I sit by the roadside
The driver changes the wheel.
I do not like the place I have come from.
I do not like the place I am going to.
Why with impatience do I
Watch him changing the wheel?
—Changing the Wheel, Bertolt Brecht
Prologue
The book Once There Was a City Named Dilli (2017)1 begins with the author Intizar Husain recounting the haunting memory of a walk. About three years after the Partition, Husain visits Delhi from Lahore and goes to the neighbourhood with the shrine of the saint Nizamuddin Auliya one evening. He is expecting the usual hustle-bustle of the crowds around the saint’s dargah, but instead encounters silence and sadness. The dargah too is silent, till three qawwals arrive and start singing. The writer walks from the dargah with two old friends towards the grave of the nineteenth-century poet Ghalib, making his way through tall, unkempt grass. He finds the grave and the boundary wall around it both in ruins. Here too, he recounts, the ‘surroundings were filled with silence’, except for the cries of a peacock coming from a distance (Husain 2017). Thirty years later, he is able to visit Delhi on three occasions, and each time he visits Nizamuddin Basti. On each visit, he finds the hustle-bustle he had missed on that sad evening. Ghalib’s tomb has got a facelift and is now on a marble platform and is enclosed by beautiful mesh walls. The grass has been cleared. Except, this is not what Husain is yearning for anymore. He remembers, misses, and longs for that sad and silent evening, with ‘the derelict grave amidst the wild grass’ and the screams of the peacock. That evening haunts him—it is for him ‘the very metaphor for the lost Dilli’ (ibid.). The hustle-bustle and the beautification of the ruins no longer serve as a metaphor for the Delhi he had lost and the Delhi that was no more. The city had moved on. And the symbols commemorating Husain’s loss were lost, had turned into a haunting, and are then reinscribed into words in his book.
At what point in space and time can a loss be mapped? The moment when homes deemed illegal overnight are bulldozed? When people stop living in the midst of the rubble of what were once their homes? When the rubble and all traces of lives lived are erased? When progress builds itself over the graves of the once-homes? At what point of losing track of mapping losses and then losing the fading marks of those mappings do you succumb to the affliction of nostalgia? Do new losses encroach upon old ones, erasing them in the process? Do we remember the brokenness of the time we yearn for or does it have to appear as innocent and whole to certify the loss located therein as loss? Is remembering then about forgetting?
In The Future of Nostalgia (2001),2 Svetlana Boym traces the origins of the word nostalgia not to its ancient Greek roots but its coinage in a 1688 medical dissertation by the Swiss doctor Johannes Hofer. The medicalization of nostalgia, circulating through the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, referred to a disease—an obsessive longing for one’s native land that incapacitated the body—afflicting students, soldiers, and domestic help living in foreign lands as well as people who had moved from rural areas to the city. Cures for this affliction ranged from leeches and opium to public ridicule and bullying. Moving beyond the ideas of nostalgia as a disease or as stemming from personal loss, Boym frames nostalgia as a historical emotion, a public epidemic in modern life, linked to not only dislocation in space but also disorientation stemming from the changing conception of time. It is, she argues, a ‘longing for that shrinking “space of experience” that no longer fits the new horizon of expectations’ (Boym 2001) defined by the teleology of progress. It is a mourning for the impossible. For, ‘nostalgia, like progress, is dependent on the modern conception of unrepeatable and irreversible time’ (Boym 2001).
There can be no return.
The not-quite-over
The pandemic appears to be fading but not its wounds. I will myself to go to what used to be my favourite haunt in the city. Part of me knows it’s a bad idea. Part of me thinks I should be ready to do things I liked doing before the pandemic.
I step out of the metro station filled with foreboding. I tell myself it will be okay. I think of the dog that used to walk with me from the chai ka tapri to this metro station to see me off heading home. That was the before, and I wonder if I’m making up this dog or mixing it up with some other one. My memory is unreliable. The other day I couldn’t remember Leonard Cohen’s name and Googled ‘singer+ raincoat’. Google is not helpful when I don’t know what I’m trying to remember though.
The shrine under the tree has shrunk and has been enclosed in a cage-like grill. There’s a sharp shooting pain in my heart. I tell myself it’s heartburn even as I am yet to consume the milky tea and bread pakora that somewhat made the decision for stepping-out-to-do-something-I-liked-earlier possible. Wary of how the street will reveal itself to me, I keep my eyes mostly on ground level, raising them only to watch out for cars. Shiny slippery speckled maroon-ish tiles decorate the new landscaping of the pavements. My stomach churns. I’m not sure if I’m hungry or sick. The road I cross is still named after the slain theatre playwright. On the other side, the wide pavement has been swallowed up by steps with wilting plants.
The hand-painted signage of the snacks shop has made way for a digitally printed one. I pay for chai and bread pakora, get two tokens, one blue and the other green. I hand over a token at the main shop counter that dishes out the food orders and the other around the corner where chai and coffee orders are handled.
Somewhere in the house I no longer visit are two unused chai tokens from this shop. I know they are still there because nothing is ever thrown away in that house. I secretly hope that mice eat up the forgotten tokens one day, forever erasing the marks of love lost.
I wait for my turn to get my bread pakora and sabzi. I move slightly to make way for a customer picking up his samosa and chutney, and I face the peepul tree right next to the shop. I’m surprised I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It’s conspicuous by its near absence. There’s only a stump, with sharp stalagmite-like broken branches poking out from the top. There is no bird perched on the stump. The chabutra around the tree is falling apart. I ask the snacks shop owner about it—he says the tree fell in the thunderstorm a few days back. How many conversations and cups of tea and bread pakoras and samosas and fights and waiting-for-someone and heartaches and after-meeting-hanging-out had this tree witnessed? In the last couple of years in the before, I’d increasingly been seeking out this place. Not to meet anyone but to just be by myself, especially on days I was exhausted or sad or confused or all three. I would sit around and watch the art college students working furiously at their assignments, eavesdrop on conversations, watch out for grey hornbills, drink a cup or two of chai, sometimes read a book or scribble in my journal, be accosted by a street vendor offering to clean my ears or measure my weight. And I would just feel okay. Now that the tree is not quite a tree, what will I be?
The bread pakora arrives. It tastes awful. And it has nothing to do with the fall of the tree.
The during
On days I find it hard to believe in anything, I watch the long branches of the tree whose name I don’t know. I haven’t looked it up in my copy of Trees of Delhi. It’s sometimes comforting to not name what you love. The gracefully swaying branches with thick foliage of the-tree-with-no-name almost touch my kitchen window. I watch this beautiful tree and ponder over this line in a letter that Saajan Fernandez writes to Ila in the film The Lunchbox: ‘I think we forget things if we have no one to tell them to.’ And ask myself if I’ll love the tree even if I have no one to talk about it to. The answer is always yes. So far.
Before the arrival of winter, my neighbour gets hold of the maali to hack away all the branches of the tree, leaving behind just the trunk with a few spiky stumps. The branches block the winter sun from her balcony. She’s taken a gleeful pleasure in getting it hacked every year, making sure every branch is cut off and not a single leaf remains. No bird can sit on the tree through the winter. The branches will start growing back around spring and be filled with thick leaves by monsoon. The hacked tree makes me sad and nervous: what if the branches don’t grow…what if the maali has gone a bit too far with the hacking this time and has killed the tree. I don’t question my love for the tree in the months that it is just a stump that may or may not transform into a tree.
Late at night, I go for the post-dinner walk in the tiny square park behind my apartment with him. I’m wearing the wrong kind of footwear and can feel the uneven surfaces of the raised concrete walking track jab me through the thin soles of my chappals. We pass the night-time junkies huddled in the bushes behind the gardener’s shack, then the boy playing badminton with his father and the cat from my apartment prowling for rats around the boundary wall, and stop near the peepul tree. I run my right hand over its rough trunk and say, ‘This is my favourite tree ever … not peepul in general, but this one.’ I say these exact same words every time we walk in the park and reach the tree in the first round of the track. Every time, he says with a smile, ‘I know’. He pauses for a bit and continues to jabber about his day. He likes filling the distance between us with his stories. I let him.
The after
The city is raining fire. The kude ka pahaad, which was gearing up to overtake the Qutub Minar, is raging in fires. It showers pollution on an already polluted city that can’t help disembowelling itself on the pahaad. The two parties that behave like estranged members of the Indian joint family bickering over property blame each other for the fire. Meanwhile, the fire continues to rage. It no longer has an appetite for the city’s dwindling trees and forests and instead devours buildings in congested neighbourhoods, cars in parking lots, babies in hospitals, workers in factories.
I’m walking less, and writing even less. Walking no longer lets the disquiet escape through the feet. I no longer want to collect stories from the street. Yet, they collect themselves, biding time to be strung into unreliable memories, retold in conversations, and reinscribed in writing.
The lovers in the park I had fought for with a rabid uncle, desirous of upholding the morality of a ‘good’ neighbourhood, no longer hold hands or steal kisses. They are huddled over their phones watching reels. The depressed three-legged dog who I had never loved and who had not loved me has been gone for months. He was in an accident and then taken to a hospital. I haven’t followed up on him. The half-blind sabziwala hasn’t opened his shop since his son ran away to Mumbai. The loose bricks and concrete slabs that once outlined the boundaries of his shop are now stacked up and covered in a gunny sack, marking the location of the once-shop. The flower seller’s son who dropped out of school during the lockdown, never to go back, now manages the shop almost entirely by himself. He brings out buckets hidden under the stall and carefully selects for me four stems of almost fresh lilies with lots of buds yet to bloom. He ticks off his father for trying to sell me stale flowers, telling him that I won’t take them because I’m taking it for myself and not for gifting. He wraps the flowers in a newspaper and not a plastic sheet just the way I prefer it. This boy who has grown up too quickly makes me want to smile and weep.
The old man and his dogs have shrunk this summer. I rarely go by that side. When I do, he beams at me with a big smile, hands folded in a namaste, and asks me if I was not in the city. I know it’s something that my absence is noticed by someone who doesn’t even know my name. I don’t linger to chitchat though.
The peepul tree, not my favourite tree but the one in my favourite place, the one that had fallen, has grown new branches and leaves and the chabutra around it has been repaired. The prison grill holding the shrine has disappeared as has its prisoner. Incense sticks stuck into the ground commemorate the erasure for those who still remember. When the incense sticks dwindle and then stop, will I still long for the shrine I had never prayed at?
The bread pakora still doesn’t taste of anything that I remember or long for. It has become my personal metaphor for the enchanted city, my city, which continues to elude me.
The before
She tells me that even though she was born in the city and grew up here, she’s never been fascinated by it the way I am. She says that I make the city to be an enchanted world, which I share with her and others by tricking them into walking with me. I accuse her of tricking me to go on a walk in this park that makes me listless. I had once loved this park or at least what used to be here—the nondescript, unkempt government nursery dotted with weather-worn ruins, which I believed was my secret sanctuary in the city. The guava trees are still here as are the noisy parakeets. But this space that has fixed the past as heritage and simultaneously performs its world-classness through the hecticness of curated walks, literary events, and organic bazaars cannot hold together my memories of the guava trees. The guava trees of that humid afternoon spent reading a book and going to sleep, all interspersed with eating guavas plucked from the trees, surrounded by the sounds of birds chirping and the distant chatter of maalis.
I have never liked guavas.
We are drinking one version of a bad tea among numerous others that we have been consuming in roadside shops scattered across the neighbourhoods that make our city. I quietly watch the people around us in between our conversation. But she strikes up conversations and cracks bad jokes with them, paying no heed to my instructions of not smiling at strange men or making eye contact with street vagrants, who I know will soon be swarming around her. I tell her she needs to be less trusting. She tells me that I need to be less wary. We will both hold on to our obsolete life hacks and continue to end up hurt. To begin yet again, making rooms of our own from scratch, finding new people to love and escape, and telling each other, as if for the first time, ‘Starting tomorrow, I’m gonna be a new person.’
We are walking in Bhogal’s Mangal bazaar. I’m doing fieldwork and she is buying things she doesn’t need, animatedly urging vendors to hike up their prices which she thinks is too low. She’s not being ironic but doling out genuine advice. But the next minute, she is haggling, as animatedly, with an artificial jewellery seller, telling him off for overcharging her on the basis of her appearance. She’s also upset because he doesn’t have a mirror. She doesn’t trust my judgement. At some point in her barrage of complaints, the vendor gruffly tells her to check herself out in the mirror of the scooter parked next to him. She is still unsure about the piece she’s trying on and doesn’t trust the scooter’s mirror. The gulaak seller sitting next to the jewellery shop, who all through this exchange had this kind smile directed at my friend, suddenly says, ‘Le lo. Accha lag raha hai.’ That seems to seal the deal. She buys the necklace and then proceeds to buy a gulaak. I ask her who she’s bought it for. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Was it a guilt buy…were you feeling bad that the gulaak seller had no customers?’ I ask. ‘No, I got it because he became my mirror,’ she says.
Maybe what makes everyday life in the city a little less unconsolable, amidst the mismatch between the city moving on and everything you want to hold on to, is not lasting love or forever friendships or even having someone to tell our stories to but rather stumbling upon these mirrors at unexpected turns. Mirrors that don’t necessarily reflect or represent our true selves but simply notice, assure, and acknowledge us: ‘Yes, you exist.’ The dog that comes to you, wanting to be petted, when you’ve made up your mind never to love another dog. A woman in the ladies compartment of the metro who compliments you out of the blue on a day you don’t particularly like yourself. An elderly neighbour who calls to check if you are okay because she hasn’t seen you on your daily walks. A tree that allows you to touch its rough, wrinkled trunk, whispering, ‘I may not be here tomorrow, or you may not. But I am here now. And you are.’
—Samprati Pani
The Years is the title of Virginia Woolf’s 1937 novel and Annie Ernaux’s memoir published in 2008. Both books span several decades and deftly engage with the intimate and the historical in genre-defying styles, albeit in their distinct voices. In a 1933 diary entry, Woolf visualized her book ‘as a series of uneven time sequences—a series of great balloons, linked by straight passages of narrative.’ Ernaux’s The Years refers to itself towards the end of the book as ‘a slippery narrative composed in an unremitting continuous tense, absolute, devouring the present as it goes.’
All photographs © Samprati Pani.
Cover image: A red silk cotton tree in Delhi.
Notes
- Intizar Husain, Once There Was a City Named Dilli, trans. by Ghazala Jamil and Faiz Ullah, New Delhi: Yoda Press, 2017. For the Hindi transliteration of the original Urdu text, see Dilli Tha Jiska Naam, trans. by Shubham Mishra. New Delhi: SAGE Publications and Yoda Press, 2016.
︎ - Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, United States: Basic Books, 2008. ︎