Numb in India, part 1: Where the sun never sets

In which I return to the scene of the crime

Today I’m writing from Old Delhi, in the grubby, ungovernable heart of India.

Every guide to Old Delhi describes it in the same words. Buzzing, bustling, hectic, frenetic, chaotic, overwhelming. It’s not: in fact, this might be the calmest, most sedate place I’ve ever visited in my life. On the streets, a near-total stillness reigns. Every square foot is packed with tuktuks, rickshaws, motorbikes, the odd three-wheeled van, sometimes wooden carts strapped to old, bony ponies or static cud-chewing cows. Nobody is going anywhere. The vehicles tangle together at every unmarked intersection. They move inches at a time, honking contentedly at each other like a herd of grazing geese. If you absolutely have to get somewhere, the only way is on foot. A few porters weave their way through the logjam, heaving huge bales of copper rods or PVC pipes, or sacks of unidentifiable material balanced on their heads. On the fringes of the street, people cluster around stalls selling chai or chaat, haggling, gossiping, bickering, but mostly just saying the word hai to each other. A street is not something you move through to get somewhere else; you’re already here. The main activity is timepass, the act of simply floating in the great static sea of it all, watching nothing as it happens before your eyes.

Everything does timepass here. The day-labourers, the chaiwallas, the stallholders. People with little businesses selling nuts and bolts in every size, or rubber tubes, or doorknobs. There’s a street where every shop sells galvanised steel springs. One for fire extinguishers. One for industrial hooks. But the old city is so clotted with itself that no one who needs a galvanised steel spring can get anywhere close, so the trader sits in his meticulously clean office tiled in Italian marble and does timepass. Animals most of all. Fat, diseased monkeys sit in the nests of electric cabling that hang between each building and do nothing. Thousands of stray dogs lie on the pavement with their chins to the concrete, sad-eyed, passive. Across the railway tracks in Paharganj, feral cattle stand stock-still in the middle of the road, totally indifferent to the vehicles grunting and beeping around them. In Daryaganj I witnessed a huge, mangy rat waddling unhurriedly along the side of the road. A barefoot child was throwing pebbles at it, but it still couldn’t even be bothered to scurry. The only ones in a hurry to get anywhere here are the Western tourists. They fuss about, trying to weave through the crowds and the traffic, trying to get to the Red Fort, the spice market, the Jama Masjid, and when nothing moves out of their way they say Delhi is bustling and hectic and overwhelming. They don’t look where they’re going. They step in small piles of shit.

Like most things that call themselves old, Old Delhi is actually the second newest. Its real name is Shahjahanabad, after the Mughal Emperor who built this place as his capital in 1648. Early European visitors marvelled at the Peacock Throne, the gardens, the magnificent boulevard of Chandni Chowk lined with palaces, the glorious capital of an empire that ruled over one hundred million people. But Shahjahanabad was not the first Delhi: according to tradition, the first was the city of Indraprastha, founded by the Pandavas around 3000 BC. According to the Mahabharata, Indraprastha was built by the demon-architect Mayasura: the city had wide streets and fruit trees, and at the centre was a palace of illusions, with crystal floors that looked like lotus ponds and pools so still they looked like solid stone, invisible doors, ceilings disguised as clouds. The city was so beautiful that the Pandavas’ cousins tried to claim it for themselves, sparking the apocalyptic Kurukshetra War that sunk the universe into Kali Yuga, the lowest of the four world-ages, which we’re still in today. Every so often the Indian government announce that they’re about to uncover the ruins of Indraprastha under their feet, the last fragments of a better world, but so far nobody’s found any shards of magic crystal in the five-thousand-year stratum beneath Delhi, just some very plain pottery.

There were seven other Delhis that did leave physical remnants. The thousand-year-old ruins of Lal Kot, including the Iron Pillar of Delhi, are in the suburbs to the south. The crumbling walls of Siri, built by the Delhi Sultanate, now contain a big sports complex used for the Asian Games in 1982 and the Commonwealth Games in 2010. The massive stone towers of Tughlaqabad rise above a freeway on the edge of the modern city, containing nothing. Tughluq was a cruel and fanatical warlord who came out of the wordless steppes of central Asia to usurp the throne of Delhi; he died when a beautiful pavilion built to celebrate his victories collapsed on his head. His son Mohammed was known as the Mad Sultan; he built the city of Jahanpanah, meticulously planning every detail until it was the most harmonious city in the world, and then moved his capital thousands of miles away on a whim. There’s nothing left of Jahanpanah; its site is now a swathe of wealthy suburbs. Gracefully curving American-style streets, immaculate lawns, coffee shops with lots of tasteful polished concrete, cocktail bars. Mohammed was succeeded by his cousin Firuz, who oversaw the empire’s decline and dismemberment; the wreck of his city of Firuzbad is near the Gandhi Museum, and supposedly inhabited by djinn. In 1526, the Mughals came pouring out of Afghanistan to smash open the carapace of the Tughluqid Sultanate. The second Mughal Emperor, Humayun, built a city called Dinpanah, some of which is still intact: the empty palaces are now set near the baboon enclosure in the Delhi Zoo. Shah Jahan was Humayun’s great-grandson. His city has been repeatedly sacked: by the Iranians, by the Marathas, by the Afghans, by the Jats, and by the Sikhs. Despite that, it’s still inhabited today.

For now, at least. Because India has an ecumenical attitude to time, it’s also possible to name the four cities of Delhi that haven’t been built yet. Raashtradhoop, which will flatten the Old City and almost everything around it in the middle of this century, will be a vast, flat landscape of modular housing units, set in a perfect and legible grid, with security checkpoints every four blocks and drones permanently buzzing overhead, flown in partnership with the Tata-Amazon Hypercorporation. In 2829 the government will flee across the river to the new city of Shashvatapuspani, where the High Samiti of Neo-Hindustan will play strange games with shapes we can’t currently imagine. Six-dimensional neighbourhoods, folding over and under themselves through zones of space that absolutely exist, just not in our universe. After the nuclear destruction of Shashvatapuspani unleashes self-replicating negageometries across the Gangetic plain, the region will be uninhabited for tens of thousands of years, but in 33064 AD the city of Teu Agu will be founded on the site of what was once Delhi. The bloodkings of Teu Agu will collect their transfusions from the masses shivering in irradiated slums, and with generations and biograft they will slowly, over the millennia, become something other than human, something slowly returning to the inorganic. Their bodies will glow with a pure white light. Eventually they will no longer have any need for skin. They will become larger and diffuse, until the blinding sandstorm of their outer regions swirl over a square kilometre or more. The final city of Delhi will have no name. A harvest zone, crammed with billions of human beings waiting for the holy wind to consume their bodies and incorporate their minds. This final city of dung bricks and reed huts will be destroyed in the year 428,887 AD, and when the wind that used to be the bloodkings of Teu Agu finally ends the age of Kali will end with it. Dharma will return to the world, and we will enter Satya Yuga again.

All of this is pretty much set in stone. The Delhi that troubles me is the other one, the one in between. If I go south of Shahjahanabad, something strange happens. The crowded alleyways widen out into long, tree-lined avenues and straighten into right angles. Suddenly I’m surrounded by buildings with white classical columns and high gothic domes. There’s a big triumphal arch. I might have spent eight hours on a plane from London, but it all feels weirdly familiar. According to the signs, this place is called New Delhi. And there’s something else weird: I’m here in the great Ganges basin, seat of an ancient civilisation to rival anything in Europe, but I understand all the signs perfectly, because they’re all in the familiar speech of the Angles and Saxons and Jutes. Could it be that I’m not the first Englishman to set foot in this place?

For the next few months, Numb at the Lodge will be on a brain-melting tourist odyssey across the past and future of Indias real and imagined. The more prosaic way of putting this is that I, a white British person, will be looking at and writing about India, and this is the type of situation that sometimes invokes phrases like colonial gaze. In 1942, the Indian National Congress issued a demand: ‘To every Britisher: quit India at once. You are an unwanted foreigner, a usurper, and an outlaw in this country.’ This is not ambiguous. But here I am. No point skirting around it. Let’s talk about the Empire.