Out in the cold

I was writing a snippet about life in Delhi when I started thinking about life in Delhi. Which is not as simplistic as it sounds, but actually refers to my life in Delhi when I lived there for a while. I often think that it was a bad time, but actually it taught me a lot about life and living it, so I will always look upon the entire experience, coloured like the curate’s egg, as a positive one.

But what was perhaps the most notable in the hilarious sense of my initial few months in Delhi was the party scene. I was used to the way it is done in Mumbai, where friends and motley others get together, have fun and don’t care whether it makes it into the gossip rags. It was about meeting interesting people, talking, laughing, finding out something new with each conversation, with lots of bonhomie, much affection and some chemistry flying through the room. The food was usually pretty good, the people usually pretty interesting and the feeling usually pretty positive.

But in Delhi I learned a different lesson. Most parties that I was taken to were more about plastic than people – there were plastic smiles, plastic conversations and truly plastic food. Which is the part that was funny, to me. You couldn’t pop into your host’s kitchen and forage, chat up the cook and exchange jokes with the maid or small boy who was helping. You couldn’t tell the person serving that you had eaten these same kebabs the nights before at the mehfil where the music was wonderfully dance-worthy and the flirtations delightful. And you certainly could not just giggle happily at the mad repartee that the man in the silly shirt was spouting over a bowl of dal that he had stolen from the dinner menu.

In Delhi it was different. I was usually found huddled over a sigri as I shivered in the open air, the chill breeze whistling through my ears, bored silly with the inanities being voiced and fed up with the crowd of wannabes that gathered around the nearest bottle of bad whisky. A barely-living waiter, who looked annoyingly like the one I had seen at every do of this kind that I had ever been to by then, wandered languidly through the groups of people, offering up doily-lined tarnished metal trays holding the most droopily tired and stone cold kebabs, along with a pile of small paper napkins that threatened to blow away to where life was more lively and happening.

Meanwhile, the guests chatted brightly to each other, finding out bona fides before deigning to say more than banal niceties. As they talked beyond the where do you work and which part of the city do you live, they got either warmer or colder to the person they addressed, but always looked over their own and other shoulders to see who was there, watching, noting, listening. If anyone could be more useful or more influential or more valuable, they drifted in that direction. And they always watched what they said, how they reacted, who they laughed with and where they stood when the media flashbulbs started popping fro that perfect photo-op.

I often laughed, but only to myself, since I was a social disgrace in this milieu. And I always wondered what made these people so self-conscious, so inhibited, so deadly dull. Once I found out, I figured out how to deal with them. I also vowed that I would never be part of that sort of circle again, no matter how great the need or pressure was. So far, it had worked.