Soumya tells us about Boy’s accidental love story in and with Delhi. An exclusive for Different Truths.

Boy’s first visit to Delhi was in his parents’ arms, and the only memory that stood out was falling from a highchair in some restaurant.

This seemed to be the theme of his relationship with Delhi, as he was to return later, and fall again, in exciting company, in a wayward lifestyle, into a livelihood, and in love, with some of its citizens, one of whom continues to share his journey through life, and with the city itself.

Like his first fall, it was all by accident.

A holiday with friends to the capital after school was over coincided with the college admission season and urged by friends that the coolest college in the country was here; he applied to this epitome of snobbery and was promptly selected. Falling in love with the beautiful green campus with colonial red brick old buildings, rolling lawns, dotted by blooming flowers and the flower of the capitals dazzling damsels, all in sharp contrast to Kolkata’s chaotic College Street, he jumped to it.

Thus, began his lifelong affair with this ancient city, purely by accident.

In college Boy lived all the clichés. Expanded his horizons, did not let studies interfere with his education, opened ‘Doors to Perception’ and being a person of heart and below twenty-five; was a deep red communist. Boy fell in love with all the going ideologies, fads, and movements, which he accidentally happened to encounter. Also, with a series of young ladies who espoused these causes, but these affairs were always one sided. Boy grew his hair, stopped shaving, dressed in kurtas and flip-flops, and joined the turn on tune in and drop out generation.

Boy also discovered Delhi. Not only the wide open leafy avenues of Lutyen’s Delhi and the international enclaves of Chanakya Puri and Vasant Vihar, or the touristy Walled city and the Paratha Wala Gallis, but also the seedy by lanes of Pahargunj where a very filmy Pathan distributed mind expanding elixirs while a policeman kept watch; the shanty town of Majnu ka Tila, where the poorest could revel in hooch and offal in the shacks run by Tibetans; the shady doctors of Jumma Masjid who would provide anything self-destructive you craved for; the innocuous street that sold hardware by day and other wares for the lonely and the depraved at night. And he loved it all. The rich colour of real life, the seedy underbelly of a growing metro; to Boy these were experiences that would help him grow up, develop a soul, and become a writer.

Reality intervened, and Boy left the city for the Deep South, to earn his living as a tiny wheel in the vast government machinery. Boy needed a change of scene to heal, for he was suffering his latest heartbreak, when yet another wise lady decided that Boy was not the right material for serious relations.

Boy did not intend to return, but fate and fatal attraction decided otherwise. He was posted back in Delhi and spent the next decade and a half becoming a native Delhite, knowing intimately the real citizens of Delhi, who came here post partition, colonized the city much like the American pioneers, and had the same robust spirit, and lived life King Size. Boy became an Honorary Punjabi.

He also found a Punjaban, who with true Sikh courage, decided to risk his company on a long-term basis, braving the ire of her community, and the communally charged atmosphere which prevailed post ’85 massacres. He finally found love that was reciprocated; you guessed it, purely by accident, among dusty ledgers, over a crossword puzzle.

Boy now can do the Bhangra, drink Moga pegs in a plastic cup sitting in a car accompanied by tandoori legs of chicken and share chutkule in theth Punjabi.

Boy has moved out of the city time and again in quest of the daily Dal Roti, but returns every time like a boomerang.

This was like an affair that is going to last.

This is the problem with memory. It took him straight from school to adulthood, skipping decades in between. It is rather fond of the fast forward button. But it will be dragged back again, and the patient and persevering reader will see him going to college, getting ‘higher’ education, and getting married, and becoming a dad himself, so that he can stop being a boy, and finally become a man. Only then the saga can end.

But that can happen in another chapter.

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Soumya Mukherjee

Soumya Mukherjee is an alumnus of St Stephens College and Delhi School of Economics. He earns his daily bread by working for a PSU Insurance company, and lectures for peanuts. His other passions, family, friends, films, travel, food, trekking, wildlife, music, theater, and occasionally, writing. He has been published in many national newspapers of repute. He has published his first novel, Memories, a novella, hopefully, the first of his many books. He blogs as well.

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