In this piece, Subhash Jaireth presents the reader with a “chrono-topo-graphy” -- a sensitive retelling of place, time, and memory invoked by a return home. Walking through the streets of Delhi, accompanied by maps and aided with histories both personal and formal, Jaireth revisits the city as an imaginative construct, an interplay of concrete and abstraction.

Remembering Dehlie: A Chrono-topo-graphy of Imagination [printable version]

Subhash Jaireth

As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands.

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

<1> In a few weeks I shall be going to India to see my daughter. This will be our first meeting after she went back to India with her mother five years ago. She is fifteen now, and, in a way, a complete stranger to me. "You don't know me," she tells me often on the phone, "Neither do I know you. The little girl whom you carried on your shoulders and played hopscotch with, is nothing but a shadow. Come and see what has become of me." I have made up my mind to go but I know that it is not going to be easy for both of us.

<2> I am no longer an Indian, the passport, which I carry, tells me. Now, like every other Australian, I have to apply for a visa, and in the application mention three addresses in India where I am going to stay. It sounds funny but it's true that I have, perhaps because of the passport and the visa, started behaving like a tourist.

<3> Like a diligent tourist, I have bought the Lonely Planet city-guide, checked the internet site for additional details, and booked a room in a hotel near Connaught Place, the main shopping and business centre in New Delhi. The inside front cover of the city-guide carries a map of Delhi. I like the map, its simple, almost cartoonish look. In the past, first as a school boy and later as an academic, I had never felt the need of a map. The city always seemed familiar and homely. Often it felt like a big town, too chaotic to be contained within the limits of a map. On the Lonely Planet map, Delhi looks like a city. It has a shape, a structure, rationality defined by a neat pattern of straight roads, roundabouts, and green patches of boulevards, parks and gardens. The meandering blue outlines of the river Yamuna, painted along the eastern margin of the map, makes the city picturesque.

<4> On the map I see Sadar Bazaar, one of the main markets of Old Delhi, situated at the western end of the Chandni Chowk, the principal street of Shahjehanbad, the Delhi of the Mughals. But the Sadar Bazaar of my childhood is different. It is not shown on this map. If it were to appear on it, the bazaar would sit behind the rectangular box that lists "places to stay" and "other places of interest." My Sadar Bazaar is in the "cantonment" of Delhi, or Delhi Cantt as it is commonly known.

<5> Like Delhi, almost all big Indian cities have inherited cantonments, the colonial military stations. They were built as fortresses without walls situated generally within five to ten kilometres from the main city. From within cantonments it was easy to keep an eye on the main city which, in the words of Winston Churchill, who visited the cantonment at Secunderabad, in 1880 in the native state of Hyderabad, housed, "all the scoundrels of Asia."

<6> Most streets in the main cities were renamed after independence but in the cantonments Mall Roads and Church Roads have somehow kept their names. Large parade grounds and lavish officers' messes have also survived. In many, the old colonial sadar bazaars still function as main markets.

<7> The cantonments were designed and laid out like camps. Their grid-like geometry and an ordered pattern of barracks and bungalows was, and still remains, quite distinct from the unrestrained muddle and hodgepodge of the main city. I know the contrast well because most of my childhood has been spent in cantonments. As a child what attracted me most in them were the large bungalows with barracks of servant quarters in the back. The green lawns and thick shady trees made them mysterious and desirable.

<8> I had a friend whose father was a brigadier in the Indian Army, and although I often went to see him, the armed sentry at the main gate always made me uneasy. "You are a complete fool," my friend would often laugh at me. "There is nothing to be scared of that man," he said, and in order to prove this, one day he ordered one of the sentries, whose name Banta Singh, I still remember, to pump up the back wheel of my bike. "Aye Banta Singh, come here and pump up the cycle of the chota sahib," he commanded. Banta Singh smiled and winked at me, letting me know that he was not offended by the command, and was quite willing to play the game.

<9> In the mid-1950s we stayed in a barrack of houses in the cantonment of Delhi. My father was only a junior officer in the army and therefore the most he could aquire for his family was a house in a barrack. The barracks were located at the edge of the cantonment, not far from the railway lines, the same lines which I see on this Lonely Planet map of Delhi. I remember often going to the railway lines with my friends to watch the trains. We would place an ear on the line to hear the rattling sound of wheels of the approaching trains. Sometimes we would put a thick nail on the line and wait for the train to pass. The nail would be flattened into a thin shiny plate. We collected these nails and used them in our colourful wooden spinning tops. We liked hurling tops and see them spin, jump and hiss. Their conical surface was grooved onto which we had to turn tightly a meter or so of a thick white string. The top was held tightly between the thumb and the second finger. The first finger ran across the thick head of the top. With a sharp movement of the arm and the wrist, the string was pulled, and the top released. The jerk imparted momentum to the top which made it fly in the air. It would land on the ground, jump, find its balance and begin to spin. To win you had to make your top spin longer than that of your opponent. We all wanted and tried to win, because winning meant that you got a chance to punish the loosing top by striking it hard. That is when the sharp flattened nails came in handy. We all kept a special top with a knife-like nail for this purpose. However you were only allowed the pleasure of three strikes. I was one of the worst spinners in the group. Not that my tops were not good or properly balanced, but somehow they often slipped out of my hand forcing me to employ the underarm style of spinning, which was considered girly and attracted double punishment.

<10> We enjoyed our trips to the railway lines. One of our favorite trains was the Frontier Mail that came from Bombay. It ran three days a week and was hardly ever late. We waited for it to come and whiz past. But it was the goods trains which had won my heart. They were slow, graceful and leisurely. I would run along the track waving to the guard who sat in a chair in his special compartment and waved back and smiled. I remember one guard particularly well because of his thick black moustache and a Khaki pith helmet.

<11> One late evening in June, during our school holidays, we found the naked body of a young woman near the railway lines. The wheels had cut the body into three pieces. The head had been dragged away for a few metres, and her long black hair was smeared in dried crusty blood. We saw the body and ran away sick and scared, and hardly ever went to the railways lines again.

Chandni Chowk

<12> In the book Indian Maps and Plans, Susan Gole reproduces a wonderful nineteenth-century map of Shahjahanbad, the Delhi of the Mughal emperor Shahjahan, who built Tajmahal in Agra. In 1638 Shahjahan decided to move the capital from Agra to Delhi. It took around thirty years to built the new city. The Red Fort stood majestically on an elevated plateau along the western bank of the river Yamuna. From there looking south-westerly one found an equally majestic Jama Masjid, the main mosque, with its two minarets built of vertical strips of red sandstone and white marble and three white onion-shaped domes. "At one o'clock in the morning," reminisces Emily, the daughter of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, the English Resident in Delhi in the 1840s and 50s, "I looked out of my palanquin, and saw in the glorious moonlight the minarets of Juma Masjid...the wonderful red walls that surround the city and I felt I was really going home."

<13> The Delhi of the Mughals was charming. It had captured the hearts of Emily and her father, who was perhaps the most influential man in Delhi at that time. The Mughal empire was falling apart and everyone knew that the power was really in the hands of the East India Company. It had gained respect and authority by ushering in a period of peace and stability in the city. For over half a century it had been ravaged by scores of Indian and foreign invaders.

<14> During his stay in Delhi, Sir Thomas Metcalfe had commissioned local artists to paint for him the scenes of his beloved Delhi. He himself wrote captions to the paintings and added detailed notes about people and places. The book came to be known as the Dehlie Book. Like the natives, Emily and Sir Thomas Metcalfe called Delhi, Dehlie. I am not sure how and when the name Dehlie was replaced by its English equivalent Delhi. A slip of tongue perhaps or an innocent spelling mistake? Mumbai -- Bombay, Pune -- Poona, Lakhnau -- Lucknow, Wadodra -- Baroda -- it seems the slippages kept on occurring. In Hobson-Jobson: The Anglo-Indian Dictionary, one can find an endless number of such mutations. Interestingly the title Hobson-Jobson itself represents a translation of the Islamic lament "Ya Hasan, ya Hosain" cried out during the celebration of Muhurram.

<15> Ali Mardan Khan, Shahjahan's chief supervisor of construction, repaired and extended old canals to bring water to the city. One small canal ran through the middle of the Chandni Chowk, one of the two main boulevards in the city. However, by the end to the eighteenth century the canals had dried up and it was Sir Charles Metcalfe, the elder brother of Sir Thomas Metcalfe who got them reopened in 1820. It is said that as water once again gushed through the canals, the Delhiewallahs greeted its coming with flowers.

<16> Along each side of the Chandani Chowk stood two-storied houses with tiled roofs and light wooden balconies in the front. The ground floor was commonly occupied by shops with the families of the merchants living on the second floor. Robert Minturn, who drove in a buggy through the Chandani Chowk sometime in the 1850s, found the natives riding on magnificent elephants painted with bright colours around the eyes and on the trunk. He saw people riding milk-white horses with tails dyed scarlet. There were bailees, the two wheeled bullock carts with bright canopies, and palkees (palanquins), and there were graceful English phaetons or buggies, drawn by well groomed Arab steeds.

<17> In Susan Gole's book I find two nineteenth-century street maps of the Chandni Chowk. From a cartographic point of view these maps are quite intriguing. The street, the canal and the trees are shown as seen from above, as a bird would have seen. Most modern maps employ this technique of projecting the seen onto a horizontal surface. However in these particular maps, the houses on the two sides of the street have been drawn not as seen from above but from the front. One can clearly see the tiled roofs of two and three story houses, their arched windows and triangular canopies. At the western end of the Chandni Chowk stands the Fatehpuri Mosque with its two minarets, three domes, the bounding wall and the entrance gate. Two view points, two modes of seeing and showing have been juxtaposed in these maps. It seems that the cartographer is not satisfied merely to fly over the street but wants to get down and walk along the street. He is scared to reduce these beautiful buildings into squares, rectangles and circles. In nicely calligraphed Persian he has inserted the names of buildings, squares and fountains on the map. I like these maps. They are far more interesting than the walking-tour maps inserted in the Lonely Planet guide. They make you feel as if your were walking on the street and stopping to look and marvel at the houses, mosques, fountains and parks.

<18> One of the maps also shows old Kotwali, the police station. The place is nowadays known as the Fountain Chowk because of a Victorian-style fountain that was built here sometime in the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1857, in front of the police station, the corpses of three princes, two sons and one grandson of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, were displayed on a cart. The 1857 sepoy mutiny had unsettled the Company. It began doubting its hold on power and was outraged at the humiliation it had suffered at the hands of the disorganised mutineers. More importantly, some in the Company earnestly wanted to avenge the brutal murder of the English residents. Lieutenant William Hodson had promised the three princes that their lives would be spared, but when the princes surrendered, Hodson panicked, and shot them. It is believed that as a revenge, the army of the Company razed more than one third of the city and almost the whole of the native population was ejected, estimated around 130,000. The Hindus were allowed to come back after sometime but the hostility toward the Muslims continued for several years.

<19> After the recapture of the city, a serious debate about the future of the city ensued in the press as well as within the official circles. One newspaper wanted to destroy the city to demonstrate the invincibility of British power. A suggestion was made that the Red Fort be razed to give way to Fort Victoria. Lord Egerton felt the same about the Jama Masjid which he thought needed to be replaced by a cathedral. Fortunately, the Secretary of State decided to ignore these radical measures. However all buildings other than the Hindu temples, within a 500 yard radius of the Red Fort, were cleared. The Jama Masjid was turned into an army camp and relinquished only in 1862 on the condition that no political meetings would be held there.

<20> The natives had to be shown their right place, and order, and the rule of law had to be restored. Hence brutal power was deemed essential. Scores of gallows were erected in the city and public hangings became common place. Sir Theophilus Metcalfe, the nephew of Sir Thomas Metcalfe, and Emily's cousin, was the Joint Magistrate of Delhi and headed special commissions for the trials of the natives. He was one of the most dreaded English sahibs in Delhi. It is said that his victims were often hanged from the charred beams of his house.

Looking for Ghalib

<21> Not far from the Fatehpuri Masjid, painted beautifully at the western end of the nineteenth-century map, lived Mirza Ghalib, one of the greatest Urdu poets. He came to Delhi in 1810 as a young boy and made Delhi his own. Although there were several other poets living in Delhi at that time he became its true voice. It is hard to imagine Delhi without him.

<22> Ghalib rented a number of houses not far from the Chandni Chowk. In August 1993, one afternoon my friend and I went looking for the house where Ghalib had lived. My friend knew the area well; most of his early childhood was spent there. For years his father had worked as a cashier in a sari shop a few hundred metres from the Chandni Chowk. They rented a house on Nai Sarak, one of the more recent streets that joined the Chandni Chowk from the south

<23> "There was only Machia, the courtesan's house and two by-lanes between us," wrote Ghalib to the son of one of his Hindu friends. "Our big Mansion is the one that now belongs to Lakhmi Chand Seth. I used to spend most of my time in the stone summer-house near the main entrance. I used to fly my kite from the roof of a house in one of the lanes nearby and match it against Raja Balwan Singh's."

<24> Ghalib liked to write letters and wrote them well. They paint a vivid picture of the nineteenth-century Delhi. He, like most people of his time, didn't quite know what to make of the presence of the British in Delhi. He was both apprehensive of and fascinated by them. As a poet, for whom royal patronage was the only means to make both ends meet, he wanted to please them but did not want to appear to his Mughal patrons too willing to adopt the alien ways either. He appreciated and valued the "renaissance," which the political stability brought in by the East India Company had initiated in the city. The city now had a college, a press for printing both in Persian and Urdu, and a number of newspapers. His first Urdu collection appeared in 1841 and was sold out immediately to be reprinted again after a few years. In 1842 he was offered a professorship in Persian in the Delhi College but declined presumably because the English Secretary to the Government of India did not come out to receive him when he went to see the Secretary for the interview. Ghalib, it seems, had a strange sense of pride, not only because there was perhaps a tinge of blue blood in his veins, but also because as an intellectual he wanted to be respected and listened to.

<25> His response to the 1857 mutiny/revolt also demonstrates a familiar ambivalence. He did not know which side to support or condemn, but one thing is sure that he detested the looting, violence, and carnage that followed the mutiny. Ghalib wrote a book, Dastanbuy, a diary-like record of the traumatic events. Most commentators believe that the book was far from a spontaneous account of the days before and after the mutiny. Ghalib, the experts agree, wanted to please the English, whom, like most people of his time, he believed were going to rule forever. The introduction in the book does not leave any doubt about his motives. I have "eaten the bread and salt of the British," Ghalib notes, and that from my "earliest childhood I have been fed from the table of these conquerors of the world." His letters to his friends, however, describe the events a little differently. In them he is quite critical of the way the victorious army of the Company unleashed a wave of terror in the city.

<26> We found the street where Ghalib is known to have lived, but couldn't locate the house. We asked a few people for help but failed again. One young boy who worked on a tea shop took us to a house next to the Excelsior Cinema and left us there. An old guard at the cinema told us that the cinema used to be part of a big mansion owned by Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, the personal physician of the last Mughal Emperor. Ghalib was a close friend of the physician and lived not far from his mansion. "Where?" we asked the guard a number of times. "God only knows," the man replied and smiled. A year later, in the book Mansions at Dusk: The Havelis of Old Delhi, I found photos and description of the mansion. In 1857, the mansion was ransacked by an angry mob of sepoys. It was reclaimed by the Hakim after the mutiny and rebuilt.

<27> The book contains a photo of the dilapidated inner courtyard of the mansion with the caption: "the picture shows the pitiable condition of the daalan, the courtyard, where it is said Ghalib loved to sit while composing his verses." Ghalib's student, poet Hali, notes that Ghalib "often used to compose verses at night, under the influence of wine. When he had worked out a complete verse he would tie a knot in his sash, and there would be as many as eight to ten knots by the time he retired to bed. In the morning he would recall them, with no other aid to his memory, and would write them down."

Walking with Maps

<28> The point of origin of this essay, if such an origin can ever be clearly and adequately defined, lies in the anticipated journey to Delhi to see my daughter. That journey opened the way for the trips which I have taken to the Delhi of my childhood and youth, and also to that Delhi which I have imagined by reading, seeing, and listening to all that surrounds Delhi like a Benjamian "aura." As I write/walk each word/step takes me through the city of my memories.

<29> Walking is one of those spatial practices through which people transform places into spaces by making them "their own" and by circumscribing them within their everyday living. "Walking," notes Michel de Certeau, "is to the urban system what the speech act is to language. Walking affirms, suspects, tries out, transgresses...it speaks." For de Certeau walking is equivalent to reading which produces a space by transforming a written text, "the place constituted by a system of signs." A similar thing has happened, and is happening now, as I write this essay, although instead of reading, I am engaged in the acts of remembering and writing. But as I write, I read the traces of my own walks. I write them for you and for myself. I have thus created a map for you to read and walk and transcribe your presence over the traces which I have left. As you read and walk through my Delhi, you traverse the mind scape of my memories.

<30> In fact, if you remember, my own walk began with a map, the Lonely Planet map of Delhi. This map took me to other maps of Delhi. I have often wondered how a map, like a book, opens ways to other maps, as if, one map contains within itself all other maps, as if one map on its own seems insufficient and inadequate, and only the adjacency of other maps or at least the capacity to generate a desire to see other maps provides it a semblance of completeness. As I write about maps I realise that I can't go past Borges' quotation of Suarez Miranda's story about the Chinese cartographers. "On Exactitude in Science" is the title that Borges gives to the story. Umberto Eco reproduces the story in a short essay "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." The plentitude of reality, the story seems to tell, both charms and baffles us. We want to make sense of the world, to comprehend its manifoldness, to take its measure and circumscribe it within our experience, all the time knowing that it is impossible to do that adequately. The Borges' story also reminds me of the essentially metonymic way in which we re-present and assimilate the world. Maps, like words, try to stand for the real, to re-place it, to be its proxy. In doing this, and perhaps this is the most rewarding aspect of the exchange, the metonymic devices provides us the capacity, the pleasure, and the privilege, to go beyond the real, to transcend it, to make and re-make it.

<31> Maps, like stories, de-scribe and in-scribe places. Through them places are assimilated, owned and disowned, longed for and belonged to. In fact, stories, to use de Certeau's words, often simultaneously employ "map type" (at the western end of the Chandni Chowk) and "tour type" (you walk along the Chandni Chowk and turn right at the first intersection) descriptions. For de Certeau they represent two symbolic and anthropological languages of space. If map type descriptions present a tableau and focus on seeing, tour type tend to organise movements and focus on operations, actions, and itineraries. In stories, the two types intervene and punctuate each other's presence, conditioning as well as preparing ground for each other. The above prompts de Certeau to suggest that the structure of travel stories, and, in my opinion, not only travel stories, because de Certeau notes elsewhere that "every story is a travel story -- a spatial practice," involves stories of journeys and actions marked out by the citation of places that result from them or authorise them.

<32> My story is not strictly a travel story, but it is still impossible to conceive and write it without Delhi. But there is something else which also makes this story possible, and that something else is the web of memories (the Latin word textum means web) which needs these places, where, to borrow once again de Certeau's words, they "like birds can lay their eggs" and turn them into lived, or desired to be lived, spaces. Ultimately it is this desire to remember which imparts a certain urgency to my story, and it is this, through which I hope I can entice my readers to come with me. As I write/walk, a poetic geography spreads over the "geography of the literal." This poetic geography is the geography of my memories.

Empty Canopy

<33> In City of Collective Memory, M. Christine Boyer cites Maurice Halbwachs, a well-known French sociologist, for whom collective memory is always embedded in a spatial framework and begins to fail when it cannot find a location in the social space of a group. Aldo Rossi, the Italian architect, calls the city the locus of collective memory of its people, and the memory as its consciousness. The city needs the collective memory to become habitable, and the memory needs its public spaces in order to appear tangible and palpable. The two nourish and sustain each other, but in both of them one can easily detect an element of coercion, reflected in the way the collective constitutes its memory and the spaces associated with it. They tell and show a story which is accepted or acceptable.

<34> The officialised public spaces are thus similar to what de Certeau's describes as "places." They need to be walked through, talked and written about, drawn and painted, filmed and photographed, in a word, lived, so as to be owned by individuals like you and me, and thereby, to be filled with our longing and belonging. Thus the collective memory and the places to which it is tied, are often personalised by being entrapped in an intricate web of personal memories. They are, to use Benjamin's words, "adorned with incomprehensible, capricious frills of imagination." I suppose it is this unceasing symbiosis between the collective and the personal memories which interests me in this story.

<35> In 1912, Edwin Lutyens began designing the Viceroy Palace in Delhi. The palace had to become the focal point of the a new capital of Britain's Indian Empire. The site for the palace was selected Lord Harding, then Viceroy, who one fine Delhi morning rode with Lord Hailey, then commissioner of Delhi, galloping across the plain to a hill. "From the top of the hill," reminisces, Lord Harding, "there was a magnificent view embracing Old Delhi and all the principal monuments situated outside the town, the Jamuna winding its way like a silver streak in the foreground at a little distance. I said at once to Hailey, 'This is the site for Government House', and he readily agreed" (17).

<36> The Raisina Hill, its gentle slopes and flat plains around it, provided Edwin Lutyens and his collaborator Herbert Baker an ideal setting to unfold an ambitious enterprise of imperial architecture. The Viceroy Palace on the hill sits at the end of a ceremonial parade called the King's Way. Like the famous Champs Elysees, the processional way is decorated with a memorial arc, the India Gate, but is much wider than its Parisian equivalent. Green lawns run along on either side, punctuated with water filled ponds and fountains, and surrounded by orderly rows of eucalyptus and casuarina.

<37> As a school boy I often went on picnics to the India Gate. We would play around the fountains, and if we had money to hire a boat from the boating club, go boating in the ponds navigating carefully through a crowd of lotuses and lilies. In the spring we flew kites and played cricket. The dust and heat of Delhi summer was hard to live through, and we knew how difficult it was to have a decent wash in the summer when the whole city was hit by an acute shortage of water. Perhaps that is why this plentitude of water near the India Gate was so incomprehensibly amazing and enjoyable.

<38> The New Delhi of Lutyens and Baker was conceived and built as an orientalised modern city of the empire. It was marked by an ample use of red sandstone, the main building material of the Delhi of the Mughals and by other "traditional" architectural elements such as stone chattris or canopies, stupa like domes with miniature elephants, and above all, by jaalis, the pierced-stone screens. One of the several chattris stands on the King's Way, a few hundred metres from the India Gate. It used to house a statue of King George V. After independence it was decided that a statue of Mahatma Gandhi would be installed there, but to this day the canopy remains empty. It is rumored that the committee appointed to commission the statue could not decide on the winning entry. However most colonial and imperial names in the area have been changed. The Viceroy Palace is now called the Rashtrapati Bhawan, the President House. The King's Way has become the Rajpath, the "State Way," and the Queen's Way which runs at right angles to it, is now called Janapath, the "People's Way."

<39> The emptiness of the canopy is hardly noticed by people these days. The King's Way on which once the Viceroys used to come out in his ceremonial carriage driven by twelve beautiful horses, now hosts the Republic Day parade. In 1957, my father took us to the parade. That year the star attraction was a soldier, Bahadur Singh. He was deemed to be the tallest man in India standing almost eight feet tall. We all wanted to see him and were told that he would walk ahead of his unit so as not to spoil the marching rhythm of the rest. The parade had a fair share of military paraphernalia, tanks, guns and fighter jets, but the most attractive for us were the military bands and colourful floats. I remember the loud festive voice of the announcer introducing each participant in a correct Sanskritised Hindi. People waved flags, clapped and cheered the parade. The loudest applause broke out when the bagpipe band of the Sikh regiment appeared. It was led by a stocky Sikh wearing a bright turban with a yellow patka (the band in the middle). In his right hand he carried a bandmaster's staff which seemed light as a feather in his strong and trained hands. As he marched the staff moved up and down in his hand. Then suddenly he threw it up in the air to catch it back in one swift and smooth action.

<40> When Bahadur Singh made his appearance, at first, everyone around me fell quiet and then suddenly we all began clapping. "What a giant! Look, look at his steps!" I recall telling my younger brother. "He'll trip over and fall, you'll see," my brother whispered. "Shush you two...," I heard my mother calling out. The next day The Times of India printed a photo of Bahadur Singh on the front cover. I cut the photo and kept it in my scrap book for several years.

<41> We didn't sit through the whole parade because a minor stampede started just behind us. My mother told me later that behind us, the families of the servicemen, stood, as she put it, the unruly civilians, who wanted to have a better look at Bahadur Singh. The wooden benches on which we were sitting came crashing down. My mother hurt her forehead and blood came gushing out of the cut which made me nervous and I began screaming. The police took some time to restore order. The first-aid people escorted my mother to an army medical van to see if she needed stitches. On reaching home we found that she had lost her wrist watch and one of her golden ear rings. For years she grieved the loss of her watch, a present from her father, but I could never forget the scar on her forehead. Whenever she would come to put me to bed at night and to tell me a story or two, I would ask her about the scar and the number of stitches the doctor had to put to stop the bleeding.

<42> She also had a big scar on her tummy and my aunt had told me that the scar was because of me. My aunt, the younger sister of my mother, was only a few years older than me, and for us, the three brothers, she was more like a sister. She was a friend and participated in all our games which included climbing up the mango and tamarind trees. She was given away in marriage when she was fifteen, and I remember distinctly that when she came on her first visit from "her home," she seemed a very different person. Can someone change so much in six months? I used to ask myself. At that time I didn't know that she had been forced into a woefully unhappy marriage, which would scar her whole life.

<43> My aunt had told me that my mother's tummy had to be cut open to bring me out, and that when I was born, I was blue, sticky and half dead. "You had to be put in a special cabin, you know," she told me, "That's why your mother loves you so much."

Epilogue

<44> In The Vision Machine, Paul Virilio describes a topographical system invented by Cicero and other ancient memory-theorists. "For example," he writes,

you might imagine wandering through the house choosing as loci various tables, a chair seen through a doorway, a windowsill, a mark on the wall. Next, the material is coded into discrete images and each of the images is inserted in the appropriate order into the various loci. To memorise a speech, you transform the main points into concrete images and mentally 'place' each of the points in order at each successive locus. When it is time to deliver the speech, all you have to do is recall the part of the house.

It seems that the Delhi I am remembering is quite similar to the house Virilio has written about. In the process of making and telling this fragmentary story about Delhi, the various "parts of the house" have provided me a spatio-temporality, a chrono-topo-graphy, onto which, faces, images, and stories have attached themselves in a strange symbiotic relationship. The difference is this that unlike the ancient memory-theorists I am not sure which comes for me first: Delhi or the people and stories assembled and imagined by me?

<45> There remains however another question which, like a ghost, hangs over this whole act of making and remaking of memory. I don't know why is it that while writing about my aunt I only remember her face as that of a twelve-year old girl and can't recall what she looked like when I saw her a few years ago in Delhi? For that I have to ask my brother to send me a photo. I remember clearly the red turban of the Sikh bandmaster but can't recollect anything sensible about the rest of the band. Memory, we all know, plays tricks on us. The map which we construct through acts of remembering and forgetting, and the topography which this memory inhabits, has warps, crevices and valleys where daylight fails to penetrate. It needs the helping hand of time to unravel that which is hidden. I am not sure if that is how the memory functions, but we always assume, hope, and believe it to work like that.

Bibliography

Alexander, Michael ed. Delhi and Agra: A Travellers' Companion. New York: Atheneum, 1987.

Benjamin, Walter. Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings. New York: Schocken Books, 1986.

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