On being a foreigner in my own city...

More than 3 years ago, I took my first literature class at SUA; that “Intro to Lit” with Ken was to define me as a student, as a writer, and as a friend in ways I could never have then imagined. Ken was a professor, but he was also a close friend, and through our conversations during his office hours, he discovered enough about my interests to suggest some amazing outside reading material. One that I still cling to, now more than ever, is Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands.”

Rushdie writes about Bombay, the city he “lost” as a child when he went to boarding school in England. He writes about revisiting Bombay many years later and realizing that he could never go home to the city he remembered. Here’s how he says it:

“If we do look back, we must do so in the knowledge—which gives rise to profound uncertainties—that our physical alienation from India almost inevitably means that we will not be capable of reclaiming precisely the thing that was lost, that we will, in short, create fictions, not actual cities or villages, but invisible ones, imaginary homelands, Indias of the mind… my India was just that: ‘my’ India, a version and no more than one version, of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions.”

I’ve thought about these words often, and now that I am back in “my city,” I know them to be true. Delhi is home, but I cannot deny that I am often a foreigner in my own city.

My India—my Delhi—was made up of so many people who have now moved on to other places. It was also made up of the absence of others who now live here and have come to mean so much to me. My Delhi was made up of school buses, exams and debates, not work, art and theatre. Having returned home after four-and-a-half years, I return with new cares, interests, and passions. I am now attempting to locate these things that I never knew existed here and never cared to find out about. Stranger still, I’m finding them here. As I attend poetry nights, plays, and cultural festivals, I realize I am in a city I never knew… I don’t feel like the Delhi Aditi; right now, I feel like the Buenos Aires Aditi. But I like being able to be the Buenos Aires Aditi in New Delhi.

I don’t always recognize this city; so much has changed while I have been away—new roads, metro construction, fancy buses… the upcoming Commonwealth Games in 2010 can already be seen all over Delhi's roads. There are also moments when I am in the middle of something familiar, like trying to convince some auto-guy to take me where I want to go, or eating chaat on the street, or talking to an artisan in Dilli Haat, when a part of me steps outside the situation and smiles at it, as an outsider would. I think of friends around the world and try to figure out how they would react, what they would make out of the madness, the chaos, and the color that is New Delhi. I think especially of my Mexican and Argentine friends, whose homes I have lived in, whose cultures I have shared, and long to share my home and my city with them. And I long to take one of my SUA friends through a whirlwind tour of Delhi’s by-lanes, of the special street foods you get here, of the abandoned historical monuments that even I have never visited. I’m trying to live in this city like an insider, but at least for a while, I too will explore it like a foreigner. I need to re-appropriate it these spaces as who i am now.

Every so often, some cursory remark will remind me that the city doesn’t always recognize me either. Some auto-wallah or shopkeeper in Janpath will quote exorbitant prices to me and either talk to me in a badly imitated American accent or at least insist on saying, “Madam, forty rupees” even as I tell him “kya baat kar rahe ho, tees rupay bante hain.” Once, I got into a long conversation and finally convinced a seller that I was not a foreigner or an NRI (Non-resident Indian)… that I am very much from here.

But am I? And what does that mean, being “from here”? When I worked in the leprosy colony beyond Shahadra (on the outskirts of Delhi) 2 years ago, I was constantly struck by how little I knew of that Delhi—the Delhi where all the hoardings are in Hindi, where no woman ever wears jeans, and where I’ve been referred to as “an educated person” (yeh padhe-likhe log) with unmistakable contempt. I remember how hard it was to convince the women in that colony that I could speak Hindi… even as I talked to them in Hindi, they looked at my jeans and couldn’t understand that I can speak Hindi and wear jeans at the same time. It was a revelation, and a moment of questioning: how can I belong here, without shedding the clothes I grew up in? I don’t think I ever found an answer, other than that there are many Delhis, many Indias, and living in one doesn’t automatically guarantee me entry into another.

But there are also moments when the years in between seem to vanish in a single remark. Last week, when I went to borrow the latest Harry Potter from 3L—a tiny, family-run, commercial library near my house that has been around since my mother was in school—I was pleasantly surprised at the smile of recognition from the owner. What shocked me was the way he whipped out the register to the exact page with my address, read out my mother’s name, and noted down what I was borrowing. Let me stress: I haven’t set foot in that place in the last five years i.e. I last went there as a high school student with long hair, looking considerably different from how I look now. I was surprised enough that the guy behind the counter recognized me, but the way he casually opened the register to my page without a moment's hesitation, as if I were a regular there, was eerily familiar. In Rushdie’s words, “I felt as if I were being claimed, or informed that the facts of my faraway life were illusions, and that this continuity was the reality.” Is it?