Like the Queen of Hearts, I too have often believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. And if the middle of the night is also reckoned as ‘before breakfast’, then the count could easily go up to sixty! With imagination, and the ability to wonder, anyone can believe the impossible. Since I have these qualities in spades, my capacity for believing the impossible is phenomenal. Especially in the wee hours, if I am awakened suddenly, which I so often am.
I am, let me confess, a fussy sleeper. A mosquito zipping past my ear is enough to rouse me. Distant thunder will do it. The imagined swish of an angel’s robes, the neighbour’s early grinding of idli batter, the far-off whistle of a train, even the merest preliminary clearing of the throat by my otherwise phlegmatic phone—each is sufficient to bring me bolt upright.
Then I lie in bed, tossing and turning, and imagining the sixty impossible things that must be believed before breakfast! The impossible things that I imagine have no pattern or connection. They owe no allegiance to one another or even to reality. And around Diwali my imagination bats well above its average, for the sudden crack of fireworks startles me more frequently than usual.
There was a time, long ago, when crackers exploded from Dussehra to Diwali and beyond in a continuous barrage. We slept through it all as peacefully as any untroubled child. Now, after years of intermittent bans, such explosions have become infrequent; each one is unexpected and startles the birds sleeping in the trees and me, sleeping in my bed, in equal measure. Or maybe it is simply my old age.
In those earlier days, I remember we were normal children – naughty, rowdy, and a general nuisance. We pestered our parents to buy large stocks of fireworks and blew most of them up in the days approaching Diwali, till a certain ennui set in. Then we sought ways to restore the thrill and invented ways to spice up our fireworks. Throwing a ‘bheel patakha’ that exploded on contact at an unsuspecting passerby added that extra thrill. The startled howl of Ramu Kaka while he was dusting bookshelves was guaranteed to make us dance with joy. Exploding crackers in ‘matkas’ and enclosed spaces like a stairwell added a delightful whoomph to the blast. But we soon got bored of all that too.
We then turned to more forbidden spice and explored ways to add extra excitement – what the cooks might call ‘tadka’. A cousin once scorched his fingers lighting a ‘rocket’ held in his hand. On another occasion, my friends tied a string of crackers to the tail of a stray donkey. The cheeky devils that we were, we watched, delighted, as the poor beast leapt in panic and confusion. It was, of course, a cruel and stupid act and we richly deserved a thrashing. And that was precisely why we found it so exhilarating.
The children today are a fortunate lot. They don’t need to add excitement to bursting crackers, because the ban on fireworks makes crackers themselves the forbidden fruit! Their very possession must be kept secret and bursting them is the excitement – the ‘tadka’! The children only need to invent ways of not getting caught. Thus, they sneak out in the small hours to ignite their ‘atom bombs’, producing the random detonations that startle me now exactly as Ramu Kaka once was startled by us.
After each desultory blast, I lie awake, trying to anticipate the next. There is never a sequence, never a pattern. The direction and intensity of each blast is never the same, and I am left guessing the different possibilities. My imagination runs, simultaneously, in different directions!
I wonder whether the solitary bomb that exploded was lit by a child or an adult. I wonder which diabolical child stayed awake till half past two for the sake of that one final cracker. Boy or girl? Or was it merely a motorcycle backfiring, or the last stragglers of a wedding procession?
I wonder, too, why the air quality in Kyiv can stay below fifty after a night of bombing while the AQIs of Tehran and Beirut hover around seventy-five. I wonder if these cities have some cosmic air purifier while the reading in our own Delhi keeps shooting towards five hundred. I wonder whether the little bombs set off by our children are, in some mysterious way, more lethal than those falling on Lebanon.
Sometimes, I am convinced that my bedroom is in the middle of a gang war. From the north, the henchmen of Chhota Rajan fire shots from muzzle loaders while the gangsters of Bishnoi from the south keep taking potshots with revolvers. Suddenly, someone fires a burst from a Kalashnikov. Then there is silence.
It requires just a slight stretch of my imagination to believe that the mousy woman who lives close by has at last found the courage to shoot her philandering husband, who returned once more past midnight with lipstick on his collar. The pistol shot registers as just another random explosion in the dark.
I add one more impossible thing that I believe to my list.
With practice, you too can believe as many impossible things.
Our Slice of Paradise
The corner of the National Capital Region we inhabit was, a mere two decades ago, nothing more than vast agricultural fields. Today it stands transformed into a concrete jungle. The dodgy builder who sold us our apartment had confidently assured us that the locality would soon hum with commercial vitality and blossom into a vibrant cultural hub. With great flourish he declared that an area once traversed only by tractors would soon be teeming with low-slung “chaar churees”—four bangles, his unsophisticated term for the Audi logo.
It was therefore with joyful anticipation that I parted with my sturdy four-wheel-drive Jeep and acquired a pre-loved Audi. (For the uninitiated: A pre-loved car is the same as a second-hand one – only it costs a lot more.) The untarred roads between the condominium blocks, though dusty, were wide and smooth. As I glided along in the Audi, I believed we had finally attained our dream of refined living—even if the snobs of Delhi’s Golf Links might sneeringly say that we lived in the boondocks.
“Look at these wide roads! Breathe the fresh air!” I would say to my wife. “Things can only improve.”
The first tangible improvement arrived in the form of freshly tarred roads, followed by the installation of gleaming stainless-steel bus shelters. I was elated.
But the missus, who only sees the negative side of things, observed, “These shelters encroach upon the roadway and leave no room for footpaths.”
“Look at the bright side,” I replied cheerfully. “This is progress. We shall soon enjoy every amenity of a proper city.”
“Really?” she countered, ever the sceptic. “Is there even a bus service here? These shelters were almost certainly erected to benefit certain contractors—no doubt for a handsome commission.”
She was, of course, correct. Even after many years we still await a local bus service. Vandals have long since stripped the structures of anything removable, while enterprising souls have converted others into pan shops and night shelters.
Stoically, we accepted the useless stainless-steel eyesores as part of the landscape and got reconciled to losing part of the road. Sometime later, when I bought my second pre-loved chaar-churee, a bright spark somewhere decided that the common man needed to have a dedicated cycle track.
“Wonderful!” I exclaimed. “Our little corner of NCR is becoming positively posh. We shall have a proper bicycle lane.”
“Look around you, stupid,” my wife replied, her cynicism undimmed. “Do you see anyone on a bicycle? This is just another scam to make money. Our roads will only grow narrower.”
As she had predicted, the carriageway shrank by a third. Worse still, the roadside ditches that served as drains got blocked. Within weeks, the newly cordoned cycle lanes—now protected by cement kerbstones—were commandeered by tyre-puncture repairers, cobblers, sugarcane-juice-wallas and coconut sellers. Pedestrians continued to gamble their lives on the roads, dodging cows, carts and cars. And whenever it rained, the streets remained waterlogged for days.
A couple of years ago, there was a brief hubbub when workers appeared to desilt the drains. They scooped out impressive quantities of rubbish and displayed it artistically beside the road. Although the thoroughfare grew narrower still, we exulted. At last, the rainwater would flow freely! Alas, the waste was never removed. When the monsoon came, most of it washed straight back into the drains. The rest added to the slush and filth on the road and in potholes.
Then, last summer, heavy earth-moving machinery rolled into the neighbourhood. Speculation ran wild—which buildings might fall to bulldozer justice? Apprehension turned to jubilation when it emerged that the machines had come to lay sewer lines. Wide trenches were dug on either side of the road; the carriageway narrowed to the width of a cart track. Still, we were happy. At last, we would have proper sewers!
The Hume pipes arrived and were stacked along the roadside. Collective hosannas went up from the surrounding condominiums. For a few glorious weeks we permitted ourselves to believe that the age of open drains was ending. Then nothing happened. For months.
When the IPL started, local urchins started playing cricket using the RCC pipes as stumps and backstop. The ragged beggar who sits outside the temple discovered that he could crawl into a pipe and sleep safe from the drunken drivers of powerful SUVs. The pipes, lying unused for about one year, have found their true civic purpose!
I am reluctant to admit it, yet all the evidence suggests that our roads are foredoomed to remain permanent construction sites. Sundry agencies keep laying telephone, data or television cables, drainage ducts, gas pipelines, electricity wires and water pipes. No sooner does one excavation conclude than another begins. If I didn’t know that the different agencies are incapable of coordinated work, I would have suspected them of conspiring to keep the roads forever dug up.
Delhi NCR, it seems, has achieved something extraordinary: it has elevated the failure to provide basic civic amenities into a form of permanent performance art. The drains are never clear, the sewers are never connected, the footpaths do not exist, and the roads are never finished. I am now quietly seeking an opportunity to exchange my sparingly used chaar-churee for an off-road vehicle of military-grade capability. Only then can I hope to negotiate the roads around my own home.