Walking Around Delhi, Talking To The City

The road is wide and the traffic fast. If ‘city’ has come to be associated with a certain kind of energy, productivity and glamour, these relentless cars, purposeful people and vivid signboards do an effective job of maintaining the image. But the winter sun brings languor too, and at a slower pace—the biped’s comfortable amble—you can discern the bodies at the paan shop reluctant to return to office, and the children tasked with selling balloons at the traffic island, ignoring their job for some good-humoured squabbling.

She steps onto the road with practiced ease, a jumble of wet clothes in hand. If I look to my left, I can see the construction site hosepipe where she has washed the clothes. If I look to the right, she has already skipped through the cars and reached the traffic divider, which is basking in the sunlight. She spreads the garments on the iron fence, the spiked ends of the fence keeping the tiny clothes from being blown away by the wind. Then she lopes back to the pavement that—augmented by makeshift tarpaulin, plastic sheets, some blankets and some utensils—is home.

I have caught her in the act of redefining ‘city’.

Over 30 years of walking in central Delhi—for the pleasure of its old trees, or because there is history and energy here, often because it is my history that is here —I have increasingly come to hear the music of the homeless, the destitute, the migrant underclass recreating the city and redefining ‘urban’.

This is what the 21st century flaneur walks with. The traffic divider is not a divider but a clothes stand on which a red-and-yellow baby sweater with bobbles can dry. The glamorous shop front is not a shop front but a secretive spot, in a corner of which the night watchman from Uttar Pradesh, having taken off his shoes, with his back to the world, spreads a newspaper, lays his tiffin box and has his dinner discreetly; not for him the public eating of a formal meal. The backstairs to the office are not stairs but a complex seating arrangement for the chaiwala’s clients. The parking space near Marina Hotel is not a parking space but a place where the destitute Bengali acid-attack survivor can retreat for a quick pain-alleviating drink. (“How often?” I ask. “Every time the money they give me adds up to something”, she giggles. If she had her right eye, she would have winked.)

How is the flaneur to see the city now? How is the flaneur to see herself now?

The Flaneur Who Stops

It is no longer possible for the flaneur to walk, to only walk, and to keep walking. It never was; even the original 19th century Parisian flaneur—though a bundle of different impulses (leisure, observation, gazing at a spectacle, revelling in the crowd)—was a “kaleidoscope with consciousness”, “a connoisseur of the street” (Charles Baudelaire), and “a walking daguerreotype of the urban experience” (Victor Fournel). Recording and registering the urban, with all the subjectivity inherent in the act, was a defining aspect of this leisurely walker.

The 20th century made a programme of city walking. Dadaist artists in the 1920 walked to experience the everyday, as opposed to just representing it. Avant-garde thinkers and practitioners of the 1950s, called the ‘situationists’, brought political agendas to acts like walking—these became radical acts through which the practitioner deliberately created situations of the unexpected and the real (as opposed to what they saw as the inauthentic and dead visions of a life that constituted working, consuming, eating, watching TV …). The practice of walking as ‘psychogeography’ became a deliberately playful intervention in understanding the world.

The most radical, passionate, and defining act for a flaneur today would be to stop as she walks. This “botanist of the sidewalk” (Walter Benjamin), has ever more children pulling her sleeves to buy flimsy ballpoint pens, more infants sleeping near construction sites on shawls tied to trees, ever more young mothers waiting in front of restaurants for leftover food. Rickshaw pullers back to work too soon after a bout of TB. Young transgenders dressed up for prostitution at night but willing to simply solicit for money in their mini-skirts and net stockings. Graduate boys looking for jobs because back home in Gorakhpur their family could not afford the money to buy the leaked question paper for a police constable’s post. An old doorkeeper to a restaurant who stands on one leg as he takes the name of Ram 50 times. Then, he changes the leg. It helps keep pain away.

“A walk is only a step away from a story, and every path tells”, says Robert Macfarlane. It certainly does. “If you listen to my story you will weep too much—like I wept when I saw Sadma and Titanic”, says the acid-attack survivor who begs. Where does she sleep? How does she bathe? What medical choices does she have? What did she dream of last night? What’s her favourite food? How does she watch films? Let the flaneur stop and listen, till such time as the expert charged with drawing up city master plans (or the policymaker managing urban homelessness, or the municipal official who regulates street vendors ...) does.

Flaneur In Progress

The ‘city’ is not what we thought it was anyway, which is why our confounded despair on its inefficiency, its decay, its discrepancies. The city is this brimming over of stories, restlessly swirling inside bodies. Each walking, sitting, selling, coughing, stealing, abusing, silent, spitting, quarrelling, laughing, mysterious person the flaneur strolls past, has thoughts, ideas, opinions, views, experiences, a philosophy, a desire. Perhaps a plan. Possibly a cry for help. Very often a wisecrack, a good-humoured shrug, and continents of resilience. Only these narratives can help understand what the city is, and therefore what it can become.

The flaneur and the city are both works in progress. While we were repeatedly rediscovering the city in leafy central avenues or Old Delhi galis or medieval monuments and gardens, it slipped past us to Narela, Bawana, Mundka, Najafgarh, Burari, Bijwasan, Timarpur … overwhelming swathes of Delhi we have never been to, which between them account for more than half of the capital now. It is Meera who cooks, Sangeeta who is a domestic help, the drivers from Uber, the watchmen of Connaught Place, who bring the city to us. But we must go walking to them as well.

When we are not walking, the city is often a mess of contractual conversations between our older, city-bred migrant selves and the more recent migrants. This conversation is bound by a thorny urban fence of punctuality, efficiency, purpose and speed, of radically differing lifestyles, world views and modes of articulation. The driver who does not seem to understand the importance of time; the shop assistant who gives imprecise answers; the very old guard who disapproves of people drinking; the towel-seller holding up the traffic; the domestic help who appears to always be in need of money; the gardener who must return to the village at harvest time … all living interrogation marks around the idea of ‘city’.

The flaneur walks so we all can meet, without the contract, out in the open, on our feet. Human, defenceless, open to trembling leaves and birdsong, hunger and noise. Walk, stop, walk again, stop again. Every tree is art; every human being, a great work of literature; every moment one of a possible contingent friendship. “Every step an arrival”.

(Views expressed are personal)

Juhi Saklani is a writer and photographer based in Delhi