Back in 2017, I was with Hartman dropping off a friend in Noida when he, well we, decided that a drink would be in order. It was afternoon on a winter day, and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I figured why not, and stopped a rickshaw and we both jumped in. I just told the guy we wanted to go drink at a cheap place. The guy winked and grinned, and we were off. I can still remember that he didn’t have any legs, and a modified rickshaw, and he did look particularly disreputable, so I figured he would know where to get a stiff peg. He dropped us under a flyover and pointed to the liquor store and said that's the place.
The shop itself faced what was obviously a park in some city planners mind, but was a wide expanse of dirt, separated by a narrow gutter. Young kids ran around in a businesslike manner, around dilapidated hunks of old coolers and washing machines, around whom were small huddles of men in lungis. As we drew closer, a young boy of maybe 12 came up to us, and said, “5 rupees for fifteen minutes, and 10 rupees for snacks”. I brushed him off to get my old monk, and asked the cashier what was what. He suggested talking to the kids.
Hartman and I had our bottle, and turned around to the kid, who was behind us. We gave him 5 rupees, and asked him to explain. It turned out that the kids would rent out the derelict washing machines and coolers as tables for the local drunks, who could drink in a measure of civility. The liquor store was on the edge of the Delhi-UP border, and hence subject to lower taxes, and the owner had paid off the cops on the UP side to create his version of a low-rent garden bar, sans gardens. The kids would get eggs and chips from the halwai next door, and sell them at a commission. Hartman and I gave the kid 10 rupees, poured ourself a drink in plastic cups he pulled out from his bag, and settled in.
We must have been a strange sight in that place, surrounded by the sweltering masses, Hartman was 65, had long salt and pepper hair, and spoke in a deep All India Radio voice, and I had pants to my chest, horn rimmed glasses, and got into aggressive arguments about 50’s jazz. I really knew we stood out, because the kid came back with chips and eggs, and a bottle with a dried rose in it, and told us we could have the rose and bottle for an extra 5 rupees, only if we returned both at the end. Hartman, appreciating the entrepreneurial spirit, handed over 5 rupees.
Somewhere around the middle of the bottle, we managed to get a crowd around us. It was pretty understandable, we were jabbering away discussing some topic du jour in english, surrounded by day labourers and migrant workers, and while they could not understand what was being said, they could understand that it was an argument and someone was winning and someone was not, and an argument is better entertainment while drinking then watching cars whizz by; so we had an audience. Hartman, ever the entertainer, nudged me on the ribs, and said “Slow Boat”. I had been singing with his group for a bit, and cottoned on, so we turned, and started singing Slow Boat to China for the guys, Hartman doing the tenor, while I did the Baritone. We leaped head first from Slow Boat to I want to be Seduced; fuelled by Rum, and Revolution.
In that dingy dust bowl was probably the highlight of my musical career, as the local drunks watched us two inebriated interlopers do the hits of the ‘40’s. Eventually, our throats gave out, as did the interest of the locals, as did the rum. We walked away giving the kid a 20 rupee tip. As I passed by, I overheard one of the drunks say to another, “aise behenchod angrez bhi dekh liye”. The liquor store was scarcely 15 minutes from the mosque burned in Ashok nagar.
I used to think I had no illusions about the dark heart of India. I was born in Jammu and kashmir. My best friend when I was 7 lost his father when he was shot down in Thanamandi near Rajouri by militants. Himalayan Mail, the newspaper we got, for the longest time, had on the lower left of the front page, a running casualty count of militants, civilians, and army and police forces. My father’s office in Srinagar was shot at when I was 13. Godhra happened when I was 11. My biotech teacher in 11th grade told us stories of how her uncle was hung from a tree when he tried to return to Sopore. My grandfather told me of how a judge of the high court who was presiding over his case (grandpa was famously litigious) was shot on the streets in broad daylight.
I saw my hindu friend call my muslim friend a Katua, and I saw photos of Osama Bin Laden in the visor of the government car my father was issued, because the driver was an ex-millitant given a government job. I listened to stories from the carpenter at my job about how he and his family were forced out from turkman gate, and I lived in houses built to house the partition refugees in Delhi. I was there in Jammu when the Panther Party started protests to evict the rohingya refugees from the Narwal Mandi refugee camps. And I was there every day when countless normal people would just say “nahi magar mussalman to alag hote hain na”
I used to think that that is all there is to it. That we were one people separated by faith, with the idiots and the reactionaries forming the border.I did use to think that hinduan ko Ram Ram, mussalman ko salaam approach was enough to keep the peace. I thought that the Delhi world view would win in the end, of hum to doobe hain sanam, tumko bhi le doob jayenge; sawaal bas yeh hai saaqi ki darya kaunsa ho. After all, we are but one people, temporarily inconvenienced by faith and politics.
As I saw news coming out from Delhi, in distant Amsterdam, I worried. I sent messages checking in with everyone I knew in delhi. My brother replied something to the effect of: north east is critical, while the south enjoys its luxury. Back in the day, I would have agreed with this economic analysis of the problem. It is always the poor that get ground up in the mix of power and politics. Give the lumpen a quarter of whiskey, and a half kilo of chicken biryani, and the lumpen will do as asked. It's like the election, isn’t it? Of course, there were people trying to round up the Sikhs in Maharani Bagh back in ‘84, but those were the poors and the unwashed after all. But it is too easy to find answers I want in just straight marxist dialectical analysis.
I refuse to beleive that a normal person will just one day rise up and make a molotov cocktail and decide that it is time to go ‘a mosque burnin’ or dalit lynchin’ or a muslim stabbin’. The fundamental humanity of a person resists that, and so you deny the humanity to the one you want to oppress. They used the black and tans to pacify Ireland because they were not Irish. The overseers in the plantations were white. The Sikhs patrolled Singapore. The soldiers in Kashmir are mostly from outside Kashmir. The Gurkhas are feared warriors for the English. The Tirailleurs from Senegal fought the Germans in the Second world war, as did the Punjabis in Somme in the First.
You do not send a man to subjugate his neighbour, for a man is nothing but a man, neither lesser nor higher. But if suddenly you turn someone subhuman, then it's simple, like eradicating vermin.
I used to think nothing like what is happening right now would happen in my lifetime. How could it, we were a developing nation, education was increasing, toilets were being created, more movies about hindu muslim unity were being made, Nawazzuddin Siddiqui was acting in Ramlilas, I could go to jaafarabad and have kebabs, and then go to Nizzamuddin dargah on thursday with my friends and see the quawwali. I could walk late at night in zakir nagar, hang out with uncles in seelampur, say aadaab to the buzurg Haaji saheb at the shop by the digs and chat all day about how yeh aaj ke launde nasal kharaab kar rahe hain,and it would be alright.
But there is a cancer in the soul of India which never went away. It isn’t just hindu chauvinism. It is also muslim chauvanism, in kashmir. It is marathi chauvinism against biharis, North Indian chauvinism towards south Indians, mainland Indians towards north eastern Indians, Sikhs against Hindus back in the Bhindrawale era punjab, and the list goes on endlessly. No matter how many inspiring speeches are made, and movies produced, and parades held, and curfews imposed, and pellets fired, and re-education camps set up, and refugees deported, if you can’t bloody see your neighbour as an equal human being worthy of the same treatment as you, then it's all hopeless. This will happen again, and it will be worse. And I don't know if I signed up for this kind of India.
I am actually considering a PhD, just because I can not handle this right now. If the family wasn't back home, I would consider not coming back. but who am I lying to. Its home. I hate it, and i love it too. walking around Delhi at late night, with only the dogs for company; sitting at a chai shop in the evening watching the cars go by as the boy comes back with more samosas, having a cigarette on a barsati looking at the horizon in the colours that only the polluted delhi air can manufacture, the acacia trees and the scrub by saket, the narrow gallis of jangpura where the galli becomes the living room, having conspiratorial drinks at IIC, the dehelvi saliqa, the dehelvi lack of tehzeeb. Delhi gave me so much. it is just that the Delhi I knew and loved and hated metastasized into what I see in the news today. And I am torn.
