(Published in Mail Today, June 2008)
Walking through my city, Mumbai, on any given day, here are some sights I might typically encounter: slums, missing footpaths, minimal greenery, loads of people, and maybe the shooting of a film or soap opera.
Now compare this to what an average Delhi-based writer might stumble upon while riding through the Rajdhani: a semi-nude march against rising prices, or a candle-light vigil by Tibetan exiles, or thousands of poor and landless tribal farmers picketing for their rights.
If I were that writer in Delhi, I’d be grateful for such periodic and forceful reminders of how bad things truly are beyond the sedating confines of our urban enclaves. It would inspire me to know that I was just a walk or drive away from 10 Janpath and Parliament, where our hot and dusty nation’s destiny is charted, albeit in air-conditioned comfort. I wouldn’t have to travel the country to know what ails it. The nation’s beleaguered masses would converge at my doorstep, waiving their banners and yelling their slogans in a futile attempt to gain the Central Government’s precious attention. Being a writer in Delhi would, I imagine, lend my vocation gravitas; it would sharpen and authenticate my politics and prevent me from falling into the trap of frivolity and navel-gazing. I might even nurse the fantasy of being read by an MP or bureaucrat, and of my words subconsciously affecting the opinions of those shaping our national policies.
Alas, I am not a writer in Delhi. I am a writer stuck in Mumbai, where the only politics we know of are the sort played out every night at ten between the inmates of Big Boss. The biggest protest-march in Mumbai’s recent history was of MNS workers stoning business establishments that didn’t give precedence to Marathi on their signboards. It hurts to admit this about the city of my birth, but the cultural and political landscape of Mumbai is by and large petty and provincial. Presiding over our superficial middle-class lives is Bollywood’s gigantic silver-screen, ever-ready with its brain-dead plots and well-choreographed dance numbers to distract us from the gruesome realities of our city and our nation.
Delhiites, much as they may want to turn their faces away, often have no choice in witnessing first-hand the horrors and ironies of our fledgling post-colonial democracy. When I imagine a Delhi writer waiting for a VIP convoy to pass, and how the ensuing rage might feed that writer’s art, I am filled with an envy that has, over the years, turned into a full-fledged syndrome: Delhi Anxiety.
Delhi Anxiety is the sense of inferiority and worthlessness that our nation's capital engenders in writers who don't live in it. It is a purely imagined disorder, unverifiable and little known, and it increases in intensity the further one resides from the city of Gandhi topis and No Confidence Motions. As a born-and-brought-up denizen of steaming over-crowded Mumbai, and a long time sufferer of acute DA, I wish to catalog the malady's symptoms in the hope that someone – a Karol Bagh chaat-wala, for instance – might concoct a cure for this crippling affliction. Because as far as I can tell, short of moving to Delhi & NCR, there is no known cure for Delhi Anxiety.
I first became aware of DA after the publication of my debut novel. Like most first books, mine too was a barely-concealed fictionalization of the milieu I'd known since childhood. The chicken shop I was sent to for half-kilo broilers, the loud over-eating aunts I encountered in marriages, the abortionists' fliers I noticed during my train-rides to work - all these and more wormed their way into book one, which was, not surprisingly, marketed as a 'Mumbai novel'.
When it came to writing book two, I discovered within me an ambitiousness that was astonishing. I wished to write the next Truly Great Indian Novella. I wanted it to be the literary equivalent of our national anthem, a 'Mile Sur Mera-Tumhara' type of pot-boiler bound in hard-cover and selling for Rs. 495. I assumed that I had only to widen my canvas - from my city and its hinterland, to the staggering landmass demarcated by our squiggly national border. I never doubted my grasp over the nation's pulse. Why else did I read Tehelka and Outlook? Why else did I endure Aaj Tak and follow the dreary debates on NDTV? I knew our states; I'd encountered people from all over the country in the course of my life. I may not have traveled beyond 250 kilometers of Mumbai, but what the hell kind of novelist was I if I couldn't fib my way through Kolkata’s Kalighat and Hyderabad's Begumpet. The technicalities were still sketchy in my mind; all I knew was that book two would be tri-colored and big!
And then, soon after book one was launched, I visited Delhi for the first time and my world came crashing down.
My cocooned existence in politically stunted Mumbai had led me to believe that India’s nationhood was a fluke, and that there was no meeting ground between our nation’s unseen rulers and their subjects. In Delhi I stayed at my Malayalam editor's home and attended a Sindhi wedding and was introduced to people from Kolkotta and Hyderabad. I even ran into folks who remembered the Partition well enough to flinch at my Muslim name. I met at least one writer who claimed to be on phone-calling terms with a Cabinet Minister, and several other people – doctors, journalists, etc. – who seemed to possess a casual and intimate understanding of the workings of power. It was awe-inspiring and even a little intimidating to be among ordinary people who were, by necessity, forced to look the state machinery in the eye (even if, in the process, their knees knocked and their hands trembled). Delhi Anxiety knocked me out, and when Delhiites spoke, I found myself unable to argue. For what did I know? What did I really, really know?
I considered moving to the capital. The climate repelled me. The prospect of having to engage with national-level nitty-gritties, after decades of luxuriating in state-level trivialities, seemed too enormous to bother with. I may crave consequence as a writer. But as a citizen of a flawed democracy, I know all too well that one can’t be too close to the smoldering center without being occasionally scorched by it. My pan-Indian designs for book two have been tempered by a more realistic assessment of my abilities. Pending the Central Government’s relocation to Mumbai, I’ll have to make do with the MNS and its Marathi chauvinism.
