A Boy Brushed Black and White Living In A City Painted Red

By Chandramouli Banerjee

Three years the boy has spent in this alien town of big cars blaring the latest gangsta rap. In the city of pretty girls who cannot speak English. In a mini-country sized city which falls in the range of surface to surface missiles of not one, but three other countries, two of which have half a mind to make use of that factor. This city seemed to hold all of the stuff that this boy was critical of, everything he swatted aside with a derisive snort {other than the pretty girls of course}. Still, three years he’s survived. And he hates to admit it, but he’s actually enjoying himself.

On a ridiculously hot summer night the boy set foot for the one and the half-th time {the first visit to Delhi couldn’t have counted as one}, shocked immediately at the audacity of a geographical location to adamantly stay at 40 degrees at 12 am. Since he hailed from Bangalore {the paradise where it’s perpetually spring}, it made him even more uncomfortable. He sweated out half his already-depleted body weight on the ride to the hotel, and he hated the god damned place. The next morning entailed standing in line for hours on an even hotter day {if that was possible} to get admission into one of the most prestigious colleges in India. It did not make him feel any better about the blessed heat though. Or the copious amounts of Hindi being spoken all around him. But this decision to run away from home and do “arts” was completely on him. So he decided to fight it out.

As time went by, he got used to the heat, but he still needed to get used to the people. Being brought up in Bangalore meant he did not really think too much about keeping up appearances. He was startled at the college fashion scene. It was like a going to the zoo. For the first time that he saw one of his friends get dressed for a party, he could not comprehend the fact that a male homo sapien can spend an hour trying to look presentable. At the party, in his borrowed shirt and torn jeans, he felt really out of place. Like a hobo in a Gucci store.  All these people milling around him, dressed like they’re going to the Oscars, blowing “muahs” at each other disconcerted him to say the least. So, he just concentrated on the alcohol. Oh, that was one redeeming factor about Delhi, the rich kids gave you nice booze. He still hated the place though, and the people in it.

But then, by virtue of being a {barely} “social animal”, he made a few friends. Friends who called him “English Boy”, but friends nonetheless. He discovered that if you looked beyond the branded clothing, and chose to ignore almost all your cultural convictions being violated in conversation, these people were actually pretty normal, but in his opinion, trying too hard. Fact of the matter remained that they were nice. The boy slowly began suspending his staunch views on stuff that were ingrained in him by his heavy metal brethren, and for starters, he actually began to enjoy techno-electro music {it’s called dhikchik auto music in his hometown}. What’s important here is that he gave David Guetta a shot, a listen, and then chose to like it. What was important, and what he realised was giving Delhi, in all its nauseous pretence, a shot.

With that plan of action in mind, the boy roamed Delhi for a good two years. He found a few things he liked, and many things he did not. He put his chappal-shorts philosophy on hold and bought his first pair of trousers, and first few pieces of non-blackgraywhitebeige clothing. He found places to fall in love with, like the congested gullies of Old Delhi, or the BRT at 2 am in the morning. He found people to fall in love with. He even almost fell victim to this Blackberry trend, but the Bangalore in his blood eventually got the better of him {it was a close one}. In Delhi, he lost some of his passions and found some others that made him happy. In many ways, he realised, the fast pace of this town made kids do a lot more at a very young age, that they are more driven, and that in turn motivated him to shrug off the lethargy characteristic of Bangalore and do something. The city gave him his brush with philosophy, an interest he may never have discovered had he not met these “arty types”. The city also gave him his first glimpse of the heart stopping beauty of winter, of the visions of the India Gate slowly emerging from behind the icy veil of dense fog on a January morning. He learnt to love chai {not tea, in his mind they are two completely different beverages} and stop hating paneer {oh, the epidemic}. He learnt to embrace the history and the beauty of the city. To him, strangely, if Delhi were to be personified she’d be a beautiful mujra dancer from a yesteryears Bollywood film. If Bangalore was his love, then Delhi became his muse.

So, now, three years later, his friends at home laugh at him when he says he liked a Salman Khan movie. They ridicule him for playing dance tunes at parties {its a party for chrissakes, not a Lamb of God concert}. Amidst frequent utterances of “Ey, you’ve become one full Delhi boy da.”, he just smiles. He loves staying at home and not having to pay 300 bucks for a pint of beer, but to his surprise he misses Delhi after two and a half months of summer holidays. He knows that as long he has a goatee on his chin and a collection of unmarked black t-shirts in his closet, he will remain Bangalore. But, it doesn’t hurt him to say “yaar” in place of “da” anymore. 

Photo Courtesy: Pratheek Vinod Kumar