Delhi (3 page)

But in February 2012 I found myself going back,
harder better faster stronger
, and on a mission—

‘—Chatterjee?'

The passenger next to me was studying my business card. (I had two hundred, all stowed in my hand luggage just in case. These are the handshake and
namaste
of twenty-first-century Delhi, palmed around by even the most remotely businessy people by way of introduction. Young ambitious types collect those of the powerful like they're trading Pokémon cards.) He was a businessman, he said, on the way back home to Delhi after some ‘bijniss' in London.

The man was a Talker alright, blight of the skies. We were still on the tarmac and he was firing up conversation ready for the next nine hours, preempting my antisocial headphones manoeuvre. This was dangerous. Aeroplanes make me weirdly overemotional. I think it's the detachment from ordinary time, the hospice food and the way the stewardesses meet your eyes. I didn't want the Talker to catch me sobbing like a mad cat-wielding spinster over the in-flight romcoms—or worse, over the adorably tiny cans of Coke. Already I was getting damp-eyed with Delhi reminiscences. Again I cursed the airport gods. The middle seat is like most Facebook updates: awkwardly intimate, all too public, but with no real views on anything.

‘Elizabeth
Chatterjee?'
he said again. ‘This is the name you use in India only,
na?'

I blinked. Did people really do that, invent entirely new names for their overseas jaunts? I eyed the implausibly vast list of qualifications on his business card with renewed mistrust.

‘Or,' he brightened, ‘probably you are married to an Indian. Yes, I think you like Indian men …' He reclined his chair with a suggestive lurch.

It was going to be a long flight.

I took a deep breath. ‘No, it's my real name. I know I don't look at all Indian but—'

Chatterjee. Aka Chattopadhyay, to use the older version rejected by the British as too complicated. It seems to be unspellable to British ears, and got me teased at school as
Chatterbox
or
Chimpanzee
or (once, impressively)
Lady Chatterley
. The name is Bengali, and I've always liked it because it almost rhymes with lots of things:
strategy, flatter me, what-can-the-matter-be?

But the Talker was not the first sceptic. I don't look Indian, or sound Indian, or feel Indian.

In fact, my usual haunt is exceedingly British, as British as boiled ham and stiff upper lips and Hogwarts. It is perched in a pale spined building at the heart of Oxford, high above a row of crumbly black gowns. Even the bed I'd abandoned that morning, and in which I'm writing now, is exceedingly British: it's an awkward size called a Gentleman's Occasional—for occasional gentlemen, I like to believe. The room is wood-panelled and the window porthole-round, like a tiny ship's cabin. The porthole overlooks a small manicured garden in which a blue sculpture of a Greek boy winks his buttocks. My nearest neighbours are gargoyles, some of them rather eminent in their fields. Tourists take pictures of us when we go downstairs for afternoon tea.

The room is lined with books: bought, begged, borrowed, and then ordered by colour just to throw off undergraduates. (This is an autistically pretty but useless system: I spend hours most afternoons ransacking the room for a particular volume.) In one corner is a fireplace, boarded up now but still full of geriatric creaks and moans in high winds. On it stand a bottle of Scotch and a series of kitschy souvenirs—Putin-Yeltsin-Lenin-Stalin Russian dolls, a goggle-eyed Sri Lankan mask, a little red Chairman Mao alarm clock with Mao's arm as the minute hand (now broken). I dust them when I remember.

The air smells sepia, like old teabags. On one wall maps are beginning to yellow in the genteel Oxford sun. India is reduced to three feet of crisp paper. A brown heavy-hipped body is hedged in green, and pirouettes on a fat sandy tail. It is topped with a quiff streaked in rocky orange and pale mauve: Kashmir. Travels—real and aspirational—are marked across the map with a scattering of dots.

The whole scene is static and sombre, like a photo of dead relatives in the days before the photographic smile was invented. (This is an invention that has not really reached India, so that in most of my photos I look like I am holding the locals hostage.) Downstairs a duck's head sits in a tiny case stapled to the wall. He has been there for two centuries, fading and musty. I often find myself in front of the case, staring into his glassy eyes with a strange sense of communion.

Leather armchairs, portraits, tweed. In the good old days explorers and prospectors set down their snuffboxes and set off from similar surroundings. Some travelled to exotic empty places that only the elite could afford to suffer: the Sahara, Antarctica, the deep wet heart of the Amazon. They spent the time naming and claiming things, and writing flowery tracts about cannibals and frostbite.

Others headed off to India, to trade and privateer, later to hunt and survey and rule. (From these same armchairs sprang three viceroys, one India Secretary, and later the second president of independent India. In Delhi I planned only to mention the latter.) India was already famed for many things—its elephants and snakes, palaces and hovels, sages and collaborators, its many gods and tongues. You might, like Mark Twain, kill thirteen tigers on your first hunt. You might classify verbs or skull sizes. You might go out to find yourself a husband from among the eligible young lieutenants and polo players. Of course, you might find the life out there all ‘stupid dull and uninteresting', like a 21-year-old Winston Churchill. All this lay at the end of a tedious months-long journey over the waves.

At the other end of that voyage was my family, and other animals.

My grandpa, my father's father, grew up in Calcutta. A sociable younger son, he trained first as a classical Indian singer and later as a lawyer. (This law degree was obtained in a fit of pique: after his father called him a flibbertigibbet, he studied at night just so he could slam the certificate down on the table in the next argument.) In photos he has sleek hair and a Hitler moustache: Nazi Germany was a big hit with the young idealistic Bengalis of the 1930s and 1940s (and their champion, Subhas Chandra Bose, looks oddly like the melting Gestapo agent in
Raiders of the Lost Ark
). In fact, the Nazis are still popular in India. The state of Maharashtra is full of Hitler brands,
Mein Kampf
is still a big seller, and I saw a DJ in one upmarket Delhi bar proudly wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the red, black and white swastika (he was reclaiming it, he said). There was even a recent TV serial about a very stern female breadwinner, set in Delhi: it was called
Hitler Didi
.

But six decades ago, my grandpa abandoned newly independent India for the bright lights and loose postwar immigration policies of the imperial motherland.

From Trinidad to the Netherlands, South Africa to Canada, the world is full of Persons of Indian Origin. The diaspora outside India includes between 9 and 30 million of them, depending on how propagandistic your definition of Indianness is. They have poured from the subcontinent in overlapping waves. Merchants to the four corners of the earth: from Russia to Kenya, Indonesia to Persia. Sailors and indentured labourers and imperial policemen across the British Empire, from Hong Kong and Singapore to the Caribbean. More recently, academics, doctors, entrepreneurs and the IT lot to the rich West. Now another surge of poor workers clean the Gulf states' toilets. Everywhere they have been unpopular: thrown out of Idi Amin's Uganda and coup-ridden Fiji, ‘curry-bashed' in Australia, second-class citizens in Malaysia, Guyana, Sri Lanka, and the Gulf.

Many migrants fight hard to preserve their homelands' cultures overseas. They force their children to take traditional dance classes, learn the mother tongue, marry within the community. Over time, as the motherland changes but the diaspora group does not, this can have quite weird effects (just look at V. S. Naipaul). They can become more Indian than the Indians, militantly committed to a very particular idea of India. And ordinarily, no community is more militant about this cultural preservation than the Bengalis.

In India, the ‘Bongs' are stereotyped as brainy dweebs. My former professor, himself owlish and clever, told me regretfully that they used to be considered great marriage catches, until the rise of the musclebound cash-wielding Punjabi in films and firms. Bengalis are bespectacled, soft-handed and sweet-toothed intellectuals, most often to be found spouting leftwing political philosophy late into the night. The only thing they love more than fish is arguing, and the only thing they don't argue about is Bengali culture: they are utterly convinced that their language, literature and brains are the greatest in all world history.

But in London my grandfather's plucky Bengali spermatozoa encountered my grandmother. In this formidable Finnish ice-hockey player with a taste for bespectacled brown men half her height, he met his match. The two nationalities could not be more different. Bengal is muggy, filled with mangrove swamps at one end and the hilly tea plantations of Darjeeling at the other; Finland is flat and icy. The population of the Kolkata metropolitan area alone is almost three times the entire population of Finland; its population density is a thousand times greater. The Bengalis chatter and eat sweets and dodge sport; the Finns ski in grumpy silence. The two share only a depressing handful of things: the aforementioned love of fish, the ability to survive sauna conditions, and a disproportionate propensity to commit suicide.

The compromise between the two extremes was English, football, and the suburbs. Their three children—my father a jolly and perpetually nude baby in the middle—grew up speaking neither Bengali nor Finnish, understanding neither Hinduism nor Lutheranism. They might have reclaimed this heritage in one of the attacks of genealogical panic that seems everywhere to seize the middle-aged. But into this mongrel mix was thrown the Mothership's side of the family too: a Scottish-Irish muddle of customs officials, conscientious objectors, and even one shipwreck-prone whaler who apparently confessed on his deathbed to cannibalizing a cabin boy. In this melting pot, Bengal was boiled up with all the other ingredients and transmogrified into little more than bad eyesight and a surname.

My home turf in northern England was full of South Asians, and all that entailed: great curry houses, sketchy corner shops, headscarfed mothers, rightwing politics, a race riot in 2001. If we were lucky, on the way home from swimming lessons we'd stop for
gulab jamun
, sticky-sweet fried dumplings, alongside our fish & chips. I remember giggling over the chorus to Cornershop's smash hit ‘Brimful of Asha': ‘everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, everybody needs a bosom'. I never knew that ‘Asha' was in fact one of Bollywood's greatest singers. I remember casting my first vote, glad to see that the idiotic racist vote would be split three ways by three idiotic racist parties. I remember filling in a tickbox form and choosing my ethnicity as ‘White Asian'; it sounded exotic and faintly incredible, like a white tiger.

There were hints of Indianness in our house. The Mothership gamely discovered cumin before all the other mothers, and once spent an entire day boiling pints upon pints of milk to make a microscopic amount of kulfi icecream, an attempt never to be repeated. In my bedtime stories Ganesh got his elephant head, Krishna sucked his demon nurse dry (terrifyingly illustrated), and Rama battled for pages and pages to free Sita from the demon king Ravana, only to chuck her out again in a moment of alpha male paranoia. Every few years relatives arrived with gold rings for my brothers and complaints about the cold. One sari-clad woman insisted we call her ‘Grandma', which we knew to be an alarming lie. She was probably my grandpa's cousin; we were never entirely sure because all Bengalis all have two names: a perfectly respectable one plus an arbitrary two-syllable family nickname, so that your stern elderly relatives might introduce themselves as, say, Pinky, Hippo and Tushy.