Delhi — Two Worlds

By Michael Hardy In New Delhi

I’ve seen extremes of poverty and wealth in my travels around India — unwashed children sleeping in the streets of Calcutta, IT executives chauffeured in Mercedes Benzes through the Bangalore traffic — but only in New Delhi have I seen the two worlds set in such close proximity.

Our first night in the city, Nimanthi and I stayed at the international guest house on the campus of Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s great research centers and Nimanthi’s alma mater. Founded in the 1960s, the sprawling campus is a heavily-wooded natural park set like a green jewel in the middle of a 13-million-people mega city.

So one is startled to find, just across the street from this soothing oasis, on the way to the local shopping centre, a slum the likes of which this American has never seen. Built on a bare, rocky strip of land between two busy thoroughfares, the slum occupies the space of a medium-sized municipal park. It used to be twice that size, but New Delhi officials have been aggressively clearing slums (“beautification” is what the city calls it) in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games, in which they’ll host the other former colonies of the British Empire in a mini-Olympics.

Like slums the world over, this one was haphazardly built by hand out of the available materials: clay or wood or stone walls, asbestos or tin or plastic roofs. To keep them from blowing away in high wind, the roofs are weighted down with large, unwieldy bundles. Narrow alleys traverse the slum in every direction, and most of the streetfront shanties are general stores selling necessaries like rice, dhal, and vegetables. From the street you can see women stooped over at the waist, washing clothes in plastic buckets. To dry the clean clothes they either whack them, one piece of clothing at a time, against the rocks, or lay out the clothing on the ground and beat the water out with a wooden paddle.

Some children play games of cricket — as children from every class and religion can be found doing on every street of every town in India — with banged-up old bats and makeshift wickets, while others help their mothers carry water from the central pump to their homes. In the part of the slum “beautified,” i.e., bulldozed by the city, boys and girls take turns defecating on a mound of rubbish, their backsides exposed to passersby. Nearby, stray dogs and enormous wild hogs with distended bellies almost dragging the ground root through the trash heaps for scraps of food. The hogs, absorbed in their own business, hardly seem to notice the people passing by only metres away.

Many of those people are heading for the nearby super-luxury hotel, where rooms start at around $200 a night. Protected from their declasse neighbours by a high, fortress-like wall topped with barbed wire, the hotel guests can unwind by the pool or enjoy a lavish buffet dinner in the gaudy, faux-restoration dining room, blissfully ignorant of the squalour less than a football field away.

Beyond the hotel is one of Delhi’s posh new shopping centers, choked with American fast food restaurants, boutique clothing shops, and crowded coffee bars. This is life in the neo-liberal New Delhi. The increasingly prosperous middle-classes live in a gated, air-conditioned world of upscale shopping and fine dining while the wretched of the earth pick through their garbage, quite literally. While the city’s good bourgeois eat at gourmet restaurants and sip Italian cappuchino, the city’s ragpickers sort through the city’s rubbish heaps for edible or saleable goods.

While walking one especially cold night around Connaught Place — the center of British New Delhi and now perhaps the city’s most exclusive shopping district — the group of friends I was with spotted an unusual sight. Although nearly every person on the street, from the security guards to the autorickshaw drivers to the beggars, had started their own fires to keep warm, we stumbled upon three people warming their hands over a full tree trunk, big enough to wrap your arms around, blazing heat from a hollow in the wood. A young man and woman, who were evidently a couple, grinned at us and said that they had been burning the trunk for two nights already and expected it to last several more.

The third person, an older woman, now spoke up in Hindi. As she related some complicated story, animated by abrupt bouts of laughter and tears, the couple made silent signs to us indicating that the woman was crazy. The Hindu-speaker of the group, Anita, was listening intently, however, and ignored their warnings. After the woman had chattered and chattered and laughed and cried for a good ten minutes, we took our leave and headed towards the bus stop.

As we walked away, Anita related the conversation to the rest of us. All three of the people around the fire were drug dealers, she had said, selling everything from marijuana to heroin (Anita had declined the woman’s offer to take us to a nearby drug stash house). The woman herself had been recently arrested for dealing and thrown in jail, where she had been beaten by the guards. She wasn’t worried, though, she informed Anita, because she was shortly going to marry Shah Rukh Khan, a major Bollywood star; in fact, she was planning a trip to Bombay for the ‘wedding.’

The conversation seemed to sum up India: poverty, drugs, prisons, people warming themselves by makeshift fires while dreaming Bollywood dreams. Like the woman, everyone in Delhi seems to be on the make; everyone’s looking for an angle, a cut, a piece of the action. From the hustler selling leather wallets on the corner to the business students trying to become multi-national CEOs, Delhi exudes confidence in the future, the belief that its time has come.

You can see it in the feverish construction of new subway lines, in the ubiquitious signs promoting conservation and energy saving, and in the obsession with self-improvement shown by the scramble for places in good universities. It seems inevitable that Delhi, if its growth continues at its current pace, will indeed find its place in the sun. Who among the city’s ballooning population the light will shine on, and who will be left in the shade, though, are unresolved contradictions in the transformation of a millenia-old city into a hub of globalisation — the capital city of India, and India’s city of capital.