David Prager - Delirious Delhi: Inside Indias Incredible Capital

*The cover from this book was inspired first by the movie Om Shanit Om. The songs from that movie blared from passing autorickshaws and tinny mobile pjhone speakers for six months straight, which is why we chose to recreate the poster.

But the cover is also a tribute to the custom-made, six-foot-tall Bollywood poster we commissioned from a nearly out-of-work poster painter whose studio was hidden near Old Delhi. That's quite a story - you can read it here.

A LSO BY D AVE P RAGER

Poop Culture: How America is Shaped by Its Grossest National

Product, Feral House, 2007 (as Dave Praeger)

Dave Prager

A RCADE P UBLISHING N EW Y ORK

Copyright 2011, 2013 by Dave Prager

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Arcade Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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For extra pictures, essays about Delhi, and more, visit the authors website at deliriousdelhi.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-61145-832-9

Printed in the United States of America

To Jenny, with great love, deep gratitude
and grudging respect for your Mario Kart skills.

If you are told they are all this or they do this or their opinions are these, withhold your judgement until facts are upon you. Because that land they call India goes by a thousand names and is populated by millions, and if you think you have found two men the same amongst the multitude, then you are mistaken. It is merely a trick of the moonlight.

Zadie Smith, White Teeth

W e knew we would love living in Delhi the moment we heard the door-to-door paella salesman.

Ah, paella! The national dish of Spain. A sumptuous fusion of saffron rice, scallops, prawns, peas, sausage and cuttlefish. Wed expected Delhi to be cosmopolitan, but never did we imagine men would be riding around with giant canvas sacks of paella strapped to their bicycles. In our eight years in New York City, the most exotic street food we ever found was the guy selling gyros on 47th Street. But we had to go to himnobody ever rode around Brooklyn shouting fa-laaaaaaa-fel! and dispensing hummus by the scoop. But after just fifteen hours in our new flat in the Hauz Khas market neighborhood of south Delhi, we already had a guy selling Valencian delicacies right outside our bedroom window.

Lying in our new bed, Jenny and I listened to the cry that was to fill our ears every subsequent morning for the next eighteen months. Pie-ehhhhhhh-AH! he hollered, riding slowly by three stories below. Pie-ehhhhhhh-AH!

We were already half-awake. Our restless morning had begun at sunrise, when the mosque across Aurobindo Marg cranked up its call to prayer through crackling speakers that were loud enough for Muhammad himself to make no mistake about how reverent they were. Soon after that came the honking, as every vehicle began saying good morning to every other vehicle on the road, a call-andresponse that would end with goodnight honks only around 11 p.m. And just as we began to wonder if renting a bedroom that overlooked a busy road was a bad idea, the paella man rode by and put all our fears to rest. Pieehhhhhhh-AH!

We peeked out the window on his third pass and saw him: thin, wiry, dressed in clothes that had long since been sun-bleached out of whatever shade of beige hed bought them at, riding a colorless bike with one rag-wrapped bundle strapped behind the seat and another to the handlebars.

Ah, I said. That back bundle must be where he keeps the paella. We wondered what the front bundle contained: thyme and saffron shakers? Bottles of 2006 Baron de Barbon Oak-Aged Rioja to pair with the meal? Extra cuttlefish for preferred customers?

And what other culinary delights were to be peddled by? We salivated in anticipation of the crpe guy. We wondered if the sushi salesman could get fresh ahi this far inland. Oh! Maybe a gazpachowallah would come around during the hottest months!

That morning, our first morning in our new flat but our sixth in the country (wed stayed in my companys flat in Gurgaon, the tech hub south of Delhi, five days beyond our realization that we didnt want to live in Gurgaon), Jenny and I lay in bed and listened to the sounds of the city outside our window. We were neophytes in Delhi, and the struggles that would soon confound uswhere do we go to buy a wireless router? why does every third car have a sticker promoting Fun N Food Village in its rear window? how do we call an ambulance at two in the morning?were still waiting beyond our bedroom walls. We would soon explore the streets of a city wed never imagined wed actually live in. We would soon see the full gamut of the human experience on those streets, from joy in the most despairing of circumstances to cruelty perpetrated by those who have everything in the world. We would soon watch dogs get beaten. We would soon see children get saved. We would soon meet holy men and unnoticed women who should be saints. We would soon stumble upon hidden treasures and walk past transcendent sights without noticing a thing. We would soon explore as much as we could manage. We would soon learn as much as we could absorb.

But we would barely scratch the surface. Every time we left our Delhi flat, wed return home with more questions than answers. Which means we never became Delhi experts. Well never be Delhi experts. Even if the city wasnt constantly changingeven if the Delhi we experienced could be frozen in time so that we could explore every inch before its next iteration came alongour grasp of the city would always be limited by the cultural filters through which we cant help but view things. All we know about Delhi is what we saw, what people told us, and what we think weve figured out. No matter how much we would try to immerse ourselves, our Delhi would remain a rarefied one: we were comparatively rich and unmistakably foreign, and the only Delhi we could possibly experience was the one that aligned itself in reaction to us.

This was the third Delhi flat in which wed woken up, but the first in which the morning symphony was this audible. In the Gurgaon apartment, the only soundtrack had been the howls of wild dogs and the pounding of construction machinery that could induce headaches even from twenty-three stories up. And in the apartment Id stayed in during the month of August, in a neighborhood called Greater Kailash-II, the mornings sounds were muted, distant and almost tranquil. (That apartment, obviously, did not face the road.)

My August in GK-II had been a test: for my soon-to-be employer, to see if theyd want to commit to me on a longterm basis; and for me, to see if Id have the