A Writer's World (29 page)

Delhi is scarcely an innocent city, for on every layer it is riddled with graft and intrigue, but it is distinctly organic, to an atavistic degree. An apposite introduction to the city, I think, is provided by Map Eight of the
Delhi
City
Atlas
, which marks a substantial slab of the municipal area as being Dense Jungle: though this is now a city of a million inhabitants, it feels near the bush still. From many parts of it the open plain is in sight, and the country trees of India, the feathery tamarisks and ubiquitous acacias, invade every part of it – the animals too, for squirrels are everywhere and monkeys, buffaloes, cows, goats and a million pi-dogs roam the city streets peremptorily.

There is simplicity everywhere, too, for rural people from all India flock into Delhi for jobs, for help, to see the sights. There are Sikhs and sleek Bengalis, Rajputs ablaze with jewellery, smart Gujaratis from the western coast, beautiful Tamils from the south, cloaked Tibetans smelling of untanned leather, clerks from Bombay smelling of aftershave, students, wandering sages, clumping soldiers in ammunition boots, black-veiled Muslim women, peasants in for the day from the scorched and desiccated Punjab plains. Endearingly they trail through their national monuments, awe-struck, and the attendants intone their monologues hoping for tips, and the tourist buses line up outside the Presidential Palace, and the magicians prepare their levitations and inexplicable disappearances in the dusty ditch below the ramparts of the Red Fort.

Delhi is a city of basic, spontaneous emotions: greed, hate, revenge, love, pity, kindness, the murderous shot, the touch of the hand. Its very subtleties are crude: even its poverty is black and white. On the one side are the organized beggar children who, taught to murmur a few evocative words of despair like ‘hungry’, ‘baby’ or ‘mummy’, succeed all too often in snaring the susceptible stranger. On the other are the courtly thousands of the jagghis, the shanty towns of matting, tentage and old packing cases which cling like black growths to the presence of Delhi.

The voice of the people, Gandhi used to say, is the voice of God. I doubt it, but I do recognize a divine element to the Indian poverty, ennobled as it is by age and sacrifice. Indians rationalize it by the concept of reincarnation, and I see it too as a half-way condition, a station of the cross. ‘In the next world,’ I suggested to my driver after a long and exhausting journey into the country, ‘I’ll be driving and you’ll be lying on the back seat,’ but he answered me with a more elemental philosophy. ‘In the next world,’ he replied, ‘we’ll
both
be lying on the back seat!’ For even the inegality of Delhi, even the pathos, often has something robust to it, a patient fatalism that infuriates many modernists but is a solace to people like me. It is disguised often in Eastern mumbo-jumbo, preached about in ashrams to gullible Californians and exploited by swamis from the divine to the absurd: but it is really no more than a kindly acceptance of things as they are, supported by the sensible thesis that things are not always what they appear to be.

But pathos, yes. Delhi is the capital of the losing streak. It is the metropolis of the crossed wire, the missed appointment, the puncture, the wrong number. Every day’s paper in Delhi brings news of some new failure, in diplomacy, in economics, in sport. While I was there I developed an unsightly boil in my nose, and the side of my face swelled up like a huge bunion. In this condition, self-consciously, I continued my investigations, and at first I was touched by the tact with which Indians in the streets pretended not to notice. After a day or two, though, I realized that the truth was more affecting still. They
really
did not notice. They thought my face quite normal. For what is a passing grotesquerie, in a land of deformities?

‘Certainly,’ said the government spokesman, perusing my list of questions, ‘by all means, these are all very simple matters. We can attend to them for you at once. As I told you, it is our duty! It is what we are paid for! I myself have to attend an important meeting this afternoon – you will excuse me, I hope? – but I will leave all these little matters with our good Mrs Gupta and all will be taken care of. I will telephone with the answers myself without fail – or if not I myself, then Mrs Gupta will be sure to telephone you either today or tomorrow morning. Did you sign our register? A duplicate signature here if you would not mind, and the lady at the door will issue you with the requisite application form for a pass – it will make everything easier for you, you see. Have no fear, Mrs Gupta will take care of everything. But mark my words, you will find the spiritual aspects of our city the most
rewarding. Remember the River Ganges! As a student of history, you will find that I am right! Ha ha! Another cup of tea? You have time?’

Even he would agree, though, that the spiritual aspect is hardly predominant in New Delhi, the headquarters of the Indian government and seat of Indian sovereignty – the newest and largest of Delhi’s successive capitals. This was built by the British, and despite one or two sententious symbolisms and nauseating texts –
Liberty will Not Descend to a People, A People Must
Raise Themselves to Liberty
–it is a frank and indeed noble memorial to their own imperial Raj. It is not anomalous even now. For one thing it was built in a hybrid style of East and West to take care of all historical contingencies, and for another, Britishness is far from dead in Delhi. Delhi gentlemen, especially of the sporting classes, are stupendously British still. Delhi social events can be infinitely more English than Ascot or Lord’s.

Seen early on a misty morning from far down the ceremonial mall, Rajpath, New Delhi is undeniably majestic – neither Roman, its architects said, nor British, nor Indian, but
imperial
. Then its self-consciousness (for its mixture of styles is very contrived) is blurred by haze and distance and by the stir of awakening Delhi – the civil servants with their bulging briefcases, the multitudinous peons, the pompous early-morning policemen, the women sweepers elegant in primary colours, the minister perhaps (if it is not
too
early) in his chauffeur-driven, Indian-built limousine, the stocky Gurkha sentries at the palace gates, the first eager tourists from the Oberoi Intercontinental, the entertainer with his dancing monkeys, the snake charmer with his acolyte children, the public barber on the pavement outside Parliament, the women preparing their washing beside the ornamental pools, the man in khaki who, approaching you fiercely across the formal gardens, asks if you would care for a cold drink.

Then the power of India, looming above these dusty complexities, is unmistakable: not only created but instinctive, sensed by its foreign rulers as by its indigenous, and aloof to history’s permutations. Of all the world’s countries, India is the most truly prodigious, and this quality of astonishment displays itself afresh every day as the sun comes up in Delhi. Five hundred and eighty million people, 300 languages, provinces from the Himalayan to the equatorial, cities as vast as Bombay and Calcutta, villages so lost in time that no map marks them, nuclear scientists and aboriginal hillmen, industrialists of incalculable wealth and dying beggars sprawled on railway platforms, three or four great cultures, myriad religions, pilgrims from across the world, politicians sunk in graft, the Grand Trunk Road marching
to Peshawar, the temples of Madras gleaming in the sun, an inexhaustible history, an incomprehensible social system, an unfathomable repository of human resource, misery, ambiguity, vitality and confusion – all this, the colossal corpus of India invests, sprawls around, infuses, elevates, inspires and very nearly overwhelms New Delhi.

Nehru said that modern Western civilization was ersatz, living by ersatz values, eating ersatz food: but the ruling classes of Delhi, the politicians, the businessmen, the military, have mostly adopted those values without shame. Gandhi said that his India would have ‘the smallest possible army’, but Delhi is one of the most military of all capitals: when I looked up some friends in the Delhi telephone book, I found that under the name Khanna there were four generals, an air commodore, twelve colonels, a group captain, twelve majors, three wing commanders, four captains, one commander, three lieutenant commanders and a lieutenant.

As it happens, I am rather an addict of power. I do not much enjoy submitting to it or even exerting it, but I do like observing it. I like the aesthetics of it, coloured as they so often are by pageantry and history. I am everybody’s patriot, and love to see the flags flying over palace or parliament, Westminster or Quai d’Orsay. Somehow, though, I do not respond to the old magic in India. The British, rationalizing their own love of imperial pomp, used to claim that it was necessary to retain the respect of Asiatics. It availed them nothing, though, against the ‘half-naked fakir’, as Churchill called Gandhi, and now too the magnificence of Delhi seems paradoxically
detached
from India. How remote the great ensigns which, enormously billowing above their embassies in the diplomatic enclave, testify to the presence of the plenipotentiaries! How irrelevant the posturings of the grandees, hosts and guests alike, the Polish Defence Minister greeted by epauletted generals, the Prince of Wales inevitably winning his polo match, the resident Congress Party spokesman puffed at one press conference, the visiting Minister of National Reorientation condescending at the next.

And most detached of all seems the unimaginable bureaucracy of Delhi, battening upon the capital – a power sucker, feeding upon its own consequence or sustained intravenously by interdepartmental memoranda, triplicate applications, copies and comments and addenda and references to precedent – a monstrous behemoth of authority, slumped immovable among its files and tea-trays. Much of it is not concerned with practical reality at all but with hypotheses or dogma. Forty government editors are engaged in producing the collected works of Gandhi, down to the last
pensée
– they have got to volume 54. Hundreds more are concerned with plans, for there was never a capital like Delhi for planners. Big Brother is everywhere, with a slide rule, a clipboard and warning in small print. ‘This map,’ says one Delhi tourist publication severely, ‘is published for tourists as a master guide and
not as legal
tender’
– and there, in its mixture of the interfering, the pedantic, the unnecessary and the absurd, speaks the true voice of Indian officialdom.

There is a species of telephone operators’ English, often heard in Delhi, which is not exactly an articulated language at all, but a sort of elongated blur. Indian English proper, of course, is one of India’s cruellest handicaps, for it is so often imperfect of nuance and makes for an unreal relationship between host and visitor, besides often making highly intelligent people look foolish (‘Chinese Generals Fly Back to Front’, said a celebrated Indian headline long ago). But the elliptical, slithery kind is something else again, and has another effect on its hearers. It makes one feel oddly opaque or amorphous oneself, and seems to clothe the day’s arrangements in a veil of uncertainty.

This is proper. One should not go fighting into Delhi, chin up and clear eyed. Here hopes are meant to wither and conceptions adjust. A single brush with a noseless beggar is enough to change your social values. Just one application for an import licence will alter your standards of efficiency. After a while graver mutations may occur, and you will find yourself questioning the Meaning of It All, the Reality of Time and other old Indian specialties. ‘You will see, you will see!’ Most disconcerting of all, you may well come to feel that the pomp and circumstance of Delhi, which struck you at first as illusory display, is in fact the only reality of the place. All the rest is mirage! Everything else in the Indian presence, north, east, south, west, across the Rajasthani deserts, down to the Coromandel beaches, far away to the frontiers of Tibet, everything else is suggestion, never to be substance.

Preoccupied with its own diurnal round of consequence and command, Delhi is paradoxically protected against the dust storm of controversy, threat and misfortune that hangs always, dark and ill-defined, over the Indian horizons. That blur or slither of Delhi, which begins as a mystery and develops into an irritation, becomes in the end a kind of reassurance. After trying three times, you give up gratefully. After expostulating once or twice, it is a pleasure to accede. You think you can change the system? Try it, try it, and when the elaborations of Delhi have caught up with you,
when you realize the tortuous significances of the old method, when it has been explained to you that only Mrs Gupta is qualified to take the money, that Mr Mukerjee is prevented by custom from working beside Mr Mukhtar Singh and that Mr Mohammed will not of course be at work on Fridays, when it dawns upon you gradually that it has been done more or less this way, come conqueror, come liberation, since the early Middle Ages, with a relieved and affectionate smile you will probably agree that perhaps it had better be left as it is.

As it is! India is always as it is! I never despair in Delhi, for I feel always all around me the fortification of a profound apathy. The capital is essentially apathetic to the nation: the nation is aloof to the capital. By the end of the century there will be, at the present rate of increase, nearly 1,000 million people in India, and I think it very likely that there will have been a revolution of one complexion or another. But the traveller who returns to Delhi then will find the city much the same, I swear, will respond to much the same emotions, indulge in just the same conjectures, bog down in just the same philosophical quagmires, and reach, if he is anything like me, about the same affectionate and inconclusive conclusions.

‘You see? You see? Did I not say so? You are thinking metaphysically, as I foretold!’ Well, perhaps. But the government spokesman proved his point better himself, for neither he nor Mrs Gupta ever did ring.

As a city Casablanca is something less than romantic, being mostly modern, noisy and ugly in a pompous French colonial way. The experience I was to have there, though, struck me then as it strikes me now as romantic to a degree. It really was like a visit to a wizard. I saw myself, as I walked that evening through those garish streets, as a figure of fairy tale, about to be transformed. Duck into swan? Scullion into bride? More magical than any such transformation, I answered myself: man into woman. This was the last city I would ever see as a male. The office blocks might not look much like castle walls, nor the taxis like camels or carriages, but still I sometimes heard the limpid Arab music, and smelt the pungent Arab smells, that had for so long pervaded my life, and I could suppose it to be some city of fable, of phoenix and fantasy, in which transubstantiations were regularly effected, when the omens were right and the moon in its proper phase.

I called upon the British Consul in the morning. It occurred to me that I might die in the course of changing my sex, and I wanted him to let people know. He did not seem surprised. Always best, he said, to be on the safe side.

The clinic was not as I imagined it. I had rather hoped for something smoky in the bazaar, but it turned out to be in one of the grander modern parts of the city, one entrance on a wide boulevard, the other on a quiet residential back street. Its more ordinary business was gynaecology of one sort and another, and as I waited in the ante-room, reading
Elle
and
Paris
Match
with a less than absolute attention, I heard many natal sounds, from the muffled appeals of all-too-expectant mothers to the anxious pacings of paternity. Sometimes the place was plunged in utter silence, as Dr B. weighed somebody’s destiny in his room next door: sometimes it broke into a clamour of women’s Arabic, screechy and distraught somewhere down the corridor. At last the receptionist called for me, and I was shown into the dark and book-lined presence of the maestro.

He was exceedingly handsome. He was small, dark, intense of feature, and was dressed as if for some kind of beach activity. He wore a dark blue open-necked shirt, sports trousers and games shoes, and he was very bronzed. He welcomed me with a bemused smile, as though his mind were in St Tropez. He asked what he could do for me. I told him I thought he probably knew very well. ‘Ah, I think that’s so. You wish the operation. Very well, let us see you.’ He examined my organs. He plumped my breasts –
‘Très
,
très
bons
.’ He asked if I was an athlete. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘come in this evening, and we shall see what we can do. You know my fee? Ah well, perhaps you will discuss it with my receptionist –
bien
,
au
revoir
, until this evening!’

I paid the money, all in advance, and I signed the usual form absolving Dr B. from any responsibility if he happened to make a mess of it, and clutching my suitcase and a copy of that morning’s
Times
, for I was not beaten yet, an hour later I was led along corridors and up staircases into inner premises of the clinic. The atmosphere thickened as we proceeded. The rooms became more heavily curtained, more velvety, more voluptuous. Portrait busts appeared, I think, and there was a hint of heavy perfume. Presently I saw, advancing upon me through the dim alcoves of this retreat, which distinctly suggested to me the allure of a harem, a figure no less recognizably odalisque. It was Madame B. She was dressed in a long white robe, tasselled I think around the waist, which subtly managed to combine the luxuriance of a caftan with the hygiene of a nurse’s uniform, and she was blonde herself, and carefully mysterious. She talked in a dreamy way, and was anxious to confirm that I had signed the travellers’ cheques. It was a lot of money, I ventured to murmur. ‘A lot of money! What would you have? He is a great surgeon, one of the great
surgeons! What could you do,’ she theatrically demanded, throwing out her white arms like a celebrant, ‘if this great surgeon could not operate on you?’ Go home to England, I said, and get it done there – ‘But let us not talk about the money,’ she interrupted hastily, and sweeping me into her ambience she opened a small door set in a corner of what appeared to be her salon, and led the way down a spiral staircase. Instantly the atmosphere changed again. In the private quarters all had been shimmer and Chanel: down here, as we emerged into the corridor beneath, it was all clinical austerity. It was like going from the seraglio to the eunuch’s quarters, not a bad simile I thought at the time.

It is true that the room numbers were painted on flowered enamel, the colour scheme was pinkish, and in the corridor there stood a baby’s crib, ribboned and cushioned. But an air of stern purpose informed the place, for these were the operating quarters. There was the operating theatre itself, said Madame, gesturing towards a mercifully closed door, ‘And even now,’ she thrillingly added, ‘at this moment an American is under surgery. My husband works always.’ She opened the door of No. 5, the end room in the corridor, and bidding me a soft but frosty good night, for she was offended I think about the money, left me to my fate.

It was dark by now, and the room was uninviting. Its lighting was dim, its floor was less than scrupulously clean, and its basin, I soon discovered, never had hot water. Outside the window I could hear a faint rumble of traffic, and more precise street noises from the alley below. Inside the clinic seemed to be plunged into a permanent silence, as though I was shut away and insulated from all other life – not far from the truth, either, for the bell did not work, and there was no other patient on the floor. Nobody came. I sat on the bed in the silence and did the
Times
crossword puzzle: for if these circumstances sound depressing to you, alarming even, I felt in my mind no flicker of disconsolance, no tremor of fear, no regret and no irresolution. Powers beyond my control had brought me to Room 5 at the clinic in Casablanca, and I could not have run away then even if I had wished to.

Late at night two nurses arrived, one French, one Arab. I was to be operated on later, they said. They had come to give me a preliminary injection, and in the meantime I must shave my private parts. ‘You have a razor? Undress, please, and shave yourself. We will wait.’ They sat on the table, swinging their legs, the one holding the hypodermic syringe, the other a sterilizing bowl. I undressed and took my razor, and miserably in that bare light, with the cold water from the tap and a cake of Moroccan
soap, I shaved the hair from my pubic region, while the girls watched sardonically, sporadically chatting to each other. I can see them now, swinging their legs there, while I struggled uncomfortably on, a lonely naked figure in the middle of the room, where the light was brightest.

At last it was done, and they injected me upon the bed. ‘Go to sleep now,’ they said, ‘the operation will be later.’ But when they had gone I got out of bed rather shakily, for the drug was beginning to work, and went to say goodbye to myself in the mirror. We would never meet again, and I wanted to give that other self a long last look in the eye, and a wink for luck. As I did so a street vendor outside played a delicate arpeggio upon his flute, a very gentle merry sound which he repeated, over and over again, in sweet diminuendo down the street. Flights of angels, I said to myself, and so staggered back to my bed, and oblivion.

When I awoke it was pitch dark, and there was no sound, inside or out. I was instantly alert, but when gingerly I tried to explore the condition of my body, I found I could not move a muscle. I was pinioned in some way to the bed. My arms, stretched away from my body, seemed to be strapped to the bed itself, and I no longer appeared to have any legs. I could lift my head a little, but it did no good, for the blackness was impenetrable. I might just as well be in the grave. There was absolutely no sign of life in the clinic. If I had screamed my head off nobody would have heard. I wondered mildly if something had gone terribly wrong, and I was in fact dead: but no, I seemed to be breathing all right, my mind worked, and sure enough a cautious clenching of the abdominal muscles seemed to tell me that I was heavily bandaged, perhaps tubed, down below. It seemed to me that on the whole I was alive, well and sex-changed in Casablanca.