Help needed for Pratima Devi and her dogs

Anyone who has contacts among animal-welfare NGOS, please do help or circulate. Pratima Devi a.k.a. Amma, the beautiful old woman who looks after street dogs near the PVR Saket complex, needs a full-time assistant to stay with her and help her with the feeding of the dogs and other related things (treating injuries, being around when the van comes to take them for sterilising, and so on). She had a couple of boys who were helping out, but they left, and often being in poor health herself, she needs someone who is reliable, sensitive and needless to say, a dog-lover. A decent salary will be paid, of course (this is something a few of us are trying to help out with), and there is enough sleeping room (and even a small cooler) in Amma’s shack.

The best place to look for someone appropriate might be an NGO, but if you know someone else who might fit the bill, please do get in touch. My email ID is jaiarjun@gmail.com, or you can leave a comment here.

[More about Pratima Devi here and here]

Fox troth - a column about hidden senses

[Did a version of this piece for Kindle magazine’s anniversary issue about sensory experiences that sometimes remain hidden from us, or that we don’t open ourselves to. I hadn’t intended to write about Foxie for a while – not for official publication anyway – but this seemed to fit the subject, so I drew on some of the things I have written earlier. The magazine website is here, and the illustration on the left is by Soumik Lahiri]


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It was a magical moment, one I often relive and dwell on. One afternoon in July 2008, walking towards a rough lane behind our building to check on our water booster, I saw a litter of six tiny puppies sleeping together. Perhaps it’s relevant that I didn’t see them from a safe distance – they seemed to materialise right under my nose; I might have stepped on one of them if my eyes hadn’t been on the ground.

What I felt in those first few seconds was generic concern (I didn’t know yet that the pups’ mother was nearby, and that they were being looked after by two kindly watchmen) and perhaps the briefest tug of a heart-string. At this point I couldn’t even see them as individuals, just as a huddled-together mass of vulnerable, twitching life. Even over the next few days, as my mother, wife and I began visiting the lane, taking across milk and bread, helping the watchmen cope, I couldn’t have imagined that one of those little creatures would become mine in the truest, deepest sense of the word – not my “pet” but in nearly every way that mattered, my child – and that the next few months would see the opening up of senses and feelings that I didn’t know existed.

I could write a book, or five, on the years that followed, but here’s a summary. We got a couple of the pups adopted, three others succumbed to infection and to the wheels of careless or callous drivers, and we took in the last remaining one, who became our Foxie. Though a strong and hugely energetic dog at first, she spent the second half of her short life afflicted by an intestinal condition that necessitated monitoring her diet carefully, providing medicines with each meal, cleaning up after her six or seven times a day, and watching the accumulation of side-effects: she became ill-tempered during the bad phases, suffered from pain in her hind legs, was so emaciated that most of her ribs showed, and when I took her for a walk downstairs she spent her time not running around after a ball as she once had but sniffing around for the sort of food we had to deny her at home. Then, just when it seemed her condition had stabilised and she was regaining the old spirit, she passed away on the doctor’s table last year, aged barely four.

It was the most devastating thing I have ever faced (and even that is such an understatement, it feels almost indecent to write the sentence). Yet her short life had opened new doors of perception and feeling for me. Back in 2008, if asked, I would casually have called myself an animal lover; today I realise how misleading that would have been, and how much I still had to learn. Ever since childhood, with my mother's encouragement, I had a basic interest in other life forms, at least the ones that humans find it easy to relate to – asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reply “a vet”. But the only animals I had been genuinely close to earlier had been cats, who are relatively distanced and independent, and perhaps this was a reflection of my own personality.

Fox was introverted too, by dog standards that is, but my years with her provided another dimension of experience. They taught me in the most immediate terms what it meant to be in communion with another, emotionally demonstrative being – to pick up on aspects of personality and feeling – even when verbal communication is out of the equation. And there was a practical component to the relationship that made it especially deep. Working out of home, I was around her most of the time during the long months of her illness, and my daily routine centered around her needs. I was a more hands-on, invested parent than most of the fathers of human children I know – and even some of the mothers.

I should stress that the intensity of this relationship was very much an individual thing: it hasn’t translated into comparably strong feelings for other dogs. More than a year after she went, the grieving process is still very much on. I still feel incomplete and numb, struck by panic each time I think of those last moments in the vet’s clinic; I have regular nightmares about being on a narrow ledge at a great height with her in my arms, being unsure I can hold on to her and maintain my balance at the same time. And I don’t think I can take on another such responsibility, or make such a strong emotional commitment, in the near future. But my time with her did, in a more abstract sense, heighten my sensitivity towards non-human life. The experience has been one of empathy-creation – the sort of feeling where I might see an emaciated dog with a scared, hunted look in its eyes scavenging for food on the streets and think to myself with a shudder, “That could so easily have been my Foxishka, if I had never seen that litter in the lane, or if we had been a little less concerned or more casual.” Such a notion is unthinkable, but I think it all the time.

Since Fox had a somewhat unusual, elongated body structure and because she stretched out in odd positions, we used to joke that she was many animals in one. When she nibbled on leaves with her ears down, she resembled a goat. Lying on the floor with her arms spread out ahead and her legs on the side, she could seem reptilian: lizard-like or dinosaur-like. There was an odd, camel-like undulation in her movement at other times, and she was a race-horse when she galloped in circles around the park in those precious, much-too-brief early months. When I watched news coverage of the “psychic” octopus Paul, I could imagine a skilled cartoonist drawing a picture of an octopus with a round Foxie head, the eyebrows raised dolefully. I haven’t come close to bonding with any of these creatures, but thanks to her I feel like I know them all a little better.

All that said, I don’t want to get over-sentimental about the idea of dogs as creatures whose inner lives are exactly comparable to ours. It’s natural enough for animal-lovers to project their own thoughts and emotions onto their pets, and in principle this can be a good thing: an extreme version of the empathy that allows us to relate to the experiences of a human being from another gender, class, religion or colour (and therefore linked to the concept of “speciesism” as a form of discrimination along the same continuum as racism or sexism). At the same time there is always a danger of carrying identification too far and seeing the animal purely in human terms, according to our limited sense of what emotion or self-consciousness is. And that is probably not good for an inter-species relationship.

But even if you accept that one can never really know what is going on in another creature’s mind (isn’t that also applicable to other humans?), there are strong indications for anyone who cares to look closely. Dogs who are well-loved come to acquire a very particular set of characteristics: there’s a softness in the eyes that suggests a sense of security, a feeling that nothing really bad can happen in their little world; it’s understood that frenetic tail-wagging is the correct response to the sight of any new human. At the other extreme, there is the perpetual wariness, the suggestion of fear hardened into aggression, on the face of the stray who knows he’s liable to be kicked or have a stone thrown at him. And somewhere in between, in some ways worst of all, is the cagey expression of the pet who lives in a house where people give him food and water and look after him in a detached sort of way, but where affection is in very short supply: a dog who isn’t allowed anywhere near the beds or sofas, who spends most of the day tied up on a short leash and who was quite possibly smacked hard the first time he chewed on a chair leg.

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In an essay about the self-absorption of human beings, our smug, anthropic inability to really “see” other creatures, the speculative-fiction writer Vandana Singh pointed out that urban development is geared to weeding out the natural world from human lives; it is based on the hubris that we are exalted creatures, capable of leading autonomous lives in our concrete bubbles, never mind the consequences for the ecology and for our own health. During my time with Foxie I got a firsthand sense of the determination with which some people cut themselves off from other life forms. There were fights with residents who don’t want to see dogs in the tiny excuse for a park we have downstairs. The small but devoted group of animal-lovers in our colony – people who have taken responsibility for vaccinations, sterilisations and food – constantly face the ire of the vast majority of households.

There is a tendency, among those who don’t like animals, to get bleeding-heart about “the many human beings who are in an equally bad state – shouldn’t we do something to help them first?” There are obvious logical flaws in this argument: is this a zero-sum game? Is human welfare unrelated to that of other life? Do we need to completely eradicate all human suffering from the planet – as if that is ever possible – before we turn our attention to non-human animals? But beyond that I find this self-serving argument funny because in my experience, many of the people who use it are just as apathetic to other human beings – the ones they don’t count among family and friends, or as “equals”, or the ones they don’t expect to benefit from. True compassion isn’t a quality that can neatly be rationed out by withholding it from one species (or social class, or religion, or caste – you pick the group).

And so, maybe I should end on a somewhat upbeat note by mentioning an old woman who leads a hand-to-mouth existence but can still see and feel things that many far more privileged people can’t. Pratima Devi – “Amma” to everyone who knows her – lives in a small shack next to south Delhi’s PVR Saket multiplex, five minutes from where I stay. For nearly three decades now, though earning a meager livelihood as a ragpicker, she has been looking after dozens of street dogs in the vicinity: feeding them, getting them neutered, maintaining relations with a local vet and animal-welfare organizations. But she is very far from the cliché of the socially inept recluse who is cut off from other human beings: her warmth and openness touches everyone who comes to know her. I discovered that quality for the first time a few days after Foxie died, when, driven by a need to reach out to someone who might understand, I went across to meet her. Since then, she has been a constant reminder of what open-heartedness is, and what seeing and feeling can really mean.

[Related posts: Foxie, a remembrance; An old woman and her dogs; Temple Grandin's Animals in Translation]

Amma revisited / pup in plaster

An update on Pratima Devi/Amma, who looks after dogs near the PVR Saket complex. (I wrote about her in this post.) She was very unwell with high blood pressure and fever for a few days, but that hasn’t stopped her from keeping a close eye on her dozens of wards. Just as she was recovering and getting back on her feet, one of the pups got hit by a passing bike, resulting in foreleg fractures. With the help of an acquaintance (and characteristically neglecting her own health), Amma rushed him to Friendicoes for treatment; both legs are in plaster now and the poor chap is restless and depressed about not being able to play, but he will hopefully recover in two or three weeks.

Once again, please do spread the word about her to animal-lovers in Delhi. Also: she has a new litter of pups – eight of them – born to a dog who evaded the van when it came to pick up candidates for sterilisation. They are all adoption-worthy. Here are fuzzy photos of them sleeping in a cardboard box together (you might not be able to make each one out, but hopefully you'll get a general impression of cute multipupdomness).

An old woman and her dogs

Just to spread the word about one of the most amazing people I know: an old woman who lives in a small makeshift shanty next to the PVR Anupam complex in Saket (near the entrance leading to the main parking lot). Pratima Devi – called “Amma” by most of her acquaintances – has been looking after street dogs for years now, on her meagre earnings from collecting and selling reusable garbage. She feeds them, gets them sterilised through Friendicoes or other local organisations; dozens of them sleep huddled together in and around her little home – it’s a truly wondrous sight for anyone who knows how territorial street dogs are, and how aggressively they keep newcomers from encroaching on their spaces.

I’ve only actually known Pratima Devi for the past six months, though we have both been in Saket – living five minutes apart – since 1987. I was vaguely aware of her existence over the years: when passing her side of the PVR complex on winter nights, I would see a couple of charpoys with dogs on them, a bonfire burning nearby. Once or twice I saw her looking very dishevelled, yelling at someone in what seemed an ill-tempered way, and I may have formed the impression that she was a belligerent nutcase who communicated only with animals and didn’t like people.

There was a story with a very interior, contemplative tone that I read as a child in one of our Hindi textbooks – I forget the title, but the premise has stayed with me all these years, long after much of what I learnt in school has been forgotten. It was told in the voice of a privileged man who sees a poor person and wants to go across and talk – to try and understand something of this person’s life and circumstances – but finds an invisible force holding him back; some combination of self-consciousness, social conditioning and perhaps an internal prejudice that makes him believe meaningful communication with someone from such a different background is impossible.

Whatever the case, though I was intrigued by the “kutton waali amma” who was often spoken of in our colony, I didn’t make an effort to come close or get to know her. That changed last June, after Foxie went. Driven by an urge that overrode all our hesitations and procrastinations, we went across and said namaste to Pratima Devi, and were relieved to find that she was extremely warm and friendly, and most happy to talk – not just about the dogs but about her life, and ours.

As we spoke to her over the next few days, many little details emerged. She left her village in West Bengal’s Nandigram in the early 1980s, she told us, mainly to get away from her husband, a lout and wastrel. She once worked as an ayah for the family of the actor-model Rahul Dev (and is still in occasional touch with them). A tea-stall she ran in the spot where she currently lives was shut down by the MCD; later she set up a little temple against the wall near her shack – it has, in a way, legitimised her presence, made it more acceptable to the people around (including the many youngsters who park their bikes nearby and are unnerved by the dogs). One of her sons lives in Sangam Vihar, working as a mistri – she has the option of staying with him (I’ve met him, he seems a kindly, concerned chap), but she can’t leave her dogs, and besides one senses that self-sufficiency is important to her. She was awarded a Godfrey Phillips prize for “social courage” a few years ago and proudly shows photos from the ceremony to anyone who visits her. She has applied for an Aadhaar card but is puzzled by the complications of the procedure; a card was once despatched but never made it to her because she has no fixed address. (I’ve seen the application form – it simply says “Near Saket Shauchalay, PVR Complex”.) Many of the dogs have film-star names - Raj Kumar, Dharmendra - which they live up to with their strutting and preening.

Every week or so I go across and check on Pratima Devi, take some food, but hardly ever has she given the impression of being in need. When I show up and ask if I can get some bread and milk for the dogs from the nearby Mother Dairy, she nods with an indulgent little smile, as if she is doing me a favour (and of course, in a post-Foxie world, she is). Or if the evening’s ration has already arrived, she asks me to come after a day or two, or to call her beforehand to check. On one occasion my mother, cradling one of the new pups, remarked aloud that she felt like adopting this one. You’d think that Pratima Devi, given her hand-to-mouth situation, would be only too glad for people to take dogs off her hand, but she practically jumped up and said “Nahin nahin! Abhi yeh bahut chhoti hai – isse mere paas kuch din aur rehna do.” (“No, she’s too little now – let me look after her for a few more days.”)

But it isn’t my intention to paint a rosy picture of her life. One often hears clichés about the “warm smiles” of the poor – clichés built on the sentimentalising of poverty, on the self-serving myopia of the well-off person who chances to see poor people in their moments of relative comfort and tells himself “They have nothing, but look how happy they are.” I have felt strongly about such hypocrisy for a long time, so it came as a jolt to me one day when I realised I may have been adopting a similar attitude to Pratima Devi; taking for granted her apparently infinite capacity for cheerfulness and optimism.

It happened on a day I went to see her after more than a week. She was with a couple of her associates – a parking attendant and another garbage-collector – and looking more depressed and agitated than I had ever seen her. The previous few days had been particularly hard: she had been laid up with a bad fever and cold, had been unable to work or to go to INA market to buy meat for the dogs, and it happened to be one of those phases when hardly anyone had come across to see her or offer help - her son wasn’t in town either.

Moaning through a backache, describing how one of her pups (a tiny Dalmatian, abandoned by some heartless sub-human) had a festering wound and was being treated by a local doctor for an exorbitant Rs 100 a day, gentle Pratima Devi muttered and fumed, half to herself, half to us: she used maa-behen gaalis as she spoke of a man who had promised to help her secure an electricity connection through the MCD, but who had then made off with more than a thousand rupees. “Gareebon ka sab phaaydaa uthaate hain,” she wailed, her face showing no trace of its characteristic warmth and openness. She wondered aloud what would happen to her dogs after she passed on. (It’s a thought that worries everyone who knows her; though these are street dogs, they are more pampered and loved than many house pets. When she’s away even for an hour or two, they get restless and start chasing after passing autorickshaws to see if she has returned.)

This encounter was a bucket of cold water in my face. I have seen her many times since that day, and she has mostly been back to her upbeat self – but that one day, when the mask slipped, is not something to forget.

I didn’t intend this post as a call for aid, but Pratima Devi has had more bad days than good ones recently (being old and living on the street as the Delhi winter gets worse will do that), and she could always do with some help, even if she doesn’t ask for it. So do go across and see her if you are in Saket sometime, and if you like dogs. (I wouldn’t normally put in that second proviso – Pratima Devi is well worth meeting even if you aren’t an animal-lover – but one must be practical and spell out these things; if you get within 10 feet of her you’ll have to contend with a few dogs first growling softly and then, when they know you mean no harm, sniffing or nuzzling you.) Or if you’re interested in meeting her but would prefer a sort of “introduction”, send me an email and I’ll take you across.

P.S. must say this, though I wish I didn’t have to. It infuriates me that people sometimes come by in their cars and leave their animals with this poor old woman, treating her like a fully funded animal shelter – which she emphatically is not. (Not that registered animal shelters have it easy either.) Her heart is big enough for all these dogs (her son tells me she holds the compassionate but highly impractical view that she should get bitches spayed only after they have had one litter of pups), but it increases her burden enormously, as well as adding to her worries about the future. So please, DO NOT use her as a dumping ground for unwanted pets.

P.P.S. Here's a photo of Pratima Devi with two of her friends at an event held to mark Anti-Rabies Day; Abhilasha went with her.

In praise of the Delhi Metro

Working from home for the past few years has softened me up in some ways – for example, I can no longer smile at the many visions of apocalyptic carnage on Delhi’s roads. Driving in this city was stressful enough even when I was doing it regularly, but having fallen out of practice I find that the veins in my forehead make popping sounds when I’m stuck in traffic for even 10 or 15 minutes. Not good for the old blood pressure and all that.

In recent years I’ve rarely travelled more than three or four km beyond Saket unless it’s for an important appointment; I don’t attend most of the book-related events I get invites for, especially the ones held near Connaught Place (spending an hour each way on the road and driving in circles to find parking space is not my idea of evening fun). Besides, our colony has become an autonomous little village since the malls opened. With a variety of good restaurants and coffee joints, bookstores, music stores, plenty of walking and sitting space, and pretty much everything else one needs, there hasn’t been much incentive to go to, say, Khan Market, which was once a regular haunt.

Now the Metro is changing this to an extent. When I wrote this post in 2008, it seemed like the construction would go on forever and we’d never get to see actual trains (all we saw then were hordes of solemn-faced, helmeted men wandering about our park with giant measuring instruments, occasionally visiting houses to take photos of every crack on every wall so we couldn’t subsequently blame the damage on the vibrations). But it’s all in working order now, and a huge convenience – these days I sometimes find an excuse to get out for a while even if I don’t strictly have to.

The initial sense of well-being comes from the fortunate location of the two Yellow Line stations in the Saket area. The so-called Malviya Nagar station is a minute’s walk from my mother’s flat where I lived for over 20 years (and where I still spend most of my working day), while the Saket station is a minute’s walk from our other flat. This makes the decision to travel by train a straightforward one. If I have to go to Connaught Place or even somewhere closer like Green Park or Dilli Haat (right next to the INA station), it’s a no-brainer. In the winter months, it's a comfortable 2-km walk from the Jor Bagh station to Khan Market or the India Habitat Centre (where the Penguin Spring Fever fest is starting today) or the Alliance Francaise (where I was in conversation with Namita Gokhale yesterday).

The stations are spacious and (at this point anyway) clean, and the trains run smoothly most of the time; so far I’ve found an empty seat on only two occasions, but standing isn’t a problem for a trip that takes 20-25 minutes at most. If I had to nitpick, I’d say that travelling on the Saket-Rajiv Chowk route can be monotonous – the entire line is underground, nothing to see outside the windows, and reading isn’t really an option if you’re standing and the train is crowded. (The journey in the opposite direction to Gurgaon – with the line elevating as it approaches Qutab Minar – is pleasanter.)

But on the whole - massively empowering. I can think of only one possible improvement: given that a section of the Malviya Nagar station is located directly under our house, it would be most useful if we could get digging rights and install a sliding pole that would take me directly from my room to the platform a few metres beneath (like Groucho shinning down the fire pole into the ballroom in Duck Soup). But that’s the lazy, mollycoddled, freelancing homebody talking again, and you’re free to ignore anything he says.

[As a tribute to crowded trains, here’s the great opening scene of Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, a film I wrote about here]

Saket vistas: the Metro crane

The Saket metro station is being constructed near the traffic intersection just beyond the block of flats I live in and a highlight of our evenings these days is the sight of a giant crane hovering over the tops of nearby houses. Most of the time it’s horizontal, as in the picture below, but once in a while it swings around and comes to rest in a nearly upright position, and then it looks like it’s giving the finger to the colony.

The photo doesn’t really capture the effect but it's a grand view, especially after dark. Here we are in our enclosed neighborhood park, walking the pup, and it’s quiet like a village green – except that there’s a huge mechanical pulley moving back and forth in a portion of the sky, illuminated by the metro site dozens of feet below it. It makes me feel like a character in a 1950s alien-invasion novel set in a quiet British town where nothing much is expected to happen.

The construction has been going on for ever with no end in sight and our detoured roads are looping crazily all over the place, so the wife and I have been mulling ways for the DMRC to employ the crane to other purposes. I mean, if you have a monster crane in the sky, shouldn’t you make imaginative use of it? Abhilasha proposes turning it into a tourist attraction for a few hours each day: it can be called the Saket Eye and members of the paying public can take turns riding in the thing. Since most of us south Delhiites don’t have access to a bird’s-eye view of the city, this would be a welcome move.

Another option is to use the crane as a pick-up facility to help clear traffic jams. Get buses air-lifted at the intersection and safely set them down a minute or so later at the Malviya Nagar-Panchshila crossing. (These days it takes more than 20 minutes to travel that distance in the conventional way.) In fact, if a few more cranes of similar size are added to the existing one and placed at strategic locations, we could have a regular midair shuttle service at our disposal.

Even more practically: anyone who has water tanks situated on the top floor of a tall building knows what a hassle it is when the main-line supply dries out and you have to call the Jal Board’s tanker to the house. For starters you’re very lucky if the tanker even arrives on the same day, but when it does it takes a painfully long time to get the unwieldy pipes to the terrace. Give the crane an extra limb and program it to stretch out an arm, suck water out of the Jal Board’s colossal colony water tank and then distribute said water into all our little black containers one by one. (Earlier post on the evils of water tanks here.)

As winter sets in other possibilities will arise, such as using the crane as a well-lit landing aid that can point descending aircraft in the right direction on foggy nights. As responsible citizens one must keep looking for ways to extract side-benefits from interminable projects.

How to keep the city clean...

...or new techniques in self-perpetuation. Spotted on a park bench in Saket:

Food review - Spice Market

Despite many opportunities I’ve mostly shied away from doing food reviews, the chief reason being that I like to be able to simply enjoy a good meal without having to analyse or make mental notes about it (it’s bad enough that reading books and watching films is no longer as relaxed as it used to be). But recently I did a restaurant review for Time Out magazine. The place was the Spice Market, situated behind the Select mall in Saket; to reach it by car, you have to negotiate a rough and bumpy road alongside the Marriott hotel. It’s a homely restaurant that makes a spirited if obvious effort to live up to its name. Sacks of spices line its interiors, there are red chillies and coriander seeds (or convincing facsimiles of red chillies and coriander seeds) in the decorative glass bowls on the tables, and even the artwork and photos on the walls have a spice theme. There is a nouveau-Indian cuisine feel about the extensive menu, which includes pungent dishes from around the country.

For starters, we ordered the intriguingly named ganne ka kebab and the dal pakodi. The former turned out to be flavourful chicken seekhs wrapped around sugarcane sticks; it’s a nice idea, and if you’re willing to forgo mundane rules of etiquette and chew hard and noisily on a cane stick at a restaurant table, the warm juice nicely offsets the dryness of the meat. The dal pakodi – compact little balls filled with moong daal – passed muster, though they were a little too tough for my taste. We washed this down with rose lassi – rich, creamy, very sweet – and a pungent and invigorating strawberry cinnamon mojito, which my wife insisted was the highlight of the meal.

Next, we ordered a Parsi chicken biryani main course: I'm not sure there was anything notably Parsi about the preparation, but the dish was greatly enhanced by the accompanying Burani raita, which had a garlic base and a distinct, pleasing tinge of mustard. The big disappointment though was the boatman’s prawn curry, which is listed on the “chef’s special” page on the menu – it was an unremarkable onion-and-tomato curry, not too different from standard dhaba fare and soaked much too generously in oil. Definitely didn’t justify the price (Rs 625). Since we already had a rice dish at hand, we opted to have the curry with tandoori phulka, soft and warm like a homemade chapati.

The food had been more than filling, especially for a summer afternoon, but in journalistic interests we ploughed on. Our dessert choices were a very interesting blackcurrant phirni and a sampler that conveniently provided miniature versions of five items on the dessert menu, including a gulab jamun dunked in chocolate sauce and a mango shrikand. It was a decent way to wrap up the meal, even though we weren’t especially hungry at this point.

Spice Market tries hard and the service is polite, efficient and well-informed, but based on our experience I wouldn’t say the food is good value for money. However, one has to make allowances for the limitations of the food-review format (we visited anonymously and could only order a meal for two - couldn't sample a variety of dishes) and it probably isn’t fair to judge the place on a single visit. There’s a lot of variety on the menu - from Rajasthani laal maas to Goan fish curry to Bengali kosha mangsho - though this can also be indicative of trying to cater to too many different tastes and not doing full justice to any of them. On the whole, I’d say it’s a pleasant place to visit if you’re in the mood for appetizers and a couple of cool drinks rather than a full-fledged meal. Or if you’re looking to escape the hurly-burly of the Select mall, which has its giant behind turned disdainfully to the restaurant.

Meal for two (including a non-alcoholic drink, starter, main course and dessert each): Rs 3,000. 12 noon till midnight. Liquor license awaited. For reservations, call 9958453636.

[Some earlier food-related posts here, here and here]

Flyovers down under

[From my Metro Now column]

I’ve concluded that the multi-level underground parking lots in Delhi’s newest malls are versions of the clover leaf-shaped flyovers that are staples in big cities around the world. In fact, if you can picture a clover flyover that goes deep down into the ground, it’s practically the same thing.

Many of us still have trouble understanding the logic that dictates the construction of flyovers, especially the complicated, winding ones. But in a large urban centre where the vehicle count rises exponentially while the geographical area stays constant, one way to prevent an eternal traffic pile-up is to keep increasing the road length within a restricted area. (The other ways are too gruesome to mention here.) Simply using direct routes to get from point A to point B is no longer feasible, so roads must constantly be elevated. Or designed in fancy shapes where you no longer simply turn right if you have to go right. This is what you do instead:

Turn left.
Then turn right thrice.
Next, turn left two more times and take four consecutive U-turns.
Now make your car jump up and down like the jeeps in cops-and-robbers scenes in Hindi films of the 1980s.

If you follow all these steps carefully you’ll find yourself back where you started – and now you can turn right and go down the road that will take you to the next clover-shaped flyover.

The multi-level underground parking lots in the Select Citywalk mall in Saket and the Great India Place mall in Noida are based roughly on the same principle: keep vehicles moving in circles for as long as possible while vaguely maintaining the illusion that they will get somewhere in the end. On my last visit to Select, I spent close to 15 minutes driving about in a subterranean maze: making countless hairpin turns, following what must have been dozens of “Vehicle exit” signs and encountering dozens of parking attendants with arms outstretched (unless it was the same parking attendant trying to be funny) before my car finally saw the light of day. Exiting, I noted that the total mileage I had clocked up in the parking lot was 3.2 km; I also noted that the spot where my car had been parked was approximately 40 feet away from the point where I eventually escaped the dungeon.

I dream of a future where this city will have multiple flyovers, one piled up on top of the other, with new mini-cities constructed on the topmost ones, so that a flyover eventually becomes not the means to an end but the end itself. And where people will visit malls not for the shopping but for the thrill of being able to zip around in underworld labyrinths for hours on end, because the city roads outside will all be jammed.

Neighborhood vistas: the brand name

Spotted outside a DDA flat in Saket:


Get it? C-1 = She-1. So did these guys decide to open a “beauty destination” only because they couldn’t resist punning on their address? Hard to say. But it’s an inventive bit of brand naming, and maybe the residents of nearby flats will follow suit. C-8 ("She Ate") could be a ladies-only restaurant. B-21 could become a rejuvenation centre with the tagline “Be 21 again”. D-80 could become “The 80”, a club for senior citizens. And C-420 ("She 420") could be a school for con-women. So many possibilities...

The Saket column

[Did this column for Time Out Delhi’s “I love such-and-such colony” section. Warned them that I'm indifferent to many things about the colony I've lived in for 20 years, and so the piece would be too lukewarm for the “I love Saket” headline that the column format would bestow on it. But it was a nice nostalgia piece to write. Have a longer version of it somewhere on my laptop, will put that up soon.]

We moved to Saket in September 1987. Still years away from acquiring road sense, I had little idea then of where this quiet colony placed on the map in relation to the rest of South Delhi, but I'd heard the area was once a forestland where people went fox-hunting, and it seemed a very adventurous thing to live in such a place. To reach the first-floor flat we made our home, we had to drive along a narrow, horseshoe-shaped lane off the main road and it felt like the opening scene of Rebecca, trees parting to reveal Manderley in the distance. The block we lived in bordered a small park, cut off from the main road, and perfect for cycling in and for playing cricket.

A couple of hundred metres down the road was a commercial complex that wasn't exactly the picture of activity: six or seven small shops (including the shacks with the dusty photocopier machines) scattered haphazardly about, a line of office doors and a single, downbeat cinema hall called Anupam. We never saw a film at this hall in the first decade of our stay; we were videocassette junkies and the complex wasn't a "happening" place, this being years before the Baristas, Subways and McDonalds' moved in to what is now PVR Saket.

Neighborhoods change gradually, through a slow accumulation of events, but in my mind's eye Saket's transformation can be condensed into a few cuts or dissolves, like in films where Master Raju jumps onto a train and becomes Amitabh Bachchan. One moment we are playing cricket in our small ground, a ball hits one of the few cars parked around the circumference and an uncle bellows that we should take our game elsewhere; the next second the park has lost its greenery and turned into an overcrowded car space where we have to find increasingly innovative ways to manoeuvre our vehicles in the evenings. One day we hear the Anupam hall is shutting down and the next thing we know we are gaping at the exteriors of India's first multiplex, plusher than any movie-hall we have seen before. (The interim period, many months of scaffolds and workers and tarpaulins, seems now to have occurred in fast-forward.)

Happily, some things haven't changed. I've gone to the same barbershop for 20 years (it used to be called "He-Man and She" or something such, now it's "A Cut Above"). Familiar faces, links to a more innocent time, still sit behind the counters of the chemist shops and the Mother Dairy en route to PVR. And though the name for our block of flats has changed to the duplicitous "Golf View Apartments" (the Lado Sarai golf course is nearby but nary a glimpse can be had), we still refer to them as DDA flats.

It would be dishonest to claim that I think Saket is a great neighborhood in some overriding sense. It's a pleasant, self-sufficient little place at its best, and crowded and traffic-spoilt at its worst, like dozens of other colonies. If it has a distinct character, I can't claim to know what that is. My love for it comes from intangibles, from the fact that the most important personal spaces of my life were situated here. The house I've lived in for two decades. The mini-market where we played Mario Bros video games outside a tiny grocery shop. The tree where a beloved kitten learnt how to climb for the first time. The large, invigorating F-Block park (a real park, not like the one outside our house) where I've gone for thousands of evening walks over the years, and where I sat on a bench with my girlfriend, now wife, in the early days of our courtship while a cop eyed us suspiciously from a distance. The Sports Complex with its giant swimming pool, clay-courts and cove-like entrance.

There are other advantages to living here. The growth of the NCR has turned Saket into a very convenient location, more or less equidistant from Connaught Place, Gurgaon and Noida (approx. 15 km each way). The Qutab Minar and the Mehrauli ruins are a ten-minute drive away. Except on Friday and Saturday evenings, when the road leading to PVR gets clogged, there isn't a major traffic problem. Let's see if that changes when the new malls near Pushpa Vihar open; I’m feeling ambivalent about those, but there’s going to be a huge new Landmark bookstore, and that’s something to look forward to.

What all this adds up to is that many of my best memories are connected with Saket, and I can't think of much that's wrong with the place. When you're living in a loud, messy city, not out of choice but circumstance, that's near the best you can hope for.

[A related post: PVR memories/Madhuban “Fine Dining”]

Madhuban Fine Dining, and PVR memories

Wandering about the PVR Saket complex after more than a month (London interlude, general busyness), I sensed something different in the air, like there had been a sudden shift in the coordinates governing the place. Then I turned a corner and saw these words blinking at me from a garish green neon board:

“Madhuban. Fine Dining.”

Now I’ve seen a lot happen to the PVR complex during the 18 years I’ve lived in this area. I’ve seen it transform bit by bit, layer by layer, from a modest, bare-boned little colony centre into a bustling hub of Delhi yuppie/puppie-dom. But looking at that new board I realised once and for all how irretrievably things had changed.

A little background here. I’ve lived in Saket since 1987. Anyone who’s only ever seen the complex as it’s been in the last few years will have trouble picturing what it was like back then. It wasn’t the PVR complex in the first place - the hall was called Anupam and we never went there, it had a seedy feel about it and we were the video-junkie generation anyway. A good decade before the Nirulas and McDonalds started moving in, there were maybe just six small shops scattered around the whole complex – and that’s counting the huts with the creaky photocopy machines outside. Where there is now a Barista, a Buzz, a Café Coffee Day, a Pizza Hut and a Subway, there was then only a bleak, anonymous line of office doors that seemed forever to be locked. The description of a red-letter event in the complex’s history was one muggy day when the He-Man barbershop (where you’ll still find me at 9.30 AM on every eighth Sunday) got an air-conditioner installed and people cheered and gave each other high-fives outside the shop – now that was Progress.

And right from the beginning there was Madhuban, this little eatery with “Indian. Mughlai. Chinese” proudly written outside. Back then, it was the closest we had to a fine-dining restaurant in the complex, hell, anywhere in Saket. Never mind that it was so dimly lit as to induce immediate somnolence in anyone who entered it. Never mind that six tables were squeezed tightly together in a space meant for three. Never mind that the surly owner sat at a tiny makeshift reception two feet away from the nearest table and glowered at his customers. Or that the “Chinese” was classic Punju-Chin (or Chinjabi as we call it): greasy noodles and fried rice; over-salted sweet corn chicken soup besieged by heavy doses of Ajinomoto and prepared so carelessly that I once found half an egg submerged in my soup bowl; and that most infamous of culinary inventions, the “chicken Manchurian”. It was still the only restaurant we had within a three-km radius and we loved it – and even when we realised that going there to eat wasn’t a very cool thing to do, it became our favourite home-delivery joint.

But what I’ll always remember Madhuban for is its tandoori chicken and daal makhni: for good or bad, my idea of what those dishes should be like has been defined for life by the way Madhuban prepared them. The chicken pieces weren’t as large or juicy as you’d get in more expensive restaurants, but they were more substantial than the scrawny things you’d find at most dhabas: just the right size as far as I was concerned. The preparation was basic – no excessive masala-smearing or self-conscious attempt to create a nouvelle-north Indian cuisine; the tandoor was allowed to do most of the work, and it did just enough to ensure that the natural flavour of the meat came through. And the daal was just creamy enough. The combination was superb value for money.

In the mid-1990s, strange things began to happen in our colony. Rumours grew of a light from the east, of a man named Bijli who had tied up with an Australian company to set up India’s first “multiplex” here. Rich relatives in other countries sent secret missives disclosing that multiplexes were cinema halls with three or four screens instead of one. We gaped in disbelief. Anupam shut down, then several months later we saw scaffolds and workers and large tarpaulins obscuring the building. In mid-1997 PVR Anupam opened and I went to see the first film shown there, Jerry Maguire, nothing of which registered because I was too busy alternately leaning back in the plush sofa-chairs and sinking my feet into the carpeted softness of the floor. Things would never be the same again in our modest little Saket which had, only 30 or so years earlier, been a forestland where men would go rabbit-hunting.

But somehow, through all the changes of the last few years, Madhuban soldiered on. It continued to exist in its squalid, poorly lit state, it refused to accept credit cards (I’m assuming it will now, in its new avatar) or to make any sort of effort to step up its publicity. It became an anachronism in this now-hep commercial centre and it was obvious that change – or closure – was inevitable. The only thing I’m surprised about is how long it has taken.

A spacious new dining area has now been created on the first floor, above where the restaurant used to be. The surly owner will probably be relegated to a back-room, replaced by someone more adept at flashing friendly smiles. Electricity will be introduced so diners will be able to see their food as they eat it. But I don’t expect many changes other than these cosmetic ones. There will be no elaborate launch. The food critics will stay away. If the Empress of Food Writing (and the Empress too of Bad Punning) in Delhi condescends to include it in her annual food guide, she’ll probably end a dismissive review with the line “There is nothing Madhur about this Van”. And all this is just as well. I don’t want a new lot of customers competing for that tandoori chicken, and perhaps urging the owners to jazz up the food.

I am a little miffed about the new name though. As far as I’m concerned, Madhuban has been fine dining for the best part of two decades. Why spell it out now?

Earth googling

Okay so I know I’ve got in on this really late, but just in case there’s anyone still left to recommend this to: Google Earth is superb! Had been looking at it perfunctorily on others’ comps in office, but yesterday for the first time I sat myself down for an indepth session, tracing aerial views of roads and landmarks in Delhi.

Though I did a lot of route-tracking (especially around the Panchshila-Saket region, which is where I’ve lived for most of my life), my points of reference were open-air swimming pools, which are quite clearly visible even without zooming in too close. The one in the Panchshila club, where I learnt swimming as a child; the one in my school (St Columba’s), the large one at the Saket Sports Complex (where I’ve been going the past few years) – and most memorably, the one at the Saket Cultural Club, which is just across the road from the PVR complex. (Most memorably because this one is more distinct in appearance than the others: there’s a small circular shallow pool for kids just a little way off from the main, rectangle-shaped one, and I could see both very clearly.)

I’ve blogged before about how new technology (or even a signpost of urban development, like a major new flyover that completely alters a landscape) sometimes puts up a wall between me and my childhood memories; making me feel like a stranger to my former selves, making the city feel unfamiliar too. This is one of the few times it had the opposite effect. To start with, there’s something comforting about viewing familiar roads from the perspective provided by Google Earth. Seen from this angle, you can’t make out that much has changed (except for the odd detour or two). The city hasn’t really shifted - notwithstanding all those flyovers and the metro construction, the fundamentals are still in place. It’s a whimsical way of looking at things, but I’ll take it.

The best part (and I’m sure everyone has done this too) is homing in on your house and then clicking on ‘zoom out’: watching as the view gets smaller and smaller, progressing from individual lanes to apartment blocks to colonies until it encompasses the whole city, then the entire NCR region, then the country…and so on until you have the globe hurtling through black space. Giddying experience, puts a lot in perspective.

Frustratingly, my Net connection at home is still slow, but I’ve downloaded the application anyway. Much exploring ahead. If you haven’t tried it yet, do.

PVR Talkies!

Walking home from the PVR Saket complex this evening, a copy of Shantaram in one hand and a bag of shwarmas in the other, I encountered a group of men dressed in dhotis and worn shirts, who asked me for directions. They looked like they had been walking a very long distance.

“Bhai saab, yeh PVR taakis kahan hai?” one asked me, or at least that’s what it sounded like.

I figured they meant the movie hall but couldn’t be completely sure; for all I knew, any number of new buildings/offices/dhabas might have come up in the colony that were informally called PVR-something-or-the-other. When I hesitated momentarily, one of the other men said “jahan phillum lagti hai” and simultaneously the first one said “PVR taakis” again. I directed them to the hall and walked off, realizing that what the first guy had meant was “PVR Talkies”. That was so cool. PVR Talkies. Jahan talking picture dekhne ko milta hai. Takes you right back to another era, doesn’t it, while also serving as a reminder that many movie theatres outside of the big cities are still referred to that way.

Anyway, I loved it, partly because of the nostalgia I sometimes feel for what the PVR complex used to be like 15, or even 10, years ago (but that’s material for another blog). PVR Talkies. Wonder what Ajay Bijli would have to say about that.

Delhi Story contd

Last year in London, I was a bit foxed that my cousin Neal thought it the most natural thing in the world to use the tube every day for travelling to his office in Canary Wharf – despite having his own car in town. I was thinking about that again during my conversation with Lalit Nirula, who I met last week for some insights into the changing face of Delhi, for that Big Story I’m terrifiedly working on. Mr Nirula, who’s lived in Delhi for all of his 62 years, agreed to the interview only after confirming several times that I wouldn’t be asking him personal questions ("personal" meaning related to his company; Nirula’s is famously media-shy).

He believes that once the Delhi Metro is completely functional – and of course that will take at least 10-12 more years – the travelling culture within the city will change. "The youngsters who will come of age in another decade-and-a-half," said Mr Nirula, "will grow up without this snobbish attitude to the metro that all of us have now. In another two decades, even youngsters from upper-middle class families won’t be averse to using the metro to travel to work, rather than contend with the stress of driving/finding parking space."

Chatting with Mr Nirula was a delight. He had the light of fond recollection in his eyes and his memories of what the city used to be were fascinating, especially to someone who’s lived 27-odd years in Delhi, never been away for more than 4 months at a stretch, and always been conditioned to believe that one can’t possibly have an unqualified love for this soulless city – that love if any must be tempered by words like "grudging" or "ambivalent".

He painted a charming picture of the Connaught Place of another age, when most of the shop-owners and office-goers in the vicinity knew each other by name, and a universally recognised churan-seller did rounds of the middle circle on his bicycle. He also recalled how, in the early 1960s, his father stopped the car by the side of the rough road they were travelling on, and picked up a head of cabbage from the adjacent field. "That cabbage field," said Mr Nirula, "was in what you now know as Hauz Khas." - a colony in mid-south Delhi which, as the city’s southward expansion continues, is now practically in the heart of the capital. It reminded me of my father’s stories about going hunting in the 1960s in the forestland that Saket, where I now live, used to be.

Am still not completely sold on this Delhi Development story I’m working on – one learns very quickly to be cynical about the claims made by authorities and their booklets - but who knows, it could turn out to have promise after all.