Delhi (28 page)

India looks unlikely to imitate California in all things. For all my physical disappointment, I have unwittingly got one asset that is unfairly overvalued: fair skin. Giant billboards displayed the pristine visages of Bollywood stars, male and female, in blatantly Photoshopped before and after shots. Buy the cream and you too can look, well, non-Indian. All the big brands are implicated. You can even buy whitening cream for the, ahem, intimate feminine areas, advertised with videos of husbands shunning wives until they bleach their unspeakables and happiness is restored.

Beyond this, ideas of beauty are very much conditioned by class and location. In the Bangalore suburbs my old boss was scandalized by my long wavy untied hair: ‘It is not tidy! Why don't you tether it up? Then I think it will look'—he paused for sleazy effect—‘
very
good.' Many women wear theirs tied back, oiling it sleek and straight. The city's elite women, though, proudly wear theirs au naturel, or rock bold short haircuts which would be attacked as ‘childish' elsewhere in the country. In smaller towns good girls are unlikely ever to wear a short skirt. Even wearing jeans and a tight T-shirt is an emphatically middle-class statement. But Delhi's wealthiest young women—those who need never take public transport—shun baggy
shalwar kameez
combinations. They are more likely to be found in power suits, taking bikinis on their foreign holidays, and stalking Delhi's nightclubs in skimpy dresses and stilettos worthy of California's finest.

Unlike this last group, I had resolved to Keep It Real in Delhi. This came with some downsides. Food shopping in India is an exhausting experience. I am part of Europe's millennial lot, credited with a culture of narcissism, entitlement, flibbertigibbetism and, I might add, supermarket shopping. The old system of actually going to all the different vendors and sorting through their produce seemed to me a full-time job.

Option 1
: I lay in a puddle of my own sweat, apathetically flicking through
Power Insider
or an equally rambunctious electricity magazine. Under the bawl of a jet overhead, there came a faint jingling clop. A pause, then:
‘Sabzi!'
And a machine-gun rattle:
‘Aloo lo, gajar lo, mattar lo, bhindi lo, kele lo!'
It was time.

I flicked open the blind. The sabziwala had parked his placid bony horse a little up the street. He whipped back the canvas for a fat suspicious woman to reveal his wares: the promised potatoes, carrots, peas, okra, bananas, and a few others. She poked and squeezed and prodded. The sabziwala's boy, who looked distinctly school-age, tossed handfuls of small onions into a small basket to weigh. The woman eyed him suspiciously, argued briefly, and handed over the money. She gathered up her enormous armful of vegetables, a small brown paper packet of chillis and coriander wedged on top, and waddled away.

Another everyday ritual: another minor challenge to overcome. Deep breath.

I threw on some ill-matched if suitably discreet clothing, stubbing my toe on an electricity textbook, and rushed downstairs. Out on the road, I looked at the vegetables with what I hoped appeared a professional eye. Most I recognized, some I didn't. I was sure the sabziwala and his boy exchanged glances. A curtain twitched.

For all its strengths in Stalin and Shakespeare, the British education system does not teach you to estimate weights. As a result I would either order four times too many carrots for the flat, or be left holding a single sad potato. Western education also is a little thin on haggling skills. I would find myself acquiring unneeded piles of ladies' fingers and, most foolishly, extravagant (but gorgeously juicy) mango purchases. Most mornings began with the faint bitter feeling I'd already been scammed six different ways, although probably at a combined cost of Rs 10.

The other shoppers checked and rechecked the prices rigorously. The city was filled with woeful tales of inflation. Rumours swirled: that onions were being hoarded to push up prices, that potatoes are going to Bangladesh, that the state allows half of all India's food to rot in warehouses. (Conspiracy theories are extremely popular in India. Alas, some of these food-based rumours may be true.) The government is very sensitive to this, fearing riots and demonstrations, and until very recently has tried to keep inflation under control even at the cost of growth.

Kamala arrived again in the evening with a clatter. I steeled myself and presented her with my vegetable purchases. She laughed throatily, picked up her ringing phone and chortled into it. She did manage to whip them into a simple but delicious meal. Our kitchen boasted only what looked like a temporary campstove to my eyes, but is in fact a common arrangement: a bench-top gas burner which ran on red dusty bottles of cooking gas. (The poor continue to use charcoal.)

Gradually I gained confidence and decided to experiment a bit more with my purchasing choices. Alas, I realized that perhaps some vegetables haven't broken out of the subcontinent for good reason. I reserve particular hatred for
karela
, bitter gourd. Karela looks like a wrinkled warty green dildo. Like many phenomenally nutritious foods, it tastes even worse, like watery earwax. Alpha Housemate demanded this on a regular basis, as (a) it's meant to be phenomenally nutritious and (b) there seems to be something uniquely masochistic about Bengali palates. In the fridge she would also store vials of a strange anti-diabetic home brew that looked terrifyingly like urine.

Option 2
: I crossed the road to the local market, admittedly a poor specimen versus the larger neighbourhood bazaars. It was a sleepy two-layer collection of stores. Alongside an array of takeaway options, a barber's sign promised ‘Rich Man Hair Cut'. A battered pharmacy with viciously short opening hours peddled piles of medication and vitamin pills. Out of the corner of my eye I could see our local ‘English wine' shop, its grimy counter packed in the evenings and Fridays with men clamouring for tiny bottles of cheap desi spirits.

At random I selected one of the
kiranas
, the small convenience stores. The owner was a big man with a haughty moustache. The tiny store, about the size of an American walk-in wardrobe, nonetheless managed to sell a vast array of items, from shampoo to eggs to Nestlé's ubiquitous Maggi noodles (‘this is a traditional Indian lunch!' my newfound cousin-brother told me, spooning them out). They were densely packed into the shelves, so that a young man had to scale boxes to reach the highest items. So far, so good: it was very convenient, had a decent range of goods, and appeared to employ at least ten relatives and hangers-on alongside the haughty moustache.

There was one major and growing obstacle to my
kirana
love, however: water. Rather than an expensive purifying pump, our flat relied on huge 25-litre canisters of water. We called the haughty moustache, who dispatched an impossibly skinny young man with the 25kg load upon his shoulder. Only the haughty moustache did not necessarily do this. The bottle would arrive an arbitrary number of hours, or days, after we'd made the call. We would appeal in person, parched and desperate, offering to roll the huge canister down the road ourselves. The moustache, stroked, looked haughtier and more Stalinist each time this took place. I'd known monopolists might raise the prices of scarce goods to cream off extra profits, but I hadn't realised they would take so much pleasure in it.

Option 3
: I strolled down the road, waving off overpriced auto ride offers, to my local mall. This was a weird and depressing place, like a normal mall after a zombie apocalypse. Most of the lots stood empty. There was a KFC—the chicken chain and Pizza Hut, both owned by the same American corporation, can be found across the city—with a consistent reputation for food-poisoning my housemates. There was a Toyota showroom that never had any customers. And then there was Big Bazaar, sprawling over three floors.

India has been called supermarkets' final frontier. They are already beginning to conquer China and Latin America, but outside our quarter, a great political showdown was taking place in New Delhi. The government had promised to allow foreign firms into ‘multi-brand retail', hitherto the preserve of the local. The prime minister and his allies argued foreign investment would reignite India's economic growth rates and counter inflation through improved food supply chains, claiming somewhat implausibly that farmers otherwise allow up to a third of their crop to rot in the fields. The opposition, and some key coalition partners, were raising a stink, backed by the 40 million Indians whose livelihoods depend on small stores. They in turn claimed the rise of supermarkets would drive up unemployment and exploit small farmers. The reform was eventually forced through in autumn 2012—after a year of wrangling—although it relies on the federal states to take it forward. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Delhi is keen.

After being searched and forced to leave my shopping bag with a guard, I set off inside. Big Bazaar, the ‘Indian Walmart', is the largest supermarket chain so far in India. It sells toys, electronics, kitchenware, and dispiriting clothes. On the top floor I found the food: pasta, American brands of cereal, endless tins. Everything got piled into cheap cloth bags that left a strange ashy substance on my hands. If this is the future, I disapprove.

Periodically I took the more exciting Option 4, and ventured further afield to INA Market, a sprawling claustrophobic mass of stalls where everything is on sale. I came home with four tins of tuna covered in Arabic script, two cushions, and a seriously out-of-date jar of Marmite which bubbled alarmingly in the heat and then abruptly sealed itself, never to reopen.

Just over the road from INA Market, the paparazzi struck. Something about my face appeared to attract young journalists. I like to believe my eyes look wise but kindly, that even strangers recognize that they flow with wit, profundity and carefully curated insights about India. Or maybe I just walk less purposefully than other passing women.

I'd already been interviewed twice. Admittedly I never knew whether they'd actually been broadcast, but I believed they'd gone well. The first was on the future of gas pipelines, the second on what I assured the interviewer was the wonderful flowering of Indian rugby. Now in the regulated souvenir market of Dilli Haat the greatest intellectual challenge arrived—the moment when my knowledge of Indian food, that pillar of Delhi life, was put to the test. Very publicly.

‘Madam, can we interview you?'

Alongside its carefully arranged handicraft stalls, Dilli Haat also periodically hosts small events and conventions. Early in my trip I had gone to ‘Comic Con', to find various Batmen, Darth Vaders &c. under a giant poster of a formidable woman with a bindi and round Harry Potter spectacles, who is perhaps called Superauntie. Now I stumbled into an exhibition of fruits and nuts from all over India, centred on the national fruit, the mango. A local TV crew, who seemed to be student journalists, was gathering responses on this breaking news.

It was unclear why exactly they would want to interview someone from a country where the sum total of mango knowledge is that (1) they exist and (2) they are vulnerable to use as a comic euphemism. I still don't know why I said yes.

The cameras whirred. The young interviewer pounced, eyes glittering under a thick layer of kohl. It was investigative journalism at its best. ‘What is your preferred variety of mango? How do these compare to the mangos of our international mango rivals? Which Indian state's mango policy do you believe has been most successful in rejuvenating agriculture, that great neglected bastion of the Indian masses to which in the end all our futures are tied?'

‘I like… those orangey-green ones. You know, those sort of round ones. About this big. Um. Orange.'

The whirring stopped. They left, shaking their heads.