Purani dilli

As I wade through the streets of old delhi, i find myself surrounded by a cacophony of horns and this feeling of eternal sadness. There's misery everywhere I see. People are carrying it on their backs along with the burden of goods. Someone is fighting with a shopkeeper for a cheaper rate of turmeric. Another fights with her husband because he did not pick her up on time. A child is pushing his mother to buy a toy he really really wants. The mother is cajoling her child as she feels her empty purse and her son's yearning.

Yearning, so much of it exists outside misery. Yet it's the only kind we see here. The magic of Dilli works on me and I find myself yearning too. For happiness. In this pothole of despair. How can there only be sadness. The need to romanticise it, the urge of a poet, the need to hear even a second of laughter. Still, misery prevails, followed by bird cries and the sound of people's hearts breaking over and over again as they try to build it back together.

It's built on railway tracks, my father tells me. The houses shake when a train passes by. But the people, they are forever trembling under the load of debt and sorrow. There are people sleeping on the road, with their hand covering their faces, to hide from the sun, from its glare. But the hands won't protect them from the glare of all the people that walk past them. A Mercedes cruises through slim roads and dead bodies. Shoving their disdain down everyone's throats. It's cuz they don't work. They laze around. As if poverty is a choice and not an imposition. 

There's a building a few metres ahead. It's a railway station. Large, well built for a govt building. It's privatized now, I hear my dad say. It almost looks like a monster. Maybe from a Disney movie. Behemoth. If I strain my ears, I can almost hear a villanous laughter come from it as it peers down at the mortals, carrying their sadness and their dead on their backs.

It's so pretty, I say. Talking about rundown houses with their chipped paint and broken glass windows. Funny how destitution has become an aesthetic. The one that looks good through an old film camera, with just the right amount of lighting and thousand dollar instruments. But you know what's even funnier. How chipped paint on my walls looks so hideous. The broken window needs to be fixed as quickly as it can be. Narrow streets near my house do not arouse the poet in me. Instead, they latch onto my inferiority, to my shame. They just become another reason to not invite my friends to my house. But as I wade through the the streets of old delhi, with it's rundown houses, chipped paint, broken windows, I think, misery has never looked as beautiful as this.