Rana Dasgupta - Capital - The Eruption of Delhi

We are sitting under Mediterranean-style parasols on the roof of one of Delhi’s upscale shopping malls. There are other tables around us where people speak on mobile phones and sip brightly coloured drinks.

Down below, the mall encloses a cosy courtyard of cafés and restaurants. There is a billboard showing a larger-than-life photo of the new Mercedes S-Class on one side and, on the other, a video wall showing fashion ads. The architecture mimics those Italian Renaissance drawings of perfectly geometrical cities: there are classical columns and porticoes, and a square piazza where docile people are pleasingly arranged. In the middle are fountains, which periodically start up a synchronised display accompanied by loud Johann Strauss waltzes; people stop their conversations during these episodes — they don’t have much choice — to watch the plumes of water prettily conversing, copying each other, chasing each other like chorus girls. The waltz ends with crashing chords and all the fountains ejaculate simultaneously. It feels like everyone should get married at this point, or kiss, or something. But conversations just resume, and the piazza reverts to how it was before.

Delhi’s malls began small and late, but as the 2000s wore on, they sucked up more and more of the city’s resources and attention. Great amounts of public land were released to private developers, who built frenziedly — quickly covering up, for instance, the ancient ruins they came upon as they went — and by the end of the century’s first decade, several great air-conditioned consumer strongholds had been added to the thousand-year catalogue of palaces built on this plain.

The new mall we are in has been erected just next to the airport — which is why low planes roar so frequently over our heads — and in many ways it has absorbed the spirit of its location. The marshalls who wave cars around the underground lot seem to have been borrowed from the runways next door: their arm signals make you feel you are perched in a cockpit. Like an airport, the mall is entirely cut off from the space around: if we take the trouble to look through the screen of trees along the wall on the other side of this terrace, we can see that the landscape around the succulent mall, with all its lawns and fountains, is like a CNN cliché of ravaged earth. Right now, a truck has come to deliver water to the large slum below us: women and children are rushing out of their houses with as many plastic containers as they can carry.

Inside the mall, the number of men and women wearing aviator sunglasses continues the feeling — as if buying French fashion or American technology were an activity only a shade less intrepid than flying a fighter jet. There is something aeronautic about everything — as if membership of the small minority of people who can shop here brings with it a desire to lift off from the chaotic sprawl of the contemporary Indian city into a kind of well-enclosed Duty Free in the sky. Through its refracted memories of European metropolitan achievement — the Italian piazza, the Viennese ballroom — the mall seems to present itself as part of a long history of ideal cities, but this ideal city, of course, is not a city at all. It is not even really ‘in’ the city, since it can only be accessed by highway, and then only by a very small proportion of the population. It is a place where all transactions seem to serve the same purpose, a place with bag scans and body checks at the entrance. Just as the ideal home for so many of Delhi’s rich seems to be a five-star hotel, the ideal city seems to be an airport.

“My parents started looking for a husband for me as soon as I finished my MA,” says Sukhvinder, who is tall, quick-witted and hilarious. “I’m Sikh, so we generally don’t wait too long.”

One should not imagine that arranged marriages are the burden of ‘tradition’ imposed by regressive parents on ‘modern’ and unwilling children, for the situation is often more complex than that. In many cases, the parents of those having arranged marriages today did not themselves have arranged marriages, nor have they forced their children into them. Many arranged marriages emerge therefore, not from tradition, but from the rush of contemporary circumstance. In these days of uncertainty and change, choosing to go it alone is for many people too isolated, and too risky, a prospect. Children who have moved very far from the ambit of their parents feel that something should tie them down. And arranged marriages provide many reassurances in an era so short of them: in such alliances, responsibility for the couple’s prosperity and happiness belongs, not to the couple alone, but to the combined ranks of their families.

But for Sukhvinder there was added pressure because she had a cleft palate, which her parents felt would make it more difficult to find a husband for her. So she joined those thousands of family groups who at any one time are sitting across from another family group in Delhi’s restaurants and hotels, trying to strike up a conversation.

“Every weekend I’d meet guys. Each time I would sit totally disinterested because you know you have this thing in your mind about a guy that you want to marry and all the guys I met were jerks. I don’t know why everyone pretends to be extremely modern and out there and inside they’re complete idiots if I may say so. They’re in the party circle and very well dressed up and all of that, very expensive shades. And when they open their mouths you’re like, ‘ Oh my God. ’”

Parents use many methods to find prospective spouses for their offspring. Professional matchmakers cover a particular caste group or social class: they circulate albums containing single men and women’s résumés accompanied by photographs which, especially in the case of women, are minor masterpieces all of their own, the make-up professionally done beforehand, the carefully styled hair borne aloft on studio fans. But such matchmakers can serve only a small and well-delineated universe of partners. For a long time now, the ‘matrimonial’ pages of the newspapers have been the primary way to reach out into the city at large — and for traditionalists they are still the sole trusted route. In the last few years, however, online marriage agencies have stormed the market — in part because they also offer additional features such as detective and astrology services. Detectives check up on a person’s marital and sexual past, and verify the information they provide — that they really are HIV-negative, for instance, or vegetarian, or perfectly sighted. Astrologers ensure that there are not terrible clashes between the birth stars of the two prospective partners.

“I wanted to get married to someone I could have a conversation with. After ‘Hi’, most of these guys had nothing to say. ‘Don’t show the real you,’ is what my parents kept telling me, ‘don’t open your mouth too wide,’ so I’m trying to keep my mouth shut and I’m sitting listening to these guys and they’re like, ‘So do you know how to cook?’ and I’m like ‘Cook? No. I’ve always worked.’ ‘ Oh .’”

It is difficult to convey in text the lobotomised tone in which Sukhvinder imitates her male interlocutors. Her renditions have me weeping with mirth.

“Then they would say, ‘Do you intend to quit your job?’ ‘No.’ ‘ Oh . Because we don’t have any women working in our family.’ So I would say, ‘I think this isn’t happening then.’ ‘ Oh . You have very strong views.’ I’m like, ‘Yeah.’ ‘ Oh .’ So the conversation used to end right there.”

Sukhvinder and her sister are directors of their father’s business, which manufactures equipment for the printing industry. She is in charge of operations, which means that her working day often ends late. Quick-thinking and sure of her judgements, it is easy to see why she would be good at what she does.