Delhi eyes

I have lost something in my three months in Delhi. Something that I think many people lose here, either temporarily or permanently. Delhi is an enormous city. There is no centre, and because of increasing expansion there are no longer any outskirts. Twenty-three million people live here, many of whom would pass one another every day for years without noticing their similar patterns. The poor sleep on the streets and beggars stop cars at every corner with the same rehearsed narratives of dispossession. Children with sun-cracked faces and dusty hair hustle with hardened expressions and adult tricks. On auto rickshaw journeys, I look away blank-faced as do most Delhiites, ignoring the vulnerable scraps of baby clothing that hang on rails that divide traffic islands; and the men and women, covered like corpses, sleeping on the shoulder of the road become invisible.

Middle-class neighbourhoods, like the one I live in, are comfortable, quiet and leafy. The servants rise first and work in dignified silence. In Delhi there appears to be a servant for almost everything. As morning merges into early afternoon gardeners trim immaculate parks where housewives try to walk off their widening rumps 8212; emblems of Delhi8217;s rising middle class. At the back of these neighbourhoods are houses mashed between mud and fetid garbage. A stream of dead black water runs like a thinning river through the middle of these slums, and farm animals stomp through, making these neighbourhoods appear macabre replicas of villages long left behind. But like well-to-do Delhiites, I rarely walk through these areas, and when I do I turn my head. After three months I no longer wonder where these people came from, and what frail dreams they carried into Delhi8217;s city streets.

The bus to and from work is always crowded. People dupe the sinewy rickshaw-wallahs out of a couple of rupees, unsympathetic at the sight of a man who is slowly becoming one with his rusty rickshaw. In the context of this rapid pace, having to have eyes that see in all directions, the constant haggling and hustling, the hardness, things, people, faces, events, sensations appear to lose their vividness and meaning. As Rushdie wrote in Midnight8217;s Children, 8220;When you have city eyes you cannot see the invisible people, the men with elephantiasis of the balls and the beggars in boxcars don8217;t impinge upon you, and the concrete sections of future drainpipes don8217;t look like dormitories.8221;

Perhaps I just have a bad case of Delhi eyes.