a problem if we put a gas stove in our room! Another owner was letting out a room at the back of a flat on the ground floor. We were to use the back alley to get in and out – mainly frequented by cows, so that one was to hop through cow-dung, if one wished to leave the house!

One day our friend Anuja, took us around Roopnagar, an area she had lived in during her graduation. The house she had lived in unfortunately was taken. So we roamed around the entire area. She took us to a lady who ran a paying-guest facility, where some of her friends had stayed. There was no room to spare. But the land-lady chatted for an hour, nonetheless. She talked very fondly of this girl who had stayed in the PG (who Anuja later told us was very hassled by this boring, verbose lady). She talked of another friend who this girl had referred to her, who had called but never came to stay (who we discovered was Anuja herself!) We knew of the birthdays that were celebrated in the PG and the background of all its inmates, before we could make a getaway.

While walking to the edge of Roopnagar, we crossed into a rather shady or eerie looking area, near the highway. In a dark alley, we were shown into an ancient looking house. It had a courtyard inside, chequered floors, large doors and windows. Evening was setting in, when we entered the house. The lady of the house was this big woman, dressed in an ornate sari, flowers in her long, plaited hair, with bindi on her head and probably some semblance of make-up too. Her husband (so she claimed atleast) was a wimpish looking guy in white kurta. They showed us a room on the first floor, furnished in an old-world fashion. Without exchanging a word, all three of us were pretty creeped out by the house, its appearance and by this lady who looked like a brothel keeper. As much as we were itching to get out, the broker and the lady were insisting we stay and negotiate! The final effect was of us more or less running out of the house and of the street, with the lady still calling out to us. Another eerie house we were shown elsewhere was a furnished dark and dinghy house, with no sunlight and choc-a-block furniture, complete with garlanded photographs of the owner’s dead parents!

Once, after a few days search, we almost finalized a two-room arrangement. We were to have half a flat i.e. two rooms and a bathroom, but share the kitchen with anyone who rented the other two rooms. We finalized the rent, talked to an old man and his wife, went back next day and talked to his middle-aged son and decided to pay an advance the next day. However, when we did go back, the daughter-in-law claimed that she had already promised to let out those rooms to two Iranian girls! As appalled as we were by them going back on their word, we realized that between foreign currency and a verbal agreement, the choice for a delhi’ite was not that hard to make. As earth-shattering as it had seemed then, things worked out for the better in the long-run.

Talking to the rather crass Delhi brokers, we were, much to our horror, picking up their lingo and intonation! This realization hit me when, talking to a broker especially sketchy about details, I exasperatedly asked her “itna to batao, kitna room haiga?” Finally it was through one such broker (to whom, Smriti, another friend who had stayed there since her graduation, took us to) that we found the house we were eventually to stay in. Pawan Malhotra must have modeled his character in Dilli 6 after seeing Kukreja, our property dealer.

Thus it was after having worn off our chappals, as the hindi saying goes, that we finally found a house, in Indira Vihar. It was quite a harrowing fortnight. Within such a short span we had entered into more twisted negotiations and met more twisted characters than one would care to do in one’s lifetime. And even if that is a slight exaggeration, this much is true that having found a house and lived in Delhi, the prospect of living anywhere else in the world will not be daunting for us.