What makes a city: M. Mukundan reports our Delhi’s Soliloquy

Advertising goes way back in the Indian history, I read that in a book about advertising. It informed me that its start was the 1910s. Ads were what dreams were made of, and what modern countries are made of, along with some fiscal deficits and GDP growths. So were Sridharanunni’s Murphy Radio dreams. Back then in the 1960s, the Indian middle class dreamt of owning this novelty. But what do the new modern middle classes dream of now? What objects specifically, are its dreams and advertisements made of when we hear one too many unfamiliar a jingle ? With EMI’s and loans for things as easily available as the next piece of clothing for the roaring middle class, are dreams even made in the country they live in? Most of us, including me, will sigh a low no.

I always wondered what would now make us say what Swami in R.K. Narayan’s novel said “ अगर मुझे वो पहिया नहीं मिला तो मैं मर जाुउगाॉं ।” What makes us ardently want that tyre now? I still see that in a generation that grew in the 70s and the 80s, it is my father’s generation. So when I drive his high end German car, the only thing that makes me conscious is not the car itself, but his subtle caution, “ I have kept that car close to my heart, drive it carefully.” His breath escapes into a reminiscence of everything that is defined by him, and this car is one of them. A lot can be thought and understood about him by way of a car. He, too, defines a lot about that particular car. It is my father’s, and every thing about a car reminds me of him. I then wonder again, if I ever will be distilled into an object thus? In a world that Mary Kondos our memories, I would want to be distilled into an object, as my father is being, and as Sridharanunni was in that Murphy Radio. Consequently, it would only be a little while later that I would ponder upon the material reminisces of my aunt, and hope to find one in a world that perhaps did not yet believe in bequeathing memories to women.

Cover of M. Mukundan's Delhi: A soliloquy

“Burning hot. Freezing cold. What place is this?” , soliloquises, the protagonist of the story who has just gotten out into the atmospheric range of Nayi Dilli (New Delhi) from Kerala. Indeed, in the short space of time that I lived in another city, I was warned about the crazy temperatures in Valladolid by many, including the city’s inhabitants. But it was not very different from that of Delhi. Smouldering hot. Numbing cold. However, I also slowly understood how it claimed the greater part of how the Vallasoletanos felt, even though I never felt that way in Delhi. For how could I? How could weather dictate my mood? No major thought was put into it until I found myself obsessing about this conversation starter.

Later, I wantonly handed my happiness to the appearance and disappearance of sunlight. It only showed how easily I had accepted, and how easily we rationalised our home, only knowing what is different by how much we did not accept just like the weather. When I returned, the Delhi rains uplifted my mood once again. Therefore, the question of knowing did not arise until difference became an imperative, for if there is no difference between cities or countries accompanied by distance; then one can never know the difference. If I knew this difference of feeling between two cities, it meant that I knew them both.

Also, people in a city with no roots in that city amazed me. Back then, and even now caste raises its questionable head. But perhaps like Sahadevan, our unrelenting migrant for a lifetime, I too, never noticed caste in Delhi. After all it was a mix that subsumed these minor differences. Moving out into a world that everyone apparently knew about, and to which you are introduced only when you are of a marriageable age, do you realise that caste means “separating the love birds” and an oddity like that of a molhaq in a brahamin’s residence. It was, therefore, a matter of microcosms hidden nicely by cities, and even more perfectly by nations. All Malayalis are caste-less and religionless in Delhi as are all Indians and Pakistanis in non-south asian countries. It is indeed natural to find affinities as one moves out in bigger communities because, ironically, the differences become smaller as the distance from one’s own nation becomes greater. But the bigger community here is South Asia, and this bigger community is indubitably partitioned. So, it surprises us, as it did me when things like - in abroad I have a Pakistani friend - came true. Though not a friend, but Valladolid became that abroad space as I entered a Doner Kebab for a friend's birthday. As I was seating myself, the store manager started playing Punjabi music ( one of the many species of Indian music), only to have me turn and see him knowingly smile at me. He said, “ I knew you were one of us.” It was later when I talked to him, - yes, we spoke the same language, that he told me that he was from Pakistan. It was an Indian (modern, liberal or old, nostalgic) fantasy come true, not stuff of fairy tales but an actual reliving of the past that I had only thought existed in people distilled into the flesh of the generation of Indian independence.

As a whole life is spent in a city one puts down roots, but for whom and for what? Sahadevan lives and probably dies in Delhi without putting down any roots. Truth be told, it was rather shocking to peruse that Sahadevan, a supposed outsider, had Uttam Singh, a punjabi belonging to Delhi, support him fiercely and like family. Interestingly, Singh is left without any relatives because he marries his daughter without a dowry, something entirely unacceptable in his “Biradari” (the immediate society) . Rather than having come back to a physical change after a period of eight months, instead, I came back to find that I had only aged a little with some wisdom. Unfortunately, it was a wisdom quite different from the people back home. My own views were therefore readily accepted in one place, and questioned in another! Biradari was a rooted common tradition, but the semblance that we find in one another is no longer purely cultural anymore. It is a liberal semblance found when lived through differences in cities.

But, when are the woes of a city, your own? The city that Sathyanathan’s parents ( his father is the migrant Sridharanunni) had come to love, “annoys” him. It was because of how lives around him turned upside down. Living in a different city amidst the pandemic, and living in a city in a state of war and emergency, the only difference perhaps from now and then is, the technology. So, when one migrates to another city in search of betterment which can be of many kinds, what difference does it make if the city that you moved was plagued (war or an actual plague)? A house, in both the cases, is the only refuge. Upon asking my father who was born in ’64, where is Amritpuri since I encountered it in the book, he said that he had no idea about a place like that. He was probably occupied with the thoughts of his immediate destination - the office. My rejoinder to it was that it was a place that perhaps vanished after the emergency because it was majorly inhabited by the Sikh community. And since it happened during a period of killing of Sikhs, continuing my sentence, he said that this place might just as well have existed, like many others. A move becomes useless, we move to no use. Sahadevan questions it looking at his broken prospects, I questioned it too.

Delhi, thus, became a soliloquy of its own.