It is not usual for someone who has described Delhi as ?provincial and mean-spirited and matlabi? in the early 1990s to end up writing on the same city, now ?hometown?, a ?dizzyingly complex city undergoing rapid and unpredictable change?.
Well, Sam Miller, is not your usual Dilliwala. For one, he has arguably come up with a book that is perhaps the first since Narayani Gupta?s Delhi Between Two Empires to bring the streets and smells of Delhi unfamiliar to the reader. The city has not lacked chroniclers ? right from its heyday during the Sultanat period to more recent like Ghalib, Zauk, Ahmed Ali, Khushwant Singh and William Dalrymple amongst many. And the only one perhaps to chronicle in such detail the post globalisation city.
But a city that has grown exponentially in the last two decades ? and as Miller points out ? has changed not just physically, but ethnologically and demographically as well ? this is chronicle in the grand tradition of western travel writer. Miller decides to give his 21st century Delhi a thorough look as a flaneur ? someone who wanders aimlessly through cities!
The tales are old. Yet there?s a freshness in the retelling. Miller is not that taken up by south Delhi, describing it as, ?the haunt of the junior diplomat and the senior journalist; of expatriate aid workers and retired mandarins. This is Anglophone, blinkered, comfortable Delhi with its large pockets of well-hidden poverty, away from the main roads, away from the unprying eyes of its more affluent residents, who travel to their offices and golf clubs and sports centres in smart new cars (with chauffeur, of course ? except on Sundays) … The rich of South Delhi live in flats and they know their square footage. The shrunken, nuclear household is gradually becoming normal. Servants and grandparents will have to live out.? (page 223)
But it is in discovering the other parts of the city that Delhi: Adventures in a Megacity adds great value. Starting from the usual suspect ? Connaught Place ? he decides upon the spiral route to cover the city ? and perhaps covers ground that any previous chronicler of the city. Black and white photographs by Miller supplement the text, while each chapter is charmingly introduced by the diagram of the particular spiral he orbits in.
The observations avoid the usual firangi pitfalls. Cows are an ignored species, bargaining is not part of the text, old Delhi plays a minor role. The tone is of an insider ? helped perhaps his ability of speaking Hindi and being married to an Indian. The humour is understated, self-deprecatory, and very humane. This is not an elite look into the exotica, in fact, Miller is fairly savage about some parts, Vasant Vihar he describes it as a ?transit camp?, while ?walking through Gurgaon was a soulless, dispiriting, lonely experience? there?s a sense of anomie that overwhelms them, a sense of purposelessness now that they have achieved a major aim of their lives ? a smart new flat in Gurgaon?.
Foreigners do have repeat cameos ? the incident of the Israeli lady who spat on the author makes for particularly unintentionally funny reading, one of the many in fact. His look at Indians from other parts of the country is kinder, and he notes the shift from a Punjabi-dominated city to a more widely inclusive one ? especially the emergence of Chhath as a major festival in the city. He discovers the Embassy of Nauru (read the incident with its guard to really know how low-level a PJ can get!), demystifies some of the Malcha Mahal urban legends, has some chilling moments in an abattoir, visits a ?computer-in-a-hole?, gets ?decapitated during his walks?, finds a monument he desperately tries to save from being razed to the ground, in vain.
His visits expand the horizon for most of us with areas we are fairly unfamiliar with. He discovers two Gandhi Museums ? both of which claim to house the watch he was wearing when he died. His first introduction to the city had been through the Merchant-Ivory film, The Householder, and recognises the Zeenat mosque from the image. His effort to identify the exact locations of the scene see him being rebuffed a number of times, and it is tribute to his perseverance that he is able to locate the room where Leela Naidu?s melancholy had played out nearly half a century ago. And perhaps it is this quality of dogged pursuance that is perhaps the most valuable asset of the book, for it is safe to say that apart from a handful of the city?s citizens, few can claim to know the city as well. Not to be missed.