Delhi: A different world

Cacophony greets you on the motherland's terra firma, writes Pavan K Varma.

Every time I go on a holiday to Delhi I fantasize that I will spend most of my days at my farm sitting in the sun reading and writing. Alas, this fantasy has always remained just that because Delhi has a strange talent to hijack my life into all kinds of distractions that I am unable to resist. I love Delhi, but whenever I return from it I feel I have not enjoyed it as I would ideally have liked to. But this is a regret that I have got used to by now.

Winter is probably the best time to be in Delhi. The days are crisp and cool, the sun is out, women preen around in their winter finery, the sky is blue, the evenings are cosy and intimate, and the nights have the resplendent covers of quilted rezais. But this winter glow of fulfilment disappears the moment the sun does. Grey, overcast days in Delhi in December and January are painful. Homes are not heated and floors are made of icy cold mosaic or marble. Insulation is poor and if there is a chill wind it makes its way inside. People can be seen even during the day shivering around makeshift fires on the street. Monkey caps—a great Indian invention—are much in evidence, and early morning walkers become ghost like apparitions in the dense fog.

Those who have gone from London to escape its winter feel particularly cheated when this happens. London is supposed to be grey and cold and depressing. Delhi is supposed to be bathed in sunlight and colour and gaiety. If Delhi weather becomes like London, where will we escape to? Mercifully, the sun peeps out sooner rather than later. And when it does, its life giving warmth thaws away the grey, and all is well with the world again.

On arriving from London the first thing that strikes me in Delhi—or for that matter in any big Indian city—is the level of noise. I have a theory that for some inexplicable cosmic reason sound gets effortlessly amplified in India. Cocks crow louder, cows only bellow don’t moo, pins fall with a thwack, doors always bang, and people happily shout when they can whisper. A cacophony of noise greets you as you touch the motherland’s terra firma. And the most pervasive and irritating is the car horn. We are an incorrigibly horny nation. Anyone with any access to the horn will press it, with or without reason, just like that, merely to announce their presence, as a matter of reflex, solely to proclaim to the world as loudly as possible that they exist.