Chanakyapuri

Ever since we Wards returned to the States in 1959, our old house in New Delhi has been the object of periodic family pilgrimages.  A perk of my father's appointment as the Ford Foundation's Educational Consultant to the Union Ministry of Education, it stood in Chanakyapuri, New Delhi's Diplomatic Enclave, on what were then the outskirts of the city. 


Set in a kind of compound with a horseshoe driveway of red quartz, an expanse of parched grass and dusty hedges, and a complex of servants' quarters in back, in its whitewashed stucco glory it looked something like the stacked upper decks of a small ocean liner, with duplexed semicircular verandahs on each end. Behind us stood a dairy, directly across the street lay a large empty lot frequented by snakes, enormous lizards,  and jackals, and a few hundred yards away lay a ribbon of empty boulevards that the Government of India had cleared and paved to make way for rows of prospective embassies.


I first returned to India as a photographer in 1968, and as the beneficiary of my father's rise in the Ford Foundation, I actually had the opportunity of living there again for a few weeks as sole sahib. The house was much as I remembered it, and no fresh refugee from art school ever landed on softer upholstery. Some of our family's old servants -- to our astonishment, eleven had greeted us when we arrived from the South Side of Chicago in 1954 -- were still around, and it had not changed nearly as much as I had. Living there again as a young bachelor evoked some curious sensations for me: nostalgia, certainly, but also a weird sense of abandonment, as if the family had somehow left me behind. Where was my mother when the cook came in to go over his accounts? Where was my father when my driver asked where I wanted to go? Why were my brother and sister's rooms empty? I felt like the young heir to an extinguished dynasty, and when it came time to make way for the next educational consultant, it was almost a relief.


Another ten years passed, and I returned to research a novel. The day after the night I landed, my first stop was the old house, where I hoped to photograph a papaya tree my sister and I had planted. I imagined that it must have achieved the stature of a sequoia. 


By now the Ford Foundation had handed the house over to the Government of India which, in turn, had bestowed it upon the Government of West Bengal to serve as a rest house. As the local caretaker graciously escorted me around, I heard for the first time the whispering of mortality that twenty years later hisses in my ears like tinnitis. The verandahs had been enclosed, the living room divvied up into bureaucratic warrens, and the covered terrace my mother had constructed had collapsed. And as for the papaya tree, all that remained was a rotted stump.


On each of my subsequent trips I vowed not to put myself through that ordeal again, but the four years I lived there had been the happiest of my childhood, and I always surrendered to its gravitational pull. On my next trip five years later I was allowed into the kitchen my mother had overseen with Switzer vigilance. Here she had lectured the servants on germ theory, and her beloved cook Amiya had worked from recipes from her own frayed copy of the Joy of Cooking. 


It was late morning when I stepped through the dining room doorway and into the kitchen's once pristine, white-tiled precincts, and interrupted perhaps fifty large rats in their scramble for crumbs from the morning's preparations. One ran over my foot as I staggered back through the doorway to the verandah, where, years before, our bearer had organized a vigil by servants and neighbors of every imaginable faith to pray for my recovery from encephylitis. That's it, I told myself. Never again.


These revisits began to sap my appetite for Delhi itself, whose population had quadrupled since my boyhood. My old haunts had been subsumed by the bustle of what had turned from a kind of vestigial memorial to British Rule to a major world metropolis choked with motorized traffic. The old republican zeal of the 1950s seemed to me to have succumbed to a corrosive cynicism, and the city's best minds seemed focussed primarily on the best way to make money.


If all this strikes you as the grousing of an old man for the old days, the unseemly and perhaps nostomaniacal whining of an overprivileged chota sahib for all the deferences that devolved upon us in post colonial India, you are not entirely mistaken. Of course the population would grow, and the city with it, and my house would not survive in all its pristine glory. It was not a museum to our brief residence in it, but had turned into something else entirely, as had Delhi, as had much of India. 


If my disillusionment extended beyond Delhi, it was only to North India, as I had never been south of Bombay. But this past February, I traveled around South India with my wife's cousin, the sculptor Robert Taplin, who'd been after me to lead him on a tour of Indian temple sculpture. Suddenly I found myself in an India I could discover on its own contemporaneous terms, and by the time I had circled back to spend a few days in Delhi, my affection for India had been so thoroughly restored that I decided to risk another tour of the house, this time with my brother Geoff.  


So off we drove from the house he was renting in Golf Links to our old neighborhood of Chanakyapuri, along streets so changed that we were practically through the gate before I knew where we were. Where we were turned out to be a construction site, for apparently the West Bengal government, having been forbidden by the municipal authority to tear the old house down, had decided simply to subsume the old place in an engulfing structure straight out of a nightmare: a great brick and mortar maw with stairways seemingly leading to nowhere. 


We stumped around the premises for a while, revisiting my old bedroom, and my parents', and Geoff's, and going up to the roof where we once set out a stuffed owl one afternoon and watched as dozens of crows and vultures and kites attacked it. The house next door, once the Japanese consulate, was still in pristine condition. But everything else had changed. The dairy was now an army encampment, and the house on the other side of ours, once the home of our father's boss at the Ford Foundation, was surrounded by walls festooned with barbed wire. Half the kitchen had been entirely and perhaps mercifully closed off, and the construction had overwhelmed what little had survived of the terrace. 

Geoff and I gloomed around the house like ghosts, and we were pretty desolate by the time we got back to his apartment. After a couple of stiff drinks, we promised ourselves we would never go back. But that besieged old place is like a kind of gauge that indisputably measures -- should we sometimes lose track -- the inexorable passage of time. Besides, though there are not yet any rats in our kitchens, the house is probably not doing much worse than Geoff and I. After all, no-one has seen fit to encase us in a protective shell. The Delhi Municipal Authority would have no objection to tearing us down. So I doubt it's a promise we will keep.