Old Delhi, New Delhi Part 2

No-one wants to take us to Hauz Khas. The auto drivers here each have a well paying, easy business driving passengers between Qubt Minar and the station, where they can pick up a return fare. Finally, after we trudge to the main road, drooping, an auto driver stops for us. Now we can see why so many refused – the traffic is horrible on this section. Thick, loud, fume ridden, in the hottest part of the day. We stop at some lights and a girl no more than three years old comes to sell us a pen. I fumble to find money, and the traffic growls and beeps to move on – the coin falls in the gutter. The auto driver mops his face with a piece of rag kept on the side. His feet are weathered and filthy in their broken plastic sandals. When he drops us off near a park entrance in Hauz Khas, we give him a good tip – and he is so pleased, unlike drivers on the tourist circuit, who sulk, demanding ever more. I imagine a good bit of money changes hands to have the lucrative routes.

Hauz Khas is known for being an upper-middle-class enclave that was once a dairying village, but now has words like “quirky” “arty” and “boutique” in its descriptions. That should have been warning enough, but it is also enticingly set amongst wooded parks and the ruins of an early 14th Century tank, a lake-like reservoir, built as the water supply for Delhi’s long ago “second city”, Siri. A seminary, a mosque and many tombs are scattered around this verdant oasis, alongside newish apartment buildings and the above-mentioned trendy small shops. One newspaper description is that “Delhi’s urban villages are where the sylvan past meets the present boho-chic.” I was hoping to find this purportedly romantic combination, and also the shop selling old film posters (perhaps Dilip Kumar’s dreamy eyes in “Mughal-e-Azam”, or the raunchy Fearless Nadia, a sort of female Bollywood Zorro!)

Perhaps it was because we feel exhausted when we arrive, but we cannot get a grip on Hauz Khas Village. The remains of Siri are beautiful, the Sultans’ tombs, seminary and mosque are so atmospheric, but we have had too much today of architectural antiquity. It needs a qualified eye, and more time spent, to appreciate more fully the detail, the era. Students laze and laugh, sitting on the stone walls. It’s all a part of the backyard, for them!

The little restaurants and bars are very expensive, serving pizzas or other western food we do not want; many were recently closed down, temporarily, because they do not meet water quality runoff standards (it was in the news for days). The boutique shops we pass also stock expensive looking items of clothing or art, or craft, not to our taste. There seems to be no centre to the village; it meanders, and we find ourselves eating Chinese takeaway food in a laneway alongside a bunch of privileged teenagers, flirty, mobile phoned, trendily dressed, vacuous (but sweet, I am sure – they are just young, after all). Later, we drink the most expensive iced coffee we’ve had on our travels, in an air-conditioned restaurant, just so we can use the toilets there. Michael notices another group of older teens come in, and wonders where they find the money to meet up in such a salubrious space.

The new middle class of India make me nervous. It feels as if they have lost grounding in the old culture and the new is still being formed. That has benefits, of course; we must evolve and adapt. This is a particularly complex issue for India with its ages-old cultural mores, one that is much discussed in social history forums. For foundations, or social philosophies, do matter.

The new wealthy (as is the case in any nation) seem to get by on confidence, pride and material show, which can seem uncaring, egotistical and snobbish. Culture becomes, perhaps, a badge of status or nationality rather than a guiding light. These are harsh words, I know, but I’m not alone in sensing the danger, and the unpleasantness, of this. Other India watchers we speak to, or who write about these unstable times, may use different words, though in a similar vein. It is an enormously youthful population, but the older, parental generation in Hauz Khas (which I am using to exemplify this upper middle class, India-wide) have a rather arrogant air. Perhaps it is the same sense of superiority found worldwide among the wealthy – say, in Rose Bay, or Potts Point in Sydney, or Toorak in Melbourne. But daily the people of Hauz Khas must drive the pot holed roads crammed with poor working autorickshaw men and child pen sellers; here, poverty is still overwhelmingly obvious and the infrastructure, the garbage, the lack of proper sewerage, still an enormous impediment. The middle class do know this, though perhaps not with the clarity of outsiders (who, as a well known historian once said, may not have insider knowledge, but do have fresh eyes); the difficulty seems to be achieving change when institutions (such as all levels of government) are ‘mired in corruption”, as the cliché goes.

Yet in trendy Hauz Khas and elsewhere there are little shops selling products from recycled materials, and other signs of “green” initiatives, most of which are driven by this youthful generation, we are told. But the ‘youthful generation’ and their motorbikes …sigh… I will come back to this topic another time. We have seen the changes over many years, now.

We pass two of the old poster shops, but I am too tired now to trawl through them. Besides, I hear they charge five times the amount that the poster man at Darya Ganj Sunday Markets does. We’ll go there instead. I had been curious about this area, and now my curiosity is satisfied enough, though my depleted state leads me, perhaps, to be unfair to Hauz Khas. But I think I get the picture –if not the poster … we are simply not insiders enough to this privileged scene to understand its developments. Yet it slots in to a particular understanding I have garnered of that privileged world. I am satisfied by that, and not, after all, surprised. If my story here is unclear, seems speculative, incomplete, it is because that is what each place we visit is, for us: pieces of the jigsaw of India. A complex, “moveable feast” of a jigsaw.

We return to Old Delhi on the evening commuter train, watching the jeans clad legs and mobile phone hands of the line of young men opposite, one of whom falls asleep repeatedly on his neighbour’s shoulder. We push through the solid crowd at the doors to our station, tackle the walk along Chandni Chowk, and collapse with relief in our lovely room at Tara Palace.

Then as the light fades, we go to the rooftop, watching as the Red Fort walls deepen and glow in the sun’s reflection, the monkeys scamper on a ledge nearby. Beautiful singing fills the air from the Jain Temple; a beautiful azan, call to prayer, rises also from the Jama Masjid, Delhi’s huge mosque, very close by. The man who lives in a house below, comes home from work and plays ball with his German Shepherd, Tyson, (after the boxer – tough is good!), on his rooftop, and we exchange greetings. I love the hazy Delhi rooftop evenings.

Shiva temple (white) and Jain temple (red) from roof of Tara Palace

Red Fort from roof top

Jama Masjid from roof top